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Growing up I have known a lot of self employed people, especially in my family. I often found myself thinking that it would be great to be self employed, and to work at my own time on things that I love. These thoughts came to me quite a bit more when I was working retail and would get frustrated with management and corporate bureaucrats messing things up. My wife would often hear me say, “the only way I am going to find a business that will work the way I want it to, is to start my own.”

But yet after a number of years, I have yet to start a business, and for many reasons. A few of the big ones are I don’t know where to start, and I don’t know what kind of business I want to do. “Starting a business is a big risk,” especially when you have a wife and two kids that depend on you. But the thought of becoming an entrepreneur and trying to find that million dollar niche still intrigues me, even to this day.

Entrepreneurs are risk takers, “gamblers” I have even heard. In order to make it big you have to take a big leap of faith. I am not going to argue that point, but I came across an awesome article/book review that kind of made me think a bit; changing my perspective on the risk involved. I started looking into the self employed people I know, and realized that there is truth in the point this blog post was making.

The article is a book review of “The Leap” and entitled “How Well do You Know Bill Gates? The Myth of Entrepreneurs as Risk-Takers.” Bill Gates – the Ultimate Entrepreneur – is used as a perfect example of how successful self starters work. How many times have we heard the story that Bill Gates is a college drop-out who started some multi-billion dollar software company? I know I have heard it a number of times, and though it might be true, sort of, the author of the book sheds some light on the the little know things that happened to bring about Microsoft. I’m not going to repeat the story here so I recommend reading it.

The fact of the matter is that entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily involved is massive risk taking. Better stated they are placed in a moment of opportunity and they cease their chance. Sure, some risk is involved in actually taking the leap and making the right move to succeed. But the example of Bill Gates’ massive risk was not in starting the company Microsoft. He never really dropped out of Harvard to take a chance on a software company. Instead he made sure that he had a great opportunity and then took a leave of absence from school, so re-admittance was easy if things turned south. Starting the company wasn’t the risk. His risky move was calling up the company, MITS, and blatantly lying about being able to program their machine. But even then how risky was that? He was competent in is skills, and his ability to program. Furthermore, Bill was surrounded by the right people and had the right experience to make the leap successful.

So to answer the question of why I have not started a company, or have taken on my own business is really because I haven’t been presented with the right opportunity to become an entrepreneur. Like I said, as I started looking around at the people I know who run own their own business, the risk did not really come at starting the business.

I really enjoyed the article to the point I plan on picking up the book. When I do I’ll give you a full book review.

Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think, wether you agree or disagree. Also if you have read the book give me your thoughts.

Enjoy! -DRM2