Meanwhile Back at Dream Big Central...

You have a stunning, consuming idea for a bookstore cafe, a tea shop, a gallery, a dance club or whatev — awesome! In order to avoid the major potholes, the gaping chasms of failure just waiting to take a bite outta you, look around — why have others before you crashed and burned?

Eric T. Wagner at Forbes provides five reasons why eight out of ten new small businesses go all Hindenburg-y within their first year and a half of life.

1) Not really in touch with customers through deep dialogue.
2) No real differentiation in the market (read: lack of unique value propositions)
3) Failure to communicate value propositions in clear, concise and compelling fashion.
4) Leadership breakdown at the top (yes — founder dysfunction).
5) Inability to nail a profitable business model with proven revenue streams.

Go read the whole thing (not long) to get his, often witty, explanations and suggestions.

Patricia Schaefer at the site business know-how has seven reasons along with thoughts and advice.

1) You start your business for the wrong reasons.
2) Poor Management
3) Insufficient Capital
4) Location, Location, Location
5) Lack of Planning
6) Overexpansion
7) No website

Read more here.

And for straight up hard facts you can look through the figures and notes at Startup Business Failure Rate By Industry posted on StatisticBrain.com.

Maybe what really trips your trigger is the creation, NOT the business end of things. Baby, I understand.  Oh boy do I.

Odds are you’re not gonna make it rich off your art unless you’re a budding Basquiat or Pollock. Making a regular old living is the beast to capture.

If you've not won the familial lottery, with parents who’ll fund you ‘till you make your big break, like Shepard Fairey fer example, you’ve got to have a way to pay the rent.

Me? I wanted a gig that wouldn't consume all my energy and time because, of course, I needed to have something left at day’s end for that newly stretched and primed canvas.

What to do? Take classes that will help you build needed, marketable skills. Become, say, a programmer, a medical tech, a plumber. You get the idea..

AND another thing — we artist types, for all our wonders and sparkles, aren’t so much known for our stellar business sense or our mad people skills.

As painful as it may be, and for me it was deeply, radically so, you've got to learn how to best market yourself and your work. That is, you do if you want to move those paintings, sculptures and prints out the door.

In pretty much every gig, you’re gonna have to interact with people (yes, even as a night watchmen). Learn some damn social skills. You like to argue? You come alive when you’ve the chance to engage in verbal fisticuffs? Grand. Perhaps you should just cut to the chase and go to law school instead.

Being a misanthrope may be all strangely, wonderfully, cinematically romantic but it’s not gonna get those gallery directors and managers all enamored of you.

Pursue your dreams but be pragmatic. Life is a big balancing act.

Jen, as we chatted about all this over a splendid Chianti last night, had this to say:

Where would we be without dreamers, artists, athletes, musicians etc., the vast majority of whom don't make the rent cheddar from their life’s passion.  What if everyone stopped blogging, painting, sculpting, tagging or even sharing their ideas at the magical graduation age of 18 because they don't get PAID for it?  

What a fucking scintillating, energized world we would live in then, eh?//snark//

Yeah. What Jen said!