Filed under: Meaning
Stop. Stop what you’re doing, stop what you’re thinking, stop moving. Now, why are you doing it? Really WHY?
Okay breathe. What you’ve just experienced is a simulation of one of those moments where you ask yourself a question and receive a potentially life altering answer. I woke up Monday morning and just such a question hit me. It was more specific though.
“Why? Why do you want to run your own business?”
I realized that the only answers I had were answers that led to greater questions.
“Um, I want to financially independent.” Why? “Because, I want to have money.” Why?
“So I can I survive” is not an answer which satisfies the lofty conscious.
Someone told me if you own your own business you have to work 10 times harder than everyone else. So what is the point of it all?
I came up with more answers; none very satisfying. If I had more money I could give to any charity I want, I could buy anything I want, and I could go anywhere I want. Nope, wasn’t doing anything for me. It wasn’t enough. No answer was hitting that sweet truth spot.
Fighting off a minor panic I ran to the coffee shop and furiously stabbed at my keyboard with desperate fingertips. The owner approached me. “So, whats new?” he asked me with a grin.
Now here is a guy who quit his job to start his own coffee shop. Perfect guy to ask!
“Why did you start your own business as opposed to working for someone else?”
He told me a story of how someone on wall street, making 100,000 dollars a year, loses their job, and what do they do? Do they try and create something with all their money? No, they file for unemployment. Creating your own business gives you a kind of self reliance that you just can’t get anywhere else. It gives you the ability to say, no matter what happens to me, I’ll be able to create something, because that’s what I do.
And furthermore, when you are an employer, taking care of your employees is a great responsibility. Now your success or failure doesn’t just affect you, it affects many more people. With you in existence, other people’s lives are supported and enriched.
He told me a story of a business owner, 60 years old, his plant burned down and he collected a check for 30 million dollars. What did he do with that money? He rebuilt the plant and hired every body back. The media got a hold of the story and went crazy.
“Why didn’t you just take the money and live a simple life?”
“What for? So I can eat more and die tomorrow?”
For the owner, rebuilding the plant wasn’t something he did for himself, he did for all the people who worked there.
Something clicked in my head. I figured it out. Being a charitable person, and being an employer are both ways of living a life of responsibility towards others. When you link your fate with others, suddenly what you’re doing becomes about more than just helping yourself. You’re doing something that affects many others. Your life isn’t just about you anymore. It means something more. It has Meaning.
Responsibility over people = meaning.
I was thrilled about this revelation. But then the clouds started rolling in.
Wait a second, so what was I saying? That I should become an employer so I can make people rely on me? What is that? How is that helping them? Aren’t I just trapping them with the promise of money to fulfill my own pathological desire for power and influence? That’s exploitation! It’s unethical! It’s dooming people to a life of slavery!
I was lost.
I suspect this is where many people give up. Some give up by deciding that they don’t want to run a business, deciding that they’re inherently evil institutions.
Some give up by starting a business and forgetting about the ethical dilemmas, repeating over and over “It’s business. Business is business,” blindly exploiting their way towards profit.
But the whole point I started this blog was to assume that this dilemma is that this conflict between ethics and business is actually not a real one.
Visibly shaken, I walked up to the counter and told the owner my dilemma.
He looked at me and spoke seriously, “Look, not everyone wants this responsibility.”
He went on and talked about the many different aspirations people have in life, and then said something that cleared the fog away. “…there can only be one president.”
These words felt odd, but I could feel a truth revealing itself. No position I could think of held more responsibility than the presidency of the United States, and yet I didn’t want to be president. Nor did I feel threatened, or exploited by anyone who was president.
I had been lacking the right perspective all along. Not everyone wants what I want.
Maybe we all gravitate automatically to our own level of responsibility, or maybe it’s more fair to say, our own kind of responsibility. Some choose to focus their responsibility on their family, some their employees, some their pets, some their communities, some choose people who live around the world. Most choose some combination of these things, all in a different balance.
But what about those who wanted to have the responsibility of an entrepreneur but just weren’t there yet? (like myself)
“Look, it is a big risk to start your own business, not everyone wants to take that risk. But anyways, the most you can do is show people how you do your job, then one day if they decide to do it, they will have those skills to do that.”
But they’ll be the ones making that choice. Not you.
This is probably the keenest understanding I’ve had on the dilemma between running a business and being ethical. We want to create as much positive impact on the world, and lift up everyone we meet. We can do that with charity by giving money or volunteering, and we can do that by being employers who not only pay fairly, but also show their employees how it is they do business. In this way we create a kind of buoyancy to our lives, which lifts people up, without imposing our control upon them. They are free to make their own choices, and it would be wrong for us to try to control them.
But as in the spirit of this blog, it is not about what is right and wrong. It is about what is effective.
Those who are out to only make profit, have jipped themselves. A business is an opportunity to increase the meaning of your existence, so that the world is a better place with you in it, and therefore you are living for others outside of yourself. This is true meaning. And while profits alone can afford you many things, they often lead to isolation, greed, and misery. They miss out on the real wealth.
It’s something intrinsic, it’s why we start a business in the first place, it’s what we’ve been after this whole time.
And it’s something that can’t be lost in the fire.
- Seth
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