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Universal values: trust and sympathy

wo values stand right at the beginning of a successful career: trust and sympathy. You have to gain the trust of your customers before you can earn money. Trust in business means reliability.

No one gives money to someone they don’t trust. Every customer has to feel right from the start that they can rely on you.

As soon as money starts flowing someone is investing trust in you. Sincerity and reliability are the bases of integrity. Corrupt or dishonest enterprises are considerably more threatened with going to hell in a handcart.

A devious person in his private life will also run a devious company. Whoever fails to stick to certain rules which have developed in markets, villages, tribes, bazaars and stock exchanges over millennia holds bad cards. “Business is sympathy” is one rule which unfortunately is increasingly ignored. Sympathy means to put yourself in the place of another.

The vulgar neo-liberal thesis that the accumulation of capital by any means is right because the complete earning population gives back to benefit others through taxation is all too enthusiastically followed. But no one who only knows Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” from a distance believes that. In reality you have to look at the market with the eyes of an “impartial observer” who represents exactly the same morals that society maintains. They function according to the good old golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Treating your fellow human beings as you would like to be treated is not only a good philosophy but also makes a good company. How people perceive your company and your team is decisive for whether your product or service will be in demand. Never before has the sympathy factor been so decisive for commercial success.

No one in modern business has to give money to someone he cannot stand. That goes for the greengrocer on the corner as much as for the car manufacturer. Both are only attractive to people who hold the same values. We all want good products and a measure of sympathy.

When our basic needs are satisfied, the soul comes into play. We become like babies: we need recognition, devotion and tender loving care. Humans are through and through social beings, after all. Unpleasant people get what they deserve, standing on their own at the end – the greatest punishment there is.

People who can stand on their own without having to assert themselves go into the service industry for others and are richly rewarded.

People need tangible presents and heart-felt reality as much as they need air to breathe. That is why there are so many Hollywood films. They are based solely on sympathy. And entertainment is always good for the soul.

Higher values: quality and service

ur modern culture is at last no longer based on the idea of exploitation, but on the idea of quality and service: the entrepreneurs of today think about the question of what people lack and which service they can establish to fill their needs day in and day out. Instead of telling others what we want, we learn to create greater values for others.

A better quality of life raises the value of our lives. We lead a healthier, more conscious and more dignified life than our forefathers. Once you have established your values, you will know what service or product to offer. It is what people and the human race in general have been waiting for.

To arrive at this point you have to face up to a couple of hard questions: what people will say about you after your death and how you deal with your real and not your constructed reality.

We strive after perfection in this new, positive environment. We expect perfect service everywhere, or we go somewhere else. We look for quality and are prepared to pay a higher price for it. Humanity in the sense of putting yourself in the place of others sets a new standard of excellence.

Only the best service counts. In Japan for example the level of service is considerably higher than in the “service desert Germany”. Japanese or Americans feel among us as we do in Bulgaria. The service ideas are lying in the street. There is a lot to do. Pick them up.

A person who lives according to his highest values knows no fear. Of course you will experience moments of fear, but you can look them in the eye. You aren’t standing in front of a gaping hole.

Values are the wires along which you can pass over the conflicts, dangers and obstacles in life with the sureness of a sleepwalker. It is said that when we are at the threshold of death an inner film of our lives passes before us. You can be the director. It doesn’t even have to be death. Fear of losing your livelihood is enough. Short term hardships like cash flow problems are sufficient. They are resolved by interim solutions and don’t challenge you to reflect on which point in your life you have arrived at.

Necessity creates discovery. Our mother at the beginning of the chapter is at the end: at the same moment she is standing at the beginning. The moment she began to tell a story, she discovered the greatest talent that life has given her. She has continued the story up to this very day and she has become one of the richest women in the world. She is Joanne K. Rowling. Apparently she still likes to write in cafes.

Sources:

Marriott, J.W. Jr. & Brown, Kathi Ann. The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Mandeville, Bernard de. The Parable of the Bees.

