No Free Lunch: Economics for a Fallen World: Third Edition, Revised

Chapter Nine: P31W: Enter the Entrepreneur! 206 evaporate, showing that they did not correctly anticipate the problems that consumers wanted solved (at a price the consumers were willing to pay). For a humorous reprise of one of those failures in light of today’s bailout mentality, watch this short video: Where’s Sock Puppet’s Bailout? Understanding the problem is not always easy; I’m sure some of you have felt that way in math word problems yourself! Understanding the problem only gets us one-third of the way to success. The entrepreneur must have an idea of how to solve the problem. If the identification of the problem was sufficient, we’d all be rich! I can identify the problem of cars not getting 200 miles per gallon, while simultaneously being able to go 0-60 miles per hour in 3 seconds! Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution. Many entrepreneurs puzzle over problems for years, trying various methods to build a better mousetrap. Some eventually succeed, while others will fail. But one must be able to correctly identify a problem, and then have an idea of how to solve it. The last step is simply to get off the couch and solve it; it’s time to stop talking and thinking, and start doing! How many of you know people who can think about the world correctly and know the problems going on, but are just daydreamers when it comes to doing? Proverbs 14:23 warns us not to be this way: “In all labor there is profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.” Nonetheless, many of us fit into this category, at least to some degree. Let’s face it, there are many problems in the world, and none of us can fix them all. But the entrepreneur will have a passion about fixing at least one. Many problem solvers are “tweakers”; they may not try to solve world hunger, but they want to solve a problem that could make everything just a bit better. Steve Jobs was identified as a tweaker, because in addition to his company’s big ideas, there were also constant innovations to improve a product. For the tweaker, even if the problem isn’t completely solved, it may be more tractable for the next round of creative thinking. The entrepreneur is different from most people; most of us see problems as problems. The entrepreneur sees problems as opportunities. If there wasn’t a problem, there would be no opportunity to fix it; there would be no THE ENTREPRENEUR AS PROBLEM SOLVER MUST: 1. Correctly identify the problem 2. Correctly identify a solution 3. Implement the solution