Entrepreneurship or Employment?

Many people want to decide what would be best for them: entrepreneurship or employment. What critical thinking can advice here? Probably, the main and the most important advice is that there is a false dichotomy here. It may appear there are only two options, but actually there are two main roads and a number of directions between them. So if you are considering this question yourself, think about the third, the fourth and other options you can imagine. You can do that right now before reading the rest.

I imagine there are a number of jobs that may have traits of both entrepreneurship and employment. For example a person can work as an entrepreneur’s assistant. It would be an employment and at the same time the person would do many things an entrepreneur does. A person can also find a form of entrepreneurship which requires only a small part of the time, for example an hour. Both of these options can help to explore entrepreneurship before doing it full time and with full responsibility.

There are also a number of temporal options. For example one doesn’t have to start anything of above right now, he can study the topic more closely, he can go to courses designed for entrepreneurs or read relevant books. Information from these sources can help to make better decisions.

Yet another way to consider this is to check what do you need. Changing the way you work may be only a step to reach other goals, like increasing the income, finding more free time, changing the field of work. After checking what do you really want and why do you want to change your job, you may find other interesting and unusual options to reach your goals.

When you know what you are looking for you can use this criteria to decide a course of action. Or you can calculate expected utilities for each option. It may mean you can find answers for more questions than you initially asked, but these answers can help you much more than an answer to a simple question, what is better for you, entrepreneurship or employment?