Читать книгу Soul Over Matter - Zhi Gang Sha - Страница 12

3

Karmic Life and Business

WE TEND TO look at the world as made up of competitors. At work we compete for promotions, budgets, resources, and the ever-vaunted corner office. In business we compete for profits, attention, customers, contracts, and market share. Even in our home life, we compete for everything from the opportunity to be heard to the choice of where our next vacation will be.

It’s no surprise that this is the case—after all, it’s how we were raised. From an early age we were taught to win in sports, to “wrestle” with siblings for attention, and to strive for grades with our classmates. We’ve been programmed from day one to compete.

At the root, however, competition is fundamentally about scarcity. In fact, scarcity is the only way that competition can exist at all. If we saw everything as limitless, there would be no need to compete at all—the idea itself would seem absurd. But we haven’t been programmed that way, and the result is that in everything from our home to our office, we inevitably build an us-versus-them competitive mind-set.

In the book Karmic Management, authors Geshe Michael Roach, Lama Christie McNally, and Michael Gordon turn this idea on its head, arguing that we should see everyone as our “karmic business partners,” with our highest goal being not to ensure that we are successful, but that they are.

In this model, you look to collaborate, not compete. If you’re in the microwave oven business, you don’t try to corner the market, undercut the competition, or win the war for search engine results. Instead, you root for your competitors; you wish them well and even buy their products. You don’t beat your vendors down on price; rather, you work with them collaboratively to find a way to ensure that they succeed. You don’t try to squeeze the most work per dollar from an employee; instead, you work to make him or her as successful as possible so that the productivity will flow back to you.

You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to reap the benefits of karmic management. As an employee, you can see your peers as karmic partners, too, not corner office competitors. You can help them get the promotions, the raises, and the kudos, and discover the wonder of watching it come back to you in turn.

If this sounds like “You get what you give” or “Do unto others,” you’re right. It is. But it’s also more than that. Karma in life is about eliminating fear by acknowledging the abundance in the world and finally seeing the divine in everyone and everything around you.

A great example of how giving benefits the giver is Google, which in 2011 built physical community hubs or coworking spaces called campuses, where entrepreneurs come to learn, share ideas, and launch start-ups.

Google also supports and reaches out to minority-owned businesses to join its Accelerate with Google Academy, a free twelve-week program aimed at small-business owners who are looking to take their marketing to the next level and significantly grow their revenues using online advertising.

In a case of helping others to help themselves, Google shows businesses how to create website landing pages, manage Google AdWords to advertise their business, and manage marketing campaigns. The program is beneficial to businesses as well as to Google: More businesses using Google’s services gives the search company more data to mine and helps it provide more granular data to people who are searching for businesses.

Here are six examples of things you can do to help others, your business, and yourself at the same time.

1. Connect with like-minded businesses. By joining forces, small businesses can achieve economies of scale and have a presence that can compete with larger corporations. There is power in the collective, and businesses can harness the power of community to move forward.

2. Participate in your local chamber of commerce events, Meetup. com, and similar networks for interested parties in your area. Build a strong Twitter network so you can organize a tweetup to leverage that network into an even more powerful experience through face-to-face networking.

3. Join a social network or virtual group for like-minded small business owners to exchange advice, get support, build partnerships, find help, and more. For example, join Entrepreneur Connect, part of the Entrepreneur Network and Entrepreneur.com.

4. Build informal alliances with like-minded companies. Reach out to other companies who share your views on customer service, business, product development, etc. Start with simple steps like swapping guest posts or sharing online communities.

5. Create a “support small business” mind-set in your own company. Support your local economies by shopping at independently owned brick-and-mortar businesses. You can adopt a similar mind-set at your own business. Analyze your current vendors and service providers for opportunities to “downsize.” Are there any places where you could be supporting a small business—virtual or physical?

6. American Express Open Forum online (https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/8-ways-small-businesses-help-communities-1/) is a great resource for small- and medium-sized businesses to help each other and to be visible to a much larger audience nationally and globally.

What to Do When Things Go Wrong

In your quest to find financial peace, things are inevitably not going to go as planned. It’s nice to have a road map to follow, but if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that not every road is going to be as smooth as you’d like.

A big part of the reason is that you’re going to make mistakes. Money is going to flow into your life because of great decisions, but it’s also going to flow back out because of some not-so-great ones. Some days you’ll make decisions that earn you a windfall, and on others you’ll make errors that cost a fortune.

