I have always wanted to own my own business. Why? I have no clue.
My dad and some relatives say, “Oh it runs in our blood. We don’t like to work under someone.” I don’t agree on this statement. While it is true you might make decisions on your own terms, you are still somehow controlled by your clients. Your client becomes your boss.
I have often wondered if it is the social media glorification of entrepreneurship and start-ups that pulled me towards this direction. Founders showing off their products on Shark Tank, talking numbers, making deals, or the fancy bean bags & foosball tables. But if I’m being honest, I hate the normal tech startup jargons such as scaling, IPOs, exit strategy and anything that stems towards the idea of constant growth.
The very thought of scaling a business to build an empire or crushing the incumbent in a competitive market made me feel out of place. So why exactly do I want to become an entrepreneur if I don’t want to see it grow?
As my dad says, am I choosing entrepreneurship just to escape the clutches of the corporate world? Or is it a lack of motivation that makes me think this way?
Digging in a bit further, I realized all these assumptions of how a business must be, stem from some of the modern economic principles — mainly the concept of Utility Maximization.
In classical and neoclassical economics, humans are assumed to be rational agents who try to maximize their utility.
And often, we are urged to target the maximum number we can possibly get. When I was moving from Germany to the UK, some of my friends said that I should target at least a 20% hike in salary moving to a new role. I had two options to choose from: one in a payments company that offered the coveted 20% hike, and the other—my current job—in the public sector, with probably a 3-5% increase from what I was already earning. That too, not very meaningful when you factor in the cost of living difference between Germany and the UK.
As a rational human who tries to maximize his utility, my choice should have been simple: take the private sector job. But there were other things I valued more than salary. Working in the public sector appealed to me because I’d have the opportunity to understand the work that goes behind policymaking and how public money is spent. The manager I’d be working with was also a big factor in my mind. So in terms of money, I was satisficing — not maximizing.
In a 2006 study, students were administered a scale that measured maximizing tendencies and were then followed over the course of the year as they searched for jobs. Students with high maximizing tendencies secured jobs with 20% higher starting salaries than did students with low maximizing tendencies. However, maximizers were less satisfied than satisficers with the jobs they obtained, and experienced more negative affect throughout the job-search process. These effects were mediated by maximizers’ greater reliance on external sources of information and their fixation on realized and unrealized options during the search and selection process.
A maximizer yearns for perfection — making the best decision after weighing all the choices. A satisficer goes for “good enough.”
Not because they don’t care, but because they care about different things.
And maybe that’s also the reason I’ve never been motivated to build empires.
Because what energizes me is not building to scale but building to serve.
The more I explored this, the more I realized: I’m not trying to grow a business like a skyscraper.
I want to tend to a garden.
A small, quiet, intentional garden with a few trusted collaborators — where conversations run deep, ideas grow slowly, and impact is meaningful even if it isn’t massive.
Maybe you don’t need to build an empire either.
Maybe you just need to decide what kind of garden you want to grow.
