There's a superbly written piece by Xianhang Zhang on Quora, that talks about the same concept. It's titled "Disregard Ideas, Acquire Assets" and presents a really convincing case by citing examples of entrepreneurs that focused on building assets, until as he puts it "they couldn't not do a startup with them". (Leverage could qualify as one of the more important ones, or if you want to look at it another way, acquiring substantial assets equates to earning leverage).

http://www.quora.com/Xianhang-Zhang/Disregard-ideas-acquire-...

This notion runs contrary to the standard approach that most early stage entrepreneurs adopt, namely the "build a laundry list of ideas and filter the top ones out using a combination of a heuristic, common sense and (eventually) customer validation and keep at it until you have traction with a concept that matters" approach.

I'm going to stick my neck out here, and recommend the approach that Zhang proposes - "focus relentlessly on acquiring interesting assets and then execute on the startups that naturally fall out of them". This means you might be pursuing something for the longest time that doesn't remotely resemble a startup. I'd qualify this with one caveat - make sure whatever it is, it's something you love doing.

And I think this is an interesting way to go about becoming an entrepreneur. Maybe you shouldn't dive in the deep end straight away (if you haven't built sufficient leverage / assets). Maybe that's another way deferring gratification, what with how cool just 'being an entrepreneur' has recently become.