saidsimply

You do not need to be an Innovative Inventor to succeed in business. Instead, you need to be a Virtuous Provider for Fallen Scarcity.

An innovative inventor seeks new tools as a way to solve their customer needs. However, a virtuous provider seeks internal growth and healing both for himself and his customers. Fallen Scarcity is more than material lack, but it’s a state of spiritual anxiety in a person, which is also tied to a goal which is unfulfilled.

The innovative inventor may be able to provide a temporary solution to the external need, but will miss the opportunity to serve a spiritual lack. By contrast, the virtuous provider sees both the material and spiritual lack as two sides of the same coin, and deals out his solution with personal care. This personal care wins the loyalty of the customer, who intuitively feels the virtuous service of their provider. The personal care felt by the customer in their fallen state, can produce a state of trust and loyalty, which is economically efficient due to it’s potential to save them from the time and paranoia usually required to trade in manipulative environments.

While the Innovative Inventor thinks the efficiency of his tools will win over the hearts of his customers, his failure to grow his own economic virtues will cause future failure to meet even the material needs of his customers. This combined with the intuitive distrust discussed above produces economic inefficiency and pushes the customer away.

The virtues are like different musical scales, which when played at the right time, dynamically harmonize with a song. While they can ultimately only be taught from an on-going relationship with Christ, it is worth listing these virtues as they relate to business and trade so we can know how we need to improve.

• Discipline: Consistent focused attention to a goal.
• Accountability: Recording transactions for later review, use of clear agreements or contracts, and amending for mistakes that fail to fulfill what was explicitly promised.
• Courage: Confident attitude in the midst of present risk or intruding fear.
• Prioritization: Principled/temporal arrangement of goals from most to least important.
• Multi-tasking: Actively willing multiple goals simultaneously, despite priority or incompatibility. (Because of uncertainty, willing two incompatible goals is beneficial because opportunity for one or the other can open unexpectedly)
• Punctuality: Achieving goals before deadlines arrive.
• Virtuosity/skillfulness: Well-practiced use of a tool such that time compresses and tasks are completed efficiently.
• Preservation/maintenance: Regular renewing or cleaning, or saving of tools or other economic goods.
• Frugality: Minimum necessary use of tools or resources to get the job done.
• Sustainability: Avoiding bad tail-end consequences of actions with a long-term mindset.
• *Note: this list isn’t exhaustive.

Criticism: Can’t the innovative inventor also be a virtuous provider? The goal of this essay is to convince a innovative inventors that they have overlooked being an virtuous provider in their pursuit of technology. The idea is not that the two are mutually exclusive, a virtuous provider would gladly use innovation to serve his customers, however the point is that being virtuous as an entrepreneur tends to be under-emphasized when we learn business.

The focus on technology also causes a blind spot in business owners. When business is only viewed through technological terms or matters of material scarcity, the novelty of customer problems is over-emphasized, as well as innovations capacity to resolve these needs in the market. If the myth of American innovation were true, we’d see economic scarcity reduce as innovation occurred, however when we look at society today, we see the opposite: extreme technologic proficiency, and an economic recession. In other words, the economic needs are the same as they’ve always been, despite our technology. Fallen scarcity persists through innovation then, and is seen as a beautiful opportunity by the virtuous provider, who, with the above conditions in mind, realizes there will always be a market for his capabilities, despite the fear-mongering of looming AI, or robotic replacement of jobs.

The virtuous provider truthfully remains optimistic, focused on internal growth and improvement to serve his customers from his heart, but those who remain stuck in the innovative inventor paradigm fear technological trends, misallocate their attention and focus to ever changing externals, and lock up as they grind the gears of their mechanistic worldview, and customers remain unsatisfied.