In reviewing my notes from class—Entrepreneurial Design—I took a moment to draft a chart that our professor sketched on the whiteboard: the trajectory of happiness an entrepreneur experiences when creating a startup.

Uniformed Happiness is the state that all of us revel in when conceiving a novel idea.

Informed Pessimism is the fall from grace that occurs when we begin to understand the implications of our idea: the complexities of its implementation. This is the turning point when euphoria has worn off and the work becomes hard.

However, if the entrepreneur can chip away at the myriad problems she will inevitably face and avoid Crashing and Burning, there is distinct transition to Informed Optimism.

Most end up Crashing and Burning; the AirBnB’s, Foursquares, and Kickstarters of the world enjoy Informed Optimism.