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Comment by pfisch | Hacker News Reader

Quit your job. Make it real. Fear is one of the best motivators.

Unfortunately this is bad advice for most people, because the truth is most people don't have the full skillset required to own a business. Maybe they could learn it if they apprenticed under an entrepreneur or in an executive role, but I'm honestly not sure.

I own a business with studios in New Orleans and Atlanta, but I worked in the real world, went to grad school, and then came out and immediately went out on my own which is easier for a lot of reasons.

I also think a series of fortunate and somewhat unreproduceable events led me here, strangely enough involving Gabe Newell, though I'm sure he wouldn't remember.

I honestly don't think reading a bunch of books telling you how to be an entrepreneur are helpful or real at all. In fact I would describe them as more of a stalling tactic.

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> most people don't have the full skillset required to own a business

i agree with your post but i never miss an opportunity to be pedantic -- reality is nobody has the full skillset to run a business -- in my mind it's really just a bunch of intangibles like vision (goal setting), determination, ability to take staggering amounts of abuse, ability to work insanely hard when it's necessary, and ability to know how to hire an expert in matters you are not skilled or experienced in, which means the ability to clearly communicate and know what to ask for through deductive reasoning.

most people have NONE of those skills, because working a normal job doesn't require any of them. zero, zip, nada, zilch. a high functioning professional has like 2 or 3 of those things. i would guess less than 5% of the general US population has those characteristics in the large amounts required to start a business from scratch, and most of the time that talent is channeled into something like e.g. investment banking or corporate law or being a surgeon.

on top of all that, the ability to take a financial and social risk is just too much to handle for most people. they just won't do it. period. you might as well ask them to sprout wings and fly.

but that's why starting a business has the potential to be so god damn lucrative -- basically, nobody else is doing it relative to the demand the overall economy generates.

i also agree that the only way you're really going to get anywhere is if you quit your job, or were fired. the slow drip of a paycheck is the biggest obstacle.

  financial and social risk is just too much to handle for most people. they just won't do it.

  nobody else is doing it

People tend not to try because they cannot embrace the intermediate feeling of "I f*ing suck at this."

When you embrace that you are not very good, you become the master. It is a tautology.

I feel like that's the step I'm on, and I really hope you are right.

> Slow drip of a paycheck haha that's brutal

Yeah I wish I could quit my day job of working in a restaurant, drives me insane the yelling/ego bs I have to deal with. Granted I'm not "better than them" sucks can't escape reality. Got a "great gig" relatively where I am actually getting paid hourly as a contractor getting paid the same (less actually with regard to taxes) to my restaurant job.

I think it's funny as an intermediate developer I have no idea what business to make/run yet there are people that can do these "marketing/subscription" things "call to action button" and they just need some site and some theme/template to do it, some coding Joe like myself to change something and boom they're raking in some monthly recurring revenue haha.

Speaking through experience working on UpWork

edit: the rates matter and having a product matters, there are fixed amount of hours in a day and even working somewhere "that you like" if the rates aren't great it still doesn't make you a lot of money.

I agree with you. I came close to doing that a few years back. I still hold on to that product idea, because I still think it's great. I took 6 weeks off and told myself I'd work on the project for a while, full time.

I got so much done, but honestly, probably not the right work. I wrote a ton of code, got the site up and running, and started working on the real nuts and bolts that would make the thing great. Hit a snag, and realized that I had no income, no partner, no publicity, and 6 digits of student loans to pay back. Golden Handcuffs, as it were.

I probably should have started with gauging interest, finding some help, and maybe looking for potential investors. But I'm a software engineer....coder's gonna code. I didn't know how to do any of that other stuff, but I can sure as hell write a program.

I'll probably buckle down on my next idea. Or the one after that. But one of these will go well.

This is bad advice for most people because, regardless of business skillsets, these kinds of one-sized-fits-all prescriptions don't take into account human diversity.

Fear is a terrible motivator for many people: rather than providing a productive boost of energy as it does for some, for others it provides an unhelpful dose of anxiety and negative stress which is at best counterproductive.

If you are crippled by fear owning your own business is probably a terrible idea.

Or one could start a business part-time and only switch to it full-time when/if things are going well... which is what the Warby Parker founders did and now they are either CEOs of or are on the board of a unicorn start-up.

You have to take risks owning a business. Even when your business is big you have to do scary, risky things.

Making almost any product or expanding your business involves large upfront costs and then hoping it is profitable. When you look at CEOs you think its all rainbows but I assure you it is not.

I also disagree with some of the points in the Original Post. We need a balanced risk profile (Adam Grants Original).

But I would also say that there is no one size fits all solution to this. There is no checklist, which if followed guarantees success. On the other hand, the same reasoning goes for not following a checklist at all.. Its like balancing intuition vs logic.

Atleast thats what I think for now, based on the limited experiences that I have had. I might change my mind later..:)

That is a tempting idea but health insurance can be cripplingly expensive when not on an employer's plan, and with the uncertainty surrounding the US healthcare system right now, sometimes it just doesn't make sense.

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