social entrepreneurship

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on December 15, 2003

Fast Company offers a handsome guide for dealing with success and competitive pressures with the help of ancient philosophy.

"The greatest case of mistaken identity in modern society relates to the four marks of public success: money, power, fame, and status. Aristotle warned that the problem with desire is that it feeds on itself. That's still true: After you make your first $1 million, your natural impulse is to want $10 million. As an ancient philosopher might have said: Desires make good servants -- but bad masters.

There are two kinds of dissatisfaction in life: One is what I call the "dissatisfaction of acquisition." The other is the "dissatisfaction of aspiration." The dissatisfaction of acquisition centers on the drive to have more things. We live in a competitive culture -- a culture of more. And in such a culture, it's hard to set limits. I know people who own so many clothes that they've had to build extra closets to store everything they've bought. The dissatisfaction of acquisition is an unhealthy dissatisfaction; it's caused by a void that can never be filled.

Success should never be confused with wealth or power. Rather, success should be linked to excellence and fulfillment. Success is about who you are, not what you have. Successful people work to discover their talents, to develop those talents, and then to use those talents to benefit others as well as themselves. It was Heraclitus who said, "Character is destiny." We don't need to develop our personality. We need to cultivate our character.

We emulate forms of success that look good, without ever asking this very important question: "What did these people sacrifice in the rest of their lives in order to excel at this one thing? Do I want to make that sacrifice?"