The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism

by John Mackey

Soon, I began to realize that we were more than just a natural foods store; we were a platform for an entire ecosystem of new products and businesses.

Capitalism, I began to understand, was not so much a top-down imposed system but, rather, an evolutionary result of letting people choose their own economic paths. And if economic freedom was the foundation of capitalism, then both cooperation and competition seemed to be the essential engines that made it run.

As much as I might want to build cooperative relationships with all my partners, it wasn’t always possible to do successfully. Human beings are also wired to compete. We envy those we perceive as having more success, attractiveness, wealth, fame, power, and so on, and we have a tendency to insist on the fundamental rightness of our own versions of reality even when it comes at great personal cost.