The world is FULL of articles about finding jobs. Most people are just looking for a J.O.B.
Right or wrong, your entrepreneur friends probably see you as a quitter. They probably see your going back to work as a failure, and naturally, your friends don't want to see you fail.
Think about it though. You probably set out on your own to be a billionaire, top the of hill, a titan of industry.
Why wouldn't your friends still want that for you?
If this is the image you've portrayed to other entrepreneurs for a while, don't blame them for wondering why you no longer believe in the goals you've expressed to them.
I want to address your point that the world is full of articles about finding jobs and also your point about why people initially set out into entrepreneurship.
As I've observed, it often begins like this:
1) This job sucks.
2) I need to work for myself.
In the start-up culture and commentary (and apparently among Gen-Y more broadly too), that idea gets a lot of airtime.
It's a natural and intoxicating thought pattern. You see that the leaders are making more money, you realize you're just as bright as they are, you reason that your efforts could be better spent being your own boss.
Without much effort, you soon stumble into a thousand thousand blogs pumping that idea full of adrenaline for you. Eventually, something you read ends with a challenge and a call to action. You take the leap.
Having a ton of articles about resumes or getting an interview or how to earn a promotion doesn't make an impact on what I'm describing.
It's having more measured, more realistic portraits of what entrepreneurship means, what success rates are, and pointing to other alternatives that address the "My job sucks," part but refrain from rushing to "Start a business." And importantly, for these to hit home at the right time for the right people, it'd be good for these messages to appear not in the Sunday Paper or Yahoo finance but interspersed alongside the rebel, hacker, lifestyle design, no-rules stuff we see.
I've seen some of that around, and in fact, I owe a great debt of gratitude to those people and those writings for helping my crystallize my frustrations with entrepreneurship as it really is vs how I expected it to be starting out and until relatively recently.
So, no, I did not set out to be a titan. I set out to find satisfying work. I mistakenly identified my dissatisfaction as stemming from working for someone else (again, as is natural to do), and I set out to blaze my own trail to make happier work.
Along the way, I wasn't interested in articles about finding just any old J.O.B.--I was looking for articles that captured the ethos of frustration and disappointment I'd experienced in my early jobs.
Where I found that, almost inevitably would follow advice or even a sort of cultural force that I should seek self-employment of some kind.
What I will be trying to add with my voice going forward is that dissatisfaction with work, especially early on, is a complicated thing. Self-employment is not a panacea. In fact, for many people who are not suited for it, self-employment can be a painful and/or expensive experiment that delays discovering a better fit company or career as an employee.
Right or wrong, your entrepreneur friends probably see you as a quitter. They probably see your going back to work as a failure, and naturally, your friends don't want to see you fail.
Think about it though. You probably set out on your own to be a billionaire, top the of hill, a titan of industry.
Why wouldn't your friends still want that for you?
If this is the image you've portrayed to other entrepreneurs for a while, don't blame them for wondering why you no longer believe in the goals you've expressed to them.