YOUR MISSION

„Roll out your guns, let’s pretend, it’s fun to lose.“

(Nirvana, „Smells like teen spirit“)

Ladies, if there is one thing that we can do it is talk. Whereas men waste about 2000 words every day and try to keep it short, we easily, fluently and chattily raise the number to roughly 9000. Further evolutionary and biological reasons can no doubt be found for the fact.

But we find that we should enjoy and capitalize on this ability and a few others as well. What was it that Lisa Stansfield sang so cutely? “I’m no classy lady, but I’m all woman.” In modern business you can be both lady and all woman. Why that is the case and how it functions emerges during this somewhat pragmatic phase when you find your mission.

What is a mission? The Englishwoman Anita Roddick also probably didn’t know exactly at the beginning of her career. But she had a sweet little idea that had amusing consequences at first: she had scarcely opened her first shop when she drew down on herself the energetic protests of the countless funeral homes on the same street.

Her shop had absolutely nothing to do with funeral homes. On the contrary, she had called it “The Body Shop” because of living bodies. But that alone would be nothing new. She brought two things together: her idea of the world harmonized completely with nature (which was very revolutionary and avant garde at that time) combined with products made from natural ingredients that enhance the lives of human beings, who are part of nature, after all.

That’s what we call a mission. And, as is well known, Ms. Roddick has not only achieved it: it has made her one of the richest women in Britain.

Why mission? No sooner have the values which are personally decisive been ascertained when you should accomplish a “mission”? And…isn’t that a little too much pathos? Ask someone who knows what he is talking about: the missionary Albert Schweitzer.

In his opinion you lead a happy life if you want to pursue a specific objective in your life. If you direct and concentrate your values towards a challenging objective, your mission will appear. And then you are happy while you are accomplishing it.

Mission and melancholia

ut like most people, we often renounce what we would really like to have. The “I want that”

of our childhood is forced out of us, though it would make decisions for example much easier.

If you can’t recognize your fundamental impulses, you can’t join the game. But it would be tedious if you attempted to fight against these human impulses.

Instead try to get them under control. Ambition is the impulse that determines the size of your goal. False humility restrains this ambition. If you duck out of the way of these challenges you will notice how the senses become dulled and you fall into a peculiar form of lethargy – the melancholy that arises when you regret in your inmost being not having tackled a goal, and you mooch around more or less aimlessly because of it.

It looks something like this. After getting up you don’t know what to do. But you get by. Every distraction, even including breakfast television, comes to the fore. You arrange to have breakfast with like-minded friends in order to talk yourself into the vale of tears. It is not long in the conversation before there is no way out of it. Then, first a prosecco to it. A small one. Thus weakened, and also to avoid being reminded of past glorious times, you lie down briefly after lunch for starters. In the end it was three “small” proseccos.

Afterwards you drag yourself over to the computer to check your email. And even if the guy you met recently has sent you an enthusiastic email you will never be satisfied with your mail. If anything, you are an email junkie. In the evening a couple of great ideas, especially ones which make sense of your life, occur to you. You make some notes and already your energy has gone. Your energy only stemmed from the guilty feeling that you haven’t done anything else sensible all day in the first place. But the first beer of the evening tastes great again. You meet up with your peers again, because you can be sure that with they will go along with anything you say. What a taxing, tiring day! Although you haven’t done anything. In his thesis on “Melancholia and Society”, Wolf Lepenies describes the phenomenon of melancholia as coming not from inside but out: forms of melancholia, such as lovesickness or other mental symptoms which were treated (mostly by blood-letting) up to the nineteenth century, are indicators of a society which has outlived its time, with failed revolutionaries, bankrupt noblemen and others who lounged about uselessly in the salons of the late nineteenth century without really having anything to do. For they had literally given up their job - or it had been taken from them.

In the modern sense this type of melancholia is of a different nature: an event in your life that continues to have an effect on you such as a separation or a divorce and makes you feel that you have been badly or unjustly treated by someone or, worse, by a man. This feeling dominates you and robs you of the power of looking ahead. You have to get out of this dark corner of the soporific salon.

