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, and 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 can promulgate. Lead from balance; serve others from balance; and innovate, improve, and create from balance.