What does success mean to me?

 As a solopreneur, my definition of what means a successful business has evolved over time.  What do I really want to get out of this business?  Answer, it’s complicated. 

Certainly, money is nice. But I’m fortunate to not rely on the income from this business.  Not loosing money is success.  Making money is bonus for me.

Another metric is impact. I teach how to stop bullying using behavioral science. So – success is – how many people have learned these techniques. This knowledge can change the world. So – am I changing the world? Or just a small part of it?  I’ve certainly helped individuals, but I’ve also NOT had the global impact I want to make. So – not as successful as I'd like to be there – yet.

A third metric for me is – travel. Being a recognized expert that people want to pay to bring to an interesting place for a talk – letting me experience that place – is success for me. Being invited to speak in India or South Africa and having the expenses paid for so that I don’t lose money, success!  I’ll gladly comp my talk if the travel expenses are paid for to go someplace interesting.

Having a lifestyle that is balanced?  Priceless. Every time I decide I need to take a day off or that I need to do something like – work the polls for an election – and a I can because I work for myself – reminds me that – this was the right move for me. I have work life balance. That is success too. I feel extraordinarily bad for people who don’t have the flexibility to take time for themselves. This is the greatest gift that I’ve given myself. More than makes up for the lost income I could be making if I worked for someone else.

Success isn’t necessarily about money, though money is important. Success to me is about the life style I get and whether my social goals are met.

Why am I sharing this? Because to be a good leader means being clear about what your objectives are. If you don't know what it is your are trying to build, you can't get others to help you build it. Imagine if someone tried to build a building like the Empire State Building, without detailed blueprints. 

Figure out what your objectives are both, for your work and personally what you want to get out of the work. That clarify will help ensure that as you lead people to whatever the work goals are, you do so in a way that is fully holistically humanistic. 

And yes, that photo is of me in India on a business trip. I gave a key note at a Happy Workplace conclave. I made great friends and learned a lot at the same time. And yes, the Taj Mahal is worth seeing! 

If anyone wants to bring me to your country to give a talk, let me know. If I can be of any help with whatever work you have going on, let me know. Mostly, I measure success in work by how many people I help.  So let me help you. 

Visit my website for more information: https://humanistlearning.com/ 

 

Meaning & Purpose in Business

If you want to have more meaning and purpose in your business life, start by thinking about your values.

Ethics and values are critical to understanding meaning and purpose.  Your values help you figure out what it is that matters to you. When you know what matters to you, it becomes easier to make decisions in support of your values. This is true whether you are talking about your personal life or your professional life.

In the day to day hustle of just getting through the day, it is easy to lose sight of what you value. This is one of the reasons why people struggle with work life balance, relationships, and satisfaction and engagement at work.

At some point, most of us need jobs, mostly so that we can afford to have shelter, food and medical care. But what happens when the only jobs available cause harm to others or are exploitative?

I’ve known people who have left high paying jobs, because they didn’t want to be involved in making weapons. It just wasn’t worth the money to them anymore.  I’ve also known people who stayed at jobs that treated them badly because they needed the money.

Work is moral. Our choices, to either support or enable bad behavior or businesses that run counter to our values impacts the sort of world we live in.

The point of Humanistic Business Management isn’t just to encourage better treatment of the humans working for businesses. It’s also about what businesses do for business and in the course of conducting business.

Is the product or service net beneficial to humans and the world in which we live? Or is it harmful?  Does the company acquire the resources necessary to create the products and services in a comprehensively ethical way or not?

Think of humanistic business management as being concerned with three levels of business simultaneously. It is concerned with the problem being solve, how the problem is being solve and ultimately the impact this business has on all the people impacted by the business (workers, employers and clients).

Do you currently feel like your work has meaning and purpose? If not, what do you plan to do to change that?

To learn more consider taking: https://humanistlearning.com/workplacemeaningandpurpose/

Good news about happiness and purpose

Research shows that doing good deeds, makes us feel happy.

I am a Humanist educator. I teach people how and why to be moral and why being moral will help lead to happiness.  This is philosophy. Humanist philosophy.  But it turns out that this approach is backed up by – science.

YourMorals – is a empirically based blog about morality.  They publish and comment on research into morality. They recently published a wonderful article about every day moral life – see (http://www.yourmorals.org/blog/2014/09/some-good-news-about-everyday-moral-life/)

This article is about a study of 1,252 participants who were asked 5 times a day if they had experienced any moral or immoral acts and how they felt.

Their main findings?

Participants reported committing and receiving more moral than immoral acts but learned about twice as many immoral than moral acts. In other words, we definitely experience more good than bad, but we like to gossip about the bad.

They also found that most moral or immoral acts were about three dimensions: Honesty, Liberty/oppression, and Self Discipline.  The first two is how people interact with you – the third is how we ourselves decide to act.

Finally, it’s not surprising to find that “being treated morally increased one’s happiness and being treated immorally decreased it. What is more intriguing is that the greatest increase in a sense of purpose and meaning in life came after reports of having acted morally oneself.”

What can we take away from all this?  Well first, that I am right and you should read my books on Humanism.

2nd, that morality really is all about how we ourselves want to be treated.  And that the best way to ensure that others treat us well is to do and be good ourselves.

But most importantly, if you want to be happy, you have to have a purpose in life that involves being good and helping others.   Or as a Humanist would say – life a life of ethical fulfillment that aspires to the greater good of humanity!

Or to quote the article: “our moment-to-moment happiness depends on (how we are treated by) others, our larger sense of purpose in life is our own doing.” Be good my friends.

The meaning of life

To figure out the meaning of life, you first have to understand what life is.

Derek Sivers is a genius. I think so at least. He has a great article on the meaning of life over at: http://sivers.org/ml  He comes to the humanist conclusion that life doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning. You are free to project any meaning you want. In short, you are free to do with your life anything you want.

But it’s his analysis along the way that I think is so helpful.  He starts his article by asking – what is life?  And he tries out some answers.  Like life is time. Finite time, so perhaps you should strive to use it wisely. His advice on how to do this is to balance your future focused thinking with your present focused thinking.

• Life is also about choice. So choose wisely.  How, again, the answer is balance. Sometimes let your gut decide, sometimes stop at good enough, set ethical limits for yourself and work on what is important, not necessarily urgent.

• Life is about memories and reflection. If you don’t ever do anything, you won’t have anything worth remembering. On the other hand, reflection is important to. Once again, balance is key.

• Life is also about learning. We all learn throughout our lives. Be of the mindset that you can always learn more and always improve. 

My take away from his article is that while life has no intrinsic meaning, we still need a purpose in life. And if we are seeking to be self-fulfilled, and who isn’t, perhaps what we should seek is balance. Because that seems to be the key to everything.

Making wise choices about how to spend your life requires balance.