I asked a successful entrepreneur I spoke with recently, “why did you decide to sell everything you had, buy a one way ticket to the United States, and startup a company?” The answer was pretty simple: “I knew it was something I wanted to do, and I had no reason to put it off until later. There’s never a perfect time to do a startup, you just have to sort of dive in and do it.”
For most of the important things in life, timing can always be better. Thinking about doing a startup? Thinking about raising that first round of funding? The traffic lights of life will never turn green all at the same time. For people my age, the rationalization seems to be “well I’ll wait until after I graduate, or I’ll wait until after graduate school, or I’ll wait until I get a few years of corporate experience under my belt, or I’ll wait until I have enough saved up” and so on.
There’s usually more to the story. There are a lot of fancy words for why we put things off nowadays, but I think the simplest word is this: FEAR. Most of us fear the risk of doing something bold. In fact, society has always punished you for mistakes. Letter grades and most public schools are an example of this. You were always taught to listen to a teacher. Don’t question the material. Color inside the lines. Follow the curriculum. You are hard-wired to believe that making mistakes is bad, and for each mistake there is a punishment waiting for you.
A lot of people fear the risk of failure, or rejection. If that’s your case and you have fears like failure or rejection, do this: first, watch the commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave to the 2005 graduating class of Stanford University. Second, look up Steve Pavlina and read his article about the courage to live consciously. And finally, ask yourself these 5 questions, to reveal exactly what your fear is, and how you can work around it:
#1 What is your nightmare, or the very worst that could happen to you?
Mark Twain is quoted saying, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” How realistic is it that something would happen to you? How permanent is it? What would the impact be?
#2 If something happened, how soon could it be fixed?
Chances are, it’s going to be something easy to fix, if anything happens in the first place. What would you need to do in order to get back in the swing of things?
#3 What are you putting off because of fear?
What we fear most is what we most usually need to do. I heard someone say that a person’s success is determined by how many uncomfortable situations they are presented with. It’s the uncomfortable situations that we avoid, and those same situations are the catalysts that we need for positive change. Figure out what needs to be done.
#4 What are you waiting for?
What it really comes down to is fear. 1% of the world reaches what is called self actualization (see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). If what is popular is right, then why aren’t more people in that bracket?
#5 Take risks while you can—forget about the “timing”
YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim left the class of 2007 at the University of Illinois with the following: “I deliberated… and the more I thought about it, the more I realized: I have nothing to lose… Looking back, what I learned is the following: take risks while you can.”
About the Author
Jared Tame is an entrepreneur who has worked with hundreds of clients on website design, marketing, and sales, and currently works with StartPal providing high-quality, low-cost website design and e-commerce solutions to small businesses and startups.