Starting a business? Actually, I just don’t want to work.

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Beijing seemed to be in a state of obsession. I even worried that many people in the capital were suffering from a kind of collective hysteria that the scientific community was not aware of.

At any dinner party, after the greetings, when we are almost talking about the third topic, the other party will ask me in a tone of pity for my misfortune and anger at my inability to argue, "Don't you want to do something yourself?" This is a sentence full of demonic spirit. It seems calm, but in fact it is like a raging wave hitting the shore, which is terrifying when you think about it carefully. This sentence is divided into several parts. First, "Don't you want to do something yourself?" This rhetorical question has basically set the tone, that is, the right path is right in front of you, why don't you think about taking it? Second, "I don't want to" reveals a kind of disappointment that is really hard to bear and difficult to conceal. Third, "myself", a declaration of mastering one's own destiny. Fourth, "do something", a grand blueprint for creating a career. You see, there is a complex flavor of care, salvation and final reminder in this sentence. It seems that the magnificent scene is shining brightly in front of you, why do you short-sighted people turn a blind eye to it?

Yes, they are persuading me to start a business.

In the past year or so, everyone around me, including the top students and the poor students in my class, have claimed to have started their own business. Those who used to show off their food on WeChat Moments have now started showing off their empty offices, whiteboards, H5s, and various plagiarized business declarations. The chicken soup industry has also found a new growth point thanks to the entrepreneurial boom, which was on the verge of death after being despised by others. It used to make a living by giving psychological massages to singles who couldn't find a partner, but now it has become a spur to those who are still working overtime to resign.

In fact, those entrepreneurs didn’t have much creativity. Their companies were different, but they were basically in the same industry. It’s not their fault. Now it seems that there is only one industry in China—the Internet. It seems that only the Internet is a sunrise industry, and everything else is declining. Haven’t you seen that even the number of people taking the civil service exam has begun to decline? The current situation is that if you have a connection with the Internet, you can get through the flood safely even if you are on Noah’s Ark; if you haven’t thrown yourself into the arms of the Internet, you are destined to be laughed at. And the way to integrate into the Internet torrent is to “do something yourself.” Going to work has basically become a joke. It is a transitional stage for people who really have no other options, are particularly unpromising, or temporarily endure humiliation in order to prepare for starting a business.

Your country can create a collective climax in everything it does. When the stock market is hot, even vegetable vendors talk about the market. Artistic young women sell their cotton skirts to buy at the bottom. A young man swimming can attract the attention of old ladies all over China in one day, and the next day they are all jealous of another Korean Oppa. So, it is not surprising that entrepreneurship can become a trend, but the problem is that you guys who usually complain every day about going to work and complain about why it is not Friday yet, if you start a business and become a boss, can this company survive?

What is entrepreneurship? In the literal sense, it means to start a business. The sense of achievement and the possibility of financial freedom it implies attract too many people. Since there is such a grand possibility, the act of entrepreneurship itself must require real ambition, a pioneering and subversive act, and not just to solve the problem of food and clothing or just to improve the living standards on the existing basis. Most people now start a business not to start anything, but to escape from something. To be honest, it is basically because of boredom and dissatisfaction, dissatisfaction with the boss, dissatisfaction with the current job, and dissatisfaction with the income. They mistake leaving with resentment as a full start. Objectively speaking, most people work eight hours a day, two hours are spent browsing Taobao, one hour is spent browsing Moments, and while sending faxes, they are thinking about where to eat on the weekend. People with this mentality will never understand that starting a business means that they need to throw all their time into work.

Starting a business is not just a beautiful dream, it is actually a hard job. If you really make up your mind to start a business, your quality of life will plummet in the unforeseeable years. Do you think that the millions of dollars given to you by venture capital and the A and B rounds of playing with you are all free? Do they give you money so that you can lie down and browse your circle of friends? Don't think that the market and investors are like the childhood sweethearts in your village. You have been away for many years, and they are still waiting for you to come back tenderly and affectionately. As long as you are interested, they will cooperate with you in various positions. There is no such thing as nothing at no cost in this world, and often the cost is more than what is gained. The problem now is that many people who persuade me to start a business regard angel investors as real angels. Do you think their daily job is to keep smiling, flap their wings, fly around and throw money all over the sky?

Back to the point, a few years ago, the word "entrepreneurship" still had a threshold. Now anyone who sets up a stall at the door to sell steamed buns and spicy hot pot can say that he is starting a business. If you print a QR code on the packaging box and order food online, you can shamelessly call it O2O. If you can also create a WeChat public account and post a story every day, you can basically become an industry leader and make a living by giving speeches, without having to sell spicy hot pot yourself. Isn't this called entrepreneurship? This kind of self-reliant behavior of doing small business is at most called stall training. When we were in school, if we were too playful, our parents would yell at us, "If you don't study hard, you will have to go to the stall training in the future." They are talking about what you are doing now. Some people love to use grand and solemn words to whitewash their humble and frustrated current situation. Only the real losers are particularly fond of concepts that are made up of various English letters and numbers, such as B2C, C2C, O2O, 0 to 1, etc., which sound refreshing but are boring to study, not to mention those pseudo-concepts that are made up by more localized losers and cannot even be translated into English. In fact, there are many interesting concepts, but the so-called entrepreneurs in China are simply unwilling to understand their connotations and only care about the psychedelic pleasure of calling themselves by these labels. In essence, this is just like when foreign companies first entered China, everyone gave themselves a foreign name, such as Tom, Jerry, Dick, etc. Today, many years later, do you have the nerve to tell others that you used Dick, a slang organ, as your name? In a few years, someone will point at you at the dinner table and tease you, saying that you used to be an O2O person.

