In essence, a creative entrepreneur is someone in command of an accurate thesis about what others truly want.

The creative entrepreneur is therefore forced to fall back on a trickier and more unexpected data source, one that is easily overlooked because it is so ubiquitous, lacking in prestige, and (this is perhaps the main reason) desperately hard to make sense of: our own minds. When we are attuned to them, our minds and bodies are infinitely sensitive i

The point of examining these instances of entrepreneurship is to shift the internal blocks around our own ideas about the kind of work we really want to do. The fact that an idea hasn’t yet been carried out doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea. What makes it a good idea is really the precision and clarity with which it latches onto our own sense

1. The pleasure of making money

The English poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771) meditated on the melancholy theme of unexploited talent while looking at the headstones of farm labourers in the graveyard of a small country village. He wondered who these people had been and what, in better circumstances, they might have become: Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregna

In order to face our troubles in a slightly calmer state of mind, we should admit the inherent dignity and complexity of the problem of working out what to do. Rather than follow a Romantic-era faith in intuitive feeling, the process of working out what to do, or what to do next, should be recognised for what it is: one of the most tricky, complica

Mediocrity is the result of being guided more by what other people typically do and say than by the thoughts and feelings that are circulating (just below the surface) in our own minds. We know inside, in a muddled way, what could be done, but don’t trust our quiet intuitions. We in effect abide by a submissive, feudal story: that it is only other

A very common way to identify what job we might like to do is to set our sights on industries that produce the sort of things we enjoy consuming. We enjoy their outputs, and therefore seek to partake professionally in their inputs. This means that we’re pretty likely to write off whole areas of the economy, because they’re not obviously connected w

We are often exposed primarily to the people in the public realm who have been unusually good at externalising their talents and acting on their ambitions. By necessity we hear more about these people even though they are in fact pretty rare and, hence, not a reasonable or helpful base for comparison.