Sit down, make yourself comfy. Grab a beer. This might take a while.

There are two basic choices. You can either become a Silicon Valley Style Capital-E Entrepreneur™ (SVSE), or a small-e entrepreneur. I won't say anything about the former. I've said enough in other places, and there are many other good sources.

Small-e entrepreneurship

Now there is another style of entrepreneurship, known simply as entrepreneurship. No capital E unless you use the word in the beginning of a sentence.

How do you learn this kind? The secret is ridiculously simple. You'll kick yourself once you hear it. I recommend you kick someone else near you instead; displacement of anger is a key skill to learn in entrepreneurship, and the fight that follows will do you good, since small-e entrepreneurship is very much like picking a fight.

Anyway, the secret is...

Fail to keep a real job.

That's how I started. Failing to keep a real job. Actually, I started by failing to keep a job that was not even real: graduate student. I failed out of my first stab at doing a PhD and joined a non-SV startup as first employee. Then I went back and finished, failed again to get a real job and took a postdoc instead.

Finally, I got a real job, but four years later, I finally failed to keep it. Cleverly, I walked out on my own terms before somebody got sick enough of me to attempt to fire me.

So the formula is:

1. Try to get a real job.
2. If you fail, you're done. You're an entrepreneur.
3. If you succeed, try to keep the job.
4. If you fail, you're done. You're an entrepreneur.

Many of you young 'uns are very lucky to be hitting the job market during a recession, it now easier than ever to get there in just 2 steps instead of the 4 it took people like me. If you fail to fail to keep a real job, keep trying till you are unemployable.

This is rather like the formula for learning how to fly in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The key there was to jump from a high place and miss the ground. Failing to keep a real job is approximately as difficult. Employment is like gravity. Others have compared it to crack cocaine. Drags you back.

Once you've failed to keep a real job, you have to keep failing at it. This takes enormous grit.

So good, now that you're an entrepreneur, how do you become a successful one?

You just have to keep failing to keep a real job till you die.

That's it.

Whether you die proud owner of an apple cart or a billion dollar company, you still get to call yourself an entrepreneur on your deathbed. So long as you can claim with a straight face that you never learned to keep any real job.

What does this continuous failure to keep a real job teach you?

In order, the longer you keep at it, the more of this list of things it teaches you, by forcing you to do them:

