My dear apprentice,
When I told you of the young woman who bought three vials, I told it quickly. I gave you the shape of it, the coin, the misunderstanding, the way she vanished into the crowd before I could gather myself, and then I hurried on to the lesson, which was a tidy one, and which I still stand behind. But I have noticed since that I passed over the part that sits in me like a stone in a boot. I let her walk away believing something false, and I let her do it because I was glad.
I want to say that plainly, because a reflection is no place to dress a thing up. I was glad. By midday I had been refused by nearly everyone who stopped at my table, politely, kindly, with a laugh or a shrug, and the refusals had begun to feel less like events than like weather, something that simply fell on me all day. Then a stranger listened to every word I said, asked a thoughtful question, and paid without haggling. I cannot easily describe what that meant. It was not the coin, which was small. It was that for the space of a few breaths someone had said yes, and I had been hungrier for that word than I knew.
Hunger ruins hearing, apprentice. I have come to believe this is the quiet mechanism behind a great many failed ventures, more reliable than any bad formula. A founder who has gone long enough without a yes will take the first one that arrives and ask nothing of it, not where it came from, not what it was really agreeing to. I did not lie to her. I want that understood, if only for my own sake. I said nothing untrue. But I stood there while she told me, in a single offhand sentence, what she believed she was buying, and I let the sentence pass because correcting it would have cost me the only sale of the day.
I told myself afterward that this was mercy. She was to be married within the month, to a man she had met twice, and I thought, what harm in letting her carry a little hope into the week? Perhaps there was something in that. I am not certain it was entirely false. But mercy does not usually arrive so conveniently aligned with my own interest, and I have learned to distrust any kindness that happens to pay.
Here is what I have come to understand about that sentence, and it is the part I most want you to take from tonight. She had handed me something far more valuable than her coin. In a single breath she had told me what the market believed my elixir was. Not what I knew it to be, after years of work. What a stranger in a crowded square, hearing a rumor and a pitch, had decided it must be for. She believed it could settle the largest question in her life. That is data of the rarest kind, apprentice, the kind you cannot buy and can almost never ask for directly, because people so seldom say aloud what they hope a thing will do for them. She said it freely, unprompted, to my face. And I took the coin and threw the sentence away.
It would have taken nothing to follow it. I might have asked her what she hoped to see. I might have asked why a person at the edge of a decision reaches for something like this, and what else she had tried, and what she had been told by the people who loved her. Any one of those questions would have taught me more about who the elixir was for than a month of rehearsing my pitch. Instead I counted the vials, noted the three, and felt the morning turn in my favor, when all that had turned was a stranger’s misunderstanding.
There is a second coin from that same day that I have also been turning over. Osric bought a vial at dusk, and I knew then, as I know now, that he bought it for love, the way a friend buys the last loaf from a baker at the end of a long and discouraging day. I do not regret taking his kindness. I would not have wanted to refuse it. But I want you to see how strange that day’s ledger really was. Of the four vials I sold that day, three went to a woman who misunderstood the product and one went to a friend who bought out of loyalty, and for neither of them was it need. I had two yeses in a day full of noes, and neither one came from the place I most needed a yes to come from. And still, for weeks, I counted them as encouragement. That, I think, is the cru
elest thing the market can do to a hopeful person. It need not lie to you. It only has to be pleasant by accident.
I have wondered more than once what became of those three vials. I never learned. I have no name for her, and I did not see her again in the square, and I have no way now to ask. Sometimes I imagine she drank one the night before her wedding, alone, in the quiet, willing to sit with whatever rose in her. And I know what the elixir would and would not have done. It would not have told her whether she had chosen rightly. It cannot do that, and it never could. It takes what a person has already seen with their own eyes, a hundred times, without letting the seeing become anything, and it burns the fog off it. So whatever she saw that evening, if she drank it at all, was not about the man she was marrying. It was something she had already been looking at for years without knowing she was looking.
I do not know what that something was. That is the part I cannot put down. It is possible that an hour of clarity, taken for the wrong reason, showed a stranger a thing she was meant to build, and that she woke the next morning with an opportunity in her hands and no one to tell her what it was or where to carry it. It is also possible she never drank it at all, and the three vials sit in a drawer in some house I will never see, true and gold and silent, waiting on a question they were never made to answer. Either way, I took her coin without learning her name, and I have thought of that more than I have thought of many of my larger mistakes.
I do not offer you a method for this tonight. I do not think there is a clean one. I am not telling you to refuse every sale that arrives for the wrong reason, or to interrogate every kindness a friend extends you. That would be its own kind of foolishness, and a lonely one. I only want you to know that a yes is not an answer until you know what it was a yes to. Until then it is only a sound, a warm and welcome one, and the warmth of it is exactly what makes it so easy to mistake for the thing you were looking for. The founders I have watched recover fastest were not the ones who stopped trusting yes. They were the ones who learned to follow it, gently, one question further than was comfortable, and to write down what came back before the warmth of the moment had a chance to rewrite it.
There is a harder question waiting for us on the road ahead, one I did not yet know how to ask the evening I stood behind that table, and it will take us somewhere I did not expect to go. But I think it will mean more to you if we first sit a little longer with this smaller one, the one I should have asked her, and did not.
So I will leave you with this, to sit with in whatever private ledger you keep.
The last time someone said yes to what you are building, did you stop to learn what they believed they were saying yes to?
Until the next batch, Eldric
Eldric & The Entrepreneurial Elixirs is published by ProfSpirit LLC.