Minding My Own Business

Employees like us have this eternally-burning desire to be in business. This we see as the window that will allow us to eventually be our own boss and finally earn income to as much as our perseverance and hard-work can bring us.

But for most, this aspiration remains and dies a dream. By just recognizing and assessing our chances against the known risks, backing out or never even bothering to start, is but a normal recourse. Filipinos, unlike the Chinese, have this pre-occupation with the safe side.

For good reason, I surmise. It’s not easy to simply forego assured income and throw away the comforts of employment. Not directly facing the vicissitudes of the market spares us the trouble of protecting our investments. We may not earn stratospheric incomes, but we still live simple, quiet and unharassed lives. To each his own drama, ika nga.

But I have long been wishing to get out of the mold. That’s why I’m now talking business with some very close friends. And as expected, we’re realizing it’s not for the fainthearted! Just at the planning stage, things could really get bloody difficult. For starters, we all cannot imagine gambling away our meager but sweat-stained savings!

I’m not quite sure if I have the acumen for business. I am convinced some people are born with it and I still have to check if I am in any way blessed with the requisite skills. Through all these time, I can only recall very few moments which can qualify as entrepreneurial ventures. And most of them happened when I was but a kid. I remember being an ambulant vendor of pineapples, pechay, eggplants and other garden produce. I may have earned a lot that time but I never really became passionate with making my own money.

But the biggest dampener must have been this incident which happened precisely on one of my birthdays:

The setting: high school in our hometown. Our teachers tried to train us to become adaptable to both home and farm work, so we exchanged places with our female classmates and had a home economics class. We were asked to prepare a vegetable dish and then sell it.

The cooking part was easy. It was more difficult selling the stuff to the town folks.

Pi-nak-beeeet!….. Pi-nak-beeeet! We shouted as our jolly group peddled around the town.

Midway, we passed by one man. The ever bubbly group-leader-me made his practiced pitch:

“Manong, bili na kayo ng pinakbet”, I coaxed him. “Siguradong-siguradong pampalinaw ng mata”.

After some more tries, he remained unperturbed. So we left him.

But after walking just a few paces away, he called us back! We ran sensing a sale.

But as we got near him, he grabbed me by the back of the neck with his left hand, then his right hand threw a quick upper cut. “Ayan, isang order”, he said.

I was bewildered. As he left, he threw a piercing stare.

There I realized what my fault was.

He was half-blind!

From then on, I never ever peddled anything again.