Jason Evanish of Greenhorn Connect wrote a post titled Why you should quit your startup today. I just wanted to leave the following content as  a comment on his post but the site requires registration. And when I did try to register, the registration email didn’t show up  and it’s been about 10 mins. I figure I’ll post this here and send a link to Jason on twitter. 🙂

Here is one more reason why someone should quit their startup.

You are not an optimistic person in general.

Founding a startup is hard. You can’t be pessimistic. You can be cautious. But you can’t be negative.  You have to be positive and optimistic by nature. Otherwise, you will get knocked down by fear, anxiety and worry every single day.

Startups are full of uncertainties. You will encounter many people who doubt your vision, well meaning advisors who suggest complete opposite of what you set out to do, customers who say no and many things that don’t go your way. You can’t lose momentum every time you hear something you don’t want to hear. In a startup, if you are the type of person who needs hours or days to recover from a setback, your startup will never get to where it needs to be. There just isn’t enough time or mental energy to not be optimistic.

From my exposure to many Techstars, YCombinator  and Boston area startups, one personality trait I keep noticing among successful founders is optimism. They just seem to have this relentless optimism that normal people tend to lack. You need at least one person on your founding team who is relentlessly optimistic every single day!

And if you don’t have it, you might be able to start a startup but you won’t enjoy the ride. Then what’s the point of starting a startup if you are not going to enjoy the experience when the risk is higher and the work is harder.