Third Shift Entrepreneur

Introduction

This is a book about how to start something and, in turn, create an inflection point for your life toward living your fully expressed purpose. The mythology and assumption that starting a business requires outside capital, the blessing of a venture capitalist, a polished pitch deck and time in business accelerators is false. Those things represent the scaffolding for a specific kind of business and pursuit, which require outside permission. This is a book written for the vast majority of businesses, organizations and initiatives that exist beyond that narrow frame which you can start today, with the resources you have, as the person you are, and from where you are in life. This is a book about giving yourself permission, and learning to start small.

Over a 15-year period, management researchers Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng tracked a group of would-be entrepreneurs to answer the question of whether quitting your job or keeping it, while pursuing starting your own business, was better.¹ They looked at more than 5,000 people in the United States who became entrepreneurs during this period of observation, and these entrepreneurs cut across age, gender, race demographics, industries and other controlled variables. The results were clear: Those who kept their day jobs were 33 percent less likely to fail in their new venture, which is significant. Adam Grant, the popular psychologist and professor at Wharton, says it this way, “Quitting your full-time job to start a company ...