Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. Even the most intelligent, hardworking, and resourceful founders often throw in the towel and return to the relative peace and safety of a corporate career.
However, if you're at a point in your life in which you're trying to decide between the unpredictability of entrepreneurship or the stability of a corporate career, be sure to put considerable thought into each option as this is not a decision that should be taken lightly. To give you some food for thought, we've syndicated a blog post from Arthur Gopak of AlphaGamma that outlines what influenced him to launch a company.
The post, "Why I chose entrepreneurship over a corporate career", originally appeared at AlphaGamma and has been republished with permission.
No, I am not saying that having a corporate career sucks.
Sure, I enjoyed my time working for some of the well-known companies in the financial industry and business consulting.
I learned a lot of practical skills to do the work I did. How to work with different types of people. How to handle workload and difficult people within organizations and their customers. But the feeling that I got stuck in a corporate environment, a “box”, never left me alone. I felt being “just a number”. This feeling magnifies when you know that you could do a better job than the management does.
Most importantly, I have realized over time that a corporate career will not make me happy. I did not see myself working for a corporation, climbing the corporate ladder and hoping to reach the top by my 50s.
I was following the show called "Bloomberg TechStars" and I was inspired to see my contemporaries coming up from nowhere, with no name and no title, and eventually killing it in the world of business. I wanted to be like that. And even before the show I knew I would become an entrepreneur one day.
Yet, I needed more confidence. And the idea I would be really believe in to make this first step. Now the time has finally come!
No, I am not urging everyone to jump-start their own companies.
Entrepreneurship is definitely not for everyone. I think that entrepreneurship is a mindset. Sure, you can learn a set of practical skills and acquire some knowledge how to do it. But it takes lots of personal traits and character to execute business ideas in challenging environments.
Nevertheless, having some work experience first would definitely help, and you will barely find well-known and successful entrepreneurs who started their companies without working for someone. For example, the Shark Tank investors Kevin O’Leary worked in an ice cream shop where he got fired. Barbara Corcoran used to work as a teacher after graduating from college. And Mark Cuban worked as a bartender at an age of 25. Although they stayed at those jobs for a relatively short period of time, they made it clear to themselves to pursue their dreams as entrepreneurs.
So some work experience "never killed nobody", but if you want to become an entrepreneur, the question is to be mentally prepared once the time is right.
(Business woman looking at road with maze and solution concept image by Shutterstock)
