Imagine for a moment you are a child alone in a room filled with strangers. What would be your first thought? You may be apprehensive, worried about what others may think about you. Another child approaches and says to you, ‘won’t you come and play with me?’ You have been introduced to the world of selflessness.

Selflessness: an impossible dream

This example act of the child approaching the other and asking them to play is used here to serve as a reminder. Do something absolutely shocking for someone this week just because you want to help them out. I think we could start an epidemic of massive proportions if we dedicated one act of selflessness to someone this week. The self, or who we are, can at times become more real to us than the needs of others. We live with ourselves, so how can you escape you and who you are? You can’t. It’s like being locked in a room full of mirrors.

Moving beyond yourself

The self is an illusion. We have personalities, traits, likes, dislikes and genes but the image we build of ourselves is largely a sleight of hand trick that is bred into us at some point. When you look into a mirror what is it you see? Your face staring back at you? Or your reflection? It’s an image. Most of the time who you think you are is an image of what you think you should be. Who you are is simple. You are you. You have gifts, talents, creative abilities. You can put those things to use to help others. When you begin to do this, even in the smallest way (without becoming a total sellout fanboy), you open up a new realm of life that’s infinitely more pleasurable.

The child who asked to come and play is you and me. Why don’t you spend some time this week doing one thing for someone where you lose just a bit of your self. See how it feels to do something for another person. How many times have you thought of doing something for someone only to excuse yourself through pointless reasoning. Listen to your heart. Do it today. Don’t wait. Life is over before the wind changes anyway so just go for it.

This is part of an on-going conversation I am having about the heart.

Can you imagine getting up every morning and working until you went to bed? What if you made a choice to dedicate your life to a certain cause and all you got in return was criticism and persecution? Well that’s what my wife puts up with everyday. She is a stay at home mother. For this reason, she is my hero. Why?

My wife the hero

I really admire people who stick to their values. My wife is one person who always stands up for what she believes and never backs down. If the world had more people in it who made an attempt to live from their values, in this way, I think we would be much better off as a society. There is another reason why my wife is my hero. She has to put up with me!

Hero’s do what it takes even when nobody else will

By definition a hero is someone who does what they know they have to do when nobody else stands up to do it. There is a person in my life who had a major tragedy when her “husband” decided that life would be better, living with his parents in another country, instead of being around for his very young son. So who stood up to help? My wife. For the past two years she has been helping out to get this person back on her feet by taking her kid three days a week so she can work to support herself. This is what I admire the most about her. She is always there to help in a time of need.

The most important thing about a hero

A hero stands up without thinking about the cost to themselves. They are humble. Not false humility where people lower themselves to make themselves seen. I mean they just get on with it. No mess and no fuss. That’s what a real hero is. These are the people you can’t see. The fractured lines in between the elements of reality we all take for granted.

Life is filled with people who are overly selfish. People who step over each other to get ahead and at the expense of others hurt people recklessly and thoughtlessly. Every now and again somebody steps up to make a difference. The thing is when you ask them why they will always answer, ‘Because it has to be done.’ You may not be a hero but I guarantee you will know someone who is. If you know a person like that remember them. Do something for them without them knowing it. I guarantee you it will give you joy beyond measure.

I am an avid stumbler. I love it. I was pressing the stumble button the other day when I came across a page on the abolition of work. It’s a very insightful post but that’s not why I am mentioning it. It got me thinking. Why do we work and what do we want to work for?

Why do we work?

In a blog post I have a limited amount of space to answer a question of this magnitude. Some do it for joy, they love what they do but I would think that most of us do it to stay alive. Simple answer. The question is: what attracted us to the line of work we are currently undertaking? For me, I liked the idea of teaching and doing research. My kind of research is pragmatic so I am aiming to improve something and study how it’s done. That said, I only really do that 10% of the time I am at work. 90% of the time I am doing admin or some other requirement of my job. So why do I work?

I do it because I have to, not necessarily because I want to. I was reading this morning that we were made to enjoy our life. There are two groups of people I think. Those that do something they enjoy and make it and those the don’t. Those that end up living their live and enjoying it are far and few between. I rarely meet individuals who have taken steps towards their dreams. Perhaps it’s the overwhelming security complex we have as people I can’t say for sure.

