Great article out today by Joel Spoelsky on the emotional management necessary for entrepreneurship. The reason why startups fail is simple: the founder gets tired of “playing with the dials” and gives up before finding the right combination.

This is what it’s like when you’re creating a business. There’s the initial burst of excitement when you come up with the idea and another surge in momentum when you make your first few sales. (At this point, you’re so dang cocky that you have too much wine at Thanksgiving dinner and pointedly remind your mother-in-law about how rude she was to dismiss your start-up idea and how, when you’re making millions of dollars, there will be nothing for her — she can bloody well eat frozen government cheese.)

As the business progresses, you start trying to turn all the various knobs on your fancy radio set in order to get better reception or to find a station you like. And fortunately, in business, we founders have a lot of knobs to play with. There’s price. Location. Employees. Marketing. Advertising. Return policies. Trade shows. Products. Search-engine optimization. And every item in your budget.

You can read the rest of the article here.