Bad advice: Don't let it stop you

Entrepreneurship used to be an inclination that festered until a midlife crisis. But the entrepreneurship bug isn't something that hits only in middle age, so why wait that long? Today, the people who start most new businesses are under 34­ and if they're doing it, so can you. Don't be stifled by your age or lack of experience– or by the bad advice people start spewing.

Bad advice #1: You won't make enough money.

 Who is making enough money at anything new? No one. The few who pull down six figures at the beginning probably spent six figures on grad school and are paying it back, with interest. So the fatalists who say you won't make enough money are really telling you to never switch careers, never risk being a beginner, never bet on yourself. This way of thinking will put your career in a coma.

What many people mean when they say you won't make enough money is that you won't raise enough money. After all, if you raised a ton of money to start your business, you could pay yourself a great salary. Most of you have ideas that do not require amazing fundraising efforts. And, let's face it, if you're coming up with ideas that require a six-million-dollar investment, that's not really a good idea.

Bad advice #2: You can be entrepreneurial in a large company.

 Large corporations suck up fast-paced, fun, innovative small business and make them boring. Then they tell you, in an interview, that the position you're considering is very entrepreneurial. It's not. If it were entrepreneurial, then it would be too big a wild card to fit into a corporate hierarchy. What the corporate maven really means is that the position you're interviewing for could be entrepreneurial if it were not in a large company.

Bad advice #3: Starting your own business is too risky.

 At this point in loyalty-free corporate life, it may be higher risk to work for someone else. You probably know someone who got laid off in the '90s. And you probably know someone who got off-shored in the '00s. It was risky of them to bet that a large company would keep them around.

And when you're sifting through those ubiquitous statistics that say most new business fail, think about the perspective of those numbers: 76 percent of new businesses make it off the ground. Sure, most do not last as long as, say, General Motors. But are you looking to run a multinational company for 100 years, or are you looking to get control over your time so you don't get laid off or tapped to travel from home six weeks in a row?

Don't listen to those people who tell you small businesses are risky. Listen to Matt Rivers, owner of Pump House surf shop in Massachusetts, who went into business when he was 17. To him, the biggest risk was that he'd have to grow up and get a job that wouldn't allow him to surf. Matt redefined the meaning of risk, and you should, too.

What's most important in your life? Can starting your own business get that for you better than a corporate job? Then entrepreneurship is pretty low-risk for you.

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And here's a piece of good advice: Don't think of failure as black and white. Rivers was so successful with his first shop that he opened a second. But running between the two shops took too much time away from surfing, and the extra money wasn't worth it. So he closed the second shop.

Is that failure? To some, maybe. But to those of us who are enlightened, closing down a business is not so much failure as it is gaining self-knowledge to lead a more fulfilling life.