Can Death be a Gift in Business (and in Life)?
What if our business and personal cycles received and honored death the same way nature does? What if we accepted and embraced it, trusting that new life would rise behind it?
Death is a topic we all seem to have an unspoken agreement to never talk about in Western culture. Even writing about it makes me tense up a bit, but I’m accepting my discomfort to hopefully encourage what feels like a vital conversation amongst us.
I notice our resistance to death everywhere: a family having a hard time facing a loved one’s failing health, women covering over their gray hair and smoothing out their wrinkles, more money being printed as the economy struggles. Who wants to die? Not me! It’s terrifying; I get it. My primal survival instincts roar to life every time a perceived (and usually imaginary) threat to my existence appears. But…
What if we took a deep breath, summoned our courage, and turned towards death instead of away from it? What if we welcomed it like an old friend?
We’ve forgotten that we are part of nature, not separate from it. We are cyclical beings moving through different seasons every month, year, and across lifetimes. And death, whether we like it or not, is an essential part of this cycle we call “life.” The seasons are a beautiful reminder of this. What could life look like, personally and professionally, if we planted in Spring, grew in Summer, harvested in Fall, and rested in Winter?
It also feels that we’ve forgotten that we are not only individuals, but also part of an ecosystem, a bigger picture and story beyond our small selves. As part of the whole, when we are fed, the whole web is fed. And in our death, we nourish those that feed on us. We live on in those that come after us. I recently heard a friend describe how one mountain lion feeds so many fauna in the forest by hunting and sharing the bounty offered from one deer. Nothing is wasted; everything gets assimilated into a new energy form. I’ll be honest: part of me feels queasy picturing this, but I’m acutely aware of how removed I am from the reality of the circle of life.
In the West we’ve been handed down the fear of death, generation after generation, but we haven’t been taught to appreciate or embody its gifts. The truth that, for this body and identity, for this incarnation, there is an end makes all the moments in between that much more precious. The gift of death affords us the possibility of fully living, blossoming with more energy and vivaciousness and less stagnation and struggling. Even life events we may not typically conceptualize as death, such as moving cities, changing jobs, ending a relationship, allow us to decompose what needs to change, in order to make room for the new.
If we accepted death, not only would that drastically change our daily lives and human experience, but it would overhaul the way we do business in the modern world. How would our economic ecosystem thrived if we worked as interconnected parts of the whole? How different could things be in companies or teams if we acknowledged and moved with the cycles of birth, growth, and death? This exists, as all things do, from the micro to the macro. From as small as an idea presented in a meeting, to the rise and fall of a product line, to the life cycle of an entire company or economy. There’s a natural arc to all of it, with the evergreen promise of newness ahead, if only we’re willing to not cling to the familiar and comfortable. Can we bravely ride the waves, trusting the next set is coming even though we can’t see it on the horizon yet?
I saw a beautiful example of embracing death during my time in VC a few years ago. A portfolio company had recently received a solid round of Seed funding and put the capital to work to prove product-market fit. Within a few months it became clear that the thesis was disproven and the whole company would have to pivot to something very different if it was to continue on. While this is perfectly normal and happens all the time in early stages of startup life, the founders felt that they could not deliver the vision they had sold their investors on. They chose to wind operations down quickly, close up shop, and return the remaining unspent capital to their investors. This could not have been an easy decision for them, but it earned them tremendous respect among their investors, and ultimately it freed them up to follow the energy and aliveness to new projects. They considered their options and chose to bury the old to fertilize the new.
What if we had the courage to do the same? What if we closed down that struggling product line? What if we left the job that we weren’t giving our best to, instead of staying just because it’s “comfortable”? What if the founders and team trusted their gut instincts when they knew the company just wasn’t going to make it?
What if we honorably buried what needs to die, mourned and grieved, remembered the good times, learned the lessons, assimilated the wisdom, and opened ourselves up to the next thing that’s waiting for us? What if we lived full and vivacious lives, both personally and in business, because we were brave enough to practice dying again and again?
What are your thoughts on this topic? I’d love to hear from you and start a discussion. Also, do you know a company that moves with the rhythms of nature? I’m eager to learn more from them.
