Commentary on "On Entrepreneurial Success"

Are the rich evil?

Modern people have mostly forgotten what is noble — I fear this rot runs all the way into the center of the economy, causing the allocation of resources to be anti-meritorious or random. In other words, worldy success is some combination of random and dysgenic.

Broadly speaking, virtue is replaced by the market, which caters to the lowest common denominator. Instead of the noblest possessing the most resources, those who cater the best to the innoble¹ masses hoard the majority of the wealth, with the remainder distributed broadly equitably (random, enabling no eugenic selection pressure).

I may, of course, be wrong — I am always open to changing my mind and the highest certainty is only achieved by mathematical proof and, second to that, by a mountain of replicated data, carefully collected, and mathematically analyzed. In keeping with that I thought I would comment on Charles Haywood’s On Entrepreneurial Success. He writes

I am often asked how I achieved entrepreneurial success. That is, how I became, in the words of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory,” “rich—yes, richer than a king.” (We can gloss over the ultimate fate of Cory in that poem, which will not be mine, even if sometimes I expect to also die with a gun in my hand.) Back in 2019, I discussed bits and pieces of my story in my thoughts on Daymond John’s Rise & Grind. Today I want to finish the tale, and probably of more interest to my readers, to offer my more-or-less complete thoughts on what it takes to become rich through starting a business.

What is the secret of money, and is it compatible with my present thoughts? Maybe this article will give us some insight.

From 2005, when I created the business out of nothing, until 2020, when I sold it, I owned and operated a manufacturing concern, named Mansfield-King. I tell people I was in the shampoo-making business, but more precisely, I was a contract manufacturer of various personal care products, primarily hair care products. I started the business with $50K and zero employees; I sold it when it had $10 million in fixed assets and 150 employees, and, more importantly, was a cash machine, with a net profit margin of twenty-five percent. You, potentially, could do this too. It is not as if I had some insight or wisdom allowing me to perceive, far-seeing, that shampoo manufacturing would be a successful business. What I had was the discipline and the will.

Businesses tend to be created out of nothing, but there is more to the story. Often networks are vital as the easiest way to build a huge business involves seed funding. This is kind of cheating compared to the “pure merit” which capitalists often speak of. Still, there is some merit involved. But networking is far more random than raw individual skill. Insofar as it is determined, it may be anti-meritorious — for example, when high in-group preference races only or primarily lend to their own kind. Or, when leftists refuse to lend to rightists. And so on. The entrance of the idea that fortune (wealth) is a result of fortune (luck) contradicts the idea that “you could do it too.” Even if the reader is maximally competent, if you essentially won a lottery ticket, he cannot do it too — the odds that anyone in a 4 or 5 figure readership wins the lottery are near null.

In my discussion of John’s book, I focused on what I call the Golden Dyad, the absolute core of entrepreneurial success. “You have to work hard, and you have to get done everything that has to be done.” I explained at length why that is not boring and obvious advice, and why most people simply cannot accomplish either element of the Dyad, much less both. I also discussed the “racetrack,” the key mechanism of the Dyad—how thoughts of your business must occupy your mind, spinning round and round in your head, every waking moment, or you will not succeed. You should read that earlier discussion along with this one; I won’t repeat here what I said there.

The dyad seems to be a monad — just work a lot — or maybe it is hard work + intelligence (work a lot and be able to work efficiently) — but that’s beside the central point, which seems to be that one must sell his soul for riches.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

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Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

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Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

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But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

So says Jesus in Matthew 6. Directly contradicting the idea that you should focus on virtue first and riches second (i.e. live the life of a theologian, that is a scholar of virtue, who takes just enough money to study what is good) is the idea that you must obsess over the “Free Market” with your every waking moment. “Man shall not live by bread alone”, and so I fail to see how one can retain his virtue in doing this. It sounds absolutely dreadful.

I quit the business job eighteen months after arriving in Indianapolis (just ahead of getting fired—my personality and ambition didn’t play well with mediocrities), immediately after my wife announced she was pregnant with our second child. This dropped our income to zero. At no point, until 2010 or so, did we have any savings, and we had no relatives able, even in an emergency, to give us money—although I had both law and business degrees from a prestigious institution, so I could always have returned to earning a salary. Nonetheless, it seems insane in retrospect, and perhaps it was.

