Why do people start businesses? The standard answers — to get rich, to follow a passion, to find work/life change — are frequency a loyal reasons. First of all, they’re not sound rationales. Only a propitious few get abounding using a business, we need a lot some-more than passion to make it work, and, in my experience, a hunt for supposed life/work change becomes a fool’s errand.

How do we know these things? Well, we have spent a improved partial of my adult years supporting, essay about and advocating for entrepreneurs — many of them, rather ironically, as an employee, modifying Entrepreneur repository for over 25 years. For a past 4 years, I’ve been using my possess company, so we pronounce from experience.

I will confess that it never occurred to me to start a business (outside of sad meditative after modifying an essay on nonetheless another successful businessman and seeking myself, “Why didn’t we consider of that?”), until we was good into my 50s. After all, we was comparatively happy with my pursuit — or so we thought.

This peculiar multiple of gratification and self-delusion is common for a women who were innate on a heading corner of a baby bang (I’m 59). When Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, giving birth to a feminist revolution, many of us were still in class propagandize or youth high, comparatively unknowingly of a possibilities that were being non-stop for us. In fact, a few years later, my high-school superintendence advisor presented me with a 3 careers that were open to me: teacher, helper or secretary. I, of course, soon deserted them all, and out of recklessness remembered saying women’s bylines in The New York Times, and announced my vigilant to be a journalist.

By a nature, reporters are not inherently entrepreneurial (or weren’t — there’s been a former change only in a final 5 years). We are lerned to observe and report. So it took me a prolonged time to comprehend we was in a homogeneous of a bad marriage, sanctimonious all was OK, though meaningful it wasn’t. And we had been “married” distant too long.

The perils of starting a business are good known. Most startups destroy within a initial 5 years. Cash upsurge is an issue, even in a best of mercantile times. And if you’re single, we comprehend there’s no reserve net, no spouse’s income to rest on while we build your business. Add to that a fact that during 50 or older, there’s simply reduction time to replenish any waste that might occur, and we consternation because anyone would be crazy adequate to embark into a good different universe of entrepreneurship.

And yet, because not? That’s a doubt we kept seeking myself. Why not? And we could never come adult with a reason. The law is, I’m not unequivocally introspective. we don’t coddle things over unequivocally good — I’m some-more a guileless type. That’s how we finished adult on Thanksgiving day, during a age of 55, in Paris for a initial time, staring during a gracefulness of a Cathedral during Notre Dame sipping a best prohibited chocolate ever made, and deciding, “Why not?!”

I was in business with several of my former employees 4 months later. Little did we comprehend we was partial of a surge: The Kauffman Foundation reports that in a past 10 years or so, 55- to 64-year-olds boasted a top rate of entrepreneurial activity, while 20- to 34-year-olds had a lowest.

I won’t distortion and tell we owning a business is oh-so-easy. we have never worked this tough in my life. Or slept so little. There were moments (more like months) where we questioned my preference several times a day — and my reason even some-more often. There were times we didn’t consider we’d make it. we can relate roughly each high (meeting new people who’ve turn friends, partners, clients and mentors; winning a new contract), and low (clients who go out of business; training a cost of health care; anticipating out people we suspicion were your friends unequivocally weren’t).

But we don’t bewail holding a leap. Do we wish I’d divorced my pursuit earlier? Absolutely. But apparently “50 is a new 30″ — and The Telegraph journal in England has dubbed us 50-plus women “quintastics,” so I’m not worried.

So because do people start businesses? Everyone has their possess motivations. Some have no choice, others are pushed, some meticulously plan, others are casually creative, and some, like me, only confirm a time has come.

Rieva Lesonsky is a owner and CEO of GrowBiz Media, a Lakewood, Calif.-based provider of information and resources for business owners, and a member of a HuffPost Small Business Board of Directors.

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/17/my-second-life-starting-a-business-in-my-50s_n_1205350.html
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