Many of us have been caught in the midst of the corporate maelstrom to reorganize, downsize, right-size. Whatever the pundits call it today, we are out of a job! Do we just start searching for another job with another company who may provide us with some security?

Those jobs are fewer and farther between than ever before. Thus, perpetuating that victim mentality of wandering place to place with our hand out hoping for another opportunity with another company that may treat us the same or even worse than the one before. Or will we wrench the control back and take our futures in our own hands and become the victor rather than the victim.

So what is the alternative? Have you considered becoming an entrepreneur?

Are you the type? Are you entrepreneur material?

Read on to find out...

Contrary to common thought that working for yourself, owning your own business, is the height of luxury of time and leisure. Past opinion has been that "If I'm the boss, I can take it easy and someone else will do the work." Wrong, even if you have a staff working for you, you will work harder that you have ever worked in your life and harder than any of your staff.

Becoming an entrepreneur is the hardest job you will ever have, but the most rewarding if you approach it correctly. Whether you conduct your business on-line, face-to-face, or via brick and mortar, there are certain characteristics that the most successful entrepreneurs possess.

Wikipedia defines "entrepreneur" as "An entrepreneur is a person who has possession over a company, enterprise, or venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome.

Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. In common understanding it is taken as describing a dynamic personality." The advance of entrepreneurship has occurred as a result of a change in our economy from time to time.

While a generally held idea considers qualities of leadership, management ability, and team-building as essential qualities of an entrepreneur, another opinion is quoted in Wikipedia "A more generally held theory is that entrepreneurs emerge from the population on demand, from the combination of opportunities and people well-positioned to take advantage of them. An entrepreneur may perceive that s/he is among the few to recognize or be able to solve a problem. In this view, one studies on one side the distribution of information available to would-be entrepreneurs (see Austrian School economics) and on the other, how environmental factors (access to capital, competition, etc.) change the rate of a society's production of entrepreneurs.

A prominent theorist of the Austrian School in this regard is Joseph Schumpeter, who saw the entrepreneur as innovators and popularized the uses of the phrase creative destruction to describe his view of role of entrepreneurs in changing business norms."

Creative destruction is defined as" The notion of creative destruction is found in the writings of Mikhail Bakunin,[1] Friedrich Nietzsche and in Werner Sombart's Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism) (1913, p. 207), where he wrote: "again out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises". The economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized and used the term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation. In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power."

As you can see neither economic chaos nor entrepreneurship are new concepts. Whether you agree with these philosophers or not, it does give food for thought as to both the history and future of entrepreneurship.

Recessions, depressions, and economic chaos are not new events to the world. They are bound to happen from time to time just as prosperity is bound to happen. It is just part of the ebb and flow of our world and its economy.

Personal fortunes can be made in the midst of chaos. Are you ready to change your direction and take control of your destiny? Are you ready to become the victor and not the victim?