“If you do things that are safe but feel risky, you gain a significant advantage in the marketplace.” Seth Godin

Yet, as Steve Jobs notes: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” 2

Entrepreneurship is connecting, creating, and inventing systems—be they businesses, people, ideas, or processes. A job is the act of following the operating system someone else created.

“A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind loving diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.” Charles T. Munger

He chose to quit his job to run an eCommerce store, not because he thought it would be more profitable, but for the same reason many people in his position do: he wanted to build a lifestyle that would let him spend more time travelling and be with his family.

we frequently avoid making choices not because the outcome is bad, but simply because it’s unknown.

Entrepreneurship is certainly not without risk. Issues of personal debt, damaged relationships, and lost earning potential can and usually will always arise . There are, however, differences in how it deals with risk.

Rand also develops another skillset in the complex domain: dealing with risk.

The Long Tail, a concept popularized by Wired editor Chris Anderson in

Start with a relatively ambitious but discrete opportunity, and use that to build out your skillset and relationships for the next project.

For technical founders, plugins (specifically those on WordPress) are the most common way to stair step their ways out.

That’s not to say it’s easy—you still have to climb the stairs, but no longer in a single bound.