It’s often hard to choose between staying with the comfort and perceived safety of a corporate job and moving to the excitement and potential riches of the startup world. I know. I’ve been bitten by the entrepreneur bug twice.

Before you tender your resignation, allow me to play devil’s advocate for a bit. It might help you determine if you would truly be following an entrepreneurial impulse or if you’re simply bored at your current position.

Being an entrepreneur means you can determine your own destiny and experience the adrenaline rush of building something from the ground up.  There’s no better feeling than putting your heart and soul into your own company to deliver a product (or service) that you’re passionate about. But start-up life has been dramatized by the media in a way that doesn’t quite capture reality.

If you’re an entrepreneur, odds are you’re insanely busy.  You may welcome constructive suggestions to improve your business, but don’t really have time to hunt for answers. The good news is there are plenty of great books on the market that can help make a difference.

No time to read? You’re not alone. But starting tomorrow here in the Entrepreneur Corner, I’ll be providing monthly reviews of helpful books for entrepreneurs that are meant to at least capture the authors’ big ideas.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary!” – Steve Jobs

Having started, run and lead various companies as an entrepreneur since I was 15 years old, I have learned many things about being an entrepreneur; often the hard way…. Some of my own business ventures were very successful, some unsuccessful, and one even resulted in my personal bankruptcy (at the age of 21), however all of them made me very rich and happy! They made me rich and happy in enriched knowledge and experience; my failures and success allowed me to learn more, build new valuable relationships, get new ideas, get more insights & inspiration and apply my lessons learned to become more successful!

(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This column originally appeared on his blog.)

When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves the following series of questions:

• Are you comfortable with chaos? (Startups are disorganized)
• Are you comfortable with uncertainty? (Startups never go per plan)
• Are you resilient? (At times you will fail – badly.  How quickly will you recover?)
• Are you agile? (You may find the real opportunities for your company are somewhere else.  Can you recognize and capitalize on them?)
• Are you creative? / Can you recognize patterns? (Can you think “out of the box?” Or if not, can you recognize patterns others miss?)
• Are you Passionate (Is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? 24/7?)
• Are you tenacious (Can you keep going when everyone else gives up? Can you keep giving 200 percent despite all the naysayers who don’t believe in your idea?)
• Are you articulate? (Can you create a reality-distortion field and have others see and share your vision and passion?)

Even if they answer yes to every question, I remind them that they should be bringing some type of domain expertise (technical or business) to the table.

This is the minimum feature set for founders.

Generic advice given to entrepreneurs assumes that everyone is going to be the founder/co-founder. Yet for every founder there are 10-20 other employees who take the near-equivalent risks in joining an early-stage company.  If you’re not a founder (by choice, timing or temperament,) you may be an early employee or a later stage startup employee.

(And my advice to students who believe they want to do a startup but are unsure if they want to start one, is to join one that’s already raised their first round of funding. Founders know they want to start something.  If you’re unsure, you’ve just decided.)

I believe that founder, early and later stage employees each require different risk/personality profile.

The Early Employee

If you’re a founder/co-founder all the attributes I mentioned above are needed in spades.  However, if you want to join a startup as an early employee (say in the first batch of 25), you can modify the list above.

You still need to be comfortable with chaos and uncertainty, but by this time the major risk of where the first round of funding is coming from is gone.  However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile.

Early stage employees are “self-starters” and show initiative rather than waiting for other people to tell them what to do or how to do it. (You may be wearing multiple hats in one-day.) You have to be passionate about your work, the company and its mission to be working 24/7. But more than likely you don’t need to be as articulate or creative as the founders (they’re doing the talking, while you’re doing the work.)  And while you do need to be tenacious, you won’t need to be the last man standing if the ship goes down.

The Later Employee

If you want to join a startup as a later employee (say employee number 25-125, before the company is profitable) you can continue to modify the list above.

You still need to be comfortable with chaos and uncertainty.  And you will be dealing with change, but it won’t be the constant daily change the early employees dealt with. By now the company may have found and settled on a repeatable business model. And at this stage of the company rather than everyone doing everything, actual departments may begin to form. However, job responsibilities and organizations will change regularly and you need to feel comfortable in embracing those changes and taking responsibility and ownership.

And you’ll still need to have a resilient and agile personality, as new customer and product opportunities will appear and change your work.  But it won’t be happening daily.  And while you still need to love what you do your passion doesn’t have to extend to tattooing the company’s logo on your arm.

Take the time and think through who you are and what level of challenge you are looking for.

You’re not joining a big company.  Startups are the adventure of a lifetime – but make sure it fits who you are.