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?

Guest Blogger Lewis Green from Biz Solutions Plus

-Excerpted from Lead With Your Heart by Lewis Green

Happiness is the driving force behind everything Americans do. It is the key to determining their wants, needs and desires. It is the essence of the American Dream and is as important as the air you breathe. Even our Declaration of Independence calls for the pursuit of happiness. And yet a 2006 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 34 percent of Americans consider themselves “very happy,” 50 percent “pretty happy,” and fifteen percent report that they are “not too happy.”

One of the most popular courses at Harvard University teaches happiness and creating “a fulfilling and flourishing life.” In fact, the course on “Positive Psychology” outdraws “Introductory Economics.” That scares me. Have we have gone so far down the road of work, power, and greed that we need to be taught about happiness?

I believe these examples point to an overactive, overachieving, over-stressed population chasing after broken dreams. On the other hand, this information points to an untapped market your business can penetrate. The savvy businessperson will do everything possible to ensure that his or her business is people-centered and not primarily focused on the bottom line. My belief is that if you do good, your business will do well. Here’s one reason why:

From the various reports I’ve read, it seems that at least 65 percent of all Americans want great business experiences that will help make them happy. Even the “very happy” folks can be moved to a higher happiness level, creating even greater customer-conversion opportunities for business.

Research also tells us that happy people are more productive and they live longer lives. One study on a Catholic religious community concluded that nuns who had a positive outlook in their 20s lived as much as 10 years longer than those who are less positive. Another research project focused on a group of people who kept a daily diary for six months recording only those things that went well on any given day. The conclusion was that these participants were happier and healthier than those participants who did not focus on positive thinking. Both studies imply that businesses could increase productivity and work attendance by focusing on happiness in the work place.

I do not suggest that happiness waits just around the corner and it is easily within our grasp. Happiness defined in the Lead With Your Heart business model looks like this:

• Business is people-centered. People come before profit in every instance.
• Its values talk to making the world a better place to live and work.
• Business understands the wants, needs, and desires of it employees and its customers.
• It creates products, services, value, prices, and most important, experiences that meet or exceed people’s wants, needs, and desires.

Only a blind, dumb, and extremely arrogant business community would ignore the data and the business potential inherent in making people happier—and not just consumers. In fact, I argue, as have a few others before me, that your employees must first feel as sense of happiness about the company they work for and the work they do if a business’s customers and clients are to experience levels of happiness that keep them coming back.

Lewis Green
Founder of L&G Business Solutions

What Are You Doing to Ensure Happiness in Your Business Community?

Is actually a blessing. Why? For a zillion reasons but let’s look at one of those reasons with a billion implications. All positive. All life affirming. All for the greater good of the romantics and the world they inhabit.

More CEOs have graduated from Princeton than any other school. And guess what, this grand dame of the Ivy League doesn’t have a business school nor will it permit undergrads to major in business. That may be because it offers virtually no business courses.

So how does it cultivate CEOs? Because it germinates romantics. By this, I mean young men and women who read poetry, contemplate art, study architecture, drink too much, read Catcher In The Rye 100 times. They are the dreamers. They are the ones who come up with every earth-changing idea in the world. Hold on. Zig zag. I just happened to see an interview with opera legend Luciano Pavarotti who died recently. I am not an opera fan and knew little about him. And then I see and hear him talk about life, love and success and I, who think of myself as a romantic, see the real thing and I feel like an aluminum siding salesman next to this Italian giant. He ruled opera, yes, but he could have taken Dell to the next level when the founder stepped back. One reason the PC maker has been slumping is that its PC’s are dull. They’ve lost their sheen. Gone commodity. Pavarotti, with no business experience (like those liberal arts CEO’s) would never allow dull in his world. Fallen in love with a woman who entered his life out of the blue, he is asked by Mike Wallace, why he is in love with her. “If you know the answer,” Pavarotti says, “you are not in love.”

Today, Roger Federer won the US Open Tennis championship for the forth time in four years. A modern record. And he may be the greatest player of all time. And he is not a tennis machine. Not a tennis engineer. He is a European romantic. He attends the Open with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. He refuses to study films of his opponents. “I watch their games for 15 seconds and that’s all I need.” A legion of would be tennis stars are deeply engaged in tennis physics. You have never heard their names. Federer is an artist. You know this. So will your grandchildren.

