How to Figure Out If Entrepreneurship Is for You

culled from:inc.com

1. Try entrepreneurship on a small scale instead of just speculating about it. Just start on a small scale: get some alone time in between classes or during lunch and brainstorm some business ideas and set a plan to get business idea feedback.  Give yourself a few weeks to solicit feedback and refine your idea. After you’re done… did you like doing that?  Going up and talking to people?  Validating business ideas?  Constructing business models? I imagine you’ll not only learn more about yourself in your three weeks of doing this than you learned in the last year. 

2. Go figure out what entrepreneurs in your field of interest actually do, and see if you like doing those things (and if you can do those things). Let’s say your business of choice is web development. Go out and talk to some freelance web developers. Ask, “what do you do?”…”how do you make money (get clients)?” The goal here is to see not only what the specific craft needed is (in this case, web development), but also how the business is built (where do the customers come from?).

3. Make a decision based on your research. So, for example, you interview a few web developers, and you conclude that they do a lot of programming (duh) (this is the part you like)…but they also have to attend a lot of courses on web development (you like this), they have to do a lot of sales (you don’t like this) and presentations (you loathe presentations), and they have to be good at customer support (you aren’t very good at this). Now that you essentially know what’s involved in this entrepreneurial venture, what are you going to do?