An 82 Year Old Entrepreneur Connected Feelings With Business

“Work Is Love Made Visible.” Kahlil Gibran

I had more questions than answers. I was a teenager.

“You have a choice.” shared a well-wisher of mine with warmth in his voice. I still distinctly remember the words, “You can either give them a crutch or you can give them your shoulder to lean in to solve their problem. Then, they have a chance to lean forward on their own — with pride and self- sustaining confidence.”

The context was homeless folks, struck by poverty.

Those words echoed when I heard the story of entrepreneur, Paul Polak. He did not speak those words. Rather, he acted on them with his own twist.

Like many families in the Americas (dating back to varying degrees of ancestry), his family immigrated. His father had the fortitude to foresee the marching German army to Czechoslovakia.

He had a flourishing plant nursery business, but he sold everything at a steep discount and moved his family to the Americas.

Paul grew up and became a psychiatrist, focusing on supporting the homeless population. As he prescribed medications to them, however, he noticed a recurring pattern: they consistently returned.

He felt a heavy weight on his heart that he was treating a symptom and not the real problem. So he decided to portray the entrepreneurial spirit of his father.

Without any formal business training, he naturally espoused two business tenets: 1) Fully listening, and 2) Showing up where the customers are. By doing that, he helped one of the homeless men to start his own business of lending makeshift locker boxes to fellow vagabonds for a nominal amount.

By fully listening and showing up where the customers were, a remarkable change happened. By not looking at a homeless person as a recipient of charity, but rather as an owner of a business, the recurring pattern was broken.

That experience sprouted the entrepreneur inherent in him. He bloomed for the next 40 years. He is now 82 years young, agile and active with great achievements to his credit.

The biggest of them, according to me, was shattering a long-held belief: “If you give a man a fish, he can feed himself for a day. If he spends the time to learn how to fish [with your help], he can feed himself for a lifetime.”

The implicit words never stated that we all assume are, “If he spends the time to learn how to fish with a fishing rod, he can feed himself for a lifetime.”

Where Paul found his life-long meaning was the changed words, “If he spends the time to learn how to fish with tools he bought with his own money, he can feed himself for a lifetime.”

There are two subtleties here. First, every tool is not a fishing rod. Second, people exit poverty not when organizations donate tools to them, but rather when they invest their own money and time on tools that can help them and their business.

His life mission was to create tools that the people living below the poverty line can afford and learn from easily. That singular construct is the edifice on which he built his social empire — market-based solutions to poverty.

He’s truly a contrarian and a self-described bohemian who brought meaning into money with something we humans take pride in — ownership.

Connecting the Dots: What it means to the problem solver in you?

His aha took a long moment for me to register. When it did, I smiled — I could relate.

As a parent, I am always looking for ways to help my two young daughters enjoy eating vegetables. I often ask them to help pick vegetables at the farmer’s market or the grocery store.

Then, I sense their feeling of ownership when those vegetables are served to them at the dining table.

What is true with our kids is often true in a social setting — opportunities to take ownership often lead to progress. That never occurred to me until I read Paul’s life works.

Like many great things in life, the lesson is crystal clear in retrospect. I was happy to learn that Paul was named by The Atlantic as one of the world’s 27 “Brave Thinkers,” along with Steve Jobs.

In all of this, one thing is clear: problem solvers have a critical place in this world. What real problems we choose to solve define a lot of our meaning.

Serendipity and curiosity to solve real problems is the underbelly of Paul’s story — holding it together and nourishing it with thoughtfulness and success on what is truly meaningful.

A version of this post appeared here.
Karthik Rajan