Acharya Prashant (AP): The questioner is asking how to be a good entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurship is about initiating something, right? Doing something, beginning something. Before you become a good entrepreneur, must you not ask what is worth doing? Or is entrepreneurship merely about collecting profits rather than salaries? To many people, that is the definition of entrepreneurship.
One says, “I was an employee, I used to have a limited salary. Now I am an entrepreneur, I can collect much bigger profits. I was an employee, I used to be humiliated by my boss; now as an entrepreneur, I can humiliate as many employees as I want to. I was an employee; I belong to an industry that would use fear and greed to compel and defraud its customers. Now as an entrepreneur, I am making my employees do exactly the same thing, probably even on a bigger scale, right?”
Such entrepreneurship is just a continuation of what one has been since a very long time. One has been greedy, insecure, ambitious, fearful, accumulative, possessive. And all of that finds a big expression in the act of entrepreneurship. One used to compete with his colleagues. Now one is competing with the other companies in his industry. One is an entrepreneur now. And even before when one was competing with his colleagues; one was competing with fellow students, one was competing with his brothers, sisters, cousins; the same tendency to be ambitious and jealous has now manifested itself on a bigger scale in the act of entrepreneurship. Nothing has really changed, there is no dimensional change in what you have been and therefore what you have been doing. It is just a change of degree.
Earlier, you were doing one thing in a small way, now you are doing the same thing in a big way. So, what has really changed for you? Such entrepreneurship means very little. In fact, such entrepreneurship is often heavily destructive. One can become an entrepreneur, for example, in the field of killing animals, cutting animal flesh, and supplying freshly cut flesh to people at their doorsteps. And this might be a successful business model. But this kind of an entrepreneurship is idiocy, perversion, profanity.
