Dear Entrepreneur - A Spiritual and Technical Guide on How to be a Fulfilled and Successful Entrepreneur / Small Business Owner

CHAPTER THREE

God, the ultimate entrepreneur

We have been designed as an image of God. Many enlightened people in history have repeated this belief, and many prophets from most religions agree.

God created man in his image, and that is why we start businesses and all kinds of ventures, we do it because we have been designed to imitate God. God itself is the ultimate entrepreneur, the designer of the universe. I would like to pause here to recommend one of the most interesting books I have I ever read in my life. The title of the book is The Freedom of Choice by Australian author Thomas J. Chalko, MSc, Ph.D. You can find it on the internet (http://thefreedomofchoice.com/index.html). It’s free, and it’s one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It helped me a lot in understanding the purpose of life, of God, and of the Universe itself. You must read it!

So we are made in the image of God, both intellectually and spiritually. God is the highest intelligence, with the greatest spirit and capacity for love and love is the most beautiful and the most powerful energy in the universe (someday in the future science will prove this).

God designed the universe, the stars, the galaxies, and everything by a continuous process of learning by continuous adjustments what we may refer as “trial and error.” If you just look at the history of the universe and the planet earth, it’s just a continuous process of learning through trial and error. Let’s analyze the earth, the process of how it became what we know at this moment in time.

According to most scientists, the universe started with the big bang about 13.7 billion years ago, and the earth appeared in the universe about 4.5 billion (4,500,000,000) years ago. And human beings came about 200,000-300,000 years ago,4 so you can see how it took God a long time (even if for God time is infinite), to shape our planet with the perfect conditions so humans could exist. Based on proportions, it took the universe and God a long time (approx. 99.998%) since the big bang to get to the point where we appear in the earth as the ultimate being created. It’s a continuous learning process of “trial and error” as you can see the history of the earth itself is a testimony of continuous changes and learning. Even in the most recent stages of earth evolution (geological ages), thousands of changes took place in our planet, freezing followed by warming and then freezing and warming again. Countless changes occurred in the atmosphere, and continuous fine-tuning took place so the first unicellular organisms could be developed.

The whole universe, the system that God designed, is a continuous learning process of “trial and error” just as life is. Just as developing a small business and an entrepreneurial endeavor is. If you look closely at the evolution of our planet, even in the last “minute” of earth evolution, during the age of dinosaurs, God almost had to re-start from scratch. The dinosaurs have to disappear by the stroke of a meteorite from out of space so the whole organic, biological kingdom could be prepared for human beings to appear on the scene.

This last step of learning- of “trial and error” of God tuning Earth for his ultimate creation-was the largest step of all. You can find documentaries that mention that the condition of the Earth in terms of weather, temperature, and atmosphere had to be so perfect, so specific for life to develop so human beings could appear on the scene.

It is the same with entrepreneurship. We, as the image of God, have in our souls, in our DNA, the urge to create. We follow the same process that God followed, a continuous learning process of “trial and error”, continuous adjustments. We have intellect and the freedom of choice, both of which enable us to be creators on our smaller, human scale, made in the image of God. We constantly see this in the history of entrepreneurship and creation. Thomas Edison had to try more than 1000 materials to finally come up with a functional light bulb…, “trial and error”, continuous learning.

I would like to pause here and make a little shift regarding the concept of “trial and error”, and why I put it in quotes in the last pages. The thing is, in reality, there are no errors in the process of continuous learning. What we consider as mistakes are really just learning experiences. One of my favorite expressions is “In life there are just two outcomes: success and learning.” In reality, there is no such thing as failure. Failure is a concept that we, human beings, invented in our misunderstanding regarding the principles of life, the principles of how the universe works, how the system works.

The same is true in business. There are no such things as errors, just learning. The most successful entrepreneurs in history have told us again and again that their worst “mistakes” actually guided them to success.

Whether we are talking personal, business, or any other aspect of life, the actual secret is that the only real thing that exists is learning. We can either decide to learn from the lessons that life unfold to us during our lifetime - in our personal, spiritual, professional, business life - or not. That is a personal decision. We can go to the same lesson, the same learning experience over and over in our life or decide to learn and move forward to the next lesson. The Freedom of Choice goes into much greater detail about this concept.

But somehow in the last decades, we have been bombarded by the media with the idea of “instant results” which is basically the opposite of how God designed the principles of the universe. The creation and development of the universe is not an act of instant results; it’s a process of continuous learning.

We as entrepreneurs / small business owners have to go through the same process: we create new things and we learn by “trial and error” (learnings and learnings) in the whole business cycle. We’re designed to do it. The whole human experience is a continuous learning process, and in fact it is basically the essence of the human experience to learn on our own. Nobody can do pushups for you. So many enlightened people through history have taught us important lessons -love, compassion, cooperation, serving, and forgiving. The subjects are always the same, but the lessons are individual for every one of us. Remember, God’s pedagogy is individual for every single one of us, same subjects, but a unique individual “program”, individual lessons for every single one of us through our lives. Isn’t this fascinating?

I once read a quote that contains great wisdom in one sentence:

“Life is a test, most of the people spent all their lives trying to copy others without notice that we all have different examinations...”

No human being came out of a mother’s womb and immediately started walking and talking. It’s a process. We all start from scratch and we have to learn, and learning is the way we acquire a higher conscience and a higher contact and connection with God and with the people around us. And this is why an endeavor of any kind, such as starting and developing a business, can be the ultimate experience of learning for us, because we have to learn a lot of lessons to develop a successful business.

We will have to learn basic skills and tools for different areas of the business: marketing, finances, sales, administration, operations, HR, etc. Besides that, in today’s socio-economic environment (whether we like it or not), we spend most of our time working. So if we understand that it is in our jobs, in the business world, that we can grow personally and spiritually, this single concept, this idea, can transform our lives forever.

If we open our mind and our soul and see this opportunity in our daily work of running and developing our business as the ultimate experience to happiness, to fulfillment, to growth, it can change our whole experience. We can experience the ultimate personal growth while we are working.

We face different types of challenges, challenges with people like employees, vendors, customers, and stockholders, challenges of learning new tools for finance, marketing, process implementation, and leadership, etc. With our everyday interactions we have a great opportunity to learn so many subjects and life lessons. And of course, we’ve got to learn how to create and improve our products and services.

So the entrepreneurship journey as a small business owner is where you can have the ultimate experiences of life, of growth, of fulfillment in your own business, but only if you see it from the perspective of continuous learning, of “trial and error”. At the end, the greatest satisfaction that any human being can achieve is to go beyond our own limits, to grow. That’s what happens when we develop as a human being, from a child to an adult, we all live different experiences that shape us and help us grow and improve, these experiences came as the lessons of the subjects that I mentioned, remember?: love, compassion, serving others, forgiving others...

It is the same in our business. We grow beyond our limits in many ways: learning how to run our business, improving our products and services, managing employees; putting all together capital, assets, tools, imagination, and creativity to provide a...