Five Myths About Self-employment To Banish At Once

Much of the conventional wisdom about self-employment actually qualifies as Urban Myths (and we know how those can circulate).

Sadly, many people who think about becoming Joyfully Jobless are stopped from doing so because of these commonly held, but unfounded, beliefs. Let’s take a look at five biggies.

Only extroverts can be entrepreneurs. A recent study found that almost all kindergartners exhibited entrepreneurial traits. By the fourth grade, however, innovative thinking was on the decline.

Being and introvert or extrovert isn’t nearly as important as wanting to solve problems. Best of all, the opportunities for creating a business that is a perfect fit for the owner means that anyone so inclined can do so.

You need the security of a job. What a Twentieth Century concept!

Even as jobs are disappearing all over the place, people still cling to that outmoded notion about security. Successful self-bossers know that you can only have as much security as you produce for yourself.

Or as Helen Keller pointed out, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do children as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.”

Starting a business is risky. So is driving, eating and sex. It’s a matter of how you do it.

In fact, self-bossers who have done their homework, visualized their business and are committed to laying a strong foundation don’t consider what they’re doing to be risky. Preparation makes a huge difference, of course, as does a willingness to ask for help, to experiment and to be flexible.

You need a lot of money to start a business. Another outmoded belief.

While it’s true that some businesses require heavy capitalization, that’s not the only option. More and more modern entrepreneurs are mastering the art of the shoestring start-up, learning to generate cashflow and build slow and strong.

Most businesses fail in the first five years. Even the Small Business Administration likes to tout failure rates, but these statistics are skewed and based on heavily capitalized, conventional undertakings.

The success rate for lean enterprises, which are often overlooked in the success/failure studies, is actually high. If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, be committed to taking advice from informed sources. In starting a business, that means learning from those who have successfully done so…not the fearmongers, dreambashers and those who’ve never even tried.

I love this advice from musician and avocado farmer Jason Mraz:

Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic, finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel.

You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put her to be part of a vast organism to explore and create.

Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on fifteen televisions at TGIFridays.

Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. 

Be the change you want to see in the world.

You’ll thank yourself for it.

Consider the Source

Several months ago, there was a big Twitter event in Los Angeles that was live streamed. Since there were several speakers scheduled that I was eager to hear, I planned to check in throughout the day.

On the morning of the event, I woke up with a touch of flu so changed my plans and spent the day in bed with the Twitter conference streaming nearby on my laptop. The audience was enthusiastic and most of the speakers were too.

One of the speakers was a famous motivational speaker. I won’t name names, but I always think of him as a Too-Cool-For-the-Room kind of guy. The venue seemed a bit small for his broad performance which has been fine tuned in auditoriums with audiences in the thousands.

I don’t remember what the title of his talk was, but all of a sudden he bellowed, “Eighty percent of all businesses fail within the first two years.” Just in case his audience (full of self-employed folks) weren’t horrified enough, he repeated that shocking statement.

I sat up in bed. I may have hollered something back at him. I might have even called him a liar. (I was sick, remember?)

Where did he find that statistic? This was even crazier than most of the failure numbers that seem to be pulled from thin air.

Based largely on conventional, highly capitalized business failures, the statistics aren’t based on an accurate count that includes less conventional enterprises. Adding to the inaccuracy is the fact that if a business changes hands, the original owner may be lumped into the failed business category—even if the business was profitably sold.

What struck me as even more ridiculous in the claim that eighty percent of all businesses tanked  was something even more obvious: despite the closing of many businesses during the current recession, we’re not even close to that percentage. If we were, every mall and business park would be filled with rental trucks and moving vans.

That’s a sobering thought, but it’s not what’s happening.

Of course, we can listen to the statistics without questioning them and scare ourselves away from our dreams.

Or we can listen to successful entrepreneurs and see what they have to say.

People like Sir Richard Branson has a different take on things. “The world is a massively more hospitable place today for entrepreneurs than it was twenty or thirty years ago,” he says.

We also need to recognize that business in 2010 is transforming into something new. Consider this experience shared by the wonderful and visionary Paul Hawken:

When I started the natural food business in Boston, my business knowledge was scant. I did the best I could and began reading everything I could lay my hands on.

I subscribed to The Wall Street Journal. It confused me. I read the major business magazines. Their Fortune 500 world seemed irrelevant.

I sneaked into classes at the Harvard Business School. Their case studies were lunar in their usefulness to my enterprise.

The more I searched, the more confused I became. The more exposure I gained to the “official” world of business, the more I began to doubt that I was in business at all. I seemed to be doing something entirely different.

I get that same feeling today when I read most of the standard business literature.I believe that most people in new businesses, and some in not-so-new businesses, have the same problem. They don’t feel connected to the conventional wisdom…as if a small business is just a flake chipped off the larger corporate world.

Hawken and I have discovered the same thing: the Quiet Revolution that’s been growing for the past couple of decades is thriving in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of places.

And we’re going to continue growing—whether anyone is adding us to their statistics or not.

On Fear and Failure

Three of my four siblings are coming to visit early next week so that was the impetus for me to go through a stack of magazines and move some to the recycling bin. My decluttering project slowed down, however, when I came across some articles I hadn’t yet read. Three of them were worth passing along to you. Happily, you can find them all online.

The October 13 issue of Newsweek had a special feature on women leaders. My favorite article was movie director Kimberly Peirce’s piece To Make It Big in Hollywood, You Start With a Good Story. What caught my attention is what she says about fear being part of the creative process. Pierce says, “Fear is part of creativity, whatever your job is. It’s part of believing in something and wanting it to happen. So I let it in and I say to myself, ‘OK, you’re scared.’ And then when something works out, I say, ‘Wow! You were scared!'” I’m going to remember that.

The big article goldmine I uncovered is in the September issue of Ode magazine, which always has thought-provoking articles. This issue is especially rich. For starters, there’s retired teach John Taylor Gatto’s piece called Childhood’s End which eloquently discusses why our schools are failing us. I think it’s important for anyone who has come through the school system in the last fifty years or so to understand the philosophy that has driven education. 

Gatto ends the article by issuing a call to arms to parents. He says, “School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers…Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so they’ll never be bored.” 

I also love Gatto’s observation that “genius is as common as dirt.” I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the piece since I read it and am going to track down his book Weapons of Mass Instruction.

I urge you to read–immediately–Ode’s cover story, In Praise of Failure. It includes wonderful quotes from J.K. Rowling’s commencement address at Harvard. While we’ve all heard stories about people who ultimately succeeded after years of failure, this article points out, in the clearest possible way, why success is impossible if we resist failure. In fact, it reminds us that if our energy is devoted to NOT FAILING, we end up in mediocrity. 

Every entrepreneur should have this article at their fingertips to read again and again.

Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. ~ J.K. Rowling