The FT today reported a Harris survey on popular perceptions of the entrepreneurial climate in the UK, the US, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

I was delighted to discover that answers to the question “Does fear of failure discourage many people from starting their own business?” were similar in the US and the UK.

Hopefully we will now start to hear less and less about the supposedly peculiarly British disease of ‘fear of failure’.  I’ve ranted about this before so I won’t say much now other than it is rational to fear failure when you start a company – not to consider it would be just plain stupid – but I really don’t think we suffer from it here in the UK more than anybody else.
If you want to see the full survey results, including the chart on fear of failure, you will have to buy the FT from a newsagent.  This link takes you to the article, but the online version omits the graph which forms the basis of this post.