Spirituality in entrepreneurship: an introduction
I could not have survived entrepreneurship without spirituality.
It was 2014 when I quit my legal career and began to dive deep into spiritual learnings and practices. Coincidentally, the same year I started playing with the idea of re-creating myself to be an entrepreneur.
In hindsight, I needed spirituality to survive entrepreneurship. But more importantly, I now believe I was intuitively drawn to entrepreneurship (despite my firm belief that I am not “the business type”) because it was meant to initiate my spiritual awakening! Spirituality and entrepreneurship, two words that you do not see side by side very often, came as a package deal for me and most likely for all entrepreneurs whether they realize it or not.
Spiritual Rule #1 for Entrepreneurs
It comes down to this: don’t die.
Do not let your venture kill you. And there are many ways it can kill you. Physically (people do die from overwork and exhaustion, you know, it is not an urban myth) and certainly spiritually as you sing “life has killed a dream I dreamed” not in the sense of Susan Boyle in Britain’s Got Talent but Anna Hathaway in Les Misérables! Come out of it alive, and empowered, no matter what you choose to do with your life going forward. Not jilted, broke, cynical and resigned. And there is certainly a lot to be said about how as a society we can better educate and support entrepreneurs instead of letting them hang out to dry.
This is what prompted me to write this Spirituality in Entrepreneurship series for fellow entrepreneurs and spiritual seekers. To me spirituality is about three universal virtues: self-awareness, love, and oneness. Imagine the possibilities of how entrepreneurship can really change the world if the startup ecosystem is more conscious. And being conscious is just the beginning, to do good and do well at the same time requires that magical union of brilliance in execution and abundance of spiritual strength.
While learning the how’s may improve your tangible abilities as an entrepreneur, exploring the why’s enables you to build that inner source of power that ultimately supports your vision, informs your strategy and most importantly, sustains you as a human (and spiritual) being in your grand voyage.
From Bali to Seattle
My entrepreneurial journey began in Bali. This mystical island in the Indian ocean, once a spiritual hub visited by seekers (reference Eat Pray Love), surfers and burnouts is now also a vibrant tech startup hub. Is it a surprise that there is a showcase where spirituality meets entrepreneurship, literally? These digital nomads in many ways shaped my original understanding of what it is to be entrepreneurial. A keen pursuit of purpose in their work and challenging the status quo while striking work life balance. Since many of them are corporate escapees and have chosen to restart in an island paradise, these people are not only trying to start a business but to re-invent their lives in a holistic way. They have literally taken themselves out of the system. In the age where startup CEOs toss around the word disruptive so mindlessly rendering it meaningless in most cases, these entrepreneurs create a way of living that is by itself disruptive in the truest sense. I will write more about these rebels later in this series.
Contrast that with Seattle, the home to tech startup-turn-gorilla like Amazon and many more startups aspiring to be the next Uber or Airbnb or Netflix. I came to this city on a whim and studied entrepreneurship in a more traditional academia setting at the business school of University of Washington. This is a place where there is always more than fifty percent chance of running into these two scenarios: one, it is raining and two, the person you just met works for Amazon or Microsoft (or, has sold his/her business to Microsoft). The vibe is completely different from Bali. Part of me acknowledges that Bali can be a bit of a bubble at times, and working on my startup in Seattle forced me to be more grounded and face the full spectrum of reality which includes the good and the brutally bad.
Soon to graduate from this one-year Master’s program, essentially an incubator in a campus setting, I have finally made the tough decision to close my business. It is probably one of the most valuable things I got out of this degree. More on this later.
Spiritual Rule #2 for Entrepreneurs
I would like to leave you with another spiritual rule before we end this introductory piece.
Here it is: be you.
Be yourself. Everybody else is taken. Over-quoted but nonetheless very true. And more importantly:
Try not to become a person of success but rather a person of value.
Being an entrepreneur can at times (in fact most of the time) be the loneliest job ever. Paradoxically, too many people tend to crowd in on you with their opinions, advice, help and mostly, noise. Once again this is one of the most challenging spiritual practices: to know your truth. There is nothing wrong with learning from others’ experiences. Usually it boils down to following what has been proven to work (or not work) before and understanding how the system works to boost your chances of success. More important than discerning which advice is good/bad, right/wrong, relevant/irrelevant, is knowing which is you, the rest does not matter.
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