In the movie "Joy" the main character, Joy, is struggling to support herself and her family. She works at an airport and is not even making enough to pay for plumbing services. Joy had always invented small things ever since she was little. She was known for it in her family but no one ever really appreciated it. Joy's parents were divorced and she was also divorced herself. No one in her family was very successful and she saw herself following in that path as well. Her grandmother was very loving towards her and would always tell her she would be the change in their family. She told her she would be successful and be able to follow her dreams. Joy did not want to let her children or any of her family down, so she knew she needed to do something. When she was struggling to support her family, she had the idea of creating a new invention that might help her succeed. Entrepreneurship comes into play when Joy invents her own new mop that she believes will be successful enough for her to live off of it. As Joy enters the entrepreneurship world she begins to experience the trials that come with being an entrepreneur and all of the extra hardships that no one talks about. This was very interesting to learn about and to connect with what we are learning in class. When we see new inventions we assume someone thought of a new idea, brought it to life, sold it and made a living out of it. We never hear about the difficulties they had to face when trying to get their product on the market. It is definitely not as easy as it seems. We see in the movie how Joy goes from nothing, to thinking she is going to have everything, to realizing it isn't going to work, to then becoming successful because of her hard work and dedication. One of the most interesting things that I have learned in class that stuck out to me was that entrepreneurs never know what they are getting into. They never know what to expect. You won't always get what you are expecting. Not all inventions are going to succeed. One thing I think is super interesting about entrepreneurship is that the consumers do not care about the work put into creating a product. All they care about is the product itself. Towards the end of the movie, Trudy says "Business is unfair". That statement is very true and you see that so much throughout the film. Joy used her own mind to come up with the idea of the mop. She used her own hands and money to build the first actual version of her invention. She used her own house mortgage and some of her family's money to bring her product to the rest of the world. She used so much hard work and dedication just for it to not sell because one person messed up on the sale commercial. The commercial made the product Joy had invented look terrible, which made the viewers think of the product as useless. It had no value to them. This just shows how unfair business can be. It does not matter how many hours you put into an invention or a modification to an already existing invention. All that matters is the final product and how valuable that product is. The consumers play a huge role in entrepreneurs becoming successful even if they don't know it. The only way for an entrepreneur to be successful is for consumers to buy their product. To get consumers to pay for a product the entrepreneur has to make it look good and worth more than the amount of money they would have to pay for it. They have to give them selling points, tell them why they should buy it, tell them how much it would benefit them if they bought it etc. After watching the movie "Joy" I definitely understand how selling a product and making it look good can be very difficult and won't always go as planned. In the movie, when Joy was trying to sell her product on the commercial, she had to go on and on about how much her product had befitted her and why it would benefit the consumers. The more she talked, the more consumers called and placed orders. The more she spoke about the positives of the product, the higher the product was valued by the buyers. It is all about making the consumers value your product more than the money they have to pay for it. Another thing about the business world is that it is always changing. One second one thing will be popular and the next second the other thing will be popular. Entrepreneurs have to plan ahead and make guesses of what they think consumers will want to buy in the future. At the end of the film, after Joy had become successful, she was speaking with the man that helped her get to that point, and he talked to her about how "HSN" was the new big thing. "QVC" was the big thing when she was growing her business but it changed very quickly. That shows how fast the business world is changing. What was successfully selling products then may not be successfully selling products now. Another aspect of entrepreneurship and business that is very prominent in the movie is the competition that comes with being in business and entrepreneurship. In the movie her competition was coming from multiple different directions. The people she was working with to help make her molds turned their backs on her and stole her patents. She also had her own sister, working with her father, trying to create an idea better than hers. There are more difficulties and trials that come with being an entrepreneur than most might think. Although being in business or an entrepreneur may seem hard, if you put in the hard work and stay dedicated, like Joy did, you have the potential to be more successful than you could even imagine.
