I recently overheard a phrase that stuck with me like a splinter: “Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.” It was said casually, maybe even defensively, as if being enterprising had become some sort of modern affliction, like ambition was a pyramid scheme. But it made me pause. Because once upon a time (not so long ago, really) everyone had to be.
Before the industrial age, before cubicles and time clocks and biweekly direct deposits, most human labor was grounded in meeting actual, physical needs. You tilled the land because you needed to eat. You repaired the roof because rain was indifferent to your calendar. You baked, sewed, built, bartered. Even if you weren’t running a business in the modern sense, your efforts were tied directly to survival, to usefulness, to family. It was industriousness without ceremony.
Then came widespread trade, the rise of currency, and the shift (slow at first, then sudden) into a world where labor became abstract. Instead of growing food, you worked in an office so that you could buy food someone else grew. You sold your hours to someone who needed your time more than your tomatoes. And that wasn’t wrong. It was progress. A certain kind of freedom. But in that transformation, something quiet and essential was misplaced.
We’ve reached a point now where effort itself is suspect. Suggest that someone grow a little food in their backyard, fix their own fence, or pick up a side gig to make ends meet, and you’re met with an eye-roll or a weary sigh: “Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.” As if doing for oneself is suddenly a brand of Silicon Valley hustle culture, rather than a basic, human instinct.
Here’s the thing. There’s a difference between being industrious and being an entrepreneur. Mending your own clothes doesn’t make you Ralph Lauren. Selling a few handmade candles at the local market doesn’t mean you’re pitching to venture capitalists. There’s a wide, open landscape between total dependency on an employer and founding a start-up; and it used to be called self-reliance.
We’ve turned “entrepreneurship” into this overblown identity (part motivational poster, part lifestyle brand) when it used to mean something far simpler: figuring things out for yourself. Making do. Getting creative. Putting your skills to use in a way that serves your life, even if it never scales.
But today, many seem content to do only what is strictly necessary to get by. Work just enough hours to cover the rent. Learn just enough skills to not get fired. Stretch the weekend as wide as it’ll go. It’s as if the dream isn’t upward mobility anymore, but downward comfort; no more striving, just scrolling. And whenever someone tries to shake us from that fog, we reach for that easy defense: “Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.” What we often mean is, “Please don’t ask me to try harder.”
This isn’t a call to burn out or glorify overwork. It’s not an indictment of the average person just trying to survive in an economy that feels increasingly rigged. But it is a call to reawaken that old spirit of hustle; not the kind with LinkedIn posts and morning routines involving turmeric and market forecasts, but the kind our grandparents practiced without needing a word for it. Chopping wood, selling extra eggs, taking odd jobs, mending what broke.
We’ve allowed resourcefulness to become optional. We’ve outsourced even our smallest problems to specialists, to apps, to corporations. And as a result, we’ve become dependent in ways that make us feel helpless when things go even slightly off-script.
You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to be industrious. But you do need to care. You need to believe that life is more than getting through the workweek so you can collapse into leisure. That it’s worth investing time and energy into building something; even if that something is just a slightly better version of your Tuesday.
So no, not everyone needs to be an entrepreneur. But maybe everyone needs a little more hustle. The old kind. The kind that doesn’t require a business plan; just a bit of backbone.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.