4 Ways Entrepreneurship Can Make You a Whole Person

culled from:inc.com

Some of the reasons I love entrepreneurship so passionately have nothing to do with business, money, or profit, per se. For me, entrepreneurship is an alternate structure to reimpose meaning and value on an anomic world, where it increasingly seems structurally absent.
For me, entrepreneurship's great gift is not to create success or wealth, but to create an essential ambience conducive to becoming whole. Here are four enabling entrepreneurial frameworks for creating a truly engaged and fulfilling life.
1. Freedom
Albert Einstein said, "Everything that is great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." While entrepreneurship is being eroded by overweening governmentalism, the entrepreneur still can create a unique and vital personal fulcrum that defies the quotidian. Entrepreneurship is a structure that can sidestep the tyranny of the majority. Entrepreneurship belies lemming-like conformity and can offer a centered existence apart from the demands and pressures of the madding crowd. It can become a transport for originality, personal dignity, and a lived private Idaho.
Which brings me to the second great non-monetary gift of a creative small business...
2. Community
Groucho Marx said, "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." Entrepreneurship is a way of creating our own club customized to our own membership. It gives an institutional context for those who prefer to walk their own walk.
This is a world where traditional community has been withering. We can no longer count on omnipresent verities of place, tradition, society, church, or culture. It's become an anomic, often inchoate world full of separation, balkanization, relativism, and an unmoored zeitgeist. There is a need for clear mission-based, culturally cohesive, independent communities--like the best of entrepreneurial entities are.
A creative small business can offer an island of identity and existential value, as well as an anchorage when the traditional verities of society no longer cement universal beliefs and mores. Thus, the increasing recognition of the importance of unique corporate culture from entrepreneurial leaders like John Mackey, Howard Schulz, Tony Hsieh, Danny Meyer, Kip Tindell, David Neeleman, and others.
3. Service
Rabindranth Tagore says,
"I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy."
Another word for service is vocation--that sense that we are doing the work of a generative higher power and contributing to the greater good of the existence we are part of. (Kip Tindell of The Container Store calls this "the wake we leave in life.") A small business offers the opportunity to give back to the world each day. And not just in big showy ways like public contributions and grand gestures, but also in the little noticed ways that probably mean more--how we generously serve our clients every day. Pablo Picasso said, "The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away."
4. A structure for faith
Faith is increasingly and institutionally absent from our everyday life. Psychiatrist Carl Jung saw the human psyche as innately religious and noted, with some alarm, "...faith has lost its grip to an appalling extent. People are no more rooted in their world and lose their orientation. They just drift....Life loses its meaning."
The entrepreneurial quest is as much religious and artistic as it is pecuniary. It is an attempt to create a structure of meaning, to create something out of nothing. It is an attempt to at least grab for a penultimate verity where God often feels absent. Steve Jobs certainly viewed his lifelong entrepreneurial journey in this light. His last words were "Oh, wow." I like to believe Jobs's words speak as a final mystical comment on the unknowable essence of what many call God.