Don't be afraid to fail

Professor Grichnik, what is behind this hesitancy to take the step into self-employment?
Dietmar Grichnik: The big brake is the fear of failure. It is the number one excuse for not making a determined attempt to stand on one's own two feet professionally. In addition, the well-functioning job market also plays its part in keeping people from leaving the comfort zone of a permanent job, despite all the discontent that is occasionally felt in and around the workplace. And finally there are also the doubters from the family, friends and acquaintances. Their braking influence should not be underestimated.

And you say that allowing yourself to be blocked by the conflicting inner and also outer voices is simply wrong. Why?
Because man is a seeker of meaning, as Götz Werner, founder and supervisory board member of the company dm-drogerie markt, of which he was CEO for a long time, so beautifully puts it. If self-employment is viewed from this perspective, then the opportunity costs of meaning, i.e. spending my entire professional life in an occupation that doesn't really make sense to me, are higher than the financial opportunity costs of leaving a secure but unfulfilling fixed employment relationship. In my work I meet many people who have dared to take the step into self-employment. Many report earning less than before, initially or even in the longer term, having to work much more, but being far more satisfied. This satisfaction, which also arises from the sense of purpose they have found in their work, outweighs the efforts of self-employment twice or three times over in the long term.

And what about risk?
It is advisable to follow the example of experienced entrepreneurs. They define a bearable loss, i.e. they set a monetary, psychological and social maximum amount of time and capital that they are prepared to lose. This limits the risk to a tolerable level and enables the step into new entrepreneurial territory, into the unknown.

Professor Grichnik, you are firmly convinced that there is an entrepreneur in everyone. What leads you to this conviction?
Both scientific findings and experience from my work! They have shown me that no one is born an entrepreneur, but every person has the prerequisites for it. Children demonstrate this. For me, children are one of the most entrepreneurial

"The big brake is the fear of failure."

ric beings par excellence. Their inexhaustible creativity when playing, their ability to communicate, but also the risk tolerance in their games are entrepreneurial qualities par excellence! Unfortunately, in the course of their lives, many people allow themselves to be trained away from this entrepreneurial spirit and the radius of action in which the joy of it is tested. But this does not mean that it is completely lost. Statistically, self-employment can be traced as a career episode. Just as vocational training or a course of study can take up a part of one's life, it can become a reality sooner or later in any professional life.

But aren't there also different mentalities that make some people like self-employment more, others less?
You bet there is! Self-employment requires the willingness to commit oneself beyond fixed working hours and, please, to strain oneself. From the point of view of mentality, self-employment requires perseverance and renunciation. And a good deal of tolerance for ambiguity and frustration. You have to be able to endure tense, ambiguous situations and overcome setbacks. This requires considerable willpower, tenacity and determination. And, also a matter of mentality, the passion for a product and an entrepreneurial project. Only this mental condition carries through many storms of the independence and is unquestionably one of its central success factors. Not to be discouraged immediately by resistance, but to work persistently on overcoming it and on improved solutions for the chosen entrepreneurial task, that brings valuable experience, that is the do-ping for success in self-employment par excellence.

What does it ultimately depend on to really get wind under the entrepreneurial wings?
Studies show that the probability of asserting oneself in self-employment increases with the number of attempts. This conditional probability of success therefore becomes greater the more experiences are made and processed. Even if no one particularly loves failure experiences, there is more to learn from them than from successes. What is forgotten again and again, in failures and made and recognized mistakes an enormous further education potential is hidden. Provided, of course, that one does not sink into frustration and self-reproach, but sets about analysing and thinking about what went wrong and why. This exploratory work intensifies the learning process and increases the certainty of action. Recognizable, ultimately successful independence does not exist without deliberate, systematic perseverance, self-criticism, constant unprejudiced willingness to learn and the courage to face oneself.

So your advice is to get busy?
How else can the all-important wealth of experience be built up and the social network activated in order to increase the reach of the venture and gain important resources for scaling the start-up that one does not have oneself? Founders are notoriously penniless, but often rich in resources in their network. And furthermore, getting into action means early testing of the conceived customer problem solution on the market. This is crucial for the all-important product-market fit with the customer, in order to achieve a

"Founders are notoriously penniless, but often rich in resources in their network."

scaling - a growth of the venture - and to lead it to economic success. If a relevant problem is solved better than by existing offers for as many customers as possible, this establishes the product-market fit and opens up a scalable business model that can be implemented alone as a solo entrepreneur with a good network or as an interdisciplinary team with relevant experience in the market.

Professor Grichnik, a word in conclusion, please.
The "Walk the extra mile!" is everyday work for entrepreneurs! And the impetus for this is personal creative freedom. This freedom drives them to top performance, from which they derive a high sense of self-efficacy, which is a source of satisfaction and happiness for them. These correlations are well documented by psychological research. The energy and time required for an entrepreneurial life should not be trivialized. Everybody has to decide for himself which effort he is willing to make and which way of life he will choose. The American Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps states that in Europe in particular, satisfaction with one's own job is not particularly pronounced. This must be all the more thought-provoking because his research also shows that 95 percent of personal happiness is determined by happiness in the world of work. And in relation to this, it is very thought-provoking that in recent years the proportion of happy employees worldwide has almost halved. As a professor of entrepreneurship, I know there is an alternative to this dilemma. And what I also know, to stand on your own feet as an entrepreneur, that can be demonstrably learned. If you want to!