The Truth Is But Lies In Disguise So we all know The Truth.
It comes to us from truth tellers who invent The Rules of Life and package it for us as the gospel. And then we drink the Kool Aid and the longer it’s out there on the shelves, the more we accept it as Divine. Inarguable. Bullet proof.
To me, it’s all a joke. Who has the right to create rules? Who tests their validity? Who starts dutifully following them and then passes the virus on to others? And who needs them. Life is best when we face the issues with a blank page and write the rules, our rules, as we go along. Any other way is an extended stay in hostageville.
Let’s take The Rules Of Business:
- A low turnover rate among employees is a sign of a healthy company. (Whenever I find businesses where almost no one ever leaves or is dismissed, I usually find a lazy culture that rewards mediocrity. I think they call it the Post Office.).
- It is always best to promote from within. (But what if a person more qualified for the job is at another company? Make due with second best? Why?)
- Seniority should be a key component of the formula for calculating compensation and authority within a company. (So if the greatest contributor to revenues and profitability is far younger than the oldest slacker in the office, the star should make less? Are you kidding Rule Maker?)
- Great companies arrive at decisions through consensus. (Actually, consensus building is a miserable excuse for inaction. Have you ever attended the UN? It will make you run for your life every time you hear the word consensus.)
- Don’t embark on a new initiative until research shows you it will succeed. (For the most part, research is for cowards and college
- Professors. Oh, I know it’s good to test the waters and crunch some numbers, but business is like war. All the plans and assumptions change when the first shot is fired. Trying to figure out a perfect path to success before you launch an enterprise, means you will be paralyzed in planning while the real entrepreneurs go out and make it happen, taking their lumps and making mid course corrections along the way.)
Liberation Day. You are free to ignore The Truth, recognizing that it is just a feel good myth Homer Simpson created in his basement. Mark Stevens
CEO
When The Words Lose Their Meaning And The Meaning Loses Its Words
We are deep in the midst of the holiday season and a lovely time of year it can be.
But I have a question: Isn’t every day a holy day? Do holy days have a season or is life a string of holy days?
Actually, I firmly believe the latter is true. Is there ever a day of our lives that is not a wonder? That we are not blessed by God in the most extraordinary way?
The problem is, so many of our words have lost their meaning. Holidays are no longer thought of as holy days. They are viewed as turkey days and gift buying days. And that is the polar opposite of the original purpose and the true meaning embedded in the words.
This is endemic throughout our society. What do the words trust, faith, love, honor, commitment really mean? Timeless and enduring qualities, of course, but when these words are used without thought, when the holy is buried in holiday, when the thanks in Thanksgiving is simply six letters tacked on to six more, we lose something so rich and deep that can make all of life that more precious.
We lose the honesty that makes things genuine. And by “things,” I mean relationships… The bonds between family members, friends and lovers. Unless these unions are knitted together with words and actions ripe with true meaning, they are mere pretenses. Hollow games people play to try and camouflage the truth. But the truth insists on revealing itself.
All of this is true in business as it is in the ways of the heart. Do we tell our clients and customers we care about them and then treat them as just another set of numbers locked in a server? The answer is almost a universal “yes.” So much so that when a company, a manager, an entrepreneur is determined to treat the people in their world with genuine care, with words that have meaning, then we witness right before our eyes that the holy is the beacon in holiday and we are astounded by it.
It is a mistake to think we live in Balkanized worlds: the personal, the business, the religious. The walls we often think clearly divide these realms are mythical.
When we purchase something from an automobile company or a pharmacy, we no longer believe we are initiating a relationship. We think we are buying something…engaging in a cold and common transaction. So when a company or a pharmacy gives back more than a product but a set of human values along with it, we are touched in a way that makes us customers for life. The business, like the lover, like the friend, that demonstrates that the bonds that bind are true and generous and genuine, are of immense value to all of us. We hold them far above the heads of the pretenders.
There is but one world. The same one where the personal, the business and the religious intersect. This is the crossroads of greatness. Not marked by physical strength or wealth or intellectual power, but more by being the kind of person, the kind of business, that adds meaning to our existence. Do you value anything more? Is there a greater goal?
Happy holy days. Everyday.
