There is a misplaced sense of romance about entrepreneurship.

If you want to be an entrepreneur in order to become wealthy, my suggestion is, don’t. There are very few entrepreneurs I know who succeeded without a long period of financial struggle, belt tightening and personal sacrifice. More often than not, success will take longer in coming than you think. There will be times when at the end of the month there will not be enough money to pay the office rent and employee salaries, but you will somehow scrape though.

There will be times when you yourself will not be able to take home a salary for months. There will be years on end when you will be financially the worst-off person in your batch from business school.

During these years, you will need to make compromises on your lifestyle—the house you are able to afford, the car you drive, the holidays you take, the restaurants where you eat and the schools your children go to.
And all this without any guarantee of success, in search of the big idea, hoping for venture capital funding— years without any light at the end of the tunnel.

To read the entire article please click on this link.
http://www.livemint.com/2008/08/14022048/Entrepreneurship-it8217s-a.html

Author: Sanjeev Bikhchandani,
Co-founder of Info Edge India (Naukri.com)
Published in: http://www.livemint.com (The Wall Street Journal)