This analogy might be a bit of a stretch but I think that it is useful for people who are sitting on the fence about starting up their much dreamed about business venture to consider the following question – why is it that your desire to start a business remains a dream even though you are able to accomplish lesser goals like buying a car, getting a new job or a new home? One obvious answer is that starting a business is riskier and typically more complex than all those other goals put together. This is true, but only half the story.

I think the only difference that matters (in this regard) between buying a car for example, and starting a business is that the latter takes more effort and more courage. More effort to overcome the many obstacles that you will inevitably encounter, and more courage to carry on in the face of doubt and doubters.

Think about it, if your offer for a car is rejected by a dealer, you either make a new offer or find another dealer right? Well it is kind of like that in business too, except that you get much more complex problems than this and usually many more of them. That said, they are still only problems – problems that need solving, e.g. funding application refused (revise business plan/pitch and try another investor/lender); customer-acquisition is slow (alter marketing campaign or tweak product). Like I said, more effort.

As for risk, what do you do before buying a car? You check it out; look under the hood – even though you don’t know anything about cars; take it on a test drive etc. And of course once you have bought it you take out some insurance in case something happens to it. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any insurance against business failure but you should certainly look for ways to test drive your business before spending tons of cash on it. Think about building a prototype as cheaply as you can or a scaled down version of your final product and offerring it to a handful of customers.

One last thing, many people including successful entrepreneurs will have you believe that entrepreneurs have 100% faith in their ideas and that this is what makes the difference. On the contrary I believe that you would be hard pressed to find an entrepreneur that didn’t have any doubts whatsover about whether or not their business would be as much of a hit as they hoped. The difference is that the sucessful ones go ahead and start it up anyway.

Still not convinced? Read Paul Graham’s essay “Why to Not Not Start a Startup“ or check out Startup Nation.

As always, wishing you all the best with your business venture.