Business is a fancy word that creates a lot of associations in the minds that needs to be explained. People imagine expensive suits, nice cars, big homes, hot wife. The reality cannot be more gray, more lifeless, empty, and meaningless than whatever image you draw in your head.
Explained simply – business is just a few excel spreadsheets that try to wrap up time, money, people and real world materials and resources and make them countable. The governments around the world need to collect taxes.
Time
From a business owner perspective – time is important in the aspect of hitting the moment in history when a product or service is sellable. From an employee perspective – time is just the hours of the day that he needs to work for a business. A more idealistic business is one that has delegated the work to machines so the humans could enjoy their time more.
Nobody looks at time in a non-measurable perspective. It is just our own idea of the passing of time. Human Life ends at some point (even for the famous, the kings and the queens). How much we have enjoyed our stay on the Planet Earth? Have we done something significant?
Income/Expenses/Profit
Numbers, numbers, numbers. Your Income theoretically should be above the expenses and you should have a profit. But, there are millions of factors that are more important. One altruistic point of view on them – is the achievement of human health, flourishment of nature. Other could be resources.
Resources
Resources nowadays is of all kinds – physical assets or digital – source code, data, relationships with the appropriate people, even attention ownership on some platform.
Taxes
Taxes are collected – when a business sells something, when the business pays to employees, when the owner extracts to his own account company funds, and so on. Historically speaking, they raised more than usual – worldwide 100 years ago. If you are not registering your income, even if your products are real, beneficial and necessary products, you are a criminal.
Total
In general, the idea of a business is to have a positive total of all activity. The thing is, we live in a illusionary world of money, stocks, crypto-currencies. The “whales” in some of the fields have the power to manipulate the trends and extract big, big, unimaginable to the normal individual – profits. And you are aiming at some real world activity and try just to stay above the “sea level”. Are you mad? Many businesses are created exactly with the idea of selling.
You could realize that – these games never end and they are meaningless or you may play it and try to extract some fetish enjoyment. Another approach is to try to make a business some activity that you enjoy. The bad thing is, many times, when these transition advances, the joy disappears. Trying to be happy is hard math formula, although it may be psychologically defined.