In his blog "How to save the world" Dave points out 10 reasons why young people are afraid to start their own business. If you have any inclination to be your own boss, it is inspiring.
I was most impressed by reason 6: Couldn't Handle the Failure
Quoting his entry: "If I tried and failed as an entrepreneur, I think I'd be crushed. I'd feel like a failure in life, it would probably affect my marriage and my friendships and my reputation, and if I came to hate my day job I wouldn't even be able to daydream about running my own business, because I'd have already tried that and failed." A survey a few years ago by Inc. Magazine found that only one factor correlated strongly with entrepreneurial success: A previous entrepreneurial failure. This is how you learn. If you avoid over-committing and learn how to "fail fast and early", you can have the resilience to be a 'serial entrepreneur', and be comfortable with the fact that no entrepreneur succeeds in every undertaking.
Don't take yourself too seriously.
Edison Failed to invent the light bulb many thousands of times. That fact kept me optomistic through the hundreds of projects I worked on. Most of them didn't work out as I hoped. Every one was a learning experience. We went broke several times, but the sum total of the whole entrepreneur thing worked out very well.
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I've wanted to comment on this post for a couple of weeks now. You've hit on some really important stuff here. It seems that no matter how often the message is heard, it has to be learned through experience to become successful.
Some of my most liberating moments came during the first half of my second decade of life; people around me, who seemed so put together, let slip that they didn't really know what they were doing. Suddenly it was okay for me not to know - nobody else did, anyway, we were all just winging it and, at times, hoping that nobody else caught on that the whole thing was ridiculously ad-libbed.
Not to say I don't still worry about living by the seat of my pants, from time to time...
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