The Necessity of Balance

Balance is maintaining and manifesting a healthy understanding of duality: wrong is balanced by right; good by evil; south by north; one’s perception by another’s. One of the hardest leadership lessons to learn is that there is nothing in our experience that is all wrong or all right. What makes this such a hard lesson to learn is our misguided belief that our perception of the world is reality. The inconvenient truth is that our perception of the world is not reality at all, but merely our perception of ourselves.

Each of us creates from our individual perceptions of the world the picture in our minds that we call reality. Based on our individual notions of reality, we develop a code that we use to explain what we perceive around us. We decide what is good, what is bad, what is proper, what is improper—all based on what we were told by our parents as children and what we have learned on our own through “good” and “bad” personal experiences.

Your desire to be a successful entrepreneur catapults you to the status of a leader in society. You will lead your company, co-lead your family, and have considerable input in whatever organizations or associations to which you belong. Because you are a leader, you have a moral obligation to move beyond the ignorant opinions and self-serving partisan views held by most people with whom you currently associate, and commit yourself to learning all you can about everything that touches you and your family. This is necessary because you cannot be a true leader and a thought follower at the same time. If you stay in that position, you are merely a client or object—someone’s puppet—to be used and manipulated as others see fit. If you take your rightful place as a thought leader, you are functioning as a subject or agent—a person operating in freedom.

The only way you can function properly as a thought leader is to see the pros and cons of every point of view without siding with one view or another, and to look for, find or create the third way—the balanced view that only a forward-thinking entrepreneur has the capacity to promulgate. Lead from balance; serve others from balance; and innovate, improve and create from balance.

The Urgency of Righteousness

Righteousness is right standing with God that is evidenced by your right treatment of people, animals, plants, and the planet. Righteousness is not related to your religious or non-religious beliefs: it is predicated solely on what you actually do and why you do it—your external behavior judged by your internal motives for your behavior—not what you say you believe, or the reasons you give to justify why you believe what you believe.

The financial destiny of a Virtuous Entrepreneur is to become wealthy enough to make a tremendous positive impact on the lives of people and to exercise economic power that promotes economic justice and benefits people by liberating them, such that the world becomes a better place to live for the many who are the have-nots, and not just for the few who are the haves.

Righteousness is urgent because those who gain wealth have an obligation to function from right motives in order to reach right ends that benefit society at large. To gain wealth solely to subjugate others is a misappropriation of the gift of wealth and a crime against humanity.

It is not money or wealth that is sinful: it is the selfish love of money or wealth that causes unrighteous people to write laws that oppress and diminish people, despoil the planet for profit, and reap unjust gain in the process.

As you enter the economic world of entrepreneurship, you have a decision to make. Will you decide to follow the narrow path of righteousness as a Virtuous Entrepreneur, or will you take the wide road of unrighteousness with the greedy and unscrupulous? You can become part of the world’s problem or part of the world’s solution. Which way will you choose?

The Power of an Idea

   It’s amazing how ideas affect all of us. Most of the things and people you like are based on the idea of them you have in your own head. By the same token, most of the things and people you don’t like are based on the idea of them in your head. The key ingredient here is that your perception of people, places and things—indeed, your view of the world—is always a creation of your own thinking. That’s why how you think and what you think about are so crucial to your success as an entrepreneur.

   Successful entrepreneurs are open-minded and relate well to people without branding them good or bad. They have come to understand that people are just like them—sometimes good and other times not so good; sometimes dependable and sometimes not so dependable, and the list goes on.

   But what successful entrepreneurs have learned is that they can be good more often than not and dependable more often than not by controlling the thoughts they think and the ideas that they allow to come into their heads. There are many ideas that you can use to control your thinking habits, but there are four powerful ideas which have the power to move you from scarcity to plenty and from surviving to thriving.

   The first of these powerful ideas is deliberately deciding to have and keep a positive mental attitude. You can form this habit by mentally willing it to be so and thinking of this idea every day. Instead of complaining about something that looks like a disaster that has confronted you, you can rather look at your situation as an opportunity to learn how to cope with and overcome adversity. This powerful idea, this decision to have and keep a positive mental attitude regardless of your circumstances, will keep you upbeat, grateful and thankful. Without gratitude for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and thankfulness for being alive, you cannot succeed either in business or at living life in general.

   The second of these powerful ideas is determining to stay in sound physical health. Physical health has more to do with the content of your thinking than you imagine. Scientists tell us that negative ideas that you persistently think about—worry, anger, resentment, hatred, revenge—lead to physical (and sometimes mental) illness. On the contrary, they tell us that positive ideas that you persistently think about—love, joy, music, appreciation, praise, beauty—lead to the maintenance of physical health. By all means, go to the gym and work out, but don’t neglect to work out of your mind the negative ideas that will keep you from living the abundant life of a successful entrepreneur.

