“When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood.  I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience).  It’s addicting.  I know this sounds superficial.  If you’ve taken the roller coaster ride that is a startup – you know what I’m talking about” – Mark Suster.

 

We wrote many articles suggesting different tips to entrepreneurs with the main goal of spreading the knowledge and experience shared by successful entrepreneurs and VCs so that new, fresh entrepreneurs could learn out of it and eventually become the next big thing. But before one gets to all of that, maybe it’s a good idea to ask yourself: Is it entrepreneurship the right thing for me? Do I really want the life of an entrepreneur? Let’s see what 3 experienced entrepreneurs, playing in pretty different fields, advise on this.

1. Mark Suster: An entrepreneur and VC in early – stage technology companies. “Make sure it’s in your personality type, make sure you have the risk appetite, make sure you can afford to take the risks given your life situations and make sure you know that there is a high possibility your startup won’t be hugely financially rewarding.  If you still want to go for it knowing all this and all that you’ll endure – awesome!  It’s the best experience I’ve had in life.  But not for the faint-hearted”, writes Suster for TechCrunch in his extraordinary blog post “Should You Really Be A Startup Entrepreneur”.  He advises that before you get charmed by the glamour of Zynga, Twitter, Facebook, or Groupon,  try to find out if you want to be behind the scenes, behind what TechCrunch and Business Insider posts. And what’s behind the scenes? Well, it is a person who according to Suster:

• Is not status – oriented

• Doesn’t follow rules well and questions authority

• Can handle high degrees of ambiguity or uncertainty

• Can handle rejection, being told “no” often and yet still have the confidence in your idea

• Very decisive.  A bias toward making decisions – even when only right 70% of the time – moving forward & correcting what doesn’t work. Follow this link to read more about the attributes entrepreneurs should have, as defined by Suster.

 

Besides all these attributes, Suster points out to one another thing as crucial factor that determinates if you should be an entrepreneur or not and that is your ability to face extreme emotional states. Suser says: “There is nothing that would ever replace the rush of being on the top of the startup emotional curve. And on the bottom of the emotional startup curve there is nothing crappier than having to lay off 60 employees in one day. And that’s what it’s like – all superlatives.  Your highs are super high.  Crack.  Your lows are unexplainably low and lonely.  It’s the startup roller coaster world”.

2. Kevin O’ Connor: the co-founder and CEO of FindTheBest.com. Yesterday O’ Connor wrote an article, a questionnaire in fact, forVentureBeat in which he tries to help entrepreneurs identify if they have what it takes to be entrepreneurs. It’s a great start to explore more about your personality and the chances you have to become the next entrepreneur the media will write about. So, what are the traits O’ Connor believes are necessary to have in order to become a successful entrepreneur?

• Self – confidence

• Courage to fight for what is right

• Innovator

• Doing things NOW not later, not tomorrow, not next week

• Setting big goals

• Charismatic

 

Follow this link to read the full questionnaire that will help you find out if you should be an entrepreneur.

3. Kapil Nakra: A Digital Marketer and Serial Entrepreneur who started his first venture Whizlabs in 2000. The company became a leading online brand in IT Certification Domain in India. Next, in 2008, he started the OMLogic, an online marketing company and recently he started a new initiative, Digital Vidya, a company committed to providing experiential learning in the Online Marketing space.In his slideshare presentation, Entrepreneurship – Take The Plunge, Nakra shares part of his entrepreneurial experience and emphasizes the following traits that every entrepreneur must have:

• Think extremes: King or Nobody

• Be the one

• Work endlessly

• Enjoy working endlessly

• Jump of the cliff and take the plunge NOW

 

Having in mind these 3 entrepreneurs’ views, do you think you should be an entrepreneur? If yes then just go ahead and enjoy the ride because you will soon be the next awesome entrepreneur the world will talk about.

 

“You have to be an optimist — almost delusionally optimistic — otherwise you’ll never ever think about creating something new like a business” – Guy Kawasaki.