Sitting on a patio enjoying the summer night I had goosebumps while reading Richard Branson’s latest book Business Stripped Bare. For those of you not familiar with Richard, he is the greatest pure entrepreneur the world has ever seen. The few books he has written are absolute gems; real world guides to the business battlefield from a General who has conquered them. This particular section from his chapter on Entrepreneurship & Leadership deserves to - no absolutely - must be shared:

To be a serious entrepreneur,you have to be prepared to step off the precipice. Yes, it’s dangerous. There can be times, having jumped, when you find yourself in free fall without a parachute…Then you reach out and grab a ledge with your fingertips — and claw your way back to safety.

Life has become too cosy for many, who have their lives mapped out by parents and teachers. It’s all a bit, well, comfortable: off you go to university to study a course.  Land a good job, get a mortgage, find a nice girlfriend, boyfriend, partner. It’s a solid life — a good life in many ways — but when was the last time you took a risk?

Many people reading this book will be affluent. If you don’t feel affluent right now, take a minute and think: the very fact that you could afford this book — the very fact that you are able to read at all — marks you out as one of world history’s richest and most privileged people…Affluence makes us lazy. It makes us complacent. It smothers us in cotton wool. If you job’s well paid, who can blame you if you’re not willing to take a risk and, say, set up your own company?

The vast majority are very happy with this arrangement, and good for them. But if you want smashbuckling action in your life, become an entrepreneur and give it a go. Learn the art of trying to set up your own business.

People have a fear of failure, and while is this perfectly reasonable, it’s also very odd. Because it seems to me that it’s through making mistakes that we learn how to do things.

Now, I grant you that you may hit a limit, beyond which you can’t learn from your mistakes. Don’t expect a chart-topping album from me any time soon, or a recital at Carnegie Hall, or a sequence of sonnets, or any of the billion and one other things I’m never going to be great at. But that’s not failure. That’s finding out what you’re good at. The world is much, much bigger than you, and no amount of worldly success if going to change that fact.

Failure is not giving things a go in the first place. People who fail are those who don’t have a go and don’t make an effort. Failures can’t be bothered. There are few people who’ve tried something and fallen who didn’t get enormous satisfaction from trying, and I’ve learned more from people who have tried and faltered than from the few charmed people for whom success came easy.

I work with entrepreneurs to provide them with the confidence, focus and strategies needed to successfully build their first business.

Dan Johnston.