This morning I was pointed to a video of a TEDx talk by Tara Hunt which left me in two minds. On the one hand, it was great to see such raw passion. On the other, it was slightly uncomfortable, a little like watching somebody about to go over the edge into a breakdown.

That’s what happens when people get passionate, but there was something different here: I think she’s chasing the wrong goal.

On her blog she wrote an article explaining how the talk happened and her reasons for being quite so passionate. In there is the paragraph that killed it for me:

And, yes, we all pay lip-service to success being in the eye of the beholder. But let’s get real here. There is only one kind of success that counts when it counts – when you are raising money or making the headlines or being invited to headline the big conferences – and it’s the payday.

If that’s the kind of success you are aiming for I will guarantee a few things:

1. You’ll have way more failures than are reasonable for any one person to handle. Warhol wasn’t suggesting you aim for 15 minutes or indeed everybody had a right to be “famous”.
2. You will be constantly miserable, stressed and on the edge of a breakdown
3. Critically, you’ll start to doubt yourself and your own ability

I agree with Tara’s main point - we should talk about failure more. If you’re not failing regularly, you’re not trying hard enough. Fear of failure keeps most people out of doing things they’d otherwise enjoy, and in the UK in particular the vast majority of would-be entrepreneurs never get started because there is an epic cultural/societal stigma associated with failing. We need to get around that.

However, here’s where Tara is going wrong in what she says above. That kind of success doesn’t matter.

The success I think does matter is much simpler: to spend each day doing something you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy your work, you’re doing the wrong work.

Making money is the easiest thing in the World to do, but enjoying yourself whilst doing it is probably the hardest. However, aiming for it is worthwhile.

If you focus on raising money, on talking to VCs and judging yourself by income, being an entrepreneur is going to be ultimately quite harmful to you unless you’re one of the very, very small minority.

One of the blockers I see for people becoming entrepreneurs (in Britain at least), is the perception that unless an idea is worth millions - and is validated as such by investors - it isn’t worth doing.

You can be an entrepreneur if all you do is own a grocery store. You can change markets just by talking to people. You can make the World a better place by contributing to open source projects, and you can even be a lean startup ninja whilst volunteering at a charity.

You don’t have to be “all in” financially for an enterprise to be successful. You just need to be committed to seeing it happen, and pragmatic.

It’s only by doing that you’ll find your life improves a little, money finds its way to you somehow, and you’ll turn around after a few years and realise you’ve built real value somewhere.

You might not have Arrington writing about you, and you might not have made billions, but you’ll be happy, content, and hopefully have some money left in your savings account.

If you adopt lean startup methods, you never have to talk to a VC on their terms and you will fail quickly and cheaply if that’s where the idea was ultimately destined anyway. Your rent will get paid and you will eat reasonable food. You might not keynote conferences you shouldn’t be going to anyway (they’re a waste of time), but you’ll have a body of work/output/ideas you’re proud of.

I don’t dismiss the idea of building a company with investment out of hand - these days I’m working for VC-funded startups for the most part. But I do dismiss judging yourself and your ideas based on VC interaction. And I hope that at some point Tara, and those like her, will realise that the World needs talented and committed people like them, just not so laser-focused on their commitment to making money and “headlines”.