I remember a while ago I was blessed to spend time with a life coach who showed me something about myself I didn’t realise. Every time we talked about something I was dreaming about or something I really wanted to do I had automatically created the excuse for why it wasn’t possible. I was particularly afraid of promoting myself. She taught me to visualise a stinky Mullet every time I felt that fear. After a few times of doing it I no longer felt that fear. I suspect the most successful of us don’t stop to anticipate what might go wrong for too long. If they do I can’t say that it bothers them all that much.

I think we work out of necessity but when you get right down to it… I believe we work because we have to. Obviously when you see people enjoying their work and succeeding you have to wonder… what is it that they do that’s different to me? I have found this one thing. They pursue their goals relentlessly as though they already had it. I will leave you with that thought.

What do we work for?

Why we work is really a no brainer. What we work for is definitely a more complex question. I believe it’s a question of how we identify ourselves. We usually make the mistake of attaching our ’self’ or ‘identity’ to our work and make that apart of us. Who told you had to work the same job your whole life? You are not your job (thanks Fight Club). What you do is not you. You are you. You with all your personality traits, habits and problems that’s you. What you do… you do out of necessity because you have to do to survive in this culture. If you are a go getter you will reach your goals and do something different. But guess what you will still be you and not what you do. Try this: next time someone asks you what you do for a living say, ‘Well I work for such and such doing this or that.’ Don’t say, I’m a lawyer because you’re not a lawyer that’s what you do… that’s behaviour… it’s not you.

I believe the majority of us work because of our identity. We think or have been brainwashed more likely, into thinking that work is us. You are a human being. You can’t be anymore than that. You have a uniqueness, talents, gifts which you need to offer to the world (I am saying this to me big time). But, you are not the job you have. You are not what you drive where you live or what you eat. You are you. That’s it, baby.

As you go about your weekend why not relax in the knowledge that you don’t have to be anything. Work is what you do for money. I am hoping that when I can come up with something of more value to offer instead of a 9-5 then I won’t have to work as much. I am certainly going to have to stretch myself to get a house. As I heard someone say once: You don’t work for money you have something of value you offer to someone who exploits it so they can make more than you. Put another way, you have been hired because of your value to solve a problem. That doesn’t mean you will do it forever. One day you may come up with another way to add value and people will exchange more money for that. It ain’t the money it’s the value you create.

So we work out of necessity (most of us) and we work for our identity. I wonder if you accepted a different identity if your behaviour would change? What if you began seeing yourself living a dream? How would that impact your life?

This part two of an on-going series of articles about bringing the heart back to business.  Click here to read part one.

A few weeks ago my wife and I acquired a couple of watches from my father that he had been given for free. Our first thought was let’s take them to the local pawn shop to see if we can get some money back for them. I know… what can I say it’s the entrepreneur in me. When we got there we saw what I think is a blight on pawn shops. A lady who was white, shaking and clearly in need of a fix was standing at the counter with a pile of DVD’s. I looked around and it occurred to me… what kind of business profits off the failure of society more so than the pawn shop? That aside, I noticed something else. And yes, considering I am on dreams, the heart and so on at the moment (for some reason) I noticed that I was standing in the house of broken dreams.

When you travel into a store like the one I went to you notice the guitars, the drum kits, the stereo systems and the like on display. How did they get there? Drug users, failed musicians, trades people who can’t get work and so on put them there. Where do the desperate, the failures and the like go when there is nowhere else to go?

The pawn shop is a business that makes it’s profit on broken dreams

The world is a harsh place. For every success there are a hundred failures. If you don’t believe me take a trip to any major city and have a look at a pawn shop. It’s the place where the end of line has been reached for a lot of people. People who had dreams of their own, desires but somehow missed out. These are the ones that didn’t make it. When I went to the store it really struck me how heart wrenching it is when you have had a dream in your grasp and it was ripped out of your hands. You do get desperate. You do begin to think… what did I do to deserve this? The answer to that is beyond this post… sure I could reason it out… blame people, God, whoever. But at the end of the day the broken dream is still there isn’t it?

Should we blame the pawn shops for cashing in on broken dreams?

The question perhaps should be framed this way: Why do pawn shops exist? They exist because there is a demand for them. This stems from the need for people to sell something or offload something in exchange for something else. Eventually as a meditated on the situation I came to the point in my thinking where I reached a paradox. Here we have a business that takes away things in exchange for money because people have a need. The businesses like Cash Converters exist because someone is there to feed them. The need is the problem not the shop. Take away the need and you take away the shop. This raises another question:

Why are there so many broken dreams?