The lesson here is that willingness to take risk is absolutely crucial for successful entrepreneurship. Most of those who desire to be, who talk about being, entrepreneurs want to take no risks. They desire, very much, success and all its trappings, but they want to smoothly step from whatever pays the bills now into success, without taking the risks. Oh, they pay lip service to risk, but they don’t mean it. Typically, they envision a side-gig that expands with modest part-time work until, one magic day, they can quit their day jobs without any fuss. That’s not going to work out. All of entrepreneurship is risk, and with risk comes its cousin privation, but the first risk is quitting whatever you are doing now—making the leap of faith. Unless you do that, you will always lack the focus needed to succeed. Don’t bother trying shortcuts.

While it may or may not be true, this is surely a trite observation. Often, “I took a risk” is used as justification for holding, potentially undeservedly, vast amounts of wealth. But I fail to see what relevance risk taking has to deserving money. Risking your family and your future is reckless and equivalent to gambling, which is a vice and not a virtue. While it may be a part of getting rich in the present day, risk taking is certainly no moral justification for being rich — if anything it is a criticism of the present system.

But what a wife adds, that an unmarried man lacks (and no, girlfriends don’t count, except if imminently to be made wives), is crucial advice and balance. Among many other balances, my sociopathic tendencies are leavened by my wife’s kindness and restraint.

I may suggest here that the author is not sociopathic but rather masculine. The connection between business success and “sociopathy” is often remarked on in popular writings, but it’s confounding two distinct ideas:

The definition of psychopathy combines traits that are unlikely to be correlated, for example

1: the ability to endure stress and danger calmly, and the propensity to lie casually without regard to the long term consequences.

2: the propensity to act vigorously and competently in pursuit of goals and the lack of realistic, long-term goals

The concept of psychopathy defines manliness as bad, and men as irresponsible and childlike.

A psychopath is defined as someone who is not a reliable friend, yet I am pretty sure that calmness under stress and danger is a good indication of a reliable friend.

The word “psychopath”, like “racist” is a twentieth century invention. If there were such natural kinds as “racist” or “psychopath”, there would have been words for them in biblical times. Such twentieth century coinages do not cut reality at the joints, but are intended to manipulate and destroy.

In fact while 1 and 2 should not be very correlated (neuroticism and conscientiousness, broadly), they do not even form a complete definition of psychopath. Psychopaths also are aggressive (low agreeableness) and lack impulse control (low executive function / IQ). Haywood certainly is not low impulse control or low IQ, nor should he be a bad friend (psychopaths cannot stay married or regard their wives as he describes). He may be low agreeableness, but not that low, as well as high conscientiousness (psychopaths should actually be low conscientiousness, thinking they are high is a Hollywood invention), as well as somewhat low neuroticism, but likely not clinically low.

Source

Openness is correlated with IQ at .3 to .4, so we see it have a positive effect on income. The next largest effect is agreeableness — it indeed pays to be disagreeable, which is narrowly “sociopathic”, but not really. It’s really just masculine. I am very low agreeableness and here I am writing for free trying to preach virtue — is that “sociopathy” or just masculinity?

This brings up the obvious question of female entrepreneurs; I say “wife,” not “spouse,” for a reason. Successful female entrepreneurs are nearly as rare as hens’ teeth

For someone who had to sacrifice his own learning for so long, he certainly has a good intuition. Probably those middle American Anglo-Saxon genetics. It’s surprising Charles tried to get rich at all — as you can guess it is usually far lower types, per my theory, who will sell themselves to the “Free Market”. Thus more rich people are liberals and non-legacy-American ethnic groups.

Still, successful real female entrepreneurs do exist. I personally know several such, because in my industry, personal care, women have started some important businesses, and they start most of the black hair care businesses, a product area that was one of my company’s biggest focuses. (In fact, America’s first self-made female millionaire was a black woman headquartered in Indianapolis, Madam C. J. Walker, one of the original purveyors of black hair care products.) As far as I can tell, this is because only black women understand what the black consumer wants. Such women-led businesses usually excel at marketing while being chaotic in the back office, but that is survivable

We couldn’t get a more heavy handed example of “capitalism is dysgenic.” Who needs a million dollars more, some black woman selling Sailer’s Law of Black Woman’s Hair products or a gentleman scholar who studies race science and sociobiology? But thinking about Black Woman Hair earns millions and race science and sociobiology earns pennies.

The short version of this (incomplete) series of reasons is that the feminine virtues, which I have described as “nurture; kindness; grace; empathy for people and creatures; the creation and formation of life; counsel before action; cooperation; and passing wisdom down through the generations,” are simply not core to entrepreneurial success, or are positively harmful to it, and the feminine vices are sheer poison to entrepreneurial success. But the male virtues, such as the implacable desire to provide and protect, mostly greatly assist entrepreneurial success, while the male vices can coexist with it, and often even assist it.

