A friend of mine sent me a link to the this entry at startupspark.com, listing the Top 10 Ways to Know You’re an Entrepreneur.  Although I liked the list, and I must admit that pretty much everything on that list could be used to accurately describe my personality, I do disagree with the posting a bit.

The list seems to imply that you are an entrepreneur if you meet all the criteria on the list.  I believe that the entry should be titled “Personality Traits of People Desiring Financial Freedom”.  Because as my father taught me, in order to be an entrepreneur, you must put your neck on the line for what you believe in, (even if it is only a small piece of your neck). 

Today’s technology makes it easy (for the most part) to start up and not risk a lot when creating your MicroISV.  But by putting yourself out there, you are still assuming some accountability for the inherent risk that goes into starting a business.

In creating our business (even as trimmed down as our budget has become lately), we are still accepting a financial risk, and we hope to make a profit at some point.  And if I just continued to just “work for the man” for the rest of my life, that list of tens personality traits would still be accurate, but I would have a tough time introducing myself at a party as an entrepreneur.  I would merely continue to be an employee.

I read a lot of blogs and forums which deal with the topic of starting and running a MicroISV.  My favorite ones are written by folks who are out there doing it.  They’ve written a piece of software and created a journal along the way.  These folks are trying to make a profit from their software that they’ve put their hearts into, not on the blog they’ve created along the way.  They tend to write articles that talk about their actual experiences and lessons learned in running a business.  They don’t write articles like that are titled “how to tell if you are an entrepreneur, they talk about why they are an entrepreneur.  They write about their successes and their mistakes.  Everything is quite personal, and I feel like I know these people.

(My wife says I should mention who my actual favorites are…)

Some of my favorites include Ian Landsman’s Weblog, where he speaks about his lessons learned in creating his HelpSpot  software and running his company UserScape, and Patrick McKenzie with his excellent software named Bingo Card Creator.  Also in the list in my Google Reader are Starr Horne’s The Startup Lowdown and of course, my favorite blog, but also the one that totally kills my productivity, Gavin Bowman’s The Obligatory Blog.

If you read their blogs in chronological order, you can learn quite a bit, much more than reading a list that tells you if you are who you already know you are.  I certainly have learned a lot from those real world blogs, and I truly hope that some day I will have learned enough that I am able to offer some valuable information to my readers too.