In the last meeting I attended with my former employer, the CEO started a presentation to a roomful of peers, colleagues and next rung of his leadership team and asked the question of “why are we in this business.” His business in particular included the likes of Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple Computers who in turn committed the lifeblood of their business over to us: booking their revenue from their customers.
This was not a sales presentation, nor was this a philosophical, rhetorical question. Why in fact were we in this business? The obvious answer is that it makes us money. Another likely answer was that we could profit from our ingenius strategies because we are smarter than the competition, or that, we do what others will not or can not do etc. None of these answers, although true in their own ways, answered the why question adequately. The actual answer to the question, from his point of view, was not provided in the presentation, but what he told me in a personal conversation much earlier. What he shared with the audience instead were answers related to strategic growth for the company etc.
He loved the whole experience of building relationships with the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, Redmond, and Seattle Washington. His enthusiasm won over clients because he would make audacious moves to build platforms, commit to what the competition would view as unreasonable, even impossible demands. Unheard of performance metrics were negotiated and the nature of the work thankless and tough. The competition was wise to back off. I should know, I worked with several of them in previous roles. None of them delivered to such standards. But it was his sense of identity, his love for the challenge and the fulfillment to see his vision realized. It was a labor of love for him.
The answer to the question of your why, and mine is simply that we love ourselves. This is not love in the romantic sense, in that we are delusional about our uniqueness and how special we are as lovable people. This is about the desire to go beyond the reasonable and logical boundaries of the mind and to arrive at the heart where we know without a shadow of doubt, the motivations and truth to our desire. Love is an effort that requires acceptance of risk, an unwavering acceptance in the value for the object of our love. To love unconditionally is to serve without expectation of equal reciprocity. The business we managed for the client that I supported was unjustifiable for the profit motive alone.
A relationship which leads to growth seldom rests on a mental or logical framework. Very few people that achieve greatness do so with a perfectly safe and rational expectation of themselves. To love ones self is similar to the function of parenting ones self in the way that healthy parent child relationships are established. In great parenting, a child receives attention, lessons in discipline and manners, a healthy diet, rest, as well as the encouragement to excel beyond the tendency to quit due to fatigue, boredom or other poor alternatives. To love ones self is to continue along the lines of what great parents provide their children during the years of their growth where habits and character are ingrained.
The question of why is not the same as your purpose. I will address that topic in another post. Our question of why is not something we can arrive at from a purely a mental standpoint. In accepting the responsibility of loving yourself in the way of a loving parent, reward and outcome are always the same. No one can fully provide you with the attention, encouragement, discipline and conditioning required to achieve your personal potential. Great parents start us off on the right path. If not, we can still hold ourselves accountable and capable as they would have. Love yourself if for no other reason that, once you do, all of your decisions and efforts will be an extension of this why answer. Its up to you.