Stay Alive .. I Will Find You

Depending on your perspective, SOMA is either:

-         A lingerie store

-         A medical company

-         A Sci-fi horror game

-         Or the drug that made the people in Orwell’s 1984 novel passive…. https://www.huxley.net/soma/somaquote.html

Probably one of the most romantic clips / movies on earth EVER is The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day Lewis, that god of the screen, who says to his love as they are taking her away, ‘Stay Alive, I will find you…..’  If you haven’t seen the clip lately, watch it again here.

It is also a fantastic metaphor to understand the life of the entrepreneur: Stay Alive, I will find you …. We find each other as so many entrepreneurs know.

For 22 years in my serious life (after INSEAD), as the road to INSEAD was not not serious but just a different part of my life that is Pre-INSEAD for me, …

For 22 years, I have met entrepreneurs every day of my life, and worked with some of the best in the world…. I see the world myself as an entrepreneur, and the daughter of one, and can only really understand life through that pair of glasses.  (Welcome to EntrepreneurCountry)  I don’t understand how people operate who don’t take on 100% accountability for themselves, their teams and their businesses.  It strikes me that the world is full of people sometimes that are looking for someone else to run their life, someone else’s money to use to do so, and someone to blame for everything that goes wrong.

Entrepreneurs live a harsh reality whereby you deal with everything you can control and frankly a whole host of things you can’t control.   That’s why we become control freaks.   That’s why we don’t have work life balance (although we should try to balance ourselves through sleep, nature, strong personal relationships, staying close to our faith and family, and laughing a lot).

The need to bond with people – to share each other’s burdens is so important. We must be there for each other, and we find that community through family, our faith institutions, our friends, our local communities, our ethnic groups, and sometimes random acts of kindness.. If we start from basics, that we are all children of God, and no one is better than anyone else, then we approach the world by saying that we may not necessarily understand or be close to everyone, but we must treat everyone fairly.

If however, we force people to collectivise with people they don’t know, through state-legislated socialism, you get huge wastage of resource.  Read this article; one of the best on this topic.

Some people will disagree with me, but in the privacy of personal conversations over 22 years, more than 95% of all of the great entrepreneurs I have ever spoken to – perhaps 50 out of 5000 entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to at length over 22 years, are profoundly in agreement with this position.

So society’s problem solvers know that they ultimately will solve society’s problems… They know that they can’t outsource this to government.   

But what socialism does that is unfortunately devastating, and we can’t be neutral on this, is that it saps the human spirit and energy and leads to profound depression, decline and passivity.

When we believe that the world happens to us, that we are recipients of a fate, rather than the architects of our future, we slip into depression and passivity.  Socialism = Soma. We no longer can unlock the power of why we were born – to create and to deliver our unique contribution to the world. That doesn’t have to be stressful, but it is why each of us was born. 

I have met an amazing artist in Zurich where I live – Conor McCreedy.   I went to a vernissage recently of his work.   He uses Chaos Theory to explain the turbulence of the world, constraining himself to the colour blue, and using memes from Venetian Masks to Nature to get at his understanding of humanity.

Watching Conor with his art in his studio, he is a new type of entrepreneur for me – but one that I am fascinated with.   Who says that the keys are verbal and text? Why not paint, and paintings and visual?   

What is clear to me – more clear than anything I have ever known – is that the SOMA in our life that makes us passive, depressed, and unable to unlock our creative talents and unique contribution to the world must be eliminated daily.    

All my life people that I have met at different places, and in different ways, have called me their sunshine.    It’s strange, but that has happened so many times and in so many different contexts and always with the word: SUNSHINE - that I have started to realise that what I do is unusual perhaps, but it leads me to survive – as in the Last of the Mohicans way … to stay alive, so that I can find others, and they can find me, and together we can create and unlock our God-given unique contributions to the world.

Here’s what I do, and there are some profound downsides to this, but it leads me to sunshine, and probably I won’t be able to change at this point in my life, nor do I want to:

-         I ruthlessly eliminate negativity from my life. This does mean that when people are negative around me, I have a bad/good habit of deleting them rather immediately.  I cannot tolerate negativity, and I am ruthlessly insensitive to it.  If you want to be negative, be negative.  I won’t be there with you.

-         I look for the system-level win, and I pursue that relentlessly.   I have no time for people who optimise for themselves.   If you want to be in my system-level win, great, then align with me for it.  If you want to optimise for your pay, your ego, your whatever, go run your own system, but I won’t be there with you.

-         I make judgements about people’s morality early on in my assessment of them.  If they are win/ lose people instead of win/ win/ win, I delete them.    This may keep me from being ultra wealthy, but I don’t care.  I don’t value wealth.  I only want to work with people who believe that there is a win/ win/ win to be had.   Some people unfortunately can’t get there, and it’s not my job to be their mother.   Be the winner if you want, but I won’t be there with you.

-         I take radical accountability for myself at all times.  

-         I put on my optimism every day of my life like a coat.   I believe my own sunshine even when I haven’t seen the sun in days.

-         I forgive and I ask for forgiveness.   We must.  There is no other way through this life than to forgive when one asks for it and to ask for forgiveness when one messes up.  

For me, everything in life starts with the fact that I am a child of God, and His will is to be done in my life.    As a Christian, it is no longer about me or us.  It’s about Him.   This does in my own interpretation of it as a Lutheran – and Missouri Synod at that! - probably make me very focused on right versus wrong in a world which has gone hopelessly relativisitic.  But the way people act matters, and the way that people make decisions matters.  Right versus wrong matters, and I would rather lose a lawsuit, leave a country, lose a ‘friend’, close a business, have a ‘dispute’, force someone to honour their financial commitment, than to ever change the yardstick by which I live my life.  There is only one person whose view of me matters.

The day in and out struggle to process the information in the world today leads us all in so many ways to try to opt out rather than making plans, shaking off the bad stuff, and believing that the world is beautiful even though there is much work to do.

Psychotic optimism may be a new habit for you to adopt.  You may want to do it first in the bathroom in the morning when you get out of the shower. Right after you look at yourself naked in the mirror and say, I can do X, whatever X is, say that you will promise yourself to deliver your unique contribution to the world, whatever it is.

What is mine you ask?  Wrote a book about that… Welcome to EntrepreneurCountry   

See you there.

#psychoticoptimism #deletenegativity #bethere4others #sunshine #juliemariemeyer #socialism=soma #uniquecontribution #system-levelwin