   The third powerful idea is keeping harmony in your personal relations. One problem that always arises in most human relationships is the belief that one person must be wrong if the other person is right. You have the power to solve this dilemma for yourself quite easily, if you adopt the position that you will commit to listening to people for the sole purpose of understanding them from their point of view. You are not a judge who condemns people who disagree with you. You don’t have to agree or disagree with any person. You only need to hear, understand and communicate to that person that you have heard and understood their position.

   When you speak to people, you should be trying to communicate as clearly as possible so that they understand you from your point of view. You don’t need people to agree or disagree with you. You only need to be sure that people understand what you communicated to them. You should always avoid arguing or debating people with whom you intend to do business. Wait until you’re ready to run for political office to do that!

   The fourth powerful idea is having a hope of future achievement. This is an extremely powerful idea because it will get you through the disappointments, delays and disasters that happen on the way to your success. As you keep your hope alive that your business will prosper and bring you the financial rewards you deserve, then you can smile when you must deal with disagreeable people and circumstances.

The Primacy of Truth and Justice

Truth is reality in itself, not any perception of or reasoning about it. Its existence begins in spiritual form prior to its manifestation in material form. Anything that is not predicated upon truth is unreality—a lie.

That is why telling the truth to yourself first and then to family, colleagues and business associates is imperative for the virtuous entrepreneur who is seeking true wealth. Building relationships of trust demand truth as the foundation of trustworthiness. The only way a person will come to trust you is if they find that you always tell the truth, even if it hurts you.

When it comes to making critical decisions that will impact profits over long periods of time, wise business leaders look for trustworthy associates whom they know will tell them the truth and stand by their commitments.

There are many entrepreneurs who cut corners, promise more than they can deliver, and function based on their perception of taking advantage of others. They may appear to succeed over the short term, but eventually they are exposed as the untrustworthy, untruthful and unreliable people they really are.

Truth is a rare commodity that is found only in the virtuous entrepreneurs who love themselves to such an extent that they show love to others by fair dealing, win-win diplomacy and honest truth telling in business deals and in personal relationships.

Justice is God’s definition of what is right. It is not based on any partisan view or political persuasion, but rather on the Golden Rule. It is important for entrepreneurs who want to function in a virtuous manner to practice justice in all their business and interpersonal dealings.

In the realm of business, justice means that you commit that you will not enter any deal that is disadvantageous to any person or entity involved in the venture, and that no harm or disadvantage will come to the end users or consumers of the products or services that are produced by virtue of the deal. It means that all the details of the deal will be set forth fully in writing, and that pains are taken to make sure that everyone involved is clear about what work, activity, product or service is expected from each, and how, at what time and under what specific circumstances each will receive compensation for performance or no or limited compensation for non-performance.

The most direct way to ensure justice in a business deal is to create a Performance Contract that spells out clearly and succinctly what is to be done by whom, when, where and how it is to be delivered, and the consequences for both performance and non-performance. A properly written Performance Agreement will minimize to zero litigation and the waste of time and money that occurs when business partners disagree over the terms and conditions of a given deal.

The virtuous entrepreneur who commits to the primacy of truth, aligns with fair dealing, and functions with justice in all personal and business dealings will always gain true wealth and maintain financial security for a lifetime.

Preparation for Initiation: The Tenth Virtue of Maat

The Tenth Virtue of the Ten Virtues of Maat is preparation for initiation. In essence, this Tenth Virtue is the launching pad from which you will make the decision to change your current paradigm of drifting through life, in order to commit yourself to personal growth and choosing to do the hard work of identifying your definite purpose in life and giving your whole self to its pursuit.

Preparation for initiation is your decision to move away from talking about going into business for yourself and taking the necessary action to do so. It is moving away from simply thinking about going into business and actually doing it.  Preparation for initiation is moving away from merely asking the theoretical questions related to going into a particular business and embracing the practical reality of setting up shop.

The first step of preparation for initiation is to secure the services of an experienced coach who will work with you over a reasonable amount of time and raise your awareness of the potential that is within you. A world-class coach will challenge and stretch you beyond your comfort zone, and support you as you take definite actions toward the goals you set for yourself.

Preparation for initiation includes doing the self-work necessary to rid yourself of self-limiting and self-sabotaging thinking and behaviors. In addition, it requires that you chart a specific direction for yourself, align your thoughts and actions to that self-decided direction, and then commit yourself to follow through in that direction starting right now. When you have reached this stage, contact me at jchurchville8@gmail.com.