A lot of people who would like to start a business think the task is too daunting. But following a passion is not as high risk as you may think. Conventional wisdom about entrepreneurs being big risk takers and living on the edge is not all that realistic. In fact, there are ways to minimize [...]

By Ryan Healy — Most of my friends would love to run their own business some day. Me too. However, we believe the first logical step is to get a few years of work experience, make connections, and save money.
A couple of months ago, my good friends from college, Matt, Cole and Adam, came to [...]

There is a glut of people who are dying to fund business plans. Especially now, as starting a business online becomes less and less expensive, people require less money from investors, so investors have to look harder for startups to fund.
The problem is that people only want to fund good business ideas. It's very hard to [...]

One of the important lessons in entrepreneurship is to figure out your goal: Do you want to run a small business forever? Grow into a multinational corporation? Or do you want to sell as fast as possible? Your business should fit your personality and your vision for your life.
New York magazine profiles a drug dealer [...]

The barriers to entrepreneurship are crumbling, and every six months, technology makes starting a business easier and easier.
As a result, entrepreneurship has become more appealing to a wider range of people. If you measure success in terms of personal growth and flexible work, their success rate is sky high.
Check out Yahoo Finance for a list of the old [...]

A few months ago, I was interviewing this guy, Ben Casnocha.
The first thing you need to know about Ben is that he started a company when he was fourteen. And it's still around today, four years later. Ben doesn't run it, but my point is that it's a real company.
But no, wait, that's not my [...]

Over the course of the last year, I've interviewed a lot of people about entrepreneurship. The common thread running through all the interviews is that entrepreneurship is different than it was even five years ago. Barriers to entry are lower than ever, and if you measure success in terms of personal growth and flexible work, [...]

Thirty is a magic number for the new generation — a time when people want their career path and their family life in place. This is a difficult convergence to pull off, but more and more people are aiming for it.
Jessica Marshall Forbes summarizes these feelings as she describes getting married: "We always knew we wanted [...]

(A couple of weeks ago I posted a piece that did not fit in my upcoming book. That post was so well received that I decided to post another that didn't make it into the book.)
We all want to save lives. The thing is that people get paid to save stock prices. We do not [...]

It's a lot easier to give advice than to implement it. You can imagine how acutely aware of this I must be.
After I've given out the same piece of advice twenty times (for example, get a mentor), there comes a point when I can't face myself if I don't follow it. Sometimes I try to [...]

While everyone was watching for the telecommuting trend to explode, something else exploded right next to it: The virtual company. The business with no office to telecommute from.
These companies give new opportunities to entrepreneurs to get started with no money down. But a virtual business also gives people the opportunity to create the personal life [...]

Are you considering entrepreneurship? It's all the rage right now because the bar at the start line has never been lower. Here are nine new ideas about entrepreneurship that will make you feel like you can do it, too. Right now:
1. You don't need a venture capitalist, you are the venture capitalist.
Today, you can [...]

Matt Rivers became an entrepreneur at age 17 when his favorite surf shop went out of business and he used his dishwashing money to buy it. “At first there was only one T-shirt rack and one shorts rack and when I sold a T-shirt I bought two more." Today his Cape Cod-based business has one [...]

For those of you about to start another year at school, here's a list of things to keep in mind: Twenty things to do in college to set yourself up for a great job when you graduate.
1. Get out of the library.
"You can have a degree and a huge GPA and not be ready [...]

The odds are that you will probably consider self-employment at some point: Eighty-nine percent of people in the United States who make more than $50,000 a year are self-employed, according to Entrepreneur magazine.
As with all decision points, the way to make the best choice is to know yourself. If you get bored easily, do a [...]

There's disconcerting news in CareerJournal today. They list the top ten professions, using generally the same criteria that Salary.com used to come up with its list of the ten best professions. And the only professions that are (only sort of) on both lists are: "analyst" and "social worker/psychologist".
Analyst is such a broad term that it [...]

Recently, Aaron Karo performed stand-up comedy in a string of sold-out shows. He also bills himself as an author, a public speaker, and a sitcom actor. Karo has always juggled a few careers. After college, he went to work for an investment bank. But he was also writing a weekly newsletter that had tens of [...]

Can we all just stop talking about promotions like they matter? A promotion has meaning when someone is moving up the corporate ladder at such a slow pace that every small step is grounds for celebration.
But there are no more ladders because no one stays long enough at a company to get up the whole [...]

It might shock you to hear that it's easier to find money to fund your business idea than it is to find an idea. A good idea, that is. There are two kinds of good ideas. The first one is for a small business that will not grow but will sustain the lifestyle you want [...]

Many twentysomethings talk about feeling undervalued by corporate America. Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman are doing what many others are doing to solve this problem: starting their own company. At universities like Harvard and Carnegie Mellon 30-40% of graduates end up starting their own business after five years, and the trend is poised to go [...]