Looking back over my life with the benefit of hindsight, I can see now how much I’d been merging the broken seemingly unrelated segments of my life. Knowing what I know now, I would have been a lot more diligent in my mission to blur the lines between what we consider business and what we consider personal lives.

photo by Magnet.me

Why the distinction?

Let’s start with why we had separated these aspects to begin with.

Business related stuff is traditionally viewed as the things that you do to make money in order to exist in a socially accepted community, ie. one in which global money are recognised as the de facto currencies of trade. We have learned over the years and become more aware, as we’ve matured as a people and species, that these socially accepted systems are very broken and not at all the catch-all we once accepted them as.

Personal life was seen as the life we lived for ourselves and our loved ones. Business life was seen as the life we lived for someone else who commanded our time and our activities in exchange for a paycheck and some other benefits. We were separated into these two main segments of life. We divided ourselves further into other segments depending on who we’d spend time with and what we were doing with that time. We had a work life and a home life and an active life and a married life and a single life and parenting life. Different lives to satisfy different aspects of ourselves.

This all served us for a while, but then the lines became harder to maintain.

As the Internet and the creativity of younger and freer minds became more pervasive, humanity realised that money could be made in a variety of ways that didn’t need old fashioned “business” perspectives. Trading commodities became more popular. Monetising what we loved doing became more of a possibility. More and more people realised that we didn’t need to do things we didn’t want to do in order to fund the things we did want to do.

photo by Toa Heftiba

The Evolved Entrepreneur

For a very long time, I have been wanting to do more of what I preferred and be less a part of the mainstream dysfunction. Sadly for me, that mission left me even more fragmented as I blindly sought a path that held more joys than the well-worn, clearly problematic ones everybody kept encouraging me on. I tried many different business models, and many different ways of making a living in this money-driven world.

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

This sentiment divides most people and the reason it does is because some people are viewing this statement from the modern perspective of living a life that they want and monetising it, while other people are viewing it from the perspective of making money the old fashioned way, through a job that they don’t necessarily enjoy, and quite possibly hate.

The latter group might think this sentiment is sweet but ultimately not practical, while more adventurous minds aim to live a more love-filled and less “work”-filled life. I think most people get confused by the term “work” which results in one group choosing to work at building more of a life they want to live and the other group resigns themselves to work at building someone’s else’s dreams.

As more of the world is maturing and gaining a better awareness of what is really happening out in the world, we are steadily putting more priority on our own lives and dreams, doing more of what excites us and, giving less of our energy and time to people (employers, co-workers, and clients alike) who don’t appreciate and respect us.

The Internet especially has made everything more possible. We can learn knowledge that we didn’t have access to before, from people who are experts in their respective fields. People have found ways to build businesses and market themselves for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time and for much larger returns than people had ever been able to without the benefits of the Internet.

I have always been a bit of a split personality when it came to business, having donned many diametrically different hats for forever. And as more people, including myself, bring their natural selves into their business ventures, and build money-making systems around what they were already interested in and enjoying, those lines blur even further. We are moving closer to a time when we don’t need a business version of ourselves because it will become just another aspect of our everyday living. We will be simply living our fullest life and making a living in the process.

photo by Ev

Bringing it together

Over the last few years, I have begun to find the commonalities behind everything I enjoyed doing, and, after all those years of trials and tribulations, things seem to be finally slotting into place. My seemingly very different interests have one thing in common. They’re what make up me. And it is I who makes up my business and life.

From rejecting that whole “business is business” excuse for fucking people over, I increasingly wanted to engage in business with heart, working with people who were kind and compassionate and more interested in enjoying themselves with the people around them versus the “every human for themselves” mentality that is rife in the competitive world of corporate business. Business, for me, is about leveraging one’s natural interests and talents and skills so as to get paid for being oneself.

This year, in particularly, I have been focused on merging all my different hats into one cohesive package. That cohesive package is, in a nutshell, me.

I am my brand and my business. I have removed myself from the world of competition, because there is no competition. There are precious few who can do all that I can, at the level that I can, making me an extremely unique entity and a business unto myself.

I don’t yet know what the final form of this will look like, of even if there is a final form. All I know is that I have been growing and maturing and learning and becoming more competent and capable at those things I was already proficient at, as well as those skills and knowledge I still needed to add to my tool belt. Who knows what other else I’ll be learning next week?!

photo by Patrick Tomasso

The future looks amazing

As more of us figure our way into a more entrepreneurial mindset of finding our own way and forging our own paths, more of the world will break away from the traditional outdated business model. This has already been happening for some time. The 2020 pandemic may have sped things up, since more people than ever before are now aware of how possible it is to live a job-free life. So to speak.

We know that we can learn anything anywhere, and we can work from anywhere, and we can connect with people from anywhere. We can do anything. Our people have built one of the the most magnificent, modern cities of our time in the middle of an arid desert, miles upon miles away from the nearest natural resources that spawned other cities.

Now, more than ever, is the time to grab the reins and free ourselves from the yokes of employment. We are here to live our own free lives, serving the world in the way we want to, when we want to. And those who are still obeying their managers, hoping that someone else is going to maintain a job for them, well, these people are going to fall behind very soon.