I think guilt stops many people from starting a business

The other day I was talking with a friend from the company. Before I left, we wanted to have one last chat, one of those final, quiet conversations. He’s a young guy and, in the past, he’d had a ton of ambition. To start things. To throw himself into a project. To build something of his own.

But over the years, that ambition started to fade. Little by little. Until, as he told me, he ended up almost developing a rejection of the idea. A strange kind of disdain.

He felt like what he was doing was wrong.
That selling a product to someone else was, somehow, deceiving them.
That no matter what you built, it would never be good enough for someone to pay for it.
And, deep down, an even more general feeling: that making money was a bad thing.

The interesting thing is that he himself admitted that if he thought about it calmly, point by point, none of it made sense. There was nothing objectively wrong with creating something useful. Or selling it. Or making money from it. He knew that. He understood it rationally.

But still… the feeling wouldn’t go away.

And I think this happens to a lot of people. A lot more than we think. That vague discomfort, that guilt you’re not really sure where it comes from, but it’s there. And I honestly think that feeling is one of the main reasons so many people never start a business, never try to build anything.

And, to be a little more blunt, I think it’s also responsible for a lot of misery in the world. Because when capable people stop creating because of misplaced guilt, fear or shame, we all lose a little.