I think people make business far more complicated than it needs to be, and in doing so they take all the fun out of it.
That is the belief. I am not completely certain about it, which is roughly why I am writing it down.
The fun bit
This is the most fun I have ever had. Complete autonomy. The freedom to chase an idea just because I want to know what happens. Time spent with my best friends building things.
The usual objection is the risk. The pressure. Setting yourself up to fail in public and the humiliation that comes with it. The uncertainty and the doubt.
All fair. And most of it is going to happen anyway. You will feel pressure working for someone else. You will fail at things. You will spend a good part of your life uncertain. The difference is who chose it.
The time is going to pass regardless.
Starting is stupidly easy now
I do not think people have caught up with how easy it has become.
You can decide on a Monday that you want a business, and by the following Monday have a limited company, a business bank account, a website, branding, social accounts and a product you are already selling to someone. No prior planning. No qualification. A week.
Whether the thing you have built is useful is an entirely different question. Most of the time it is not. Plenty of mine were not.
But that is the argument for starting, not against it. Starting is how you find out. Planning is how you avoid finding out.
You can plan for six months and end up with a folder of ideas nobody has tested. The moment you put something in front of an actual person you get a data point, and data points are the only thing that makes the next decision better than the last one.
You have to touch the stove
Throwing myself in and working it out as I went is the most useful thing I have done. It let me speed run the mistakes.
You do not learn a mistake by being told about it. You learn it by making it. Your parents told you the stove was hot and you touched it anyway. That is not stupidity, that is how it works. You need the burn.
I have had a significant amount of burn since I started. It still has not stopped being fun.
I would like to think that writing some of this down means a few people avoid the same mistakes. Realistically it will not work. It did not work on me. But it might make the burn shorter.
The bit I am less sure about
There is a line people use, and I have used it myself: if it fails you are just back where you started, with better information.
I am not sure that is true, and it feels dishonest to leave it standing.
The worst mistake I have made in business was giving people equity instead of a salary. Equity is not a portion of the business, it is a portion of the control, and it does not come back to you when the venture goes badly. You do not land back where you started. You land somewhere slightly worse, holding better information.
I still think the information is worth it. But "you have nothing to lose" is the sort of thing people say when they are selling you something, and I would rather not.
Anyway
Nobody is making you do this. That is the part worth holding onto. Being able to build something of your own, to spend your day on your own idea, is a genuinely lucky position to be in, and approaching it with fear and doubt wastes it.
Everyone is capable of building something. Failed ventures are normal, and you should probably welcome a few, because they will teach you more than a decade of doing what you are told.
That is what I currently believe. Writing it down is how I find out whether I still do.