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- Whole Foods founder John Mackey: “It’s easy to be a critic. It’s hard to be an entrepreneur.”
Whole Foods founder John Mackey: “It’s easy to be a critic. It’s hard to be an entrepreneur.”
John is asked how he balanced his ideals of being an ethical vegan with building Whole Foods. He responds:
“It’s easy for critics to judge and say, ‘You’re selling out. You’re betraying your ideals.’ I’m plant-based and I hear it all the time from vegans: ‘You say you’re an ethical vegan and yet Whole Foods sold meat. So you’re just a hypocrite and a liar.’”
But John will say to these critics, “What exactly have you done? If you think a vegan store will work, do it.”
As John explains, only 0.5% of Americans are vegan and only 2% are vegetarian.
“You just don’t have a that big of a market… And you have to meet the market where you find it — not where you’d like it to be… Perfect is the enemy of good. If you just want to have your ideals, you can have them, but you may not have a business. You have to engage with the market. You can try to influence the market and educate the market. But at the end of the day, they vote every day with their pocketbooks exactly what they want. If you’re not prepared to serve what they want, then they’re going to find it somewhere else.”
He continues:
“I like to say we’re always pushing our ideals, but always listening to our customers. It’s like a dialogue you’re having or a dance — if you don’t dance with your partner, your partner is going to dance away from you.”
John reflects on this tendency that we all have to project our own failings onto other people and criticize them.
“It’s hard to be an entrepreneur. It’s hard to actually create anything — particularly anything that’s going to be successful and meet the test of time. But it’s very easy to find fault with what other people are doing.”