I Want to Start a Business

You have called yourself a coward, probably late at night, and nobody has ever checked whether it is true.

In 2024 the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that among people looking straight at a good opportunity, 47 per cent would not start a business, for fear it might fail.

Thomas Aquinas argued that fear is a fault only when it drives you from something reason says you should face. If reason agrees with your fear, running is not cowardice. It is arithmetic.

Eleven chapters, each ending in one evening's work. The estimated 1,500 Americans who died on the road after September 2001 avoiding the sky. The law in your own country that says what really happens when a business cannot pay. The experiment in which the founders trained hardest to test their ideas were the likeliest to shut them down.

You will not lose the fear. You will know which parts of it are telling the truth.