Charisma: the power of women

omen have one big advantage over men in their careers. At the end of the performance scale, that is to say at the summit of satisfaction, you find yourself in a Buddha-like state: things happen simply because you want them to. You don’t do anything any more, you have an effect. Your magical magnetic power of attraction, the spell of your charisma alone ensures that everything you want comes true. You know this situation. You only have to be standing on your own at a party and send out a couple of signals, play with your feminine charm so that men sniff around out like Pavlovian dogs and, yes, sit up and beg. As is well known, men can always do that. But if the woman isn’t interested they don’t have a chance. And everything that men do, they do only to win women, even if they aren’t aware of it. And if that isn’t an incentive to use this wonderful feminine quality in your career, we don’t know what is. At last that is the aim of this chapter: to show how women can determine their goals.

What would happen to these wonderful values if you didn’t use them? Of course you need a target before you can hit the bull’s eye. And a target needs a playing field, a system of coordinates in which the time span and the challenge are plotted. Then your values will turn into a mission. For one thing has been missing in our notes up to now. And this factor comes into play in this chapter: other people. Your mission is your personal vision of how to use your values in reality. This vision can be brilliant, bombastic, challenging or simply sweet, humane and tender: there is no difference in principle between Joanne K. Rowling with her empire and Mother Theresa. Some people want to change the world, others to have a good life and raise a family. And some want both.

Your mission is a game for life, a strategy which will in every case even fascinate and attract like-minded people. If you ply them with what arouses your curiosity and bring out what is within you, you will not be alone for long. As soon as you channel your values into a coherent mission, your life takes on a sense of direction. You will have comrades-in-arms who love you and want to put the same values into practice with you. Only: the others have to realize that these values can be implemented together.

Up to now we have talked about general values that are important for you. These are abstract values that you have taken for your personal ones. But up to now we haven’t been dealing with concrete things, personal goals, content. Life isn’t a church synod. It is great to be for peace, but it won’t bring you any closer to your goals. Think more individually, more egoistically, more materially: what can I do for peace? What are my intentions? What do I want to be successful at? Not what do I want to be, but what do I want to achieve. This is nothing to do with thanks and recognition for great human endeavors, but with success. Enough of petting, what you need is a brilliant idea, which however you have to be completely convinced by. Then, and only then, will your success be unstoppable.

What arouses my curiosity?

he fundamental question of your mission is: what arouses my curiosity?

What is it that keeps me going, what theme can I play upside down on the keys like Mozart, for what do I have the right touch, will I appear genuine to people, what drives me, what things that others don’t see can I paint in oil if I have to, curiously enough? What devolves on me, what is so easy for me that I am amazed that others don’t find it so?

The answer is very simple: your genius. And your genius consists in exactly those things for which others admire you, even if it is that you are the only one around who can open every kind of tin can. And that’s why missions develop out of things that can be seen. Your mission is no longer an abstract mental picture, but an ability to attract the attention of others in the real, physical world. You often do something that arouses your curiosity and combines two of your basic interests in a strange way – look at Anita Roddick – and suddenly everything revolves around you. It is decisive that you see these things in all clarity. Don’t think too much about what you would like to be or to have, or about false compliments, or your career will take completely the wrong direction. You discover two things: that your road will cost you trouble and pain, and that your efforts are not fully recognized. A genuine mission comes true when people come to you in droves by word of mouth and enthusiasm, because they can see that you are the best at what you do!

You have one major talent in your own right: you can see the truth. In the end you are a professional in your chosen field. Like a premiere league football coach you know every move, every trick inside out from your own experience. No one can fool you. And so you can look on with partial amusement when others in your own field make the most stupid mistakes. You are professional and realistic, and see things as they are, so you also know your limitations. There is little point in projecting yourself as Marlene Dietrich when you aren’t. What one person can do others can do better.

Find out exactly what specific field you can be the best at, even if it’s a self-organized world championship in female can opening in which possibly thousands world wide would take part.