Passing down wisdom is not really female — that is the closest in the enumeration to my objection to capitalism, but it’s not exactly a perfect description. Rather my objection is fundamentally about eugenics — it is a masculine objection fundamentally.

However, it turns out that in Indiana, unlike in Chicago, people are frugal and don’t want to spend the money on built-in bookcases. Oh, they like the idea, and will waste your time asking for detailed quotes, but they won’t pull the trigger. My actual market for bookcases turned out to be custom bookcases for wealthy Californians. My website (back twenty years ago when websites were quite simple) made me seem like a larger business, and I carefully cultivated that appearance (referring to non-existent other employees, numbering quotes with a number beginning in the thousands, not at “001,” and so forth). The Californians not only paid for custom bookcases, but would pay to ship them across the country. I set up a small workshop in an industrial area, and did this for nearly a year.

This is quite common. Not sure how much it matters but it’s not virtuous to do. Many people on X who are trying to sell you something lie about already being rich. But this is a the most fitting of an Indian — it is the same as forged degrees and fake resumes.

As I mentioned in my Rise & Grind discussion, I cut ethical corners, too. Shhhhhh. I bought crucial lab equipment a former employee haunting the auction privately sold me for cash in a dark corner. I didn’t ask where he had got the equipment, or why it was so cheap. When the fillhead, the most essential piece of equipment, for which I bid $14,400, was charged to me as $1,440, I said nothing. After the auction, I noticed that all the business records of the defunct business, including formulas, financial statements, and the like, had been thrown into a dumpster. I went to the bank’s man running the winddown and asked if I could have the documents. He said no. So I went and took them all anyway, and they were invaluable in understanding the business.

This shows how disagreeableness contributes to business success. As this behavior is not dysgenic I see little wrong with it — often prices are high as a scam to begin with and banking rules are designed to keep you down by the dysgenic, so nothing wrong in circumventing these things.

Up went a website, grossly exaggerating the company’s capabilities (this, as almost everything at this point, I did myself—you must be a jack of all trades). Over time, the company became known in the industry simply as MK

Individuals with large followings in the influencer sphere to this as well. There, I suspect it works to some degree. I find lying deplorable, so this is hard for me to bear. For example, many overestimate their own IQ by 15 to 30 points — I don’t. For this, they furnish unfalsifiable evidence interpreted incorrectly. Curtis Yarvin, for instance, has spread the rumor of having an IQ of 160. His evidence for this is that he scored something like a 1400 on the SAT at the age of 13. This, of course, cannot be verified. If it is true, it does not suggest an IQ higher than 130 to 140, under a reasonable Bayesian interpretation. Both the evidence is unverifiable and the interpretation of the evidence is skewed. At the same time, Yarvin is mostly known for sloppy 110-120 IQ blog posts. So, something here isn’t adding up, but when he is criticized his low bandwidth fans often reply “but his IQ is 160 though.” If we are going to inflate by that factor, I should go around saying mine is 175, since my writing is at least a standard deviation more intelligent than Yarvin’s.

I did all the bookkeeping for the company by myself until 2013, and even in 2012 (during yet another high-risk pregnancy) on one occasion had to wipe out my wife’s and my entire personal savings of $100K to make payroll.

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By chance, though, a law school friend of mine who lived in Georgia pointed out that Purdue University, where my father taught history, and an hour from where I lived, was looking for a lecturer in Business Law at the business school. I applied for that job, and it gave us enough to eat, and insurance, at the cost of often getting up at 4 a.m. and working eighteen hours on the two days a week I taught

Insofar as business still selects for high IQ (even though it might select for negative other traits), this meat grinder aspect is dysgenic.

That doesn’t mean any of this was easy, even if I am making it sound preordained. Very early on, I coined the phrase that “Business is dealing with a rolling series of little disasters,” and this is God’s truth. Between that, which you must accept and not internalize in a psychologically damaging manner, and the thousands of other items to be done that cruise around the racetrack, you will be fully occupied. Moreover, you must become comfortable with ambiguity, with not having any idea what the future will hold, and this is not easy for most people.

Sounds like chance plays too big a role in determining who becomes wealthy.

I covered how I obtained my first customer in my Rise & Grind discussion, and the difference between one customer and no customers is everything, because it conveys to potential customers you are real. From there it was, as they say in this business, lather, rinse and repeat, for fifteen years.

A friend on X said “Behind a successful businessman is so often a mediocre and dull man. Someone who finds his deepest pleasure in repetition of tasks which produce a dulling of the mind. No need to worship such men.” Shall we give such men infinite wealth if they put their families at enough arbitrary risk and get lucky enough? Or should geniuses run everything?

