Smart, rich pt 2

Yesterday I started talking about how being smart and $3 still only gets you a latte.

I was having this conversation with my friend Steve on Monday out at Linvilla Orchards, a 300-acre farm where a third or so of those acres are dedicated to something like a harvest-time amusement park. All over the place, somebody at Linvilla has been exercising business canny.*

Now Steve is an intelligent guy. What you call a classic "idea man." A musician and actor, with a different set of networking contacts and personal inclinations, he could do well in advertising. As we discussed good ideas (or more accurately, as Steve doled out good ideas and I agreed with them), I came upon my own: funnel cakes.

Nobody doesn't love funnel cakes. But you only ever see them at special events: fairs and carnivals and such. Why don't funnel cakes make it into everyday life? Why don't restaurants sell them as dessert options? Why don't food trucks that already have built-in fryers sell these on Philadelphia street corners?

I don't know. I don't even know how to know. And all modesty aside, I'm a pretty smart guy. I should be able to figure this out. And then sell a crapload of funnel cakes.

Some people seem to have business canny easily, but that doesn't mean it can't be learned. The question for me is not even my usual Step One question, "Do you want it?" but maybe the Step 1.1 question: "What are you willing to give up to get it?"

This is, I think, the difference between business canny and your average smart person. The business canny person has sacrificed a lot to get that way. If BC guy was ever curious about tapirs, but couldn't see how to make money on them, tapirs got left. A smart person curious about tapirs gets a zoology degree and makes $35k shoveling tapir dung.

There must be some way to walk a middle line there, to meld curiosity with capitalism. The classic question, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is a misunderstanding of what smarts is good at. But it's not a bad question.

*My favorite application was a row of apple slingshots. All the apples that the orchard couldn't sell to eat, they sold for you to shoot at scarecrows with industrial strength slingshots. Turning garbage into money is fascinating to me.