While I see nothing in Coke's advice that demonstrates understanding how things work in ways serfs are incapable of, that advice about starting your own business ain't bad, and it is under-utilized. Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for economics in 2006. He started some bank giving micro-credit loans to poverty stricken people in India I believe. It was something like that. He summarized his philosophy for doing so on the Charlie Rose show, saying "Don't wait for someone to give you a job, go make a job!". And yes, a lot of poverty-stricken Indians started business and boot-strapped themselves out of poverty with the loans his bank made.

But finding the opportunity is always a pain in the ass. At the last family funeral, I ran into a guy who turned out to be my mother's cousin on her mother's side. Years back, the guy was barely surviving and just looking in the newspaper for a job. He ended up with a company who audited utility bills. That's basically looking at company's utility bills and finding errors in them. You split the amount of money the error was worth with the company. The cousin just roamed around the distant region he lived in selling this service. Before too long he looked at the company and decided they had too much bureaucracy and overhead, so he could do it cheaper. The wife was livid, "you don't know how to do what they do!" He just said, "Nope, but I can figure it out." 25 years and 2 (expensive) divorces later, he's telling me about it in my grandparents' living room. Then he's telling me about the bay house he's thinking about buying as a 2nd home. As he's leaving, I notice his SUV is a Lexus.

Not all businesses require start-up capital. But, it's the imagining them that's the trick. And, it's probably a bad time to strike out on your own now, unless you can think of something you wanna do that does well in a recession. But, it ain't a bad time to start keeping your eyes open. If you ain't looking, you'll never find it.