Design Your Work: Praxis Volume 1

by Tiago Forte

The primary risk of entrepreneurship and other free agent lifestyles is not financial or even social — it is the risk to a person’s very self-concept as someone who does what they set out to do. In entrepreneurial endeavors that depend just as much on luck and timing as intelligence and hard work, this feels like a terrible gamble. And it’s a gamble with odds you can’t improve through careful preparation and planning (in fact, too much planning will probably worsen your odds). This sort of risk is not any less threatening in cultures that are relatively tolerant of failure, like the U.S. If anything, it’s more threatening, since these cultures also tend to be more individualistic, with your actions reflecting more directly on your character and abilities. Stripped of risk-mitigating social structures, we are faced with the terror of total accountability. The correlation between individualism and suicide rates in developed countries speaks to the risks of this sort of attribution.