It’s interesting to see the various responses here. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset, as does my wife, but I know a lot of folks who prefer to go into work from 9 to 5, forget about work at 5:01, forget about work all weekend, and start over on Monday. There are certainly advantages to putting in your 40 hours and enjoying the remaining time. A lot of folks, including many family members and friends, find comfort in that. Even the ones who complain about their jobs have no interest in starting their own business. I wouldn’t try to push my own mindset on them. I will say, when you have a salary position, you rely heavily on a defensive strategy, as a set income means the primary way to save more is to spend less (aside from raises and climbing the ladder, of course, but those are typically 3-10% increases). Obviously a strong defense is a huge component of MMM philosophy.
Personally, my wife and I thrive off of the challenge of starting new businesses and making our own schedules. If we ran into a windfall of 1 million dollars, we would invest all of it into new businesses. Our passion is creating and marketing businesses. When we lose excitement over one business, we start another business. We mitigate the risk of self employment by running 5-10 businesses at a time. And none of it ever feels like work simply because we love every second of it. It’s true that an entrepreneur works 80 hours to avoid working 40, but what’s important is enjoying those 80 hours. It’s also important to remember that an entrepreneur may make in 2 months what a salary employee may make in 2 years.
For the folks interested in entrepreneurship but feel like you don’t have a brand new idea, you should remember that in this day and age, almost every thing you could ever dream up has been invented, monetized, or turned into a business of some kind. But the most successful businesses aren’t from the inventors. It’s from the folks who see an idea being done, and they improve upon it by 10%. You could name 50 businesses and I’d venture to guess that 49 of them weren’t the first to do it.