I would discuss not the action of starting, but the motivations and preferences that inform your strategy. Things like the kinds of problems you can engage with

I would discuss not the action of starting, but the motivations and preferences that inform your strategy. Things like the kinds of problems you can engage with and the solutions for them, the ways in which you connect with people, etc. Since business works over periods of months and years, it's important for me to engage in projects that play to as many of those preferences as possible. Starting at anything new is its own skill; you have to accept an early period of flailing around and making wrong turns, before you can reach the comfortable, confident stages. But it's not really the make-or-break thing here. Common wisdom says that it's the last 1-10% of the project that is the hardest part; you need to line things up so that even those stages are tolerable, or else you'll burn out somewhere in the middle once you see how far you still have to go. If your preferences are misaligned against the project goals, you're also likely to drift off target(e.g. I get caught in building technology quite often) and it helps to have people with other preferences involved so that they can bring you back in line.