Do you create from the light side or the dark side?
Martin Bjergegaard (Denmark) launched his first company on his 18th birthday and is co-founder of the company factory Rainmaking, which to date has created 25 startups, as well as being the daily “home” for over a thousand entrepreneurs in Copenhagen, London, and Berlin.
A famous Albert Einstein quotation is as follows:
“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”
So fundamental was the wish of one of world history’s greatest geniuses that his fellow beings reflect upon their relationship with existence. In the same way, I would like to invite you, dear entrepreneur, innovator, or leader, to go right back to your starting point and take a helicopter view as you read the coming few pages.
When we create, we can fundamentally move from positive feelings and experiences of the world or from negative equivalents. Whether A or B, it decides if what we create is part of the solution for the world or part of the problem.
When you look around you, you will most likely agree with me that there are many problems in the world—or challenges, if you wish. Thus, much of what has been created throughout human history has been a source of problems rather than real solutions. This applies to nations, public institutions, NGOs, businesses, and everything else.
You will undoubtedly be able to name a business, large or small, that doesn’t make the world a better place—rather the contrary. Why is that? Behind this creation, this business, are some people of flesh and blood who at a point in time, long ago or recently, brought this project into the world. How they looked upon their existence then, what they felt and what they thought about it, sowed the seeds of what the business is today. How they and the people they took with them on their journey have since felt about and experienced their existence has either confirmed their starting point or adjusted it.
It is obvious that this must be the way of things, as every organization is nothing by itself; it lives only because of the people who have given it a voice and form, and who still do so. Yet we still overlook this evident fact to a very high degree. We believe that the business model, the idea, and the professional skills of the team are more important than the way the founders experience the world, seen on a profoundly personal level. We don’t even have a language for talking about the latter. When I ask here whether you create on the basis of the light side or the dark side, you may perhaps think that it’s an odd question. It’s not improbable that you look upon the question in a completely different way than the way I mean it. And we can’t even be reproached for that, because we are simply not trained to communicate on that level.
So let me you give two concrete examples of how what I call the “dark side” can look in an entrepreneur’s and/or a leader’s reality. The examples are hypothetical—but they are nevertheless very close to things I have experienced in reality. While I write this, I’m sending kind thoughts to those who act “darkly”—for they are fundamentally well-meaning people who do their best but who on some parameters have lost their way.
Example 1
An entrepreneur I know has many companies and is quite cynical in the way he moves their assets around between them. Sometimes he lets one of his companies go bankrupt, so the suppliers do not get their money, even though he could have paid them everything without problem. He tells himself a story that it’s better that he has the money than other people have it. When I look at his actions I am sure that he is incorrect about that assumption.
Example 2
One of my acquaintances has created hundreds of jobs. He’s very proud of that, but it’s as if he’s forgotten to ask himself what the everyday experience that he offers his colleagues is. On bad days he is stressed, absent-minded, restless. This has set the pace for an unhealthy business culture, where people do not remain because of their love of the mission and the organization but rather because the leader’s fears have spread to them and they are now worried about what they would otherwise be doing.
Perhaps you will say that it is necessary to be cynical in business life. On this I beg to differ. You have a much greater potential—we all do. When you successfully eradicate fear, self-criticism, and concerns from your mind, then there are no longer any problems in being the entrepreneur or leader that you at the deeper level want to be.
One of my friends often says, “Everyone is rotten in one way or another.” What he really means is that he is very frustrated by not being able to find the way out of his habit of self-criticism and a fearful mind. He does many things really well, but at the same time, he is almost chronically dissatisfied. He’s restless, never sincere or spontaneously happy, and he feels he has to protect himself in a hostile world. We might have normalized such a way of being in the world, and maybe we excuse ourselves by stating that we are only human.
However, we cannot allow ourselves to be so defeatist when we take upon ourselves the task of bringing creations into this world. When we understand that the quality of our creation depends completely on the quality of our inner lives and the dialogue we have with ourselves, then we suddenly acknowledge that we have an enormous responsibility for turning on the light side in ourselves—a realization that can feel very intense when we finally get it.
The method is not to focus on resisting the dark side, as that will not work. There’s an aphorism that states, “What you resist persists,” and it is very true. That’s also why slimming diets never work in the long run. Our focus on losing weight makes us sad or frustrated, so we eat to comfort ourselves. Perhaps not in the first couple of months, but sooner or later. When, instead, full of joy and enthusiasm, we register to take part in a long-distance race and really start to involve ourselves in the project, that’s when the kilos fall off, without any feeling of sacrifice. When you turn on the light, the darkness disappears by itself. You don’t have to fight it; just turn on the light.
For an entrepreneur, creator, leader, turning on the light means at least three things:
1.That your business or your project is launched with a clear mission of being part of the solution, instead of being a part of the problem. Egoism is darkness; helping your fellow beings is light.
2.That in every interaction with other people you come from a position of love, trust, and a pure intention to create, rather than from the all-too-common position of mistrust, self-obsession, manipulation, and indifference.
3.That you love yourself. Seriously. I’m not talking about being arrogant, complacent, or self-sufficient. But it is really true that you cannot love others if you don’t love yourself. You must learn never to criticize yourself, whether in words, thoughts, or feelings. Self-criticism compromises the quality and presence that you can put into your project.
An objection I often hear is that, as an entrepreneur, you must be chronically dissatisfied, as that is the fuel that powers you to fight for change. If you think about it, that statement is something you’ve heard elsewhere and now repeat without actually having thoroughly examined it. The statement is false, like so many of the other propaganda campaigns against human nature that we more or less unconsciously participate in. The truth is that we humans are born with a creative urge. Until we learned self-criticism from the adults around us, as children we threw ourselves into all kinds of creative projects. It isn’t true that we humans are fundamentally lazy and that if we don’t beat ourselves into action we’ll just lie on the sofa. There are plenty of people who have little initiative and strength, but that’s because they’ve criticized and doubted themselves for far too long and have now almost given up. Perhaps they insist that they really like having a good time doing nothing, but if you pay attention to the look in their eyes, their energy, and the words they use, you will discover that behind the facade they are restless, dissatisfied, and perhaps even desperate or despairing. It’s in our nature to challenge ourselves, to be curious and learn new things, to grow all the time. Being entrepreneurs and creators therefore suits us perfectly. People who create and build are generally more authentically present in life than people who demolish, maintain, or are on standby.
So far, many more have unfortunately come from the dark side than from the light side. That’s why we have problems in the world. The Dalai Lama has said, “If every 8-year-old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.” He’s probably right about that. In the same way, I’d say that if all creators turned up the light in themselves more, if they really learned to love themselves, and if they were deeply rooted in positive thoughts and feelings, then all problems created by human beings could be eliminated in the course of a generation.
To the beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.
Thich Nhat Hanh