I was in the emergency area of a local hospital recently and had just taken a CT scan to see if I had suffered a stroke. A neurologist I met for the first time came into my room and told me the CT results were negative but an MRI would provide more information. One of my daughters is a doctor in another state and in an earlier phone conversation strongly recommended an MRI, as did her twin sister who works with doctors. An MRI would mean I would be put on a list, and that might mean an overnight stay, the thought of which I dreaded.
While I thought about it, the neurologist quietly added, “No one can guarantee tomorrow.”
His statement was both obvious and profound. And also an honest admission. I decided I was in good hands and agreed to the MRI.
The future’s inherent uncertainty is an absolute we face every moment of our lives, but how people deal with it varies as widely as the weather. No one can guarantee tomorrow but we all have to decide what to do today. It is from this condition that entrepreneurship arises.
“The uncertainty of the future is already implied in the very notion of action,” Mises wrote in Human Action. He continues,
Economics, in speaking of entrepreneurs, has in view not men, but a definite function. This function is not the particular feature of a special group or class of men; it is inherent in every action and burdens every actor. (emphasis added)
An entrepreneur is not defined by a particular occupation, a college degree, or even ownership of a business. “Economics,” he writes,
. . .calls entrepreneurs those who are especially eager to profit from adjusting production to the expected changes in conditions, those who have more initiative, more venturesomeness, and a quicker eye than the crowd, the pushing and promoting pioneers of economic improvement.
Mises acknowledges a confusion arising from calling every purposeful action entrepreneurial as well as the economic meaning attached to people called entrepreneurs, and suggests referring to the latter as promoters. We are all of necessity “entrepreneurs,” but only a very few are promoters.
The driving force of the market, the element tending toward unceasing innovation and improvement, is provided by the restlessness of the promoter and his eagerness to make profits as large as possible.
And this reminds me of a young man I’ve known for many years, who I’ll refer to as Julian. In his early twenties he once said to me, “I have two goals in life. I want to make a lot of money, and I want to be considered dangerous.” In this culture that’s almost like confessing, “I want to be a gangster.” But, having known him since he was a toddler, that didn’t fit.
Julian was raised by his grandmother in a household with two brothers and didn’t learn who his father was until he was a teen. He graduated from high school and was a good athlete, but his particular strengths were his engaging personality and good looks, or as his grandma puts it, “He never meets a stranger.”
After graduation he went to work and did odd jobs, one of which was an extra in a movie starring Will Smith. Becoming a movie star would have brought him the money he was after, but he would have to learn to act first. Instead, he landed at a local roofing company doing sales work.
The details of what happened are unknown to me, but the owners of the company decided not to own it any longer and abandoned it. Ordinarily this would have left Julian unemployed, but he saw it as an opportunity and seized it. He found customers and hired crews.
When I heard about it, I hired his firm to replace the cap on my chimney, which had been blown off during a storm. Julian and his crew chief inspected the chimney and put a new cap on it but that was not the end of the transaction. We all knew the cap would have to prevent rainwater from leaking, which it failed to do after a hard rain. They came back and fixed it without delay or extra charge. Only then did we all consider the job finished.
Julian would never get rich doing jobs for people like me, so he learned to sell to the government, the organization with our money. This took him out of state and sometimes in collaboration with other roofers. He also used an AI to create his company’s web page, on which visitors will find an app he created on how to bid on government contracts.
I went entrepreneurial in the early years of the computer revolution when I developed a programmer’s library for a popular programming language, Turbo Pascal. The library was solid but the market of Pascal computer programmers was insignificant compared to the market for people who wanted end-user productivity applications. The market for roofs has no limit.
I got a sense of Julian’s life when he drove over one Sunday morning last summer to pick tomatoes from my garden. I saw him pull up in his GMC Sierra, get out, then begin pacing slowly with his phone to his ear. After about ten minutes he came inside, and, with a smile of relief, said, “Every day is Monday.” A problem had come up with a crew in another state that needed immediate attention.
Then he seemed to forget roofs for half an hour and plunged into the wealth of beefsteaks my garden had yielded. He was so excited he took pictures along with two bags of tomatoes. I made him pledge to share his bounty with his grandmother, which he gladly did.
Entrepreneurs can’t guarantee tomorrow but that doesn’t stop them from trying, at a cost that sees every day as the same day.