And while the times you get everything right are wonderful, you’ll never escape the downturns; inevitably, you’re going to screw up and you’re going to make a mistake that costs you. It may cost you in time, in energy, in heartache, or in cash, but whatever the cost, know that it will happen.

The issue, then, isn’t if you’ll make mistakes on the road to prosperity, but what you’ll do when they happen.

First of all, know that you’re not alone. Mistakes happen all the time, yes. But understand that they happen to everyone, not just you. You may have screwed up, but you haven’t screwed up any worse than the rest of us. If it doesn’t seem that way, it’s because most people don’t like to talk about failure. Show me someone with a perfect, error-free life and I’ll show you someone who’s too scared to tell you the truth.

With this in mind, you’re presented with a glorious new opportunity the next time you make a mistake: You don’t have to beat yourself up the way you usually do.

The greatest danger when things go wrong isn’t the thing going wrong, but your judgment of yourself in the situation. You may judge yourself by feeling you caused the mistake. Or perpetuated it. Or weren’t able to resolve it. You may judge yourself for your response to the hardship. But the cause, the response, the behavior, the resolution—they all matter less than how you treat yourself in their wake.

That’s the real potential “wrongness” of being wrong.

This “failure phobia” we all experience is something we come by honestly. We all learned early that mistakes are “bad.” You make a mistake on a test? You get a C instead of an A. You bring that C home? Your parents are upset. You make a mistake in the office? You could lose your job. Your career. Your license.

Our world punishes mistakes. That’s the lesson you were taught, and it’s why you take failure personally.

Ultimately, though, that perception is also what slows you down. It stops you from trying something new. From taking risks. From doing things that are intuitive. That failure phobia stops you from taking a moment to listen to that inner voice, the whisper of your soul, saying Try something different.

Yes, the programmed lessons of mistakes are powerful ones. Right now, you have many years of unconscious training telling you to ignore your instincts, your intuition, your soul. You have decades of programming telling you to invest your time and energy in just maintaining. In treading water. In protecting the status quo at all costs.

But remember the cost of that. It’s mediocrity. A ceaseless, mindless commitment to what is safe.

Here’s what you’re telling yourself: Mistakes are bad. I made one, so I must be bad, too. If I just never make another one, everything will be okay.

But it won’t, will it?

It’s time to realize that mistakes are the best thing that could happen to us. Not in the trite sense of “everything happens for a reason,” but in the knowledge that everything happens for a reason, and that reason is there to serve.

What to do when things go wrong? Forgive yourself, forgive others, and find the reason that is there to serve. Find the nugget of wisdom. The lesson. And move forward to something even better.

Don’t avoid the mistakes because you’re afraid you might be something less.

Celebrate the mistakes, because without them you just might be.

I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.

—Thomas A. Edison

Just like Thomas Edison, who made more than ten thousand attempts before he found the proper substance to make the filament for the lightbulb, you too have found ways that won’t work and you are on your way to inventing what will work to light your version of a lightbulb. And it will most likely take a lot less than ten thousand tries.

Hold On Lightly: Letting Go of Expectations

The root of suffering is attachment.

—Buddha

Expectation can be a heady, intoxicating feeling. Looking forward to that first date. Dreaming of your next vacation or your annual bonus. Picturing the new car you’ll buy when your lease expires or the new home you’ll move into after your wedding. They’re all exciting plans for the future, and they carry an emotional charge that gives us a little boost of pleasure when we anticipate them.

On the surface, that seems pretty harmless. After all, what could be wrong with having something to look forward to?

The problem occurs when expectations grow into a powerful form of attachment, and that has some very real potential side effects.

Expectations have a way of evolving into a need to have things turn out in a very specific way. You get so caught up in exactly how you expect something to be that you can’t accept anything different. You’re attached to an outcome that’s so specific—the perfect weather for your perfect wedding day—that you can’t enjoy the real value of the moment.

Attachment also puts energy anywhere but in the present. It’s a focus on the future—this is where I’m going or someday I’ll have that. Or it’s a focus on the past—I’m not going back there again or I deserve better because of all that hard work. As a result, attachment has a way of becoming like wearing a set of blinders: You can miss opportunities and possibilities that are just outside your narrow field of vision. When you’re too attached, you simply can’t see them.

So how, then, do we resolve the need to have goals for the future—to plan and set a course for where we want to be—with the dangers of attachment?

