Maybe you think you’re too invested in your career to start a business. Or too settled and comfortable. Or even too old.
Then again, a study found the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged, even in the tech sector.
Researchers compiled a list of 2.7 million company founders who hired at least one employee between 2007 and 2014 and found that the average startup founder was 45 years old when they founded the most successful tech companies.
In general terms, a 50-year-old entrepreneur was almost twice as likely to start an extremely successful company as a 30-year-old. (Or, for that matter, a successful side hustle).
Even more surprising, a 60-year-old startup founder was three times as likely to found a successful startup as a 30-year-old startup founder – and was 1.7 times as likely to found a startup that winds up in the top 0.1 percent of all companies.
But what if your business doesn’t become wildly successful? According to Steve Jobs, there’s a broader reason to take the entrepreneurial plunge, even if you “only” dip a toe in the side hustle waters. (His use of the pronoun “one” is distracting, so I’ve substituted “you”).
While Jobs refers to consultants, the premise definitely applies to being an employee:
I think that without owning something – over an extended period of time, like a few years – where you have the chance to take responsibility for your recommendations, where you have to see your recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick yourself up off the ground and dust yourself off, you learn a fraction of what you can.
Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implications, (provides) a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn to be better.
Without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three-dimensional.
And you will never care as much about what you do.
I worked for a Fortune 500 company for nearly 20 years. I was dedicated; over the years I worked hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime. I was committed; I agreed to take on assignments that I knew might derail opportunities for advancement.
But I was never as dedicated, or committed or engaged as I felt when I started doing freelance writing jobs in my “free” time at night and on weekends. Or when I decided to turn my side hustle (even though that term hadn’t been coined yet) into my occupation.
And Jobs was right: I’ve learned a lot more – about business, about people, about life and about myself – in the last 20 years than I did in those first 20 years working for someone else.
Start a business or a side hustle and you’re free to chart your own course. To make your own decisions. To make your own mistakes.
To learn from those decisions and mistakes.
And add another dimension to your skills, your personality… and your life.
Credit – Taken from – https://incafrica.com/article/jeff-haden-31-years-ago-steve-jobs-shared-best-reason-you-should-start-your-own-business-even-if-its-just-a-side-hustle
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