A striking number of us (that is, we who have yet to become who we are) are apt, in our private moments, to express our understanding of how the world could be altered for the better by picturing to ourselves various businesses we would like to start. In our more self-indulgent moods, we may even entertain detailed musings about what the awning should look like above the shop or how the advertisements for the new service ought to be phrased. These pleasing and all-consuming daydreams appear to spring from those very same aspects of our personalities which led us as children to delight in running a grocery store out of a corner of the kitchen or to open a hotel in a cardboard box in the garden -- as though there was some sort of innate and enduring human impulse to lend entrepreneurial form to certain of our deeply held enthusiasms and insights.
And:
Entrepreneurship appears to be almost wholly dependent on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, but merely evidence of the conformity and lack of imagination of the herd. Yet the milieu also demands that its protagonists develop a hard-headed awareness of certain intractable financial and legal truths, as well as an accurate sense of what other human beings are actually like. The field seems to require a painfully uncommon synthesis of imagination and realism.