Mark Stevens
CEO
Five Minutes To Forever
It is ironic that from the earliest days of our cognizant lives, we are programmed to fear its end. Especially, the last five minutes.
This entire notion, this ripe fear and in many cases dread, is preposterous. We have no idea where we came from, and why we arrived in the world, but we are certain that in death we are leaving it. That it represents an end. Finality.
How is it that we admit to looking backwards to our arrival on earth with no knowledge but look forward to our departure with great certainty? A certainty that has no basis. No founding. It is mindful of our predecessors who were convinced that if they sailed into the horizon, they would fall off the face of the earth.
Little did they know that the truth was the polar opposite: that they could sail into the horizon for eternity.
The fact is we are preoccupied with living a long life when life as we know it is never long. If we live 100 years, it is but a blip. And to complicate matters, but to introduce an essential reality. Whose life was longer, Mozart’s or Jane Smith, who died at 98 after a 60-year career as an insurance actuary. And who hated her work from the moment she left college and took a seat in her cubicle at Homestead Life Insurance Co.?
We have a monumental choice before us all: to be in the life fulfillment business-meaning we live every day without concern for when it ends, if it does, or to be in the life protection business-meaning we spend nearly every day seeking to postpone or circumvent the inevitable.
All too many people do the latter. And in the process, they waste so much of the joy of being alive on this earth. They seek safety. They run from risk. They make sure not to work too hard. They are sticklers about having balance in their lives, whatever that means. They look askance at those who burn the candles at both ends, walk the high wire without a safety
net. Start companies with their life savings. Quit “good” jobs for careers that bring them joy. Abdicate the throne to marry a lover.
The only way to truly live, to achieve success as a manager, artist, factory worker, actor, CEO, mother, father, friend-is to do it with abandon. Without fear of when it will end. The more you try to control the ending, the less control you have over it. It won’t ask for your permission. It won’t ask for your timetable. It will just end. Nothing you can do will stop it.
And that’s the good news. You can let go. It’s out of your hands. And even better, the last five minutes here may be the countdown to forever.
Mark Stevens
CEO
How do you live your life before your five minutes are up?
Before The Morning Becomes The Day
There is a moment in time that is paradoxically, timeless and fleeting. It is finite and infinite. Like so much of our existence, it is a Rorshach test of sorts, 
open to whatever we impose upon it. We can view it as the end of the night. We can see it as the dawn of a new day. Or we can treat it as a magical time, a virginal moment, that is a blank page, allowing us to paint our thoughts and dreams on it once we have gone through the night and before we grapple with the day.
For those who crave black and white, this is too much to deal with. It is too poorly defined. It is not about sleeping. It is not about waking. It is, instead, about cultivating the endless possibilities God puts before us and that are so rarely harvested.
All of the great, the astounding ideas in the history of the earth, have come from the “mindless” moments we are free to walk down the street, sit under a tree, lie in a hammock and think freely.
I have always loved the story of Edwin Land walking around Cambridge with his young daughter when she asked “Why does it take so long to see a picture after you photograph it daddy.” Land was about to answer within the confines of current technology when he caught himself and, like the exceptionally intelligent and gifted man he was, asked himself the same question. “Why indeed?” Thus was born Polaroid. And ditto for nearly every extraordinary enterprise and artistic masterpiece through the ages. They are born not when the mind focuses, as conventional wisdom would have you believe, but instead when it floats.
In life, we have but two great possibilities: love and achievement. All else is TV, fast food and cigarettes. If you value the first two, the wondrous two, the divine two, you need to push all else out to sea. And you need to fight for them.
Often, people who don’t know me ask, “What do you do in your free time.” Please tell me what they mean. What is “free time?” Every second carries an opportunity cost. If I don’t spend it well, toward love and achievement, it evaporates
forever. Hard on myself? I will accept the charge, admit to it and keep on relishing every moment.
I thought about John Locke today for the first time in many years. When did he first have the epiphany that we are all born with blank sheets of paper, absent of ideas? I know.
When he was alone. When his mind could drift. In the time he chose not to be free.
Before the morning becomes the day.
Mark Stevens
CEO
What are you writing on your sheets of paper?
Mark Stevens Interviewed by Lewis Green
