What are the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field?

The odds of success are only off putting when you calculate them externally.

If your metrics for winning the game of entrepreneurship include getting famous, attracting funding, making millions, scaling large and selling out, then yes, those odds are extremely low.

And many founders are likely to be unmotivated and knock themselves out of the game before they even start. Because the risk is simply too high. They’d rather compete in games where the odds are better.

On the other hand, if you calculate success internally, with metrics like increasing learning, fostering growth, exploiting opportunity, building connections and making meaning, then the odds of winning are quite high.

Betting on yourself is a smart play and worth taking the plunge.

Framing the experience of starting a business in that way makes the barriers to entry much lower and motivates you in a completely different way. Harvard’s study on serial entrepreneurship revealed that founders of a previously successful business have a thirty percent chance of success in their next venture, whereas first timers only have an eighteen percent chance.

These numbers do make logical sense, in that experience increases the odds of success.

But just because someone’s never done something before is no reason not to try. You may have no idea what you’re getting into, but you also have no idea what you’re missing.

Personally, the lure of entrepreneurship for me has always been growth. Starting a business is a great adventure, and that alone is often enough of a motivator for me to give it a go.

Maybe my new product will change the world, maybe not.

Maybe my customers will rave, maybe not.

Maybe my enterprise will become profitable, maybe not.

It doesn’t matter.

One, because there’s no way to tell at the outset, and two, because there is limited control once you’re in the thick of it. May as take the plunge and navigate with an internal compass from day one.

Paul, the professor of philosophy and cognitive science, wrote a stunning book about transformative experiences. She writes:

Choices involving dramatically new experiences, in this case, starting a business, are confronted by the brute fact that we know very little about our subjective futures. Having a transformative experience teaches us something new, something that we could not have known before having the experience, she explains. The experience can be life changing in that it changes what it is like for you to be you.

Our best response to a potential situation, then, is to choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become on the other side of it.

Aren’t you curious how starting a business will change you? What if the growth opportunities were enough to convince you that launching something was worth everything?

I’m reminded of the best line from my favorite space western.

Threepio says:

“Sir, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately three thousand seven hundred twenty to one!”

Han Solo responds with, never tell me the odds.

How are you measuring success?