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It's a little past four on a Saturday morning. My tumultuous week has subsided for now. Starting a company is like crossing the Atlantic in a dinghy. The least wind-gust can speed or capsize you.
The quiet seems strange and wonderful after my noisy days. I used to be used to quiet. I was a writer. Quiet is a writer's habitat. He hears voices in the silence. What he has to say emerges out of the hush. When people are gabbling, he cannot hear himself thinking. In too much noise a writer drowns.
Business is all about talking. Business is two, or 200, or 200,000 people collaborating to get something done. To collaborate you have to talk. The talk may be aloud or written or phoned or mailed or emailed, it is all talk. The art of business is listening closely and responding appropriately. It's as simple as that.
In business there is always an interesting question to discuss: what next? A business is a body that must evolve. Stronger or weaker, faster or slower, it is never the same yesterday and today. The slightest symptom an itch or a sneeze might indicate a deeper sickness. Managers should be worrywarts, always taking their patient's pulse. Metrics, statistics, accounting are ways of taking a business' pulse.
I enjoy taking care of our business. In these rare interludes of quiet, I think of our business as an infant. It seems very healthy but who knows? It might develop chicken pox. It might roll out of its crib and crack its head.
In my years as a writer, I tended to denigrate business. Like many writers I sniffed that Art was about making meaning while Business was about making money. It is human nature to see our own occupation as superior to the rest.
Business is not about making money not our business, anyhow. True, we have to make money to stay in business. The more money we make, the faster we grow. We like to make money. But money is the result of what we do, not our reason for doing it. Our reason is to tell neighbors what's going on in their towns and to help our neighbors' businesses grow. If our neighbors' businesses grow their workers will be happier, they will spend more and contribute more to their communities. Moderate wealth is not a luxury. It enables us to be civil, generous, kind.
When I was a writer I used to wonder why we exist. This is typical of writers. Sitting alone in a silent room, with no ideas coming, the writer feels useless. He thinks, What difference do I really make on earth? He gets gloomy.
Helping to build our business I am cheerful every day. Not every day is victorious, but every day our business needs me and benefits from my exertions. By making our business better I make life better for my teammates and for the neighbors we serve. Every headline I sharpen or storeowner I convince or rookie I instruct, I am improving life for the folks our business touches. The distinction between business and philanthropy is a false one. Any job worth doing is philanthropic.
The sun is rising on a new day. Sometimes I am sorry I don't have more time to enjoy my time, to study the flowers and squirrels, to read wisdom and poems. Our business keeps me busy every waking hour. If I had ten times more waking hours, it would keep me busy.
Our American myth decries work as a necessary evil. Free time is supposedly happy time. Vacation, days off, weekends, retirement are our rewards for striving.
My experience is the opposite. Work makes me happy. I sleep to wake to work. I rest so I can work better. Empty time I look on with a kind of dread. Work gives me purpose. What use would I be if I did not work?
The cruelest thing Americans do is to force each other to retire. There are sound practical reasons to replace older with younger workers; still, it's a vicious practice. After a lifetime of being needed, suddenly you are superfluous, a drain on the system, not a contributor. I don't wonder that older people get cranky. I get cranky just thinking about it.
The greatest gift we can give our kids is the necessity to work. The other day a rich person boasted to me that his kids would "never have to work." I congratulated him, since he wanted to be congratulated. Silently, I thought, "What a decent, hard-working, conscientious guy and what a monster."
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