Some people are born entrepreneurs, some people struggle to become entrepreneurs, and - in tough economic times - many people have entrepreneurialism thrust upon them.
People often cite security as the primary reason for choosing employment over the stresses of business ownership, but I believe their sense of security is misplaced. Job security is a myth, and always has been a myth. Businesses fail, economies falter, tastes and trends change. Jobs move to where labor is cheap. Capital goes where it can find profits. So why not take your capital - in the form of talent - where it profits you most?
According to a study by the Center on Aging and Work/Workplace Flexibility at Boston College "...about 20 percent of men aged 51 to 61 in 1992 were self employed, already a sizable proportion. Twelve years later, more than one third of those working were self employed - an increase of more than 50 percent." There are many reasons for the increase, but whether they left or lost their jobs, I think a lot of older workers have seen through the job security myth.
Older workers usually have a little capital built up, but they also have the wisdom to see that the stresses of owning your own business are far superior to the stresses of working for someone else, because the benefits accrue directly to you. For example, many who move from employment to entrepreneurship find that even when they make less money, their lifestyle improves dramatically simply because they have so much more control over their day-to-day responsibilities.
As we learned from The Millionaire Next Door, entrepreneurialism and frugality are the cornerstones of personal financial security. In our current economic crisis, I have no doubt the government will do everything it can to mitigate the damage, but I don't think the rest of us should just wait around to see what happens.
The most common comment I hear from late-blooming entrepreneurs is that they wonder why they waited so long. They believed their job with a big company provided security, but then came the downsizing or the rightsizing or the restructuring or the bankruptcy. And remember, when the company declares bankruptcy, it is the company that wins protection from creditors, not the employees. The imprisoned executives from Enron have better retirement prospects than most of their former employees.
Go rogue: start a business. Stop selling your time to indifferent strangers and start capitalizing on your talent. Sole proprietorships are easy and require little extra paperwork, making it easy to dip your toes into entrepreneurial waters while you are still employed. There is no such thing as job security, so as long as you're taking chances, why not take a chance on yourself?