🤲 The Truth About How I Run My Business
"I" don't really . . .
“What you can plan is too small for you to live.”
—
If I tell you the secret behind how I run my business, it will reveal a hidden shame: that it’s not a business at all.
A real business sets a powerful vision and measurable goals, and then implements a system for tracking leading and lagging indicators toward achieving both. A real business ensures the team—a growing team!—is all rowing in the same direction. A real business plans ahead, as the real CEO steers the ship toward successful shores.
The American Dream1 beseeches each individual to strive for the skies with tenacious, unflappable, courageous go-getterism. Here in ‘Merica, we make things happen. We ask employees to be entrepreneurial, treating the company like it is their own, and we require entrepreneurs to be even more relentless because for better and for worse, there is no one—other than the market—to rate their performance.
So it is with a touch of embarrassment that I admit something: the best things that have happened in my career, my business, and my life, are almost always the ones I didn’t plan for; I was only lucky to receive them. A decade ago, after a Saturn Return existential crisis rewired my brain, away from specific ideas of what I could or should want and toward surrender instead, I have mostly held onto just one wish.2
It is possible that all my “problems” of the last few years are subconsciously intentional, flowing downstream from this stubborn philosophy. After all, I am an unreliable CEO. One look at my balance sheet reveals as much.
I try to reconcile all this with a saying my career coach friend taught me years ago: “If you want to be hit by the luck truck, you have to stand in the middle of the road.” Sure, I have done things to eek my way closer to that dashed yellow line, but even those impulses, ideas, and actions were mostly gifts from grace.
“You are the kind of guy who always hopes for a miracle at the last minute.”
—Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984)
If I’m being generous, I could lean on the esoteric Human Design system (whose charts I find deeply confusing no matter how many times I try to grok them). I would tell you that because I’m a Generator, I operate best like a magnet. I must wait for things to come before responding based on gut feeling and intuition.
According to Genetic Matrix:
Generators are designed to flow in the “now” with the current of life, taking their cues for action as they appear. Generators are not here to worry about the future. Their correct future will come automatically if they respond in the “now” to what life gives to them.
The Sacral Center can only respond in the moment with a “yes” or “no” answer.
I’m like an understudy in an off-Broadway play who waits to be called up for my moment. There are countless examples of such career-changing boons; to name a few: