“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”
―
I’m trying to type this post with the puppy sat on my lap — and he’s nearly fully grown. He’s disgraced himself this morning by eating a loaf of bread. Still, it could have been worse.
In the last week, I’ve picked up, but not yet started reading again, the E-Myth series of books written by Michael E. Gerber. His book the E-Myth Revisited is still one of the most important books I’ve ever read but not for the fact that it goes into great detail about how to start and grow a business. No, his writing, influenced as it is by being a serious and ardent Gurdjieff student, is more metaphysical than corporate and, indeed, the letter to Sarah at the back of the book still remains one of those ah-hah moments which has stayed with me all these years.
You might be asking what’s that got to do with the rubric.
Simple.
Business is and has become too sophisticated for its own good and has lost touch with reality.
What reality?
The sort of reality that says profit — or at least the great gobs of profit that everyone seems to think is normal – is antithetical to living on a finite earth. Also, a business to my mind should be as focused if not more on our personal growth than it is making up the numbers, providing meaningless (or is that BS) jobs and all the other paraphernalia that everyone gets so worked up about.
For me at least, business is very simple: we provide something that people need and at the same time act as stewards of the world and all sentient life.
Now of course, if you’re ripping a hole in the middle of the ocean, polluting without a care in the world and getting your gaggle of slaves to build another pyramid then this sort of ethereal, Will-o’-the-wisp shit isn’t for you but you mark my words, namely, that which goeth up and up only leads to one thing: the early demise of all of us and all our non-human brothers and sisters.
The thing is, I’ve read a gazillion business books, worked in a plethora of companies and firms and it’s all the same. No one wants to admit that what they’re doing is only so that we can carry on the cultural charade that is called capitalism. As crass and as uneducated as that sounds, no one wants to break the sales = profit model and wonder what it might look like to live in the gift economy or find a completely different model to the corporate vehicle or even the partnership (s.1 Partnership Act 1890 — “Partnership is the relation which subsists between persons carrying on a business in common with a view of profit”). No, it’s too easy to keep peddling the old, out-of-date, killing-the-earth model and hope beyond hope that there will be a technological fix down the road. Not that I’ll be around to see the END GAME but if I was a betting man, I’d wager that we’ll all be blown off the earth, never to return again. That would, wouldn’t it, serve us right for being on the take all these years.
Pretty heavy stuff, right?
I don’t think so.
In fact, I think it high time we stopped living in corporate land and started to pay homage to and respect that which keeps us alive — i.e. Gaia.
What do you think?
Is the direction of travel — i.e. our demise — already baked in?
Take care.
Julian