If you plan to go and do your own company, or a company together with a bunch of buddies or some other wild thing you plan then I want you to realize this to the core of your being or you probably should not even start until you do: you very likely will fail but it doesn’t matter one bit.
The only thing that really matters is that you try and not succeeding is already much much better than never starting
Every business, even the very largest eventually fails. The question really is when it will fail, at the beginning or after a much longer life. Nothing is forever, not you, not your business. Anything we make automatically has a life-cycle associated with it.
In my eyes, if you start some project and you bet the house on it you gain tremendous respect, no matter what the end result. Failure isn’t an option, simply because failure is inevitable.
When times get tough, when it looks as though there is no way out please look up this small message to you, the guy that starts his company today when it looks as if failure is impossible and realize that the voyage is much more important than the end goal.
If you fail you’ve tried. Try enough times and you will one day succeed, and then most likely you’ll fail again. And even if all you do is change people’s awareness about an issue or you find 50 (instead of 50 million) happy users then you’ve succeeded. Success has many dimensions, money and adoption are but two of those. Personal development, satisfaction and so on are examples of others.
The failure along some of those axis will come regardless, so don’t sweat it and don’t be ashamed about it.
It happens to all of us, even those that have succeeded. They just haven’t failed yet so consider yourself to be in good company.