What happens to a life when it falls short of it’s potential? I don’t really know. I can say that I was reminded of it at Cash Converters the other day when I saw all of the lost hope in the eyes of the people there. The reality is why does a business decide to profit of broken dreams. I am not one of those people who believe that businesses can sell whatever they like. Greed is not good.

Businesses need to bring the heart back

Making money can be done in a way that society is improved and not devalued. I think establishments like Cash Converters elevate the status of the dollar above human worth. As Gordon Gecko says: ‘Greed is good’. A business that profits off broken dreams and people who do the same have lost their heart. Business can be conducted in a way that it profits both the owners and the customers without destroying lives. So, I hear you say: What about some examples?

Examples of businesses with heart

The first place that comes to mind for me, is Gloria Jeans coffee. On this page you can read about the things they are doing to build a better future in various communities. W.I.S.E is another example of what I am talking about and you can watch this video below to explain it better than I can:

This is social entrepreneurship. A more recent famous example can be found in Richard Branson’s decision to invest future profits in reducing global warming:

What about another example? Imagine taking over a company at a young age and running yourself into the ground with stress? That’s exactly what Ricardo Semler did. To combat that he set out to build a democratic workplace where people got to vote for their managers, negotiate their pay scales, choose their work hours and so on. If you are ever in the mood I would recommend reading the book called Maverick or the Seven Day Weekend. Recently the 7:30 report ran this story on him:

I could go on for hours citing examples of people who have changed their businesses by putting the heart first. For me, a business should be about building dreams not destroying them. It should be about letting those who make it help build something for those who can’t. It’s a two way street that goes beyond personal wealth into the area of social wealth where we build this world as well as success. I don’t think there can be anything wrong with that?

This post is the first in a number of posts on bringing the heart back to business. It’s the theme of the month at the moment!

Imagine you have just reached your dream. What would that feel like? Think for a moment what is it you really dream about? Say it was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. If that was your burning desire what on earth would stop you from doing it? Money? Time? What about if you had two legs amputated below the knee? Warren Macdonald suffered a horrible fate of losing both legs below the knee after being crushed by a rock on a trek in Hinchinbrook Island, Australia. Yet he managed to reach his goal and climb Mount Kilimanjaro. So what’s your impossible dream?

Dreams are meant to be impossible

The fact is when we were formed dreams were formed in us. I don’t care what your friends told you or what you think… you have some deep down burning desire in you that wants to form itself into an actual reality. As I have said before there are two kinds of reality that we need to be concerned with.  That which is active and that which is passive.  The passive kind are the dreams we have and the things we entertain in our heart.    These things are what I am talking about today.  What is it that you deeply dream about?   What are the things you have in your heart to do?  Write them down.

The main goal of having a dream

The major thing you need to do when you have a dream is to think about it.  Don’t shuffle it under the carpet and pretend like it’s not there.  Your dream is that thing that keeps you up at night, that niggle in the back of your mind.  It’s the thing you would do if you could do anything.  It’s meant to be impossible because it will take miracles, action and much faith to get the thing off the ground.  If it didn’t why would you dream about it?  If it was possible there would be no need to dream about it.  You would just do it.

So what can I do about my dream?

The thing I have maintained having reached a dream or two in my life (getting a post graduate degree and a PhD… almost there) I can say that there are several things you need to know.  The most important for this post is this: hold on to it.  Don’t let it go.   There are many things I want to achieve before I go home but that doesn’t mean I am a failure.  The only failures I have met are people who fail to try.  So what’s your dream?  The first and most important thing you need to do is work that out and hold on to it no matter what.   Never give up.

I was reading this via What would you do and began to wonder what would I do if I had terminal cancer.  What I accept it and prepare for my death or would I fight.  What surprised me about this survey was the amount of people who opted out of knowing right away.  A very close friend of mine has bowel cancer at the moment and he is going in for surgery this weekend.   So my short sharp question to you is this:  what is your life worth to you?

A while ago I was involved in a small business that made software.  Each year we would have to fork over a massive amount of money in licensing arrangements to Microsoft in order to keep being able to legally make software.   After doing this out of my own pocket for several years I reached a point where it became obvious to me that if I spent in anymore money on making software that wasn’t paying for itself yet, then I would probably have to declare bankruptcy.  I was struck with a dilemma.  Do I continue in business and dig myself into even more debt or do I put my own financial considerations first?  The dilemma was a moral one.

