Make That Bold Move Now -- and Avoid Looking Back With Regret Entrepreneurs live to push boundaries, but fear can cause us to second-guess our gut. Don't. Act now.

Get a bunch of people in advertising together, and they'll complain about the same thing: Their clients are wimps. The clients keep saying they want innovative ideas -- they want to do something big and bold, something nobody else does. So the ad folks dream up a ton of ambitious stuff. The client reviews it and winces. Not what they're looking for, they say. And they steer the ad firm toward a campaign that's safe and timid and very, very familiar.

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I've seen it myself, in my own industry. At a magazine where I used to work, a boss kept telling me he wanted the magazine to be funny. Frankly, this magazine was not funny. It had never been funny. But, I agreed, this was a good way to shake things up. So I hired comedy writers. I added jokes to stories. I made it funny! Then he and my other superiors took all the jokes out and killed the stories by the comedy writers. "Too off-brand," they explained. What they really wanted, it seemed, was the idea of the magazine being funny. But they didn't want to sacrifice the comfort of familiarity -- of doing things exactly as they'd always been done.