Sensitivity to Inconvenience Drives Entrepreneurship

I grew up not so wealthy. Being not wealthy usually means that when inconvenience strikes, "let's buy something" is not a viable solution. When shoelaces snap, a piece of string would do well as a replacement. When soy sauce is gone, salt is just fine as an alternative. When the curtain or the windowsill is broken? A piece of cloth would do well to cover up the gaping holes. While my conditions were not often bad enough to resort to such, a mentality emerges: if an inconvenience appears, the priority is to find a workaround with existing resources.

It was much later that I found that not everyone thinks this way. Particularly when I was living as a white-collar professional in Japan, I was amazed by how for many locals, when something breaks down, the first instinct is not to find some immediate plug-gap measure to fix the situation, but to complain why the inconvenience ought to happen. Rather than assuming that an inconvenience is bound to emerge, they think that there ought to be something that prevents it from emerging in the first place. Longer-lasting shoelaces, automated refilling of soy sauce, and stronger curtains and windowsills are on their minds.

For the poor person trying to survive the day-to-day, such complaints about why lives ought to be perfectly devoid of inconveniences sound like whining about first-world problems. Hearing the whining would induce eye rolls and thoughts of "suck it up and move on." But the whining has its merits: by setting expectations that inconveniences should not exist, whining motivates people to think about new products and services that can do much better than immediate workarounds to find a more permanent, perfect solution. 

I, growing up in a family value that encourages cheap, ad hoc, but mediocre solutions, dampen my own need for something better. But for the whiners expecting their lives to be problem-free, every inconvenience is a chance to explore a new paradigm, a way to inch toward perfection and away from mediocrity. It is that determination to be and remains inspired by those everyday problems that creates fertile ground for turning ideas into real products and services that millions around the world may one day find to be a matter of fact.

What is more, the whining entrepreneurs have the power to eventually drive into oblivion that workaround mentality that retards the acceptance of new solutions. For instance, the emergence of cellphones quickly superseded the time-honored practice of running home or to the nearest public telephone booth to make a phone call. And when the smartphone came out, gone was the need to draw a physical map to remember what streets one needs to follow to get to a desired destination. Ad hoc workarounds are great, until the more perfect solution becomes popularized.

Thus, instead of the extoling the pinny-pinchers who try to use what is available to fix an issue for their financial ingenuity, we should be extoling the whiners who cannot shut up about the unfairness of getting anything less than perfect. The former is instead the intellectually lazy who rather bathe in the comfort of saving a run to the store, while ignoring how a deeper thinking may unlock so much more value than the few extra dollars they did not need to spend at the store. Finding the quick workaround might be satisfying for one person one time, but the world does not run on ad hoc quick fixes, but scalable solutions for all.

This is not simply an ode to capitalism. Even in the olden days, before the private enterprise or even the concept of money was a thing, human civilization advanced because of those who refused to simply accept the inconvenient status quo. Everything from the fire to the wheel was invented by those who would not tolerate discomfort of the workarounds. Even without the lure of global markets and venture capital funding, they created the products and services that underpin the very foundation of human lives today, thousands of years after they lived.

Perhaps the term "entrepreneurship" itself is a glorification. We simply need people who invent for the sake of bettering themselves, not for money or fame, but just be more comfortable. Those who want to be more perfect in their lives can start with themselves, and if they come up with something, tell others, who in turn tell others, until the solutions become globally known. Sure, getting paid for the process would be nice, but suppressing the whines of the perfectionists and snare at the poor-but-lazy-in-the-mind are oh so much more satisfying.