I spent two months seriously thinking about what to do.  I tried everything I could think of to make the product sell more but people just weren’t buying it.  One sleepless night after the other I kept wrestling this through… what do I do?  Eventually as I thought painfully through my options I was left with an ultimatum by my business partner at the time.  Pay up your part of the share or get out.   Considering I was facing personal bankruptcy I chose the latter and not the former.  One of the statements made to me by my partner at the time was, ‘we always be friends but this is about business.’   I think I would have almost preferred bankruptcy though I am very thankful that it didn’t happen.   What I want to think about in this post, through these personal events, is why do we seperate personal values from business?

The split between emotion and greed

When you get right down to the meaning of the statement, ‘it’s not business it’s personal,’ you come to a contradiction in terms.  Business is built on the backbone of personal things.  Initially, it starts with a personal desire.  You then gain support through people who pay for (support) your goods or services.  You are then a success.  Simple isn’t it?  However, notice the most famous examples in recent times in entrepreneurship.  Richard Branson is all heart to the audience and he uses this to great effect.  Car companies are now becoming green and so on.  This is not a mere marketing ploy these things are personal.  I think the majority of business first thinking is flawed because it is simply a neat way to box things into a corner where the emotions of life are cut off.  That, last time I checked, is borderline personality disorder.   I am one of those people who believes that you cannot take your heart out of what you do.

If you split business and emotion you are seriously misguided in your understanding of how human beings operate.  Why?  If you cannot personally connect with people you will not be very popular in the coming ten years.  What differentiates loyalty in this current generations of web nomads is not the desire for personal success and wealth but what makes them feel satisfied.   I was sitting in my office the other day listening to some people bickering (as usual) about their grades.  One of them said that they couldn’t understand what the problem was with their assignment they had met the criteria and done this and that.  Then the conversation turned ugly.  One of them called the lecturer a nasty name and a fellow student another!  I was in my office, admittedly surprised and at somewhat amused by it.    It occured to me however that the calling of the name was an outpouring of emotion. He was hurt by the grade he had received.  I should have walked out of the office and said, ‘it’s not business it’s personal.’  Would he have felt justified by that do you think?  No.  He FELT wronged.

My story

While I felt terribly wronged by what happened to me in business, it is my fault.  Business operates under certain rules, obligations and concepts that are accepted practices.  That said, when the ultimatum was given to me I felt betrayed.  I had spent four years designing the product, marketing it (including once almost scoring a distribution deal), getting free offline media exposure at least three times.   All of which was a terribly hard for me to do because I am not really inclined to attention (moderate introvert on the Myer-Briggs typology).  I went through it though in the hope that my efforts would pay off.  They did, I scored a position in the local paper, Marie-Claire magazine and in various places online.   I spent hours asking people about the design of the product and brainstorming ideas with my partner.  Ultimately though all of that work, effort and planning came to nothing.  Why?  People didn’t want to buy it.

As the months wore on to years I became more and more in debt to this program that people didn’t want to buy.  Sure, I could have done more and I have learned a lot more about marketing since then.   I will say this though, money gets money and attention gets attention.  There is a common, all to misunderstood, idea that all you have to do to have success is think the right way or do this or do that to get in.  Let me warn you as a twice failed business person: don’t believe the hype.  I had more success with Guerrilla Marketing methods than with many of the so-called new ideas in the early part of this century.  Concepts like ‘viral marketing’ really only work for people who have a product people want to talk about.  It only works when you have access to the ’sneezers’ and they are willing to endorse what you have done.  I am sorry but most of what you read online about marketing a business doesn’t apply if you have a product that will never get the level of saturation required.  Read the Guerilla Marketing stuff, it’s a lot more helpful than the crap being dished out by popular marketing myth makers of the day.

When I was told cough up or get out I could see this was a business decision.   The line it’s not personal it’s business was thrown at me and since then I have reflected on the dichotomy it causes in people.  It’s like when people try to strip the emotion out of religious debates.  You just don’t get it.  Faith and personal beliefs are felt.  It’s like saying to a leper, ‘Hey put aside your leprosy and look at it objectively.’ Tell me how to remove my emotions.  Tell me how not to fell the sting of failure.   Business is personal.  In my situation though there really wasn’t much that could be done.  I had borrowed to capacity and I had to leave.  There was no choice for me.  I could have sought venture capital but I had lost faith in the product and in my partner.   Especially when I had seeded in a great deal of my own money to begin with.

