It Matters to That One

I know, that poem about the starfish is so

overrated. It's so over-told. Time after time, about the kid

and the starfish and walking down the beach. And how can you

get all the starfish? And it made a difference to that one.

And when we come into business, it's even more like that. People

are walking around talking to us while we pick up starfish

telling us, "You can't, you can't pay attention to the

starfish, you can't get the starfish back in the sea,

there's so much to catch. There's so much to do. There's

so many castles to build, holes to dig, and you can't possibly

rescue all the starfish and do everything else." And anyway,

there's so many starfish, there's always another starfish,

there's always more, there's always more to do, there's

always more you could be better. That is the cacophony that we

are surrounded by. And I do mean cacophony. When I first came

into business, I came from parish ministry, which is a heck

of a transition, going from a business, a work, a calling,

that isn't supposed to be about business at all, where marketing

is a bad word. Where somehow people are supposed to magically

appear on the doorstep, and be dedicated, intrigued, engaged,

where people are supposed to love it, because of what it is,

for its essence. Coming from that to a business, where 90% of

it is marketing. At least 90% of it is marketing, it could be

more. At the beginning, it's all marketing, you barely have

enough time or energy to create the product that you're trying

to sell, because you're too busy trying to sell people on it. But

if you don't sell people on it, you won't have the resources

that you need to create the thing. And if you can't create

the thing that you need the resources to create, then you

don't have a business at all. You've got to buy and sell and

do everything all at once and stay up late nights coding or

writing copy or developing that product that you're selling

during the day when other people are awake. And for what? Like

for why? Well, because you have an idea. You have an idea, you

have a plan. You have a something. You have a something,

a spark, and it won't let go. And maybe that spark is just

that. You want to sell a thing that will make some money so

that you can be wealthy so you can take care of somebody so you

can.... But a lot of times it's more than that. For most of us,

it's more than that. For most of us, there's some element of "I

want to run a business, that's a good business, I want to be an

honorable business person." I relate to Santa in 'Miracle on

34th Street'. I want to be the person who's so strong and

confident and well-off that I can send people down the street,

if what I have is not what they're looking for. That's how

I want to be in business. And what I want to be offering

people in this business is something that they actually

need, not a widget that will gather dust. Not a course that

doesn't tell them anything they didn't already know. I want to

to bring them from here to somewhere else. I want to carry

them on a journey. I want to accompany them, I want to

transform them. I want to transform their life. Even if

it's just by having the perfect shower scrubber. Sometimes you

need the perfect shower scrubber.

Sometimes it's by bringing a whole new way of cooking into

residential kitchens. Sometimes, sometimes it's by taking care of

people one person at a time. Sometimes it's by figuring out

how to take care of people more than one person at a time.

Because taking care of one person at a time is actually not

enough because there are too many people who need too much

care and it's not their fault and they're not doing anything

wrong, but we got to get more care out to more people and we

only have so many skilled and trained caregivers. And so how

are we going to give care on a larger scale? How are we going

to reach more people? How are we going to give people the

baseline tools that they need to get to the point where working

one-on-one is actually a valuable experience, or maybe

working one-on-one is valuable, so valuable that we have to

create a way for everybody to have that one-on-one witnessing

experience. How are we going to do that? Solving for the unknown

variable, or set of variables, is the lifeblood of a lot of

entrepreneurship- not all of it. Sometimes people are just

building a better mousetrap. But sometimes, often, we're here

because we want the world to be a better place. And we're pretty

sure we're pretty sure that if we could do the thing, and get

people to understand why the thing is helpful and important,

if we could do all of that, then they would have better lives.

And it doesn't hurt that we would do. Not only because we

might make enough of a profit to pay our bills, and go home and

save some up and buy a house and a car and take care of our

families. But also, because our work will have meaning. Meaning

making is one of those things that's gotten largely handed off

from the religious world to the business world as more and more

people spend more and more time at work. And so it matters, why

we do what we do. And it matters what we're doing. It matters

what the end goal is, it matters what the impact is, all of it

matters. And so why do we do this thing, where we walk down

the beach, and everyone is telling us that we've got to

build more castles, we've got to dig more holes. And we're

building castles and we're digging holes, and we're raking

up various things out of the sand and looking at them and

admiring them and maybe putting them back or maybe tucking them

in the trash bag that we're carrying along with us. And

we're throwing those starfish back in the water. We're

throwing the starfish back in the water, and we don't see it

as incidental. It's not like, "Oh, I'm here to dig holes, but

also I will throw this starfish back." It's "I'm here to dig

holes and throw starfish back." Of course, throwing starfish

back is a metaphor, and what we're doing depends on who we

are and how our businesses are shaped and where we're

positioned. We might be creating much better work environments, I

hope we're all creating much better work environments than

the standard average run-of-the-mill work

environment. We're being more flexible, we're treating our

employees like human beings. We care about our employees' kids

for real, not just, you know, in a line and a form letter that

goes out to everybody from the CEO once a year. We mean it, we

really do want them to be happy and healthy and succeed. We want

them to build wealth of their own, we want them, we want them

to work in a way that works best for them. And that works out

well for us too. It's good business, when your employees

are happy and working in their zones of genius. It's good

business, because then you get the best work out of them and

they're happy and they stay. And so you don't have to onboard

eleventy-million more people. And you don't have to go through

long interview processes. By the way, we do not need days and

weeks of interviews for these jobs. We don't need that much.

Let me just say, you're not going to learn more. You think

you will. But you're not going to learn more, you're not going

to prevent more mistakes, by interviewing people seven,

eight, ten times; you're not going to make things better,

you're not going to make them happier by making them keep

coming back and coming back and coming back and piling on the

stress and the homework problems. It's not-- no, no.

This was never the norm before. And it's a waste of resources, a

waste of time, a waste of energy. There are particular

things you can look for- intensiveness and expansiveness

that I talk about a lot. That's one of them. There are other

things you can look for that are important, but you're not going

to learn much more after the second or third interview.

Enough is enough. In fact, I just saw an article about one

organization that's paying people to interview. They pay

the people $75 to come and be interviewed because the time is

valuable and the people are worth honoring. And that's the

kind of thing I'm talking about. We're throwing the starfish back

each in our own way. But we keep doing it even when everybody

says everybody says that that's not how you run a good business

and the reason we keep doing it the reason it's so important is

because it's not a side-gig. Starfish are not a side-gig.

Starfish are integral to the beach. And so helping the

starfish live is part of what we do. It is why we are here; we

are as much here to build widgets or create personal

transformation, as we are here to save the starfish. We are

here to throw starfish back in the water. And so nobody, nobody

who says that that's not a thing you can do, understands what

we're doing. I used to have a little card on my desk that said

"those that say it cannot be done should not interrupt the

person doing it." My business is about starfish but so is yours.

Where are you throwing starfish back in the water?