We’re often encouraged to think that the secret to starting is a business is to have a bold and entirely original idea. But the suggestion here is that all we really need is to LOVE something a little more than most other people do: that will be enough to help us stand out from the competition.

Businesses for Love; Businesses for Money

Many of us want to start our own businesses. Public space is filled with reports of new ventures. But the reporting on entrepreneurship is heavily skewed in one particular direction: towards people who have started new kinds of businesses, pioneers who have pushed the boundaries of commerce by creating a wholly original offering, usually through the help of an innovative piece of technology.

The new entrepreneurs might, for example, have invented an app for measuring and controlling the humidity of clothes’ closets, or they might have come up with a tiny sensor that can detect hunger in domestic animals or have built a social platform to connect people planning a trip to Italy.

This emphasis on novelty can leave us feeling that the chief and correct way to become an entrepreneur is invariably going to be through radical, technologically-based innovation. We may therefore, as we contemplate an entrepreneurial future, ask ourselves (with increasing panic) what entirely unthought-of idea we might ourselves come up with to propel us forward. In our frenzy, the answers we arrive at may start to lean towards the implausible, the trite or the naïve.


But there is another path. Most of the economy is made up of businesses doing stuff that people have always been doing or have been doing for a very long time: making daily bread or shirts or trousers, teaching languages or giving travelers a bed for the night, raising animals or fixing teeth...
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