Einstein was the greatest romantic. Loved women. Loved music. Loved everything. He said that his scientific knowledge was important, but “my imagination enables me to encircle the globe.” And he arrived at relativity by allowing himself to fantasize about the impossible and work backwards to the possible. Precisely what Pavarotti’s woman said.

The world is built for crowd control. It can’t take too many romantics. So it sets up a system that tells us how to think and act. That way, there is order. And the engineers, actual and virtual engineers, breathe order. It is their oxygen.

And it is the vampire cross to the romantics. Look forward. The nerds won’t inherit the earth. The engineers won’t build the next great companies.

It will the Picasso’s, the Pavarotti’s… the Romantics.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How Will You Show Your Romance?

I went for a hike yesterday to sort through a major quandary. Or so I told myself. You see, I convinced myself that all the gods were conspiring against me. They had a meeting in heaven and Mark Stevens was tops on the agenda. Specifically, they were going to see to it that he had no place to turn. No road to run down. I was facing a business dilemma-or so I told myself-that I was turning into a life dilemma. A major chapter in the history of Western civilization. More than that, a biblical epic.

As I carefully constructed this drama, I made sure it was one of those stories Hollywood hates. There would be no happy ending here. How could there be: all the roads were closed. Every strategy I thought about, pondered endlessly, brought to life in a film noir I was directing, wound up on a dead end. Whoa, I was making damn sure that there was no viable exit from my business dilemma and that I had every right, excuse me, to feel terribly sorry for myself. The gods had it in for me and when they feel that strongly about a marketing guy and his business issues, well there’s a place in hell waiting for him.

And then the hike. And then the epiphany. All the roads are NEVER closed. In fact, none of the roads are ever closed. Not if you want to take a five minute break from feeling sorry for yourself and apply your creativity, your determination, your imagination and your guts to simply going down THE road you want to follow. I don’t care if every member of the Harvard Business School faculty says THAT road is closed. I don’t care if the Bishop Of Canterbury says it’s closed. I don’t care if an act of Congress says it’s closed. It’s not. Order takers, rules players, worshipers of conventional wisdom may be paralyzed by these decrees but the people in business and in life (which I happen to think are one and the same) who blow open the conventions and put genius in their place, they pick a closed road and walk confidently down the middle and no one is going to stop them.

Where do you see the myth of a closed road now? Where do you want to go in your career, your company, your business that the naysayers are telling you… well, sorry, but you can’t go there, do that, or think that. Revisit the issue. Look at it through a prism. Stand on your head and see it upside down.

I can guarantee you one thing: All the roads, every beautiful and glorious one of them, are open.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me How You Keep Your Roads Open.

You dream a thousand days and nights and work to the point of exhaustion to build something of great and enduring value. And then you turn around to see that it has fallen from the sky. Crashed to the earth. Lying there in pieces on the ground. What you do at that moment of truth is of overwhelming importance to your success, or lack of it, as a businessperson, marketer, entrepreneur, liver of life, lover, inventor, and romantic.

It begins by recognizing that it is not really a moment of truth. It is a phase of a continuum. If you are to make your true mark as a business person, marketer, liver of life, lover, inventor, romantic:

You must recognize right there at that moment of head on confrontation with the realities of life, that the pieces can be put together again. Or that they can be rearranged into a different type of satellite that will follow another flight path. Or that you can scrap all of the pieces you built your dream on and find others and others and others until you create the code breaker and the great and enduring achievement of your life stays in orbit. A beautiful vision to behold. Everyone is a genius, a winner, a king or a queen when a product, a service, a company, a love takes off. When it soars from a laboratory, a boardroom or a country road, and glides into the blue. But few of the kings, queens and geniuses retain those titles when they are standing there, alone and pole axed, staring at the pieces on the ground.

The greats, which we all can and should aspire to be, view these moments as beginnings, as challenges, as calls to action to find out what went wrong and how to fix it. Or more than that, to rethink everything from the blueprint stage and up and to create a new kind of satellite, software, company, that defies convention, flies in wild gyrations as opposed to predictable orbits and creates a new category far different than what you dreamed of from the start.

