Entrepreneurship and the Possibility of Real Failure

In 2007 Vinicius Vacanti quit his highly-paid job in finance to take on life as an entrepreneur. In a short post describing his reasons for doing so, Vacanti says that most of us haven’t faced the possibility of real failure, and entrepreneurship is a way to test your limits by attempting to create something of real value:

A scary idea started creeping into my thoughts: what if I could build something? Wouldn’t I always wonder? Wouldn’t I regret it? Wouldn’t it eat away at me over the years?

And, that’s when I realized that I didn’t actually know if I was good enough because I hadn’t really failed in life (at least not professionally). Most people don’t really fail. We tend to take the job that we think we’ll succeed in. We are hesitant to reach. And, if we do reach and succeed, then we don’t reach again.

The only way to know how good you might be at something is to fail trying it.

And, that’s when I decided it was time to test my limits. It was time to really reach. It was time to quit my safe job and walk straight into almost certain startup failure.

There’s nothing mind-blowing here, admittedly — I just love how Vacanti phrased this.

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