I have a gripe with the way entrepreneurship is generally talked about or even taught.

Most of the aura associated with entrepreneurship kind of suggests that it is the ultimate professional nirvana and the path which everyone worth his salt must tread.

The truth couldn’t be farther.

Entrepreneurship is not for everybody despite what numerous B-school professors or entrepreneurship experts might have to say and this is irrespective of the eventual outcome of the “entrepreneurs born or made?” debate.

The truth is its like any other professional choice you make. It requires different kinds of skills and attitude and temperament, is exciting like hell for some and can be equally depressing for others. Bungee jumping may be exciting, sexy and adventurous but is not so for all. Now, even if the bungee jump example is over-glorification of entrepreneurship, not liking bungee jumping doesn’t make one a “lesser man”. I, for one, am too scared to bungee jump.

A more pertinent question may be, if it is for me. Again, no decision tree algorithm exists which can help you figure that out. For most of the entrepreneurs, it is some mysterious voice in their stomachs which keeps telling them, “You HAVE to do it”. This is distinctly different from the moments of frustration and anger with your boss or your company which may happen to most of us some time or the other. Deciding to be an entrepreneur becaue your job/boss/company sucks is bad decision making.

This voice of the gut is so persistent, it gradually starts consuming you with drums beating all around your head. This persistent crescendo from within you brings you to a situation when you tell yourself that even if you were all alone, stripped of all the good things you cherish, you’d still do it. In this somehwhat metaphysical sense, entrepreneurship no longer remains a choice.

What all these entrepreneurship courses/trainers/professors could do then is to encourage students to listen to their inner voices and know themselves more. What makes them happy, what gets them excited, what gets them depressed. Self discovery should probably be the first chapter in any book which wants to tell the truth about entrepreneurship.

The steps, structure, financing, strategy, marketing – are the details. Once the inner game is set right, all else follows (yes, that’s the truth no matter how philosophical it may sound; entrepreneurship, in that sense, can have highly philosophical overtones).

And this is where I agree the most with Sunil Handa’s Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation (LeM) course at IIM Ahmedabad. He doesn’t talk about financing, strategy, recruitment, the works. He tries to get the inner game right.

In that sense, the guys who did the course were lucky. It helped identify the inner voices and convinced a lot of us that following the gut was in no way less scientific or more superstitious than following an enormously involved decision making algorithm.

The directive for the curious, then, should be that if you do not hear that crescendo in your head day in and day out, the pesky little voice screaming, “Why the hell did you not get started already?”, either the time is not right or you’d be happier not doing it.

For a first generation, first timer, the reasons have to be all internal. Unless and until internal reasons gather enough steam to become unbearable, don’t do it.