That’s what I was told as a teenager. By someone I love and respect nonetheless. All I had said was I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

I know it was well-intentioned. He just wanted to prepare me for the truth. To let me know that I can’t do what Bill Gates has done. And guess what, he was right. I was and still am not as smart, talented, or well-positioned as Bill Gates.

But that’s irrelevant.

My initial reaction to being told that was… So what? I don’t need to be. And if this person whom I love and respect so much can’t convince me to give up, then the only other person who can is myself.

Let me explain.

First of all, entrepreneurs exist in infinitely different shapes and forms. Do you know about the guy who supplies toilet paper to Bill Gates’s company? The stuff used to wipe his ass of the poop remnants after taking a shit? Yeah, that guy—he’s a billionaire.

Do you know his name? No? Neither do I. He’s still a wildly successful entrepreneur.

There are over 2,700 billionaires in the world today. That number may not seem large. But think about it, do you even know 2,700 people? In your entire life, have you interacted with 2,700 different people?

Do me a favor and count to 100. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…. 100. Now do that again nine more times. I’ll wait… Now you should be at 1,000. Do that entire process over again two more times. This will take a while…

That is how many individual billionaires there are in this world. That is a lot.

Now, attaining a billionaire status is pretty far-fetched. But how about millionaires? There are over 58,000,000 individual millionaires today. Try counting to 58 million. If you counted non-stop, with no sleep or pauses, at a rate of one number per second, it would take approximately 671 days or nearly 2 years to count the number of millionaires in the world today. By the time you finished counting, there would’ve been approximately 3,500,000 net new millionaires^[2]. That is a lot.

These numbers above that you (attempted to) count are individuals. Think about the households and family members who become defacto millionaires & billionaires from them. That is a lot.

I digress.

This activity is to make you realize that you only know of a handful of public-figure wealthy entrepreneurs. You know Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. But not the billionaire supplier of their toilet paper. The stuff they wipe their shit onto.

A business is an organization that solves a problem and provides value to people. Simple as that.

Tons of unglamorous needs must be met. These are products and services that get overlooked by the general public. Things like hyperspecific industrial manufacturing, dredging, waste management, funeral services, aircraft ferrying, and debt collection. There are some really peculiar ones out there. But guess what, if they’re solving people’s problems and providing value to lots of people, then they’re making a lot of money.

This brings me to my second point. This insight can be used to great advantage if you really understand it.

The general public mostly only hears about stories that sell. Stories that make you ardently go WOW or fearfully go wowwww. This leaves the boring truths in the shadows. It’s why everybody knows the story of the nerdy teenage Harvard dropout turned tech multi-billionaire and not his billionaire poopy paper supplier. It’s why everyone knows the eccentric immigrant space rocket entrepreneur and not the prosaic funeral services owner whom everyone is an eventual client.

I’ve previously written about the advantages of non-popular information. In investing, popular information tells you not what will happen, but what the general public will be reacting to. Advantageous insights either must be popular information interpreted differently or quality unpopular info.

In business, you only get an advantage by doing something different. Not different for the sake of being different, but because you have a unique and valuable insight. If everyone had that insight, it would’ve already been used by someone else. You get that unique insight by exploring the boring overlooked stuff. By looking where others aren’t looking.

Mainstream media is very predictable. Due to incentives, stories in the news must be provoking. It’s a requirement within the business model in order to be self-sustaining because that’s what people naturally consume. So I don’t blame the person who thinks all entrepreneurs need to be a genius and start a tech company out of their garage at age 17. That’s an archetypal storybook entrepreneur.

But in reality, that type is only a small fraction of the vast entrepreneurial breed. There’s a lot of unglamorous money to be made in poop services and such. Websites and back-end coding need to be constructed. Buildings need to be cleaned. Materials need to be found, mined, and transported. Goods need to be designed. Machines need to be fixed. These are all business opportunities waiting for an intrepid trailblazer.

Circling back to the title of this essay, it’s true. I’m not as smart or talented as Bill Gates, and you may not be either. But you don’t need to be to be a successful entrepreneur.

Go solve a problem and provide as much value to as many people as you can. Do that and you might see yourself on Forbes Magazine someday alongside Bill himself.

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[1] Money isn’t the only measure of success for an entrepreneur. In fact, arguably, the most successful entrepreneurs stay in business longer than others due to a higher intrinsic purpose. This is because there are diminishing returns to the benefits of making more money after a certain amount. Therefore, to stay in business, you must have a reason other than money.

[2] Between 2013 and 2023, the number of millionaires globally increased by around 5-10% annually on average. Reports from institutions like Credit Suisse indicate that between 1.5 to 2 million new millionaires were added globally each year on average.