I don’t understand people who can steal from their companies or their clients. Can you imagine waking up in the morning and knowing you have nothing in yourself that’s real and genuine by which you can live? This is what you’ve got – what you’re made of – this is the fruit of your character? A fakery? Can you imagine waking up knowing that your life depends on your ability to scam, to fudge, to be anything other than real?
What must it be like to look in the mirror? What do such people see in their mind’s eyes, thinking of themselves? They’ve denied the world of meaning, and are looking at life as a cold crypt. I can’t imagine.
I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. I watch people who get by or pad their bank accounts and their lifestyles by ripping other people off, and I just get sick to my stomach trying to imagine myself in their place. I’m partly in business for myself because it frees me to live ethically. It doesn’t make me superior – it just makes me more human in that way than I would be otherwise. It keeps me from getting sick.
The thing I learned from a friend that has consistently inspired my business endeavours is: if you can’t find the good in what you’re being asked to do, then do what you need to yourself, for yourself, make it yourself, start it yourself – begin with you, and only then can you move out from there to each person you can include who wants the same thing. But if it doesn’t begin with you, it won’t happen anywhere else in the world that you’ll ever find. “For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert.” To me, that translates into a business.
Sometimes I think that people who derisively apply the term “small” simply can’t see the landscape at all.
