When it was young it had the opportunity to flourish. To blossom. To create. To Inspire. But the moment it turned five years of age, its owners rushed towards its Wiggles and Ninja-turtled themed office and handed it a piece of paper, asking 'What service or function do you want to provide to resource-holders in return for financial compensation?' Maybe it wasn't exactly that; it probably was phrased 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' It didn't know.
At that time, this business that I wanted to start wasn't much of a business. To the investors, it was actually a bit of a flop. I tried to explain to them that what I was starting wasn't about the returns or profit column on whatever QuickBooks account they may have had open at the time, rather that I started this because of something thing called ideology. It wasn't even supposed to be a business. It was more of an honest appreciation of the world. But that kind of thinking doesn't stand in modern society. So I tried to convince them of the merits of my efforts. I said words like 'principles', 'virtues', 'creativity', 'exploration', 'character'. I tried to explain to them how this business would help us conquer abstract ideals such as 'the inquisition into the nature of a human psyche divorced from societal norms' or 'the freedom of possibility latent within the human spirit' or '[insert deep, meaningful, string of words of what we should do with our lives here]'. Sure, my business couldn't do very much when it first started - smearing paint in a motley blotch of different colours all over the kitchen table, or putting every goddamned thing it could find in its mouth is hardly suggestive of conventional excellence - but at the time, it didn't matter because this business was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
But unfortunately in the world that I come from - that is, the world of letter grades, career progression and progressive taxation - that sort of whacko ideology stuff just doesn't fly. The only principles the investors cared about was that of competition and accumulation. Creativity meant achieving in the top 5% of all English students when it came down to end of year performance reviews. Character meant following Best Practice Policies consistent with the rest of the competition - since studying two hours a day and keeping up with extracurricular involvements, music, a bit of exercise, and holding some leadership position will set your product apart from others, so that when potential consumers scan your business's history, they'll be more likely to choose yours over a competitor's.
This is the kind of stuff that was important to those who invested in my business. Competition. Achievement. Performance Reviews. I still wanted to keep my business aligned with my principles, but have you ever met someone who knows how to 'run the show'? They know how to convince you. So I went and talked to these people who held all the cards with the intention of convincing them to my way of thinking, but as often happens with things like this, it was they who would be doing the convincing. I was prepared when they began talking about the money - with those who deal in commerce, this was to be expected. Yes, a business that prospers and succeeds will bring all sorts of monetary benefit, but I was happy how I was - I didn't need to run my own enterprise to get money. But then they started talking about how if only I built up my business a bit more, if I focussed on expanding and connecting with others to form partnerships, I could have an enterprise. Working on this would 'open doors' and provide 'lots of opportunities for the future'. Now, being just a simple person who writes every now and then on a simple blog, the idea of the future wasn't something that I had thought about a lot. I looked at the state of my business - it was just a business: what it did was what I told it to do. It didn't think about the future - it never had. If I left it alone, it would go back to what I originally wanted it to do - explore, create, enquire. But I had spent a lot of time augmenting this business of late. I had spent a lot of effort investing in the kind of R&D that these investors had suggested. Thinking back to all this effort suddenly made the principle of 'return on investment' far more clear and real than that of 'ideology'. If I had invested in so much, what was a little bit more effort if it meant 'better opportunities' in the future?
But thoughts of the future wasn't what convinced me.
What really convinced me was fear.
Because as a businessman, an entrepreneur, the last thing I would want is for my business to fail. These investors told me that if this business were to fail, if the consumers didn't want to purchase my product at a high enough price, then I would be worthless as a businessman. While I had spent the last 20 years of my life working on someone else's investment, I had grown attached to how it performed. What it would do. What it could become. The line between running a business and living my life began to blur - that business and how it performed slowly and surely became more and more integral to the idea of who I was. What kind of industrialist doesn't increase their competitiveness by implementing the most refined and advanced production methodologies? What kind of CEO fails to market their product by writing down all of its qualifications, alongside glowing user testimonials, on an A4 document before showing it to potential consumers? What kind of person doesn't get a job, doesn't follow the roster, doesn't 'contribute anything to society'?
What if I never wanted to start a business in the first place?
You see, fear is what stops us. Fear of failing. Fear of going against the trend. Fear of what our friends might say. Fear of what our parents or teachers might say. Fear of the 'what if'. Fear of not being normal. Fear of not doing what everyone else is doing. But sometimes it isn't fear. Sometimes closing your business just isn't ever considered an option. We've never thought about doing it because in our world, it's a treachery unheard of.
This business's name is Eric. It's also Joe. Miguel. Alexandra. Amir. Jacek. Salama. Zhi. We don't necessarily all sell the same thing, but a lot of the time we've followed a similar programming. It's a great deal of us. And those investors I've harped on about? Anyone who's ever held the expectation that you or I should one day study, get a job, pay our taxes and colour ever so delicately in between the lines.
I'm not saying that a world without work, education, and knowledge is an ideal world - extremes are rarely a realistic representation and understanding of the world. Yet why is it that the question asked of our youth is 'What do you want to be?' or 'What are you studying?' As we age, this simply becomes 'What do you do?'. Is the extreme of simply following the programming set out for us really how we ought to live our lives?
I'm also not saying it's anathema for your work to be your passion, or for you to find great fulfilment, satisfaction, and enjoyment from what you do to make a living. It's when its the only the thing that defines us, when our value as human beings is boiled down to a qualification or an ability to earn that the alarm bells ring. When all of society has dictated that the greatest and most honourable way of living our lives is to labour for other people, to sell our labour and our skills so that other people may profit. Perhaps slavemasters don't need chains to enslave us - we now do it willingly. And perhaps our lives and who we are should be dictated by more than simply what another person pays us to do.
