Observations and Inferences

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine burst through the door brimming with the joy of a new idea. I won’t spill the beans here, but it’s a good one—it solves a problem and is perfectly aligned with what he enjoys offering the world. It’ll stretch him a bit—he’s gonna have to learn a new skill in order to make it happen—but ultimately, I believe that creating this thing is going to be both fun and good for him as a person and an entrepreneur.

There’s only one problem:

He doesn’t know whether or not it’s going to work out.

How can entrepreneurs overcome the fear of failure and embrace the unknown?

People come to me with ideas. A lot. I have a tendency to get really excited about whatever the person who’s talking to me is really excited about, and I’m good at the Internet (launch strategy and marketing), which gives me something to offer founders.

The elephant in the room is, of course, always the potential for failure. None of us ever have any foolproof way of knowing whether or not the...