[eganist]

I've found career advancement as well as business success to largely be directly correlated with soft skills.

I mention this because "conmen (i think they call them executives and MBAs)" is a pretty broad brush to paint with, and if I had to take a guess, I'd think there's some association between your disillusionment with engineering as a profession and a soft-skills delta that might help you otherwise advance in your field and navigate corporate culture -- or culture generally.

This is all relevant because you may find yourself having a harder time with customer acquisition while running your own business if you don't re-examine your current world view.

That's probably step 0, at least if I were to try and build a mental model from what you wrote here.

An excellent resource: https://www.manager-tools.com/all-podcasts?field_content_dom...