A category that first came to you when you stared at the pieces on the ground and saw not the disconnects but instead where the wise and true connections could be made. Anyone can walk away from anything, depressed, defeated and even bitter that it didn’t have a happier ending, a more fruitful result, a more stunning breakthrough. John McEnroe was just another talented mid-level kid on the tennis circuit until he walked on the court one day, saw the pieces on the ground, and
said, “this isn’t about beautiful ground strokes, it’s algebra. It’s all about angles.” with that he rearranged the pieces and became champion of the world.

It’s what we do when we see the broken pieces, not the achievements, that makes the difference in our lives. In our grand and blessed continuum.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me How You Recovered.

When people are proud of themselves, it is often for their minds. Those complex calculating machines that sit on our shoulders and turn everything in life into decision trees.

Is this good? Is it right? Is it fair?

Will it be good and right and fair months from now? Years? Days? The decision machine, the mind, keeps analyzing the variables. Looking for the perfect answer…in an imperfect world. How absurd. How naive and self-defeating: looking for the perfect in an imperfect world.

The heart, at the other side of the spectrum, keeps pumping out passion. Like a child untainted by rules of the system, it reacts to what it sees as good in life and what it wants to embrace, without a single caveat: it is true, spontaneous and alive. Unchecked, unfettered and unplugged.

This is the titanic struggle in life, in business, in love. As business people, we must all beware of this. And we must wonder as we approach our prospects, our markets, what will prevail: the mind or the heart. Will people like your products or services and buy them or will their minds squash the deal with concerns on price and practicality. Do I really need this? Is this priced well? I already have black shoes, what right do I have to buy more? Is that good use of my money? Am I being a responsible person? What will others think?

The Mind, you see, has no heart and in the worst cases, zillions of cases, it holds the heart hostage. And the prospect will not buy. Will not indulge in its dreams and will succumb to the “what if’s.”

But there is a way to reverse this and empower the heart to prevail. To buy what the prospect sees and likes and wants even though the heartless calculator of the mind finds endless reasons why this is not good or right or fair. That is how to transition prospects from like to love. In cases where the prospect, the customer, falls in love with what you are selling and how you are selling it, the heart will take over and the sale will be made regardless of the million and one reasons the mind will invent to deprive the soul of the joy of the expensive, the impractical, the unacceptable, the inappropriate. Standing in front of a beautiful new car that is slightly out of your reach, ignites the mind/heart battle. If the design and packaging makes you fall in love, you will buy and find a way to keep it. And love it. And live your life your way, with a wonderful sense of abandon.

People divide into these camps: those who lead with the heart and the others who are paralyzed by the mind. As a businessperson, your mission is to melt the mind and light the heart. If you don’t, they will walk away empty-handed. A sure sign that they liked but never loved. And as in human relations, a sure sign that they are deprived of each other. The mind thought the desire to death and killed it. No one buys jewelry, Prada, iPhones, vacations to St. Barts with their minds. They buy with their hearts. Find a way to show them the love when there is no glamour-the rustic appeal of LL Bean boots, the quiet charm of most anything that carries the Martha Stewart brand-and you will make the critical transition from like to love.

From the mind to the heart. And in those cases where you can’t walk away, there are prospects of passion just across the street.

Mark Stevens
CEO

You wake up in the morning and you look at your clock and you get dressed and you go to work and you come home, eat dinner, watch TV and start the cycle all over again, every moment wishing for the weekend. What a miserable way to do this thing called LIVING. Why do you do it this way? In all likelihood, it’s because you see only one path. One route to your goals. One way to be a success. One way to bring value to your job. One way to grow your business. One way to be a friend. One way to learn, enjoy a special moment, make love, cope with pain, maximize joy…the whole crazy ass stew that is LIFE. One way?

No way! There are a million ways to run through your days, your years. All you need is a willingness to experiment. To eschew the safe and narrow. To put your butt on the line. To dream crazy dreams and turn them into reality. To forget the call for a safety net. To walk the high wire, come hell or high water.

It’s all a meteor shower. Is that dangerous or infinitely beautiful? Scary or exhilarating? The answer, that one damn answer, defines your life. Because if you see the fear, if you live it, if you are shackled by it, you get under the covers and hide. Not literally-because there is no place to hide-but instead by getting up, getting dressed, going to work, going through the motions, wishing for the weekend, waiting for Godot, eating Jell-O, blaming everyone for the fact that you go nowhere and are bored by the cocoon you have built for yourself. That’s what the routine is: just another way to hide under the covers. You take no chances. You have no risk. You are safe.

