Heidegger once pointed out that we never experience our own death, only those of others. If we envision our death, we move into another sphere.
We leave everyday life and its commonality with its rituals, conventions and clichés – what Heidegger calls the “inessential core of being” - completely behind and encounter the essence of our character and recognize what is real and what we live for: our values
It is not by chance that a deep personal experience is often at the beginning of a thorough reflection on the value of life. A heavy illness, a sudden redundancy, a difficult break up with a partner or bankruptcy can lead to you thinking for the first time about the real values in life. Possibly you feel disappointed, conned, abandoned, and punished. But why this whining? This is the beginning of the rest of your life. And possibly the real beginning of your success. What will people say about me at my graveside? The answer is synonymous with the contribution you made to the human race: your worth, your values, those attributes for which you want to have the thanks and recognition of your fellow human beings.
It is only recently, possibly since the end of the industrial age and the beginning of the service age, that work can even be fun. We don’t have to work as hard as before. And we can choose for ourselves what we want to do. If you follow your own way, you don’t have the feeling of working. You feel led on by your sense of curiosity. You aren’t dealing with something, something is dealing with you. If the “background program” consists of your own values, you have your model. Tie this model to your curiosity and your life will pay out in cash. It is not normal in our latitudes to connect economic success with these values. No, it is even considered reprehensible to want to earn money from your personal and social interests. According to the protestant ethic – one of the founding tenets of western civilization – hard work is the only way of being redeemed after death and received into eternal life. Work in this sense is more of a punishment or probation: the exile from paradise is the beginning of the necessity of working, and work is the only way back to heaven. “First comes work and then pleasure” is the well known formula of our social system of values, which vulgarizes this principle. Or: “work is work, beer is beer”. Work in its classic meaning is martyrdom: it causes pain. And it should cause pain. Work, as Karl Marx had already concluded in the 19th century, is alienation from oneself.
The question is not how you live, but why.
F
or the first time it is possible to abolish the historical separation of “work” and “pleasure”, “9 to 5” and “5 to 9”, working hours and holidays in our modern economy. There are more and more people who are actually able to make use of the German shop opening hours because they are no longer forced to work during this time.
But you enjoy “working” whenever you want to, including weekends or in the night, if you go your own way. You do what nourishes you, permanently and gladly. Someone who is comfortable with himself knows his worth, his values and the price at which he can sell himself.
To reach that stage we must go back to death again. How do I feel about the thought of it? Am I frightened of it? What stops me from dying? Is there anything for which I would give my life? To answer such questions to yourself is anything but deadly. It enables you to think about life and its value. If there is anything worth dying for, then it is also worth living for.
What obsesses you so much that you would dedicate your whole life to it? And why aren’t you doing it? Because we all prefer to play it safe.
In the classical division between job and pleasure we land in a job after our training that we like more or less, receive compensation for the time we spend there, instead of uniting work and pleasure. We would have to suffer less and would not abandon ourselves to partially senseless occupations, hobbies or chronic partying. What are you waiting for? Your old age pension?
Use questions about death to discover possibilities. Devote some time to it, a little solitude, and pen and paper. No distractions, no email nearby, no cell phone, not even a normal phone. Rent a hut on an alpine meadow. Do not take your partner with you. If I had only a year to live, what would I do in the time remaining? What should take priority? If the doctor told you that you had only thirty days to live, what would you concentrate on? And what if it were only a day, an hour? And how much time would you spend in self-pity?
The answers to these questions are the beginning of a lifelong search for the really important things in your life – the much quoted “meaning of life”. Your meaning, your values.
The secret is this. If there were no death we would not think about our lives. Death is there to make sense of our lives. A rich, meaningful life therefore entails coming to terms with our own death.
Then we see ourselves as we really are. The closer we get to our own real values, the more alive we feel. You can judge your values by the vitality and energy within you. They will be carried over into everything around you, including employees and customers, once these values become “lived”.
They are deep and therefore longer lasting than everything else. One of the largest and most successful hotel chains in the world is the Hyatt Regency Hotel. In his autobiography the heir to the chain explains the fundamental principle of its long term success. The “core values” of the founder have been passed on from generation to generation and taken up by all employees. It doesn’t have anything to do with visions on the drawing board during weekend conferences, but with deep human values that are according to the Hyatt family genuine and long lasting. Above all “the spirit to serve”.
The possibility of always being able to perceive what guests lack and what they expect, to put oneself in their place or their character and their demands, automatically raises the quality and promotes progress, so that there is hardly one stone left upon another in spite of the lasting values in the over 70 year old history of the Hyatt chain.
Its reputation as one of the leading international hotel chains justifies these “core values”, in accordance with the Lampedusa motto: “Everything has to be changed so that everything can stay the same.”
Paradigm of values: “the performance scale”
T
he following seven chapters describe all the stages in the development of a business up to the moment when the original occupation becomes a business. You have to cross these “seven bridges”-there is no way round.
The only alternative is to stand still or to go back. There is no compulsion: you will find yourself automatically on a higher level. That can be recognized from the mental development of the company, its state and your own state of mind. However once you have adopted the road to a self-employed career, it would be sad to back down.
Look at it as your preparatory phase before your personal big bang, after which you will get in on the act in the world of business and thereby realize your personal goals and become increasingly fulfilled.
The performance scale (see Fig. 1) outlines your business activities. The subsequent development up to the launch is not only intended for the planning phase, but for you to discover your mission, to set goals, to learn how to sell and to try out a succession of projects in order to test whether your dreams can be realized out there in the real world.
The lower half of the performance scale can be called the theoretical, the upper the practical. We prefer to talk about the conception and the action phases.
Our approach has nothing to do with numbers. If you are looking for a business plan you won’t find one here. Although we strongly advise you to make one.
A
