Businesses Aren't Selfish: You Need To Know This

Business isn’t evil. Business isn’t selfish. Business isn’t shallow. If anything, businesses (usually) are the most altruistic pursuits you can undertake. Businesses provide value by definition. Value, which opens countless doors for you, me, and kindred billions. Doors you can’t live without.

Makes No Sense…

How can entities which enrich the lives of billions of people be selfish? What makes you think business owners are evildoers—eager beavers to suck their employees’ and customers’ souls dry and reap their hard-earned cash? Can you consider a reality where every business is merely trying to help its customers? Answers: (1) they aren’t, (2) they aren’t, and (3) they are.

Value is the thesis of business. Create value, bundle value, distribute value, share value, sell value. Money embellishes them in this atrocious cloak. Yet money is just a driver for atrocious, selfish, shallow, and talented assholes—referring to humankind—to join their forces in the value equation. Benjamins get us cooperating. Jack’s and Jill’s and Joe’s paychecks situate them for awesome shit to happen.

The CEO Delusion

Once the money is there, the motivation to work for righteousness is there. Colossal firms make billions and use them to hire, manufacture, and get products and services out to you. To hire talent and strategically make them collaborate, to utilize diverse skillsets, to generate opportunities, possibilities, and day-to-day comforts. To make magic—what it means to do business successfully.

What, you think the CEO gobbles up the revenue and flies out to the Bahamas? No. The CEO, his or her forehead sweaty, mind racing, brain calculating decisions, is riled up in the value equation to help deliver more awesome shit. Those highest on the ladder work the hardest and smartest jobs. A CEO’s steps, words, and decisions ripple thousands of employees and customers. Can you imagine the pressure? Can you catch even a glimpse of the stressful nights and days of “glory” CEOs and founders go through when their baby isn’t functioning?

Monkey Business Without Businesses

Following the CEO’s footsteps is the value consumers receive. The second, or third, or fourth altruistic part of business already—(1) new job positions; (2) talent alignment and collaboration; (3) opportunity, possibility, and comfort generation, and the twenty-something points I missed. Humans alone? Frail, stupid, stinky, needy, and ugly. Humans in a team? Stronger and smarter. Humanity in tribes intergenerationally passing on knowledge? Powerful, intelligent, pleasant, and beautiful.

Magic happens when you get the right people working together on the right project at the right time. Daily sorcery. Everything you own and do, everywhere you’ve lived, and everyone you’ve met was the result of a business aligning it’s prowess. Envision for a minute gathering and making all you use. Mix the concrete, cook the bricks, invent electrical and plumbing systems while you’re at it, and one day you may have a shed. Forage for plastic to make a toothbrush—wait, plastic for bristles and electronics doesn’t grow on trees?

Be Thankful For Them

Businesses make the impossible possible. If not them, forget your home, the internet, high-quality education, comfortable and warm clothing, most of the food supply… Forget it all. Nobody would live in skyscraper apartments with glaring windows if they had to build them. Nobody would delight in succulent foods and fascinating vacations abroad. These establishments we take for granted are only possible due to the coordination of businesses.

Oh, and the itty-bitty comforts I haven’t touched on. Most businesses are small-medium-sized and solve a small-medium-sized handicap for the consumer. Restaurants for wonderful food on every corner. Reusable bottles and shaker cups. Post-its—office workers famously used to stick notes with glue to their monitors—and dry erase boards for ideation. Tons of tiny improvements compound to make your life marginally easier. You don’t notice. You forget that the fork and knife you eat with are probably not utensils you could shape—what about that mouse, keyboard, phone, or laptop?!

Complex, Uncertain, and Beneficial

Writers ink books to entertain and teach. Agents transport their ideas to publishers. Publishers buy licenses to the ideas. Printing companies align the typeface, print, and bind, and books come to life. Marketing agencies work with the authors and publishers to advertise their alphabetical soup. Distributors deliver the initial copies to bookstores. You click “buy now”. Logistics carriers promptly place the couple-hundred pages of goodness on your doorstep. That, my friend, is an oversimplified version of the pipeline to get a book from author to reader.

Therefore, if your excuse for not starting a business was selfishness, forget it. If your reason for hating money was evildoing, forget it. If your logic for deeming business owners atrocious pricks was the pursuit of dollars, forget it. Just don’t forget what the CEOs and little guys have gotten through and continue to suffer to make your life comfortable. Risked houses, maxed credit cards, non-existent reputation, families in disbelief, friends who “support” you with smirks on their faces, debt beyond understanding, negative comments, stealing to eat, homelessness and sleeping on relatives’ couches… The dream, the get-rich-quick scheme, the overnight prosperity, it’s a myth.

Do You Want It?

Absorb how arduous business is. Years and thousands of hours go into projects before people get their first dollar. A brave act by a courageous and dedicated man or woman, that’s what every business you see once was. Not one soul deeply supports you. Trials and tribulations of build, break, rebuild, question your sanity, go to bed with a pounding headache, wake up, and try again… Guaranteed rollercoaster of stress, fear, confusion, anxiety, and exhaustion. Business doesn’t suit most. Or many. Or barely any.

Doesn’t that sum up what an entrepreneur is? A stupid—really stupid—optimist willing to risk everything to do what needs to be done for the interest of others. Businesses are their vehicles. Money makes their engines roar. Most pioneering entrepreneurs would, believe it or not, do what they do for free. They have a quest to accomplish, and they’ll try until it works.

To Conclude,

businesses and entrepreneurship are amongst the most altruistic pursuits on the planet. The selfish and shallow morale assigned to CEOs, founders, and business operators is fallacious. Fallacious, since the entire point of a business is to deliver value. Value you’re thankful for. “Far and away the best prize that life offers,” said Theodore Roosevelt, “is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”