Whole Foods founder John Mackey: “It’s easy to be a critic. It’s hard to be an entrepreneur.”

It's easy for critics to judge and say you're selling out, you're betraying your ideals. As I'm plant based, 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 liar or you're not even ethical vegan. I don't believe it, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, what exactly have you done? If you think a vegan store will work, do it. Don't just criticize other people if you think you can make that a viable business. The problem in that instance is that about half of 1% of Americans are vegan and 2% are vegetarian. So you just don't have a big for that big of a market. And another cliche which is true is you kind of have to meet the market where you find it, not where you'd like it to be. The perfect is the enemy of the good. If you just want to have your ideals, you can have them, but you may not have a business. So you have to engage with the market. You can try to influence the market, you can try to 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 them, then they're going to go find it somewhere else and you and your business may end up failing. I always 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. And if you don't dance with your partner, you're your partner is going to dance away from you. You have to meet them where you find them. But I also think there's a tendency for all of us, including myself, to project our own, our own failings out onto other people and criticize them. Then it's like you're not doing what I think you should do. Of course I'm not doing anything. It's easy to be a critic. It's actually hard to be an entrepreneur. It's hard to actually create anything. It's really hard, 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. And you know, I've learned the hard way. For example, I just don't read comments anymore. All this hate's gonna come my way. Hate. They hate Whole Foods. It's gone down since Amazon bought it. I hate John Mack. He's a hypocrite. Blah, blah, blah, blah. The comments just allow people to vent all this negativity. And so I've learned just better to just to let the stuff go.