life of the unemployed - what's life like outside of the corporate job?

Imagine this: not having to drive your painfully long commute to work, or having time to finally meet up with your friends for a 5PM happy hour at that cool downtown bar you’ve always wanted to check out.  I always imagined that my life of unemployment would be great: sleeping in, vacationing, eating ice cream, watching lots of television, partying it up …   I imagined all this plentiful free time I would have to do all the things I never get to do.  It’s supposed to be great.  I thought how lovely it would be to have time to do groceries and cook at home, how clean my place would be, how happy my dog would be to have me around more often. 

It is great.  It’s awesome.  …   Just the part about the plentiful amounts of free time to play and hang out, that part is a myth.  Well, at least for me, I'm busier more than ever.

What have I been doing?  Well…  I left my nice salaried job back in July 2010, and for that first month afterwards: 1) I did an independent contract gig at Expedia for a month, 2) I went to Hawaii for the first time in my life for a week, and 3) then came back to a to-do list as long as the Nile River (I brought my trusty notebook with me to Hawaii and jotted notes down while there).  The second month, ...  Click here to read more

~Arry

did you know? part II

One thing that seems to be "common wisdom" about start-ups is this(at least among the young budding entrepreneurs I spend a lot of time with) : 90% of companies fail in the first year. I say, "Really? With odds like that, you still want to start a company?" Of course, failure can be defined in many ways, and one person's failure may be another's success, so it's hard to talk about what the accurate failure rates are. With that caveat, here are some survival rates, according to census data as reported by the SBA:

69% of new firms survive at least 2 years
51% survive at least 5 years

Better than common wisdom, but still somewhat bleak.

Scott Shane's book The Illusions of Entrepreneurship has a great table with more detailed survival info.

-Mina