by April Wilson

Created on: November 11, 2009   Last Updated: November 12, 2009

There is a saying that entrepreneurs would rather work 16 hours a day for themselves than 8 hours a day for someone else. And that's very true. When you are doing what you love, work and play blend together and you lose track of the time you're investing.

Our educational system is set up to reward conformity, following others, and most importantly preparing for a "job." In fact, from Kindergarten on, what you're doing is preparing to be someone else's employee. But some people don't function that way mentally. Those of us who are entrepreneurs have something inside us that says: "I can do that better on my own." And so we do.

While you will make great money if you get a degree and become a doctor or lawyer, most people with college degrees are not doctors or lawyers. In fact, the majority of people with college degrees are working in jobs completely unrelated to their degree and aptitude. They are simply cogs in someone else's machine. Many stay in this situation because of the perceived security.

One of the reasons people choose to become entrepreneurs is because they start to realize the security they thought they had with a job, is nothing more than an illusion. The majority of people with six-figure (or more) incomes in America, are self-employed. And many of those self-employed people don't have college degrees.

I am in no way knocking education. I sincerely respect it and love both learning and school. But, a degree isn't necessarily indicative of how much money you can make. And a job working for someone else in most cases is far less secure than becoming an entrepreneur.

Having many different income streams (i.e. multiple clients, products or services), allows an enrepreneur to cushion themselves more than their jobbed counterpart. For example, if you have a job at an advertising agency and you get fired, you're done. If you have an advertising agency business and you lose a client, you make it up somewhere else, or find a new client. You don't lose everything at one time.

Many people become entrepreneurs also to gain personal control over their time and lives. There is a sense of empowerment that comes from being able to rise and go to sleep on your own schedule and follow your body's natural rhythms: eat lunch when you're hungry, take a break when you need it., be able to leave the house to run an errand in the middle of the day. Being tied to someone else's desk won't allow you to do that.

Ultimately though, most entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs because they've got ideas and a passion to create and make those ideas a reality.

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