I paid everyone very well. And I rewarded everyone financially beyond their base pay, because money is what matters, at least in the masculine worldview.

Well, money is what matters in business, but it’s not what matters. But I have said enough on that here.

All this paid off. The years passed, we got other lucky breaks, and we made our own luck.

I enjoyed all of it, whatever the stresses; there is a great deal to be said for independence, for answering to nobody, for being king, even if only of a minor kingdom

But in business you are a slave to the Free Market. Why else would you work so many hours? Whose dream is it to manufacture shampoo? Some people see this form of slavery as a path to freedom. But only if you are lucky. There is nothing virtuous about slavery — an hour of slavery only entitles you to another hour, and never to an hour of freedom. There are natural slaves, as Aristotle wrote:

It is manifest therefore that there are cases of people of whom some are freemen and the others slaves by nature, and for these slavery is an institution both expedient and just.

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it is in a living creature, as we say, that it is first possible to discern the rule both of master and of statesman the soul rules the body with the sway of a master, the intelligence rules the appetites with that of a statesman or a king and in these examples it is manifest that it is natural and expedient for the body to be governed by the soul and for the emotional part to be governed by the intellect, the part possessing reason, whereas for the two parties to be on an equal footing or in the contrary positions is harmful in all cases. Again, the same holds good between man and the other animals: tame animals are superior in their nature to wild animals, yet for all the former it is advantageous to be ruled by man, since this gives them security. Again, as between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject. And the same must also necessarily apply in the case of mankind as a whole; therefore all men that differ as widely as the soul does from the body and the human being from the lower animal （and this is the condition of those whose function is the use of the body and from whom this is the best that is forthcoming） these are by nature slaves, for whom to be governed by this kind of authority is advantageous, inasmuch as it is advantageous to the subject things already mentioned. For he is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another （and that is why he does so belong）, and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it; for the animals other than man are subservient not to reason, by apprehending it, but to feelings. And also the usefulness of slaves diverges little from that of animals; bodily service for the necessities of life is forthcoming from both, from slaves and from domestic animals alike. The intention of nature therefore is to make the bodies also of freemen and of slaves different—the latter strong for necessary service, the former erect and unserviceable for such occupations, but serviceable for a life of citizenship （and that again divides into the employments of war and those of peace）; but as a matter of fact often the very opposite comes about—some persons have the bodies of free men and others the souls; since this is certainly clear, that if persons were born as distinguished only in body as are the statues of the gods, everyone would say that those who were inferior deserved to be these men's slaves. And if this is true in the case of the body, there is far juster reason for this rule being laid down in the case of the soul; but beauty of soul is not so easy to see as beauty of body.

Maximum justice is every freeman is always a freeman and every slave a slave. No natural freeman shall be slave for any time, including to the market, for the market only makes the man of reason a public slave, one owned by “society”, which the Greeks likewise had and took good care of, see e.g. the gambling public slave in Against Timarchus. To sacrifice your reason to the alter of making black women dey shampoo is to be enslaved to the mass of black women, and so on for every other class of hair possessing person. This is clearly not just — freemen are built for “citizenship”, which means governing, “philosophically” (now scientifically) in fact — free men were meant to be thinking about topics like capitalism, using the height of their reason. And article such as this was meant to be read on the floor of the Senate. But we are ruled by natural slaves to possess no reason and seek only to subjugate the freemen.

Hayworth intuits this, I suspect:

I am not, and was not, sad or nostalgic, not in the least (though I will admit to being sometimes at loose ends nowadays, without the racetrack to always fill my thoughts). I did it for the money, nothing more, and nothing less. Yes, I would do it again if I had to, but running another business, or even being involved in the running of a business, is not what I want to do. In fact the thought is highly distasteful, which is why I loathe the idea of being an angel investor—give me land, guns, gold, and a pile of nice low-risk interest-bearing instruments, which latter I assume will, some random Tuesday, lose their value overnight. Some men are serial entrepreneurs; not me. You never know, however. Maybe I will change my mind someday. Or maybe the armed patronage network will be a type of entrepreneurship.

As a natural freeman, he would rather govern and think. Hopefully, all freemen can come to realize that be subjected to entrepreneurship is unjust.

Does this mean don’t do it? Do what you must — but always keep in mind the unjust nature of the system around you. If you are successful, it’s your role to help something better emerge, not to just sit on top of unjustness saying, “I got mine.”

1. la ortografía española superior