1. Dollar Number One: Congrats, you've failed to keep a job. Make money by any means necessary, other than getting a job (in the US, there is a preliminary step called "get health insurance by any means necessary). A shocking number of people with entrepreneurial ambitions have never made a non-paycheck dollar. Do it now. I am not setting a high target. Just ONE dollar that's not from a paycheck. "Making money" is a very different activity from "earning a paycheck." For one thing, it's like P. T. Barnum's definition of PR. In a job, if you do nothing for long enough, somebody might eventually notice and get rid of you. Even if they do, you might actually be able to stay (cf: Wally of Dilbert, or Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener). But there's a good chance they won't even notice until you're ready to retire, and they have to think of something nice to say about you. And you'll still get paid all the way. Surprisingly, they won't make you give the money back when they notice you haven't been doing anything. But as an entrepreneur, if you do nothing, a very scary thing happens. NOTHING. And when nothing continues to happen for exactly one month after you use up your savings, you are out on the streets. There's nowhere to hide. You default to destitution.
2. Revenue: Once you've made your first buck by any means necessary, you make your next buck. Then your next buck. And so on. You'll notice something very strange about your Rate of Incoming Bucks (RIB). It is very, very uncertain. So you have to learn a strange kind of arithmetic known as book-keeping just to figure out whether or not you are financially alive. In a paycheck job, you keep track of money with the formula: Paycheck - Expenses = Retirement Savings. As an entrepreneur, you keep track with the formula: Vague Money-Making Activities - Expenses = Varying Levels of Anxiety.
3. Operating Cash Flow Positive: If you're lucky, you'll keep surviving one rent-check at a time, so you can continue to "fail to get/keep a job" one month at a time. This is like when Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel San to punch while standing on the sides of a dinghy in the Karate Kid (original version). The punches are your rent checks. The dinghy is your revenue. Mr. Miyagi shaking the boat is also known as VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. The ability to keep doing this no matter how hard Mr. Miyagi rocks the boat, is called cash flow generation. Falling into the water and NOT clambering back into the dinghy immediately is called "failing to fail to keep a job." It is necessary for, but not the same as "keeping a job." Keeping a job is an entirely different skill that maps, in our convoluted metaphor, to learning to swim. So if you fall into the water, you either keep climbing back into the dinghy, or you learn to swim, or you DROWN. If you manage to stay on the dinghy for more than two quarters in a row, congrats. You are "operating cash flow positive."
4. Vision: Now, once you can keep your footing on the shaky dinghy and keep punching well enough that you can dare to actually look around, you'll notice stuff around you in the universe that is NOT a rocking dinghy or punches or Mr. Miyagi. It's called the "environment." You probably noticed it before, but you never really noticed it. You cannot really see see the environment for what it is unless you are throwing punches while standing on a wobbly boat. Seeing the environment while throwing punches on a rocking boat has a special term to describe it: vision. Any idiot can look around while standing on firm ground. It is also easy to look around while swimming (it's called the back stroke).
5. Innovation: Now once you've got the vision thing down, you'll start noticing tempting, alluring, attractive flying fish occasionally jumping out of the water. These are of the species called slipperius opportunitus, otherwise known as "opportunities." But if you try to reach out and grab any of them, you'll most likely fall into the water. Then you get back in (unless you accidentally learn to swim), find your footing again, get going with the punching again. Eventually after enough falls, you'll notice that you can catch some opportunity-fish without falling into the water. Once you get a fish into the boat while continuing punching, congratulate yourself. You've risen above merely making rent. You just learned a skill known as "innovation." Some people just get tired of falling into the water and switch to just excitedly yelling out each time, "there's an opportunity, and THERE goes another one." This is not innovation. This is an activity that looks superficially similar called "R&D." These people eventually fail to fail to keep a job, fall into the water, and learn to swim. Many go on to win Olympic gold medals in the back stroke.
6. Marketing: Eventually you'll notice that certain things you do -- certain combinations of wobbly punches -- seem to actually create opportunities (=flying fish, remember). This is called "marketing." You'll notice that these opportunities tend to be better than those you randomly catch flying around. The more of this voodoo behavior called "marketing" you do, the more such opportunities are created. Unlike "grab 'em as they fly by" opportunities, created opportunities are an autocatalytic thing. The more you create and grab, the more show up. Yeah, those fish are kinda dumb that way. This is called "creating a customer." Once you're past this step, and have learned a few of these voodoo patterns, feel free to make and print out a certificate declaring yourself "Drucker-Certified Real Businessperson." You get this because you just learned innovation and marketing and have "created a customer" rather than simply paid yet another rent check. Your life now has Business Meaning. It is doing more than just surviving and failing to keep a job.
7. Doctrine: Now, many people stop here. They just grab all opportunities as they fly by, and dump 'em in the boat, where they thrash around until they jump back into the water accidentally. This is like unintentional catch-and-release fishing. If you stall here, there's only one useful thing you can do, which is to tag the fish with RFID chips before they escape, a weird kind of evil anti-business known as "patent trolling." There's a famous, smart and rich guy named Nathan Myrhvold who is really good at this. But he's still a troll. You later make money by blackmailing the people who do manage to keep those specific tagged fish from wriggling away. Anyway, getting back to our story, at this point, you can only progress further if you learn a REALLY neat trick: knowing when to quit. You'll find that you can only hold on to some fish longer if you actively throw out other fish faster than they wriggle away naturally.When you are able to quit effectively and intuitively, and without recourse to things like patent trolling, and can state with precision your principles for holding on or letting go, you've learned the business skill known as doctrine. You Now Know What You Believe.
8. Strategy: (sometimes spelled "strategery"): At this point, you're standing on a wobbly boat, catching fish without falling off, doing not-too-evil things that make more fish jump out at you, and deciding which fish to keep and which fish to throw back into the water. But you still haven't learned the master trick required to avoid learning how to swim long-term. At some point, you'll recognize that having certain fish in your boat is even better at attracting more fish than your voodoo punch combinations that we identified earlier as "marketing." You keep the opportunity-fish that most increase the rate at which MORE opportunities jump out at you, constantly trading up along the way. This is called "getting inside the tempo of the market" for people who believe in a mysterious business religion called OODA. When more fish start jumping out at you than you can catch, you've hit a state called Product-Market Fit. At this point, you are in danger of your boat sinking due to too many fish in there. Getting yourself a bigger boat that can hold more fish is known as SCALING (hehehehehe! this whole answer was an exercise in getting to this one pun). You can also scale by getting some good swimmers to swim alongside your dinghy, throwing them dead fish to eat, so they can concentrate on swimming. In return, they do various useful things for you that will really push the limits of this metaphor.

At this point the punching-on-a-wobbly-boat metaphor fails.

If you do all these 8 steps correctly, you'll be an entrepreneur. And remember, all along you still have to have the grit to continue failing to keep a real job. That task never ends. There is ALWAYS a danger that you'll accidentally learn how to swim.

The journey actually goes on beyond point 8 (it's called "building a company") but I won't get into that. That's a different question.

And just to round out the metaphor:

1. Retirement is swimming to the shore quickly enough to enjoy a few hours on the beach before you die.

2. Inherited wealth is finding yourself on the beach at adulthood, rather than on a wobbly boat.