The post is essentially a list of questions that would be entrepreneurs should ask themselves before starting a business. It’s designed to be a quiz of sorts, to give you a gut-check, to see if you accept the challenge of signing both sides of your paycheck. I was ready to run through a wall when I read it. Here are a few questions from the quiz:

1. Members of my family run their own businesses.
2. I have friends who run their own businesses.
3. I worked after school and during vacations when I was growing up.
4. I get an adrenaline rush from selling things.
5. I am exhilarated by achieving results.

At the end of the quiz, if you answer “Yes” to 17 or more of the questions then maybe you should ask yourself “what’s holding me back”?

Read the full article and take the quiz here: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/02/should_you_be_an_entrepreneur.html

• In every single year from 1996 to 2007, Americans between the ages of 55 and64 had a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity than those aged 20-34.
• For the entire period, the 55-64 group averaged a rate of entrepreneurial activity roughly one-third larger than their youngest counterparts.
• These trends seem likely to persist: in the Kauffman Firm Survey, a longitudinal survey of nearly 5,000 companies that began in 2004, two-thirds of firm founders are between the ages of 35 and 54.3
• Additionally, Kauffman research has revealed that the average age of the founders of technology companies in the United States is a surprisingly high 39—with twice as many over age 50 as under age 25.4
• See, for instance, the birth rate trend from 1980 to 2005: from 1980-1987, the total birth rate for the U.S. fluctuated between 15.6 and 15.9 live births per 1,000 people. From 1988 to 1991, the birth rate increased to over 16, peaking in 1990 at nearly 17 per 1,000. See also National Center for Health

1. Statistics, http://205.207.175.93/VitalStats/ReportFolders/reportFolders.aspx. That slight uptick in the birth rate may not sound like much, but consider that an extra one or (mathematically, at least) one and one half births per 1,000 in population, for a population of, say, 100 million people, translates into an additional 100,000 people per year.
2. Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, Table 10, Projected Life Expectancy,http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/summarytables.html. See also Jim Oeppen & James W. Vaupel, “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy,” 296 Science 1029 (10 May 2002).
3. Janice Ballou, et al, “The Kauffman Firm Survey: Results from the Baseline and First Follow-Up Surveys,” Kauffman Foundation, March 2008, http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/kfs_08.pdf.
4. Vivek Wadhwa, Richard Freeman, & Ben Rissing, “Education and Tech Entrepreneurship,” Kauffman Foundation Research Report, May 2008, http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/Education_Tech_Ent_061108.pdf.