Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur

Dan Pallotta

HBR – 1:08 PM Tuesday April 20, 2010

Entrepreneurs venture forth into the unknown, butterflies in the stomach, and wonder – for the sake of their reputation, their security, their children, and even their reputation in their children’s eyes – if they might not have been smarter to have stuck with the bird they had in their hand.

This is a crucial thing for the entrepreneur to know, lest you walk into Wells Fargo Bank, or even into Nike, with a partnership idea and expect to meet people of the same mind as you. Generally, you won’t and they’re not. You are pursuing a dream and you measure things through the prism of possibility. The people across the table are in all likelihood pursuing job security and measuring you through the prism of liability.

We have to re-shuffle our notions about security. The danger isn’t where we think it is. The danger is in not being entrepreneurial. If you’re not creating the future, then someone else is, and that someone else will change the face of the world as you know it. But that’s not the greatest danger. The greatest danger is arriving at the end of our lives and feeling like we haven’t really lived. Risk is the currency of life. Without risk, there is no life. We have to be willing to risk failure in return for a sense that we are living. And it’s when we’re really living that we really have a shot at changing the world.

Alan’s WDDinc perspective: The joy of a business is not the money, its the opportunity to be part of a team that knows it can make great things happen.