11–15 of 15 posts
I always thought that Drucker said it best: "Profit is the cost of doing business." Businesses exist for a purpose: to provide goods and/or services to customers. They don't exist just to make money. You can make money in plenty of other ways and not have a business. (Think about a lottery winner or speculator.) But if you want to keep doing business, you have to make money, and you have to make money over and above…
Somehow, it seems like making money and making meaning are two sides of a Mobius strip. They are really the same thing, although they appear to be different. Fooling oneself into thinking they really are separate things is harmful to the wealth of an entrepreneur.
Somehow, it seems like making money and making meaning are two sides of a Mobius strip. They are really the same thing, although they appear to be different. Fooling oneself into thinking they really are separate things is harmful to the wealth of an entrepreneur.
Meaning is the metadata people derive from experience. It's always there, but it's representation becomes significant when people communicate.
Money is an efficient representation of a promise, which is a special kind of communication between people.
Money is the embodiment of a specific kind of meaning.
Somehow, it seems like making money and making meaning are two sides of a Mobius strip. They are really the same thing, although they appear to be different. Fooling oneself into thinking they really are separate things is harmful to the wealth of an entrepreneur.
I don't know, what about criminals? They make money, too, but do they make meaning?
I always thought that Drucker said it best: "Profit is the cost of doing business." Businesses exist for a purpose: to provide goods and/or services to customers. They don't exist just to make money. You can make money in plenty of other ways and not have a business. (Think about a lottery winner or speculator.) But if you want to keep doing business, you have to make money, and you have to make money over and above…
I'm not entirely sure playing the lottery and speculating are such good ways of making money. Someone who's in it solely for the money is probably going to start a business before doing either of these things.
My observation is that entrepreneurs are NOT risk takers. They are very much risk-averse. This is a strange comment but as an entrepreneur, I differentiate between taking risk and mitigating ambiguity.
I don't gamble and I don't play the lottery. I think doing so would be taking undue risk because I have absolutely no control of the outcome.
On the other hand, doing startup is not risk to me because I believe I can control the outcome. It is just that the outcome is somewhat ambiguous which I know how to mitigate.
I suppose if I take a step back, this is not unlike the difference between an amateur gambler and a professional gambler. If I know how to count cards, I won't think that I am taking risk neither.
--Denny--