Why Business Needs a Bigger Myth
An invitation, a quest, a mission
Once upon a time, there was a human who thought very much of their talents and skills and looked for every way to share them. But no place could meet their deeper knowing that they were something bigger…
Does this story ring true for you? So many of us are searching for meaning and work often offers the main context for that search. It’s why understanding your “purpose” and your “why” is so fundamental to mobilizing teams, orienting our values, and defining our goals. But what if your company’s “why” just isn’t big enough? What if your spirit is calling for something more?
It’s impossible to think that our jobs alone could completely fulfill us as human beings: particularly our work as seen within a vacuum and limiting context of capitalism and its definitions of success against a backdrop of unlimited growth in a world of limited resources that is breaking at its seams. It is impossible for a finite definition of work to fulfill a soul in a world of existential crisis. Let me say that again, even if you have a “why” for your company, it is too small for the spirit of any human living in a world on the brink of collapse.
No work alone, no matter how meaningful, is enough to meet the deeper inquiries, questions, and concerns of the human psyche and soul under existential threat.
And yet, work keeps trying to be the savior and the solution. Why?
What if work was just one part of a larger system, constellation, mystery, and invitation? Just one part of a beautifully intricate play designed to liberate all involved? What if business, was just one character (maybe even a fool and jester) in the larger unfolding of humanity’s awareness of itself: of its divinity, its perfection, its grandeur, and its wholeness?
Business needs a bigger Myth. Our understanding of our work is far too myopic to satisfy our deeper desires for connection, relevance, and meaning. Business (and its leaders) need to expand their awareness to hold a larger vantage point - for why they exist, for what to do, and for what “impact” really means in the hearts, lives, and minds of those they serve and affect.
Service from this perspective does not mean just a product and what it offers. It might mean that it allows those who work for the company to realize their larger purpose. It might mean how it inspires actors in an ecosystem to respond and relate differently: more justly, more humanely, more inspired. It might mean how it impacts the larger psyche of a nation, of a world that hears its message.
And success from this perspective might not mean just profit. It might mean a legacy. It might mean touching many more humans with something beautiful, or many fewer humans with something more meaningful who ripple out and touch others. It might mean the more beautiful realization of a very personal story.
What is business’ role in the world today? In this Anthropocene moment on planet Earth that will surely pass - a blip in the vast space-time continuum? How will it shape humanity’s experience of itself; as a meaty visceral being with five senses that walked a world with water and one sun? How will it have impacted the spirit of the individual and the collective - for the better? For the worse? How will it have helped humanity to know itself as the Divine?
Business needs a bigger myth - and to find it, its leaders must carry out their own quest. To know themselves as part of something greater than just their own lives. Greater than the lines of 0s and 1s on a screen that makes up their reports. They must go out and find themselves and what their souls know to be true about who they are and why they are here at this particular moment in time. And then, they must live it.
Only then, will we know what we are capable of. Only then, can we carry out a more beautiful myth that is greater than our small view - like an ant walking across a copy of Love and War. What do we know of the story we are walking? I invite you to find out.