In 2008 I entered the University of Technology in Jamaica to study electrical engineering. That same year I began publishing online and operating my first businesses. I was young enough to believe the world was available for investigation and stubborn enough to keep going when the money disagreed. I had wires, resistors, notebooks, curiosity, and a dangerous habit of looking at a useful invention and imagining its benefits on the other side of the globe.

My education quickly escaped the engineering classroom. Every summer I travelled to America through the work-and-travel programme. The first summer I saw a lifeguard opening at approximately seventeen US dollars an hour, while many student jobs offered eight or nine. The difference meant real money for tuition, boarding and the rest of a university year. I wanted the lifeguard job. I had only one problem: I could not swim.

Yes, a Jamaican young man who lived on an island surrounded by the Caribbean Sea could not swim well enough to qualify as a lifeguard. How is that for the difference between a resource being present and a person having access to it? Water was everywhere in my national geography and nowhere in the training my body had received. I could admire beaches and rivers. I had not been given the leisure or the systematic opportunity to master the water.

I taught myself to swim in nine short weeks. I trained toward a gruelling examination: eighty laps in an Olympic-size pool, recovering a heavy log as though rescuing a person, diving for a weighted block, carrying it across the pool with my legs doing the work, and learning first aid, CPR and the responsibilities of a first responder. The written and physical standards demanded marks of at least ninety percent. I had gone looking for a higher-paying summer job and found a new human being in the water. A skill that had seemed completely outside my identity was suddenly mine.

For three summers Community Pool Service Inc. in the Washington, Virginia and Maryland area became one of my classrooms. I guarded swimmers by day and worked at a local McDonald’s by night. I watched families on vacation, studied American service operations and paid close attention to a society that had learned to turn everything, including attention, into a market. America was also showing me the reach of its media. A television programme could quietly teach a Jamaican household what a desirable house looked like. A magazine, brand or video could travel farther than its makers. If I wanted to contribute to the world’s future, I had better learn how the world learned what to think about its future.

Back at UTech, Farquharson Hall was my headquarters for whichever business experiment I had chosen. I bought a printer and ran a dorm-room printing service. Another year I cut hair. Another I repaired electronics, particularly laptop chargers crushed or shorted after students packed them into bags full of books. I learned to see the little physical cause behind a repeat business problem. I learned pricing, inventory, service, customer habits and the awkward truth that the profitable thing is often far less interesting than the important thing.

Robotics and renewable energy were the important things to me. I wanted solar equipment, wind turbines and intelligent machines to improve actual life. An island did not have a queue of wealthy customers waiting to buy a robot that could teach children several languages. The conventional business lesson was to pursue only what a revenue model could justify. I kept designing beyond that instruction. A civilization should ask what an invention can do for people before asking whether someone can make a profitable business by withholding it from them. I was learning that years before we gave the principle a name.