According to Oxford Languages,

“Entrepreneurship is the activity of setting up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.”

Pretty scary, isn’t it?

This definition probably is the most negative definition of entrepreneurship you can find online. It makes it look extremely risky for yourself (taking financial risk) and governed by chance (in the hope of profit).

Explaining entrepreneurship highlighting only the negative aspects of course does not contribute to encourage people try to dig deeper in understanding what in reality entrepreneurship is about.

But chances are high that if you are here, you would like to know more about the REAL meaning of entrepreneurship.

So here it is:

Entrepreneurship is a process.

Stanford in this regard provides us with a better definition:

<aside> 💡 “Entrepreneurship refers to an individual or a small group of partners who strike out on an original path to create a new business*.”

</aside>

*to strike out (somewhere): to start on a long or difficult journey in a determined way (thank you Cambridge Dictionary!)

And than continues with a less worrisome

<aside> 👉🏼 “An aspiring entrepreneur actively seeks a particular business venture and it is the entrepreneur who assumes the greatest amount of risk associated with the project. As such, this person also stands to benefit most if the project is a success.”

</aside>

Entrepreneurship is in fact a very risky activity. But these risks come from the fact that chances are high that you will fail with your venture, not because you will go bankrupt and/or end up in jail (even if it can happen if you do illegal stuff, as Theranos case teach us).

This is due to the fact that entrepreneurs need to face an enormous amount of uncertainty to literally build their ventures. Anoter very nice definition, in this regard, says that

<aside> 👉🏼

“entrepreneurship is a process by which individuals, either on their own or inside organizations, pursue opportunities without regard to resources they currently control” (Stevenson and Jarillo, 1990)

</aside>

posing the enphasis on the fact that entrepreneurship means to build something new by gathering resources from the outside world.

And there is no way to eliminate these uncertainties and attract required resources to build something new other than trying to follow a semi-structured process of progressive derisking of the idea.

The best think you can do to reduce your risk of failing is therefore to equip yourself with the right tools to try to clear out uncertainties as fast as you can.

To start your entrepreneurial journey in the best way you can, you need to recognize three main (entrepreneurial) universal truths.