Nothing happens until you take a chance. There is no success without risk. You simply can’t play it safe and expect to come out on top. As an entrepreneur, you must be willing to take risks. I am not saying you should take reckless risks, but be daring and do what others are afraid to do and you will succeed where others have failed.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com gave up the success and security of a cushy job on Wall Street to pursue a dream. He packed up and drove across couontry in an old Chevy Blazer (with his wife and dog) to Bellevue Washington to start ‘Earth’s Biggest Bookstore’. Pretty gutsy. Even more so when you consider that E-commerce was an entirely new and untested field. He looks at it differently. “I call it a regret minimization framework” he told Success magazine, “I projected myself into my eighties and asked what regrets I had about my life. And I realized that, at eighty, I problably wouldn’t even remember all the things that seemed so important right then, like forgoing the end of year Wall Street bonus. But I would have definitely remembered that  I’d ignored the emergence of the Internet just as it was  happening, and tell myself I’d been a fool”.

I always ask myself, what is the worst thing that could happen? Could I deal with it? Yes, okay then, onward and upward. If I can’t deal with it, how can I scale this back a bit?

The bottom line is that the saying ‘the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward’ is true. When it comes to careers, big success comes to the bold, those who went for it when they had the chance. It may not seem sensible to those around you, but it is what you must do if you want to live a life without regret.