If you regard yourself as a small player in a big game, you will not only disappoint yourself, but won’t be able to entice anyone out from behind the oven because you don’t appear credible or fascinating enough. So, Ms. Cobbler – stick to your last, and go for quantity. Aim for high goals. Really make something of your mission. How? By visualizing it. That’s enough of theory.

Anybody who has a vision can see something: the goal. It becomes visualized. You see a million human beings all over the world sitting in front of the TV or the internet to watch the world championship in tin can opening which you as former champion organized! You see how you are acclaimed, carried on people’s hands, honored, valued…and loved by millions.

This is what a vision looks like. Three dimensional. It can be grasped in the hand. Not something far away. If that is the case, Helmut Schmidt is right. Anybody who has visions should go to the doctor. And so don’t ever give in to small, realistic, attainable short-term goals. There aren’t any. Instead live your life as a series of astonishing incidents and take care of the surprises yourself: throw parties, go on exciting journeys. Take the bull by the horns:

meet the people you have always wanted to meet, for example.

A journalist we knew always had a list of prominent people whom he would most like to meet – particularly architects, musicians, philosophers, futurologists and visionaries. But how? Simple: he founded a magazine dealing with the subject. Not financed by himself. Instead he convinced the boss of a PR agency of the idea of starting a customer magazine through which the company could make a name of itself as cutting edge. It worked. He was even astounded how easy it was to get an agreement from these people as soon as he became a representative of the press. For the next few years he traveled all round the world, met everyone he wanted to meet and a few more, and was paid a princely sum for his interest.

It is very simple: become a person whom others admire and the person you have always dreamed of being…Close your eyes and envision yourself in your wildest dream. That is your mission.

Comments are killers

f course the road to success, your “Road to Mandalay”, isn’t always visible as far as the horizon. There are often obstacles in the way. There are well-meaning friends, who comment on your project to death, who want to demonstrate that they are leading the right life and you the wrong. And they are not in the least malicious: but being frustrated themselves, they don’t see that others might fare differently. Because they have accepted their lot.

This is the negative side of the mission: melancholia. When you look back on your life high spots appear which are irretrievable. They move further and further away from you. As long as you fail to embark on your mission, these images will remain present. There are people who live entirely in the past. You can recognize them by the fact that they are always telling anecdotes and “stories from my life” that begin with, “Do you remember…?” They are satisfied getting old with a partner and a pension. Hello? “I want to live while I’m alive” is a wonderful and simple lyric and very close to reality. How many people can honestly say that they are in fact alive during their lives? Instead they have given up at some time in their lives. They lay most of the blame on others without realizing it. They can least stand it when others dash ahead. They prefer to be mired in mutual misery.

Germany is a very melancholy country. It can be seen from the peculiar unanimity in grumbling. It is simply alien to most Germans to be greeted in a friendly way by someone in the street. On the other hand it is completely acceptable to get volubly excited over some nuisance, and a whole chorus of dissatisfied people can be found to agree with it, whether it is delays on the railroad or some failure on the part of the government. They lay the blame on higher powers instead of taking responsibility for themselves.

Simply don’t be taken in by such things. It is better to keep your mission to yourself or to choose the people you tell it to carefully. Comments that call your pictures, visions, intentions into question are killers, as for example, “Yes, but that has certainly already been done”, or, “Great, and where will you get the money for it from?” These are valid questions, but one the whole they are not meant constructively. Don’t let yourself be deflected from your path by obstinate needling. For as soon as you do it will be painful, and you will feel it physically. On the other hand it is a sign that you are on the right path. Imagine you had an excellent plan for becoming self-employed, and then found yourself back in a stifling insurance agency office. This is the kind of pain we mean.

As long as you stay on your path you will have many good experiences, even if it is often stony. The more you can convince, the more pleasant impulses come from without that justify your activities. And that’s a damn good feeling. What is convincing is your sense of curiosity and your self-confidence in everything you do.

What you can do like no other inspires you and you can talk about it frankly, freely and with absolute enthusiasm. You become your own PR machine. This charisma attracts more and more people.