A version of this post appeared in my blog Positively Media on Psychology Today. There's a lot of buzz about entrepreneurship right now. This is especially obvious if you hang out on LinkedIn, Twitter, or cruise the Ning social networks. It is not surprising, given the amount of people looking for jobs due to cutbacks and restructuring and a few bankruptcies thrown in for good measure. So far, the government plans to promote economic growth have tried to stimulate a lot of things, but stimulating entrepreneurs doesn't seem to be one of them. It's important to encourage entrepreneurship and not just for economic reasons. Entrepreneurship is the ultimate exercise in developing the attributes that we know from positive psychology to be essential to having a good life: self-competence, optimism, engagement, and resilience. I'm against government stimulus the way it's usually done for the same reasons that I'm for entrepreneurship. Sending people checks in the mail may give them … [Read more...]