Entrepreneurship used to be about building things — real production, real value, real mastery.
Today, it feels more like a game of taxes.
The modern entrepreneur spends as much time navigating deductions, write-offs, credits, compliance, subsidies, and reporting rules as they do refining the product itself. The system turns the business owner into a part-time accountant, part-time lawyer, and only occasionally a creator.
You don’t optimize for excellence anymore.
You optimize for paperwork.
Success is often determined not by who produces the best good, but by who understands the tax code well enough to survive. Whole industries form not around innovation but around arbitrage — exploiting incentives, avoiding penalties, managing cash flow through bureaucracy rather than through customers.
It creates a strange distortion:
The most valuable skill becomes knowing the rules, not creating value.
And when the rules grow thicker than the market signals, you incentivize a new type of entrepreneur — one who wins by mastering the maze rather than mastering the craft.
This is the quiet tragedy of the modern economy.
The reward structure favors compliance over competence.
Real entrepreneurship — the kind that builds durable goods, solves real problems, and leaves a mark — now fights upstream against a system that treats creation as a secondary activity and regulation as the main one.
