I Want to Start a Business but I'm a Coward - Find Out Which Fears Are Telling the Truth #1006460

You have called yourself this word before, probably late at night, and nobody has ever checked whether it is true.
In 2024 the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor surveyed more than 150,000 adults across 51 economies. About 60,000 of them said they could see good opportunities to start a business. Among those people, the ones looking straight at the door, 47 per cent said they would not go through it, for fear it might fail.
More than seven hundred years ago Thomas Aquinas argued that fear becomes a fault only when it drives you away from something reason says you should face. Everyone remembers the first half of that and forgets the second. If reason agrees with your fear, running is not cowardice. It is arithmetic.
So the question is not whether you are afraid. You are, and this book will show you why you probably always will be. The question is whether the evidence agrees with you, and nobody has ever sat down and checked that with you, one fear at a time.
Eleven chapters. Each one ends with an exercise you can start the same evening, usually with nothing more than a pen and your phone.
Inside:
- The estimated 1,500 Americans who died on the road after September 2001 because they were afraid of the sky, and what that says about the choice you are making right now by not starting
- Two jars of coloured balls that show how much of what you call fear of failure is really a fear of not knowing
- The law in your own country that says what actually happens when a business cannot pay, which runs twelve months in one place and three years in another, and never the forever your fear has been quoting
- The famous claim that 85 per cent of what we worry about never happens, traced back to the seventeen people it was really measured on
- An experiment with 553 startups in which the founders trained most rigorously to test their ideas were the ones most likely to shut them down, because sometimes the coward is right
- Why telling yourself to calm down before a big moment may be the worst advice available, and what 113 people singing karaoke showed instead
- The third founder of Apple, who gave up his tenth of the company for 800 dollars in 1976 and has said ever since that he does not regret it
Every study comes with the names of the people who did it, the year, and where it appeared. Where the evidence is thin, disputed, or failed to replicate, you read that in the chapter itself and not in a footnote at the back.
Diego Segura is an industrial engineer with an MBA who has started businesses in more than one country, and more than a million people in over ninety countries have read his books. He also took a construction company into bankruptcy, dissolved a second company in 2024 and spent the months afterwards on credit cards and oats, and once waited an entire weekend at a conference at Harvard for thirty seconds with an investor who looked at his prototype for four and walked away. Those stories are in here with the parts that do not flatter him left in. He is not a psychologist or a lawyer, and he says so before you can work it out for yourself.
By the end you will not have lost the fear. You will be holding eleven pieces of evidence, and you will know which parts of it were telling you the truth.
Right now you are already making a choice. You are not starting. What if that is the risky one?