I will also invite you to do your best and reverse many lifestyle-related diseases. You can get healthier with no pills involved.
You can find plenty of inner peace and joy in your life, business and relationships.
I have created Peace of Mind School to enable self-discovery journeys for everyone to lessen stress levels, so you can live and work in harmony with yourself and others.
You will start living a healthier life and achieve so much more in business or work.
My ultimate goal is to empower your entrepreneurship, business, body and mind.
Visit Peace of Mind School today and enroll into the course online. You can create your own ‘Enough Peace of Mind’ plan with our course today.
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Wishing you the very success. Happy to be able to help you be better off!
I grew up with a notion that in order to be successful you need growth. This growth covers your skills and experience, but also monetary remuneration and that comes from helping to grow businesses. After all, if you are employed or an entrepreneur, you are needed in the business if you contribute to its growth.
is there ever ‘enough’?
If I make a comparison with business lifecycle or even how a person progresses through his or her career, there are similarities. Frankly speaking, when we are young and inexperienced, and when our businesses are just startups, we do need to grow. However, these days this strategy of growth really never stops.
Feeling of ‘lack’
What it brings to all of us is a belief that we lack something. We always lack something, don’t we? We may lack money, or experience, or knowledge, or skills.
I remember spending countless hours after work studying more and more, learning new skills and so on. Yet when the crisis was evident, I realized, I should have been dancing too!
Businesses are considered as such as well – they always need to grow and some stability is regarded as first signs of decline and/or even worse than that.
This feeling of lack created stress for us personally and also for our businesses and even countries. We measure our success by our growing bank accounts, companies by growing net profits and countries cheer for their growing GDP. Yet all of that is just a ‘rat race’! When we achieve 1000 whatever currency it is in savings, we strive to get 5000 and so on. When our company achieves a million in net profit, we may start thinking about expanding and developing the business. It just never stops!
Scientists were studying how our salaries contribute to our happiness levels. In USA, for example, an average salary in 2018 was circa $44,000. Research has shown that when people surpass $75,000, their happiness level remains the same. In some cases it even declines after reaching new heights. It is of course should be taken in approximation as the cost of living varies considerably from the largest cities to some small towns. In New York City it may well be $100,000.
What it means is that when we reach certain levels of income, so we satisfy our basic needs in housing, food, medicine and clothing, the surplus does not contribute to our happiness much. So there is some point, after which our stress only grows and happiness not. This is what I can call a point of enough. I doubt that there is a formula to generalize and calculate this point. However if you are familiar with a concept of ‘breakeven point’ in business, this point of enough swiftly follows suit.
The point of ‘enough’
To calculate it for yourself, think about your basic needs, create your budget and get your own personal breakeven point. Think of your personal meaning in life and what’s important to you – add to your budget. This will more closely reflect the number you need to feel ‘it’s enough!’
For your business it can be calculated in a similar fashion – you have your budget, cashflow and profit and loss. You know how much your business needs to achieve in turnover and gross profit to then be able to pay salaries, bills and other commitments. As soon as you know this number, consider your business purpose: how does it serve others and what sort of mission it has. Do you need to add anything to your budget so your business fulfills its mission and is able to execute on its strategy and plan? If so, please add this to your number. This will constitute your business point of enough.
What it does for both you and your business is that you are not running constantly to achieve an ever elusive growth and figures that are 20% more or 50% more, simply because everyone is doing the same rat race.
Less stress, more joy!
It is a change from ‘stress guaranteed’ to a more comfortable and mindful living, both personally and when managing your business.
Personally, what it did for me is that I am no longer interested in simply helping a person to generate money via digital marketing. Economy of enough enables my own mindful and peaceful living. It allows me to be kind to myself in my thoughts and then actions. It allows me to be committed to my goals without harming others.
When creating a new business model you can adopt one to create an ethical business based on the economy of ‘enough’ . Consider stakeholders, their needs and calculate business breakeven / stakeholder breakeven points. This will allow you to analyse how feasible is your business. What’s more, you can determine a point when you won’t be a slave of running the business but instead start enjoying owning one.
I invite other entrepreneurs share your views on this concept and help me to further develop it.
Many entrepreneurs think about different M’s for their business – money, marketing, management and a model of their business. My view is that they miss one key M there – meaning.
Why are you in business?
Let’s take some quotes from the guy called Viktor Frankl, who is the world’s most famous writer about meaning with his “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Surely, he was referring to personal meaning, but that’s exactly how businesses are created – with one’s personal meaning. This meaning is an answer to the question ‘why are you doing this?’
Modern day entrepreneurs can definitely relate to Viktor’s understanding of the importance of human freedom: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in an any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”.
After all, by creating a business, you are going your own way.
He also said that this is how ‘we can turn life into an inner triumph’.
Entrepreneurship is hard
Yet we know it is hard, entrepreneurship is sweat and lots of tears, hard work and sometimes lack of sleep. Having a clear meaning of why you are doing it (read, your own meaning), helps with dealing with all these stress factors.
I personally love a quote by Spinoza in his ‘Ethics’: “Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam”. It can be translated as: “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it”.
He recommends to take on these bumps on your journey with a clear head, eyes wide open and understand what’s the problem. It is not about avoiding things or even positive psychology, it is about realism.
And one thing that can feed this realism in a good way is your meaning.
Meaning fuels you and your business
Personally, I would have given up my own startup when it was damn hard, but there was always this meaning that carried me through, it gave me additional strength and powers.
In a way, you connect your personal meaning to things that happen. Surely, it can be good and bad, so you either celebrate your success or learn from your mistakes. Yet you move on with enthusiasm and energy fueled by your meaning.
Have you experienced your own huge setbacks? Was it demotivating or was it easy for you to learn and move on?
Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
I think he meant that the feeling of being worthy of a suffering comes with realizing a very deep personal meaning and lessons learned.
So I invite you to contemplate your own personal meaning for your business and maybe even the whole business meaning there there could be. When you re-connect with your values and what’s important for you and your business, it becomes so much easier and somewhat happier to live!
And finally, a personal quote from a guy I met last year. When we spoke about his own meaning for the business, he said that ‘it is simply why I am getting out of my bed’. I want to love my mornings and I feel that knowing and living my own meaning is key to that.