To start with, instead of goals, I prefer the term intention. In law intent is a big deal. When we look to where criminality lies—in determining first-degree or second-degree murder, for example—we rely on intent. Did the person intend to cause harm or was it accidental or negligent?

Intention is a powerful force in law and no less so in life. Where a goal is a wish, an intention is a declaration of the energy behind an outcome. Goals can be a slippery slope to attachment; intention, on the other hand, is about the energy of the present.

Once you have an intention, it’s time to walk the tightrope. You need to set an intention, but then let go of the outcome—be willing to let go of your need to have things work out in a certain way. You must be willing to detach.

This can be a tricky idea. Detaching isn’t about not caring. After all, how can you stay motivated to do what’s required to move ahead in life if you don’t care? What you’re really detaching from is the meaning of things. Consider the following statements:

If I get the promotion, I’ll be respected.

If I earn this much, I’ll be happy.

If I have this and that, people will look up to me.

Those are all ways of attaching meaning to things and events, and it’s that meaning that has the power to cause suffering. Detach from the meaning, and you detach from suffering the fear of a failed outcome.

Set the intention, but detach from the meaning. Accept that the outcome may be different, and the path impossible to see. Imagine that your intention is a beautiful rose that you hold in your hands. Hold it too loosely and you lose it. But hold it too tightly and you crush it.

The secret is to hold on lightly.

The Trim Tab Factor

In my midtwenties, before my pivot to life as an attorney, I was working in New York City as a public school teacher. My wife was a teacher, too, but working on Long Island.

During her time there she met a couple with a boat. We hit it off, and one weekend they invited us to go with them to Block Island—a trip of a hundred miles or so from Port Washington.

The boat was large enough and comfortable enough for the trip, but it was no cruise ship. We didn’t have the radar you might find on a larger ship, but instead something called LORAN, a system of radio beacons and charts that could be used to navigate from waypoint to waypoint.

Our boat also had trim tabs—small steel planes that could be adjusted to keep the boat more level in the water. As I learned, changes in the angle of the boat in the water could not only make you more or less efficient, but over a long journey those changes could also have an effect on your path through the water and take you off your charted course.

Now, on a clear day, you can see Block Island from the mainland. It’s not exactly an Atlantic crossing—no big deal at all on a clear day with calm weather. During our trip, however, a fog bank rolled in and we couldn’t see much past the bow of the boat.

It’s an unsettling experience to hit bad weather on the ocean. What seems incredibly benign and easy in one sunny moment can become quite threatening when the weather changes in the next. There we were in a twenty-seven-foot boat, unable to see anything and surrounded by a very, very big ocean. If we lost our way, we could run out of gas in the Atlantic, adrift to who knew where. Not an appealing prospect.

To complicate matters, the area was full of boat traffic, much of it a lot bigger than us. We certainly couldn’t see them, and we couldn’t count on them seeing us or even being able to adjust course in time if they could.

In short order, our pleasant sea voyage seemed to become very serious.

What if we lost our way or missed a waypoint? I knew that tiny mistakes in our direction could stack up and lead us many miles off course. Navigating accurately became priority number one, and part of that was a near-constant process of adjusting the trim tabs and tweaking the rudder and controls to make sure we traveled successfully from one waypoint to the next.

Of course, we made the trip just fine, but it has occurred to me many times since that life isn’t so different. You make these small changes in your direction all the time, and over the course of months, then years, then decades, they have an enormous difference in where you arrive and when—it’s the trim tab factor of life.

It’s been said that Apollo 11, carrying Neil Armstrong and the rest of the first lunar crew, was “off course” for much of the journey. On a trip of a hundred miles on the Atlantic, that can mean missing your mark and heading into open ocean. On a mission of almost a million miles from the earth to the moon and back, missing your target and sailing off into the universe unchecked means you can end up . . . well, infinitely off course. Forever. It was only the work of readjusting the course that ensured they reached the moon safely.

In your financial life, the trim tabs tend to be your habits—the small things you do without fail. How you budget, save, spend. How you think and talk about money every day. As with our boat, small changes in direction can make a huge difference in where you end up financially . A little comment here and a few extra dollars there. They add up over time.

Do you constantly assess your position in life and adjust accordingly? Or do you drift aimlessly and run the risk of waking up a million metaphorical miles from where you hoped you’d be?

The above everyday events and stories illustrate and provide insights, tools, and lessons that transfer directly to your business and finances. As you progress in the book, you will find more stories, techniques, and inspiration that will help you achieve the abundance and success you are looking for.