ELON MUSK HAD NOTHING ON ST. MAXIMILIAN KOLBE

Today the Catholic Church celebrates the feast day of the Polish martyr and priest St. Maximillian Kolbe.?If ever there was a man worthy of the monikers "renaissance man" and "entrepreneur" it was him.

Intellectual Giant:

• Kolbe was brilliant, completing two doctorates, along with continued studies in physics, astronomy, and mathematics.
• While pursuing the priesthood, at the age of only 24, he had designed and submitted an idea for a spacecraft to a scientific journal.

Marketing and Branding visionary:

• Launched a publishing company in 1922 with no experience.
• With no marketing budget, no digital media and no experience, grew the monthly circulation of his paper, Knight of Immaculata, to 750,000.
• He might have been the first to try a "fremium" model to market the paper.?There was no cost for the paper, only a suggested donation.?This proved successful enough to fund much of his growth.
• Grew his publishing to include almost a million other print pieces per year.

Entrepreneurial Risk Taker

• Believing so much in the vision of his publishing company he borrowed to pay for pay for the printing of the first edition. When the printing was done he had not raised all the money to pay for it. His superiors chastised him for taking such a risk and threatened him with consequences if he was not able to raise the remaining money.
• He did what all saints do in the face of challenges. He took this to serious and convicted prayer. Unexpectedly he met a priest he had never seen before who gave him an unexpected and generous donation. But he was still short of the money he needed.
• He went to Church and prayed fervently and confidently at an altar dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows. After a lengthy time in prayer he rose to leave and noticed an envelope on the altar, that was not there when he began his prayer.
• He opened the envelope and found the EXACT amount of money he needed to pay off his debt to the printer and to publish the first edition of his paper.
• His biographers share that this would not be the only time he borrowed to achieve pivotal moments of growth in his publishing company or his order.

Technology Evangelist:

• He was a huge advocate of using technology and was quoted as saying “If Jesus or St. Francis were alive now, they’d use modern technology to reach the people.”
• He worked on inventions for voice recording and transmission.+ He built the first Catholic radio station in Poland, Radio Niepokalanow.

Human Resources Pioneer:

• He was an incredibly successful recruiter. He grew his organization to 700 people and become the largest Catholic monastery in the world.
• St. Maximilian was an astute manager of people and knew how to fully integrate work, prayer and rest. He created a vacation policy requiring every priest to take two weeks of vacation every year. + He built a dedicated facility that allowed for rest, recreation and maintaining prayer and faith life while on vacation.
• He was way ahead of his team in creating offsite team building activities.

Extraordinary Community Supporter:

• He saw a need for firefighters in Poland so he developed a fire-fighting training program and a created a brigade of fire-fighting friars.

Global Expansion:

• He created a monastery and publishing company in Nagasaki, Japan.
• When the atomic bomb was dropped there, the monastery building was miraculously spared from destruction, while almost everything around it was leveled. St. Maximilian accomplished all of this by the time he was 47.

Love of Neighbor and Martyr:

• During the Second World War he provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from Nazi persecution in his friary in Niepokalanów. (1)
• On February 17, 1941 , he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. On May 25, he was transferred to Auschwitz I as prisoner #16670. There Kolbe would offer his life to the take the place of a family man who was about to be executed.

Happy Feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe - Adopted Patron of Entrepreneurs

Here's to St. Maximilian Kolbe - entrepreneur, marketing genius, HR pioneer, inventor, publisher, radio station creator, space travel visionary, fire-fighter, international missionary, servant of man, martyr, and Saint.?Thanks be to God for his witness to fully integrating faith and his gifts, to achieve incredible levels of success and service.

St. Maximilian Kolbe intercede for us to discern and achieve the fullest use of our gifts and talents in our business vocations, to be able to best serve our fellow man and truly glorify God.

#entreprenuer #integratedlife #faith #saint #success

(1) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/maximilian-kolbe