For ordinary people, everyone needs to work, and work brings you income and social interaction. Yes, no one is born to squeeze into the subway or bus, get up early and go to work late, but because of this, you can't naturally prove why you don't start a business? Some people always encourage themselves that working is just as hard, so it's better to work for yourself. You get a salary when you go to work. What is a salary? In the final analysis, it is a rebate of the profits you create for the company, but when you don't create value at certain times, your company's risks are borne by your boss and other colleagues who create more value. What's more, many times what you do is basically a service position rather than a position that directly creates profits. But when you start a business, you become the one who holds the bottom line and must raise the ceiling.

Most people in this world are not suitable for starting a business, which requires a strong internal motivation. It does not mean that anyone who is interested in money can operate a company and list it on the stock market. Those who can create wealth that will amaze you are actually not interested in what wealth can buy, but in the process itself. But most people are not like this.

Therefore, entrepreneurship is destined to be a niche thing. There must be something wrong with mass entrepreneurship now. When a society begins to eagerly encourage college students to drop out of school to start a business, something begins to be frightening. It is not that Jobs and some other Silicon Valley elites have dropped out of school, and it can be inferred from this logic that dropping out of school to start a business will definitely succeed. Instead, they found their own direction and made the choice when it was impossible to balance their studies. For them, if they want to start a business, they must drop out of school, but dropping out of school does not necessarily lead to entrepreneurial success. This cannot be reversed. A big reason why China encourages college students to start their own businesses is because of the difficult employment situation, but we cannot use entrepreneurship to paint a rosy picture for these people because of this difficulty. What's more frightening is that the possibility of dropping out of school to start a business and becoming rich overnight not only confuses many young people, but can also easily convince their parents. China is a place where pragmatism prevails. In the face of the light of money, the IQ of most people will drop off a cliff. People will not think rationally that the probability of listing their company after starting a business is actually almost the same as winning the first prize in the lottery. Ask yourself, is your creativity on the same level as Steve Jobs' Apple? Do you really think that you can go public after a few years of financing by selling spicy hot pot and delivering a few vegetarian meatballs to customers, and compete with Wang Jianlin and Jack Ma?

Perhaps because they hate going to work too much, or perhaps because they surrender to the sharp polarization of the rich and the poor, some people begin to inject themselves with imaginary possibilities. They desperately want to write titles such as C.O. or co-founder of a certain company on their business cards and WeChat signatures, fantasizing that after starting a business, they will stand in front of the glass curtain wall of the office building with confidence, look into the distance with a resolute and heavy expression, wear a custom-made suit every day, and sign their names on various documents with a high-end fountain pen, and the company will be able to live well. That is a melodrama on Mango TV, not a real entrepreneurial history. In reality, the founder of a startup company who pitifully questioned me why I didn't start a business, the day before, he was still in the group and claimed that he was negotiating millions of dollars in financing, and the next day he forwarded in the circle of friends "My roommate moved, and I sublet the second bedroom in Tiantongyuan." Do you think this is interesting? But don't tell me that this is the hard work that must be done to start a business. There is a gap between your appearance when you were promoting the financing and your actual financial status, which is almost a lie. This current situation with too much suspense is not the appearance of an entrepreneur who is in full control of the future. When these people were further questioned, the gap became even worse. I asked you about the size of your company, and you talked to me about future plans; I asked you about your salary and benefits, and you talked to me about dreams and distant places; then I asked you what the future would be like, and you patted my hand and said like an elder, "We are still young." I tentatively said that some of your current partners are not very reliable, and you said that we mainly look at the ability of people to create value; then I asked about the possibility of future profitability, and you said, "Be a good person before doing things." So, your talents are wasted in the Internet industry. If you write chicken soup, you may become a new generation of Internet celebrities. If not, you can find a department to be a spokesperson and maybe you can shine and heat.

Let me put it this way. Many people who start businesses now think that they can get some venture capital and spend it for a while, and then talk about it later. This is not called starting a business, this is close to fraud. And the cost performance is slightly lower than that of the scammers who say "Come to my office tomorrow". This is also one of the reasons why media people are becoming more and more mainstream in the entrepreneurial army, because their main business is to tell stories. At present, both the investment community and the audience are still willing to listen to stories, but when the story is finished and the reality is revealed, what should we do? This is not a movie theater. The story is over, the lights are on, and we just need to pack up and go home. The business world is a place of life and death, and capital is a white knife in and a red knife out. There is always a difference between life and death.

Starting a business is awesome, and the Internet is a great tool. These can create endless possibilities, but the question is whether you are suitable for it. I don’t believe that a person who needs to prepare himself mentally even to go to work will become a great entrepreneur, and I don’t believe that in the future, most people can become entrepreneurs and achieve some kind of utopian financial freedom and equality of status. We must always understand that starting a business is tens of thousands of times more difficult than going to work. It is niche and has a low probability. If you find a direction and a market, and you must try to achieve it because of inner needs rather than external noise, then you can try it, even if you have to burn your boats. If it doesn’t work, don’t daydream. Even if you can complain for half a year about losing tens of thousands of dollars in the stock market, you should stay away from starting a business.

For all those who have started a business, are telling stories and preparing to start a business, it is best to find some time every day to say the things you usually say in front of the mirror a few times. If you don’t laugh, it’s not too late to say it again. Maybe, I will "do something on my own" in the future, or maybe it is more likely that I will not do it. Compared with many completely unreliable ambitions, I would rather have a good job. One day, this strange, collective hysterical entrepreneurial trend will fade. When that day comes, if you encourage someone to start a business, others will say to you, you are the only one who is starting a business, your whole family is engaged in entrepreneurship!