There is a particular intellectual vanity common among founders like me: we skip the transaction and go straight to the philosophy. You are selling something. That is the entire job description. Someone has a pain, you have a solution, money changes hands. Full stop.
But the mind drifts. You start interrogating the legitimacy of the pain itself. A competitor is figuring out how to make a lipstick's pigment more saturated, how to engineer the unboxing moment. You are busy asking whether anyone truly needs thirty lipsticks, whether the packaging constitutes environmental violence, whether consumer desire at this granularity is a symptom of late-capitalism's colonization of identity. They close the sale. You write a manifesto no one commissioned.
This is not humility. It is a disguised form of arrogance — the assumption that your philosophical altitude exempts you from the ground-level work of understanding what another human being will actually pay for. You have promoted yourself, unilaterally, from vendor to moral arbiter. The market did not approve the promotion.
Here is what I have had to learn to hold simultaneously: the upward pull is real. Individuals and institutions do grow by questioning the order of things, by asking whether the need they are serving is the need worth serving. That tension is not wrong. But survival precedes transcendence. The revenue that funds the questioning comes from the transaction you are currently too elevated to complete.
Study the pain. Solve the pain. Get paid. That income is the tuition for every larger question you want to ask next.