It’s no surprise that from the outside, people see running a startup as a glamorous job of fame and riches. An infatuation for wanting to live a similar, contrived fantasy builds up in many and before you know it, they are dropping out of school, brainstorming the next big idea on their brand new whiteboard…

Wait a second…you’ve already set yourself up for failure.

What I’ve experienced over the last few years is that more and more folks are obsessed with starting a company without experiencing the true problem they are trying to solve and without setting their expectations appropriately to what starting and running a company really entails. How many times have you heard someone say, “man , I just came up with the best idea ever!” Yup, it must be a great idea and it must be the next billion dollar company, go for it!…

The courage and bravado is great but reason cannot be thrown out...

To learn how to become an entrepreneur I’d first have to ask myself why I want to be an entrepreneur. The answer to that now is the standard, traditional, not very exciting or unique response of: I want to build something that changes the world, have my own company with my own culture and challenge myself everyday. Right.

What’s odd is that I never once did ask myself “why do I want to become an entrepreneur?” Why not? Because I never wanted to be one, at least, never intentionally. It wasn’t my aspiration to be one, it wasn’t even a thought in my mind.

That’s what makes the story of how I got to where I am now and how I ended up an entrepreneur a bit more interesting…

I’m an entrepreneur today out of trying to take shortcuts and a lack of identity.

In high school I was an avid gamer (counter-strike 1.6). In fact, I was pretty good. That said, I wasn’t a professional eSports level...

I have a huge issue with business reads, startup reads, success/failure reads, and reads that reflect what you should or should not do in a business or what is good or bad to do in a given situation. (reads = books, essays, blog posts, etc.)

Those reads genuinely scare me. Why? They often, even subconsciously, shift my trajectory, hamper my creativity, and in some cases, make me conform while robbing me of unimaginable experiences.

I had a colleague once that loved explaining how to navigate certain business concepts/situations by saying “oh, you should read Paul Graham’s essay on that.” Hmm.

A major issue I have with such reads (your standard essays/books like PG’s essays, Crossing the Chasm, Four Steps to the Epiphany, etc. – entertaining reads, no doubt, the call here is to be mindful of what you absorb) is that in many cases they are retrospective. In retrospect, things are misl...