Editor’s note: Read episode two in the Respect for People series here.

In a previous column (“Why Innovate?

When I was 7 years old, I went into the woods behind my house, built a fire, then fried an egg over it in an old pie tin. When the egg was done, I ate it. I didn’t even like eggs, but because I had cooked it on my own, it was delicious.

The first message sent by Morse code’s dots and dashes across a long distance traveled from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore on Friday, May 24, 1844—175 years ago.

Many people are writing about innovation. Yet, the more I read, the more confusing the term becomes.

Many years ago, I worked for the president of a bank famous for aggressive bank acquisitions and rapid growth in the financial services space. The bank ultimately became the Bank of America, and the president became its CEO.

How do you know if your election vote is really counted? How do you know the person you’re chatting with online really is who they say they are? And how do you know if a product you purchase has really met quality standards?

During the last several centuries, the economy of the modern world emerged from a contract—unwritten, unspoken, almost unrecognized—between risk-takers who started businesses and the hirelings who did the work to ensure those businesses’ survival and profitability.

Lately, the term “innovator” conjures up the image of a young entrepreneur disrupting an industry with concepts like ridesharing, e-currency, or meal-kit delivery. But it doesn’t have to.

The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher” at the entrance to the New York subway at 57th and 8th were perhaps random but inevitable.