My conclusion was that getting a job is probably suitable for the “stable” people who won’t want too many fluctuations and just want to get by, while being an entrepreneur is not for the faint-hearted but will definitely bring greater rewards if you are not too dumb.

His conclusion was that getting a job is the way to go for except the really brilliant people, and his reason was we have run out of ideas in today’s world and it is too difficult to compete with established giant companies if we don’t invent new ideas.

So really, is that the case?

On the surface, his conclusion seemed to have a lot of truth to it. I remember my dad telling me the same thing when I was a child, and I couldn’t come up with a clever new invention idea to challenge his stance. Even today, I can’t come up with some cool ideas on the spot. So it would be normal for most people to reach that we have run out of new ideas to start a new, successful business.

I don’t think so

But then, I really put some thinking into that, and I could see that there are in fact endless possibilities still waiting for us to discover. How did I know? I asked myself this simple question, “Does everything in the world that we live in simply just works?” Obviously, anybody will tell you how something, many things, don’t work quite right in their lives. As opposed to having to come up with constructive ideas, just blaming what’s not working (or put another way, inconveniences of life) is a lot easier. I can come up with a few on the spot here:

• I still spend a significant amount (maybe 5 – 15%) of my life on transportation.
• I recently permed my hair curly, and I am constantly worrying that I might do something wrong that will make it straight.
• If I want to eat some food I enjoy, I’m constantly counting the calories.
• Urban countries dump tons of food every day. Third world countries dump tons of corpses every day.
• I have to manually clean my ass with toilet paper every time after I defecate.

OK the last one might sound like a cheap joke but it’s a pretty legitimate issue, when we look at the fact that flush toilet is considered one of the inventions with most impacts by many scientists.

See, there are countless small things that are still screaming for improvements in our daily lives. It’s just that we don’t notice them. Many people think that it would take a rocket scentist to make some ground breaking invention, which is totally not true. For example, I recently came across this brilliant new device:

Approximately 3,000 woodworkers get their finger cut by a saw like that every year. This new invention, which consists of no next-generation scientific discoveries, is saving 3,000 woodworkers’ fingers every year.

The point I want to illustrate here, is that there are still endless possibilities here in the world, and we are not destined to be stuck in a cubicle day in and day out. All it takes is the ambition and the creativity, and we all can do much more meaningful work than sitting in a cubicle.

So until the day when we have all the gadgets in Doraemon, you don’t have to get a job because you can start your own!