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Hard Lessons For Entrepreneurs - Why We Fail (howtosplitanatom.com)
15 points by socalsamba on March 11, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


This is a very nice article; I was surprised.

Too many people out there are depending on some crazy stuff to happen.


I had the opposite reaction: a negative article making blanket statements. The guy is angry. In my experience, anger does not usually create wisdom.


Hey! I actually wrote this article, so I wanted to make a point -- angry is the very last thing I am.

Other than not really having any context to be angry within (I am not speaking about any startup in particular), I generally agree that anger doesn't make innovation.

My point was that many young entrepreneurs have strong misconceptions about what it means to build a business. Every single one of those points are things I have heard from other entrepreneurs, things they -wish- they had known when they first started.

The point is not to discourage people from building business', that's absolutely ludicrous. The point is to get people to see what they are doing without the rose colored glasses and to bring up some common traps that entrepreneurs the world over fall into.

If you have been in business for any length of time, I am sure you realize that putting yourself in perspective is absolutely crucial to your success.

Cheers!


I didn't get negativity or anger from the article. It's not life-altering wisdom, but it is pretty much all true and worth thinking about from time to time.

The most important thing to take away from it, I think, is that if your success depends on a single unlikely (but wonderful) event, your likelihood of success is very small indeed. Might as well play the lottery or hop a plane to Vegas. But, I do see entrepreneurs fall prey to that line of thinking, whether it's hoping for a Google acquisition, a big deal with a single client, or just expecting people to beat a path to their door upon launch.




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