The Happy Neuron
A Talk Between an African Entrepreneur and an African American Entrepreneur
I have spent hours discussing with one of my young brother’s ex-classmates a very motivated entrepreneur living in Washington who was passing by the market that is down the street from my mother’s home for making market research about a project he would want to start in our shared and beloved country, Senegal. We have spent hours discussing many things about finance, basic economics, and cognitive science and talked about people like Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, and tsun zu as well as unknown entrepreneurs from our country like his grandfather who from nothing and without graduating from universities succeeded at building economical empires that pushed our local economy a bit forward. During our discussion, he pointed out to me the happy neuron and the effect of this small win that he was trying to get by coming here and talking with sellers. I was aware of the effect of small wins because it’s the first and foremost goal of these words that I am trying to write and publish every day but I had never heard of the happy neuron which made me think of the Gandi neuron when I heard it.
What I have learned in this discussion is how the discourse of passionate entrepreneurs could be endless because he was just passing by to say hello but our discussion made him spend more than an hour talking with me. What’s make me happy is that he confessed to me that he was looking for a small win when he decided to spent time walking arround the market and talking to retailers but he ended having a great win which I also confess is my case even if I want that passionate African American entrepreneurs as well as any entrepreneur arround the world interested in the development of Africa to not only have passionate discussion which is a good start but to join force for building the foundation on which will lay the next connected African economy that will be made of giants actors exploiting the power of technology to solve African problem like health and the problem which he is trying to tackle that his about better food supply and prices what made him study the whole agricultural chain in order to better understand the specific interactions between actors of this chain even if as we have both agreed that there are some economical dynamics that never change in an industrial chain from country to country.
What I witnessed after this discussion is that it’s time for African entrepreneurs to join forces and bring even more innovative solutions based on tech or not such that African consumers could be able to have an easier life which will have the positive side effect of bringing ever more innovative solution because those whose life has been eased by the first wave of innovations will now have a free mind and time to spend on thinking about others problems that are above the first step of the Maslow pyramidal hierarchy of needs that we talked about during this insightful discussion between an African entrepreneur and an African American entrepreneur that I am narrating to you. What I wish with this story is for it to help you see how we all are the same kind of entrepreneurs seeking to bring solutions to the people and places we care about. We could have a local vision and focus on one territory but if we mind deeply and think about what we share wherever we are, however we look like and whatever we want we could see that it’s possible to not push boundaries but to break them, to see the world as a whole and to try to ship solutions that will not only impact Africa, America, Europa or Asia only but this same whole world that we all share which start to show us how it form a unique entity in which something happening one on edge of it could affect positively or negatively the other edge. I think it’s worth recalling that the theory of dynamical systems teaches how a small change in the initial conditions of a system could lead to a big change in its final state, then we should be always aware of changes happening worldwide and not tell ourselves that events that happen in America will never reach us here in Africa or vis versa. Like my brother’s ex-classmate, there are droplets of ocean water landing here on African coastal lands whose journey could be traced back to coastal parts of America passing by the coastal part of Europe due to the currents and winds of the Atlantic Ocean which used to be exploited for the commerce of goods and the dehumanizing commerce of slaves and but now we can use it along with the kilometers of fiber cable that we have deployed in it to build a better world and a better world requires the best of all continents and ever more freedom and liberty for people to follow the path they seek to follow.
Here is an insight from the discussion between an African entrepreneur and an African American entrepreneur but I could just say a discussion between two entrepreneurs. I narrated it in the hope that it serves someone else in the community of entrepreneurs that we are and entrepreneurs are always curious people willing to be part of any kind of discussion then here is one I tried to write for you to feel like if you were part of it and you were.
Thank you for reading
PS: Happy Independence Day to France, I may have had the same discussion with a European entrepreneur.