What a Pyrrhic Victory.

I am a businessman. This is a business blog. That doesn’t mean it has to follow the Harvard case study approach. That turns out managers who “live” by the book. And they are a curse to the shareholders in any business.

I just read Time Warner’s CEO Richard Parsons reject the idea that he should be compared to Rupert Murdoch’ because to paraphrase Parsons, the latter has been relentlessly driven to build a media empire and I just have a job to do?

A job to do? The fabulously compensated CEO of a major public company built by Henry Luce and other driven capitalists, and he sees it as just a job. As just one way? One route? If it’s just a job, let the guy who runs the mailroom do it.

Business success and life success are inexorably related. The dreamers, the rule breakers, the visionaries who see a million roads to run, who wouldn’t think of hiding anytime, any day, anyway, they become the Richard Branson’s turning music empires, into airline anomalies, all the while breaking speed limits flying hot air balloons around the world.

Hide? Routine? Safety? Guarantees? Are these words in your vocabulary? If so, turn up the electric blanket and go back to sleep.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me How You Plan to Expand Your Business Horizons.

There is no doubt that right now, in mid-2007, Google is the premier company in the world. It buys all of the best minds, it drives them to keep making the impossible, possible, it grows its business model almost daily and it makes it all work, cubed. It seems there is nothing Google can’t do.

So I say it’s time for the search engine, advertising, algorithm crunching juggernaut to buy Starbucks. Starbucks? Why the hell would they want to do that? Because what used to be one of the true stars of the corporate galaxy-a Google of its industry-is now a sad, tired, arrogant, sloppy, remnant of the past. Yesterday, I had breakfast with a friend in the Starbucks in New Canaan, CT. Did I say breakfast? Airlines don’t serve such plastic food. But we were there and hungry so we picked the best of the worst and then set out to find a table outdoors. Oh, there were plenty of tables, but we had the temerity to want a CLEAN one. At the Starbucks 2007, that is always mission impossible. So we bused the table ourselves and enjoyed the autumn like day in New England. And then we both had to use the restrooms and let me say I’m glad we ate first. I know this store has been open for years-and it used to be a delight when Starbucks still had the word “customer” in its lexicon-but I don’t think the restrooms have ever been cleaned. EVER! My friend and I could only debate if the ladies room was more disgusting than the men’s, or vice versa.

What is happening to Starbucks is an all-too familiar corporate scenario: once it looks like you can’t do wrong, that the cash machine will just keep on pumping, management loses its intensity or becomes distracted or just doesn’t give a damn anymore. And the arc that every business moves through slides south, slowly at first, and then into a dizzying freefall. Now Starbucks has a zillion shops selling ok coffee in filthy surroundings adorned with prison food. So imagine Google steps in. In months, every Googlebucks is wireless, plasma TV screens line the walls, video games are built into the spotless tables, Thai specialties are worked behind the gleaming counter, and on and on. You wouldn’t recognize the place. Amen.

Some months ago middle of the road hotel giant Marriott paid a visit to ultra chic and inventive hotelier, Ian Schrager. Marriott is the behemoth of the hotel industry, Schrager a virtual gnat next to them. But Bill Marriott is a big enough man to admit his dynasty of a company can learn from Schrager. Absorb some of its sex appeal and open doors to the boutique segment Marriott is absent from. Most companies would not admit they lack the DNA to create a product with an entirely different culture than their own. But not Bill Marriott. So he boarded a plane, ate humble pie and asked Schrager for help. They will partner in 100 hotels around the world. And the experience will impact Marriott’s 2,900 locations. For the better.

Marriott needs a dose of Schrager. Starbucks needs a dose of Google. Starbucks is on too high a horse to ask for it. So Google go buy the fading star and remind them what a great business looks like.

Once we stop learning, once we start thinking we have it all figured out, we become Chrysler, General Motors, and Jet Blue. Dumb companies selling junk to people they couldn’t care less about.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me How You Will Avoid Being Another Dumb Company.

