Someone putting it all on the line is putting it all on the line, it doesn&#x27;t matter if they are selling flowers at the corner or doing something larger than that.  A plumber (or a small or trades entrepreneur) doesn&#x27;t take failure lightly as you&#x27;ve suggested.  Regardless of scale, a failure is a traumatic event and fighting against it can take months or years.<p>If you&#x27;ve never lived through the anguish of having a business go bad you might not be equipped to understand this.  I have.  It&#x27;s not fun.  And, no, you don&#x27;t think &quot;fuck it, I&#x27;ll just get a job&quot; three weeks into it.  Again, you have to have walked in those shoes in order to truly understand it.<p>I am not trying to insult you, just stating a fact.  It is really easy to have all kinds of nice sounding opinions from the outside yet there&#x27;s only one way to truly understand what it is like to make the decisions to take out a second mortgage on your home to keep people employed, make payroll and try to rescue a business (as I have done).<p>It is impossible to understand something like that without having had skin in the game at some non-trivial business.  Talking to a &quot;well weathered&quot; business person is very different from talking to someone who worked for the government or as an employee in the private sector all of their lives.  Their understanding of reality is very, very different.  That&#x27;s how you get people saying things like &quot;you didn&#x27;t build that&quot;, because they simply don&#x27;t have a clue.