The Great Bridge

Thank you for taking the time to read my new blog, The Ownership Path.  Some of you may be familiar with my first blog, Fool of Psalms, which is devoted to the topic of religion.  While I very much enjoy that topic, I find it to be somewhat controversial, so I wanted to create a separate brand for this blog which, I am sure, people will find much more agreeable.  I will still attempt to take you to the edge of your comfort zone in my writing here, but in a different way. 

For my first blog post, I would like to briefly talk about what commerce is and what it means to me.  I have several friends who work or are studying for careers in music, art, fashion and academia.  I even have a couple of friends who are philosophy majors!  We have a tendency to think of people pursuing these subjects as following their dreams at the expense of practicality.  If we criticize someone for getting a degree in philosophy, the typical criticism will be, “how are you going to get a job doing that?”  If we praise them, the typical praise will be, “Good for you for studying something that interests you rather than just selling out and going for a corporate career.” 

Of course, in many instances, my friends who have set themselves upon these educational paths have indeed rejected a career in something safe and opted instead for their passion.  I would not deny them this.  The corollary of this criticism and praise, however, is that we tend to also think of those individuals who pursue careers in business and commerce as having been faced with a similar dilemma—between a practical career and a passion—and having gone with the practical at the expense of their passion.  The assumption is that those of us who endeavor to be successful in entrepreneurial or intrepreneurial ventures do so only after making a conscious decision to toss our paint brushes or guitars into a fire along with any dreams we may have had about being the next Picasso or Clapton, resigning ourselves to a life of chasing dollar bills and upper middle class mediocrity. 

This, emphatically, is not so.  I will admit to a personal affinity for all things scientific, and, had I the intellectual capacity, I may have studied science at some deeper level than a reading of A Brief History of Time and River out of Eden.  I will also freely say that I consider myself a writer at the very core of my being and I hope to have more than one book to my name before my days are over (although I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens saying that “everyone has a book in them, but in most cases that is where it should stay”!)

However, given my current personality, interests and abilities, I could not think of a single pursuit that would give me more happiness or fulfillment than running my company.  I have never been as completely satisfied with my life as I have been since, less than a year ago, I left (or, more accurately, was politely asked to leave) my job at a large regional bank and began to work full-time on my business.  I answer to no one except myself.  I am building something that has the potential to touch hundreds of thousands of lives.  I have a great relationship with my customers.  I have the least demanding schedule imaginable.  I get excited when I think about the work I do and, probably best of all; I get to make children happy.  If any person living can claim that they are passionate about what they do, I can. 

For me, a career in business is not a settlement.  It is not a resignation of ones dreams.  It is the fulfillment of them.  Although I do want to pursue other things later in life, if I could spend the rest of my days running and building my company I would die a happy man. 

I look at it like this:  Without commerce, you have those few genius individuals making discoveries and doing theoretical science, composing beautiful music, writing compelling works of fiction and nonfiction alike, and they are separated from the general public, who sit on the other side of a vast gulf of mutual irrelevance.  Enterprising individuals come in and find ways to bridge that gulf by taking the new discoveries, the films, the art, the music, and developing new channels through which to bring those enrichments to the general public, and to do so in a way that is relevant to them. 

To be a part of that process, to aid in whatever small amount in building the great bridge across that vast gulf of mutual irrelevance, is, to me, no resignation.  It does not involve shelving my passions in any sense.  It invokes my passion.  It is my passion.