The problem with creating silly paradigms

To say it’s not personal it’s business, means that you have no heart.   I am the first to admit business decisions are often the hardest to make and they do involve people.  But there is a false paradigm that comes with business that I want to address in this post.  You can’t separate your heart from what you do.  If you do have that ability then you must be a borderline sociopath.  I am not talking about receiving constructive criticism because that only improves what you do.  There is no better way to test your ideas than to show them to your enemy.  The devil’s advocate is a strong ally in business.  I am saying that business decisions often involved choosing money over people matters.  Business is often portrayed as being all about the dollar at the expense of people.  What then is social entrepreneurship?   Money and wealth are good things.    Disaster couldn’t be avoided in my situation because it was too late for me.  I had to make a choice.  I didn’t want to get divorced so I picked what I picked and I am content with that decision.   In the time since leaving the business I have reflected on that, the choice of words, and realised that this is a big problem.  We really need to bring some heart back to business.  The two are not mutually exclusive.  They are just “not talking” at the moment!

When we create ideas to believe in our subconscious mind supports us 100% of the way but our heart (or inward person) will give us tell tale signs that we have made the wrong choice.   An idea the world and especially the university system believe in is the separation of emotion and mind.  This is a huge mistake.  We have educated the mind but altogether pushed aside the role emotions play in such things.  What a tragic mistake.  By doing this we have taken the heart and soul out of business in favour of decisions that are in essence evil.  We have let greed dominate our thinking instead of making responsible moral choices.   If you ever get the chance to see a movie called the Parable of the Sadhu you really should watch it.  It explains the story of a man who was trekking through the Himalayas with a colleague.  Along his path he met a Sadhu from the local village.  She had wondered onto the mountain become dehydrated and lost.   The mountaineer made the choice to leave the Sadhu with another group and move forward to the summit.  After returning to America the events troubled him and made him think he made the wrong choice in choosing his own objectives over the need presented to him as the Sadhu.   What I learned from watching it was that people often say they would do the right thing but often make the business choice first.

The road forward

It’s very easy to sit here in my little rental listening to the wind blowing through the besser brick structure of my run down house and say these things.  I mean why do I really care?  I care because I see, day after day, shallow people who have plans for success coming into my courses and leaving again.   Things aren’t getting better. I have been stepped on, stabbed in the back and for what?  For a few thousand dollars?  I mean c’mon.  The road forward is for us who desire to be leaders in the entrepreneurial sphere to begin to bring back discussions on ethics and the role of values in business decisions.  Especially in the technical sector where all we do is get larger, wider and less coherent.   In particular, we need to make a place for emotions and understand the role they play in decision making.  You can’t turn them off.  You can’t say, ‘well I will put these aside for now.’  Again, if you can do that they you are sociopath and you need treatment.   The road forward in business is to learn from our past ethics stuff ups and begin to make better decisions that are informed about emotions and their role in the workplace.   Even the stuff I had to read for my research on emotional engagement is about making people becoming emotionally hooked into their work so they will become more productive!  That’s brainwashing!

So what have I learned from my failure?  Lots of things.  Two major things… how to market something successfully and how not to.  More than that I have learned that business is good and I love it but it has no heart at the moment.  I blame myself for failing in business and I do not point the finger at my partner.  He did what he had to do.  I have overcome my feelings of hurt and betrayal which really were uncalled for.   I have learned this: it’s not ‘business’ it’s ‘personal’.  The heart and the mind cannot be separated to suit what we think business should be.   Every time I read it’s not personal, it’s business.  I think of how shallow people like that are.  How selfish they are and how they really don’t know how human beings work.  These are just images we have floating around in our heads.  Who said business had to be tough? Donald Trump? That’s just the way HE chooses to do it.   You may think, ‘well he gets results.’  So what?  Where’s the heart?  I know people who have spent their lives putting on the ‘tough guy’ image and they are alone, miserable and indifferent.  Is that what you think success is?  Just having money?  You are much poorer than you realise if you think that.

In closing I would like to say that I consider myself as an entrepreneur.  Even though I am employed as a academic I am still at heart and will always be an entrepreneur.  I just so happen to be one who leans to the right side of the brain.  I am emotional you might say.  That said, I am not a basket case neither am I suicidal.  I recognise the place and needs people have and choose to put them first where I can, instead of chasing the almighty dollar.  I just wish I could find people who were like me so they world could become a better place.

Technorati Tags: small business, business, heart, subconscious mind