Everyone has a dream. Martin Luther King’s was a Mother of a dream. Yours may appear petty in comparison…to everyone but you. It is yours and it is magnificent and sweeping and grand: The best that can be. But the question is, will it ever make the cosmic transition from dream to reality?

The truth is, life races by and the dreams wave back. And you keep promising that you will turn the dream into reality, but you don’t. You blame it on the gods and circumstances and religion and tradition and other people, but it’s you that builds the wall you refuse to pass through. Just you.

Life is a precious gift. To refuse to live it to its utmost, to the extreme -in effect, to seize the dream- is a form of “sin.” Not the kind you go to hell for but a more insidious kind that deprives you of what can and should be the most important thing in your life. When King Edward VII of England fell passionately in love with Wallis Simpson, the only way he could fulfill his dream and marry her, was to do the undoable: abdicate from the throne. Which he did in a heartbeat. In doing so, in breaking the rules others had set for him, he reversed the general and passive order of things: his dreams took flight and life threw a kiss for his courage and his passion.

I walk into countless meetings and hear of dreams. I fly in planes and hear of dreams. I attend conferences and hear of dreams. And I love dreamers because they have the electricity of life. But so often it remains static electricity. “My career would be what I really want it to be, but…”, “My company would break new ground in our industry and achieve truly dramatic breakthroughs, however…”

Dreams are like snowflakes. They dance from the sky and powder the world with possibilities and in most every case, melt and disappear, leaving nothing but what might have been in their place.

Those who took the snowflake in mid flight and refused to let it melt dominate the history of the world. Abraham Lincoln would not let the dream of a great and enduring republic vanish. That fact that there were armies of men slaughtering each other did not stop him. Franklin Roosevelt had a dream of a near broken America rising up from its despair to its finest potential. That he could not stand without braces did not stop him from carrying the whole damn world on his back. Edwin Land’s daughter asked him why it took so long to produce a photograph and he dreamed and created instant photography. Rosa Parks dreamed of sitting in the front of a bus. And with the threat of death all around her, that is precisely what she did.

At this moment, in companies and firms and homes around the world, millions of dreams are out there, in holding patterns, waiting to take flight. Will yours? Life WILL fly by.

The question is, will your dreams wave back? Snowflakes of the mind?

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me About Your Dreams…

Everything in life is doomed at the start. There is no question that it will have a trajectory, the only mystery is how long and far the flight will last. A heat-seeking missile embedded within whatever you have built, simply waits for the right time to fire and bring it to the ground. Why? We haven’t a clue. But in our moments of champagne euphoria, it is good to be armed with the knowledge of the truth. With the knowledge that this too will pass. With the knowledge that behind it, another rocket is ready to launch. Another journey ready to be taken. Renewal is one of the true majesties of life. Interesting, we think the end, of a business, a job, a passion, a relationship, tells us something about the beginning. But the polar opposite is true. The beginning and the end are born at precisely the same time. But in the giddiness of the new we refuse to see that it is an imposter for the end. All of the fault lines and limitations and physics and DNA that will destroy it, are there in full view when the opening toasts are made.

Imagine if we looked for them. If we engaged in due diligence at the start. Hunted down the enemies of the good and the beautiful and the successful-the enemies of longevity-and destroyed them before they ruined what we have built. What we adored. What we looked at with amazing pride. What we had every right to be proud of because we vested it with care and intellect and creativity and drive and faith. Blind faith. Reckless faith. Joyous faith.

It would change nothing. You have to throw yourself at the things you create in life with wonderful abandon and let them fly for as long as the gods allow. Probably the truest axiom is that the secret to life is enjoying the passage of time. That’s all you need to do… and it is endlessly wonderful. Because when the business dies, you can form another. When the job turns into a drudge, you can walk across the street. When the strategy or the campaign fails-and ultimately it will-you can rethink it and raise the curtain on ACT II.

It is just important to know at the start-not to dwell on it but to know-that there will inevitably be an ACT II. And you are alive. And you can seize it. We all have to live knowing that there is so much we do not and cannot understand. The trick is never to let that mystery hold us hostage. Or stop us from taking risk.

Until we know why the sun never shines at night and the moon never cries in the morning, we are on our own. Free to build and create and manage and love, knowing the uncertainty just makes it more enthralling.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell me what in your life, your work, have you forgotten has a trajectory?