Be Chateaubriand or nothing!

Victor Hugo

This text was originally published in Eudoxa, by me, on January 2012, under a Creative Commons license. It still reflects my business philosophy quite well.


Those who know tell that Victor Hugo, author of Les Misèrables, once said the phrase captured on the title of my post: “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing”. François-René Chateaubriand was an author, considered the father of the french romanticism. His quill, honestly exquisite, was the perfection standard even for Victor Hugo.

“To be Chateaubriand or nothing” is an enormous declaration, a vocational proclamation that orient the Victor Hugo existential bow in the direction of perfection. His dream, absolutely ridiculous, is to be perfect. And that is what made him enormous.

Can we entrepreneurs learn something fro Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand? On the surface the obvious answer is “yes”: it’s necessary to follow an ideal, do things in the right manner and look up to soar. However, I believe the lesson is more profound.

Entrepreneurial vocation shares the same nature as the artistic-literary vocation. It cannot survive drinking only from fiction and reveries, but it is utterly dependent on our capability to the absolute. An enterprise is doom to fail if its goal is not placed in being as big, as enormous, as Chateaubriand. To sell, to exchange products for coins, can be done by anyone; but to create a community that brings good to the world, that is the bosom of the personal development of its members, in a word, that creates value and not only pennies, that is only achieved by embracing the call to greatness, to infinity, to the absolute.

Can you think about the universe, about the complete cosmos? Can you imagine time defeated by eternity? Can you see and accept the life of a company that transcends everything that happens? You have found your entrepreneurial vocation. A company that isn’t meant to exist per saecula saeculorum is not a company. A company that does not bring the seed of immortality is not a company; a company that does not know that within a year or a thousand could continue to generate true value is not a company.

To be Chateaubriand or nothing. Do you accept the challenge?

Here’s to the crazy ones, Apple

Surely, the risk is enormous. And, even so, isn’t easy to comprehend. Every monumental work tend to be forever mysterious.

Listening to Mahler’s Seventh Symphony demands as much as seriously confronting the question of the Trinity: at the end of the day, we know that something escaped us. A company is another mystery and, therefore, must be treated as such. Every company is a question for everything we are and everything we can become. As Chateaubriand would have said: you cannot make a society subsist without the mystery; a pragmatist can measure and weigh the world (they can count their successes and pennies), but they can never create a town.

And, what is a company but a town? What it is but a community bound together by a shared mystery, the mystery of being everlasting?

Of course, the dumb unbelievers and incorrigible pragmatists will accuse me of idealistic and metaphysical; they will say that I play with words and that I build empty panegyrics that contribute absolutely nothing to the daily work of a company. After all, what does mystery, infinity, and Chateaubriand have to do with payrolls, sales and the daily pain of management?

Everything! Absolutely everything! When companies talk about organizational culture and missions and visions they are aiming to the mystery; when CFOs care about growth and business subsistence, they point to infinity with their finger; when managers and partners lose their sleep and feel that daily risks corrodes their guts, they live the same fever that Victor Hugo embraced in his life: they want to be as big, as good, as eternal as Chateaubriand!

Once accepted this, the source — the seed — that will give life to the entrepreneurial tree has been found.

But, for the tree to grow it is not only necessary to be able to think about it. You have to sow it, take care of it and prune it. Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is huge because it exists in the world and not only in the mind of his author. Victor Hugo outperformed Chateaubriand because he wrote his Lady of Paris and his Misèrables, not because he wanted to reach it. And to compose or write it is of necessity to know about music and grammar, sit down for days and dent the stave and the paper with colored spots that, little by little, will erect the cathedral that will be the temple of our mystery.

Salesforce Tower
Juan José Díaz Enríquez

Written by

Philosopher and entrepreneur. Founder of Wizdem!

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