STARTING A BUSINESS

What many of us would dearly love to do — if only we had the confidence — is to start our own businesses. But here, as in so many other fields,

what may deter us is a dispiriting feeling that everything has surely already been done; the world obviously doesn’t need yet another bakery, grocery store, pet shop or skin cream manufacturer.

But such pessimism is a sign of a punishingly and misguidedly narrow conception of what business is actually for.

The ultimate purpose of business is to satisfy human needs. Put more colloquially, it is to make people happy. And once we frame matters like this, what we quickly see is that business as a whole hasn’t begun to fulfil its historic mission —

because human beings are still so pervasively, fascinatingly and (if one can put it this way) inspiringly miserable. There are — of course — a few areas where enterprises have learnt to satisfy our needs rather well. The world truly doesn’t require yet another brand of breakfast cereal. The toilet roll market is saturated. We have enough white T-shirts, sneakers or baked beans. But if we’re looking to identify entrepreneurial gaps,

we need only run through an average day and note all the areas in which we remain unfulfilled. Despite the millions of businesses that exist, there is still no one to call when our partner falls into a sulk.

Almost no one seems to offer us a service to help with us the Sunday blues. There aren’t any enterprises helping us to have interesting conversations. There aren’t any multinationals promising us next day delivery on better parent-child relations.

In short, across a vast range of areas, we’re still scrambling to align the disciplines of commerce and industry with the intimate pains and hopes of our minds and bodies. Every area of frustration, grief, friction, longing and boredom is a business waiting to be born. Profit is merely

the reward for superior insight into the unformed wishes of strangers. Entrepreneurialism has barely got off the ground, let alone run its course.

This article is from the school of life

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