Business As a Spiritual Path

It’s common practice to pursue spirituality as a way to be better at business—we go on meditation retreats, learn mindfulness techniques, do group exercises—with the hope of bringing these skills and insights back to our jobs and “spiritualizing” the workplace. We look to spirituality to change us and the culture of the world for the better, and then the workplace is downstream from that.

But there’s actually something more spiritual than meditation, more spiritual than breathwork, more spiritual even than prayer: work.

Work is the most spiritual thing we do. Business itself can and should be a spiritual pursuit, and I would argue that it is the spiritual pursuit. All those practices listed above are tools, and they can be great tools. Businesses are where those tools are put to use, and spiritual work actually gets done. That’s where the struggle between selfish ambition and the impulse to serve the greater good vie with each other, where we spend so much of our waking hours and mental resources. That’s where the actions that change society most often happen. The spirituality of the workplace is what is most primed to change the world.

Now you’re probably just about to stop reading this article because you and everybody you know can quickly rattle off ten examples of companies and individuals in the business world that have dramatically made the world worse. It’s easy to call up instances of ruthlessness, exploitation of resources, workers, and customers, irresponsible risk-taking, and soul-draining, cruelty-filled work environments. How dare I put spirituality and business in the same sentence?

Yes, business is not automatically spiritual, but because of what it is, it is inherently predisposed to the possibility of being a powerful, and yes, spiritual force for good. Whether businesses grow into a blight and a parasite on the human race and the planet, or become brilliant problem-solving, humanity-enriching miracles ultimately comes down to one seemingly-mundane thing: the role that usefulness plays in the organization. 

Usefulness simply means: doing something helpful to someone, and doing it because you know that it is a helpful thing to do. That’s it.

Usefulness is doing good for the sake of the good being done. It’s solving a problem because you know that that problem needs to be solved. Because it will affect people’s lives. Anyone who has been caught up in the passion for this can tell you how energizing it is, how hours can fly by unnoticed. There’s a reason for the magic in it. As humble as it sounds, usefulness is the fundamental building block of both human spirituality and happiness. Only a useful life can be a happy life, only a useful life can be a spiritual life, and we practice our usefulness most fully at work. 

Part 1: Work is happiness

If happiness is a state of well-being and contentment, then I want to propose a radical idea: work is happiness.

Work is the thing most equipped to create a state of well-being and contentment. I’m not saying that every moment of being at work will be riveting, or that we would all toss plane tickets to a week at a beach-side resort in the trash because we couldn’t stand to miss those five days crawling through emails at work.

But work can and should be a steady meaning-making machine, a consistent foundation of purpose that undergirds and supports everything else in our life. It should give us the conviction that we are giving back to the human race. It should be a place where we continually grow and improve. And it’s only from that foundation that a deep, lasting sense of well-being and contentment can arise for a human being. And yes, by all means work can be a source of joy. According to the Harvard Business Review:

“The importance of having a job extends far beyond the salary attached to it. A large stream of research has shown that the non-monetary aspects of employment are also key drivers of people’s wellbeing. Social status, social relations, daily structure, and goals all exert a strong influence on people’s happiness.”

[source: https://hbr.org/2017/03/does-work-make-you-happy-evidence-from-the-world-happiness-report]

We’ll only reap those positive feelings in a rich, deep way if we believe and experience that we are useful at work—that what we do for those inside and outside the company matters and is in some way making the world a better place. Because participating in something useful allows us to align our motivations in the order that makes true job satisfaction, and overall happiness, possible.

Part 2: The Three motives

I mentioned before that businesses have just as much potential to do harm to the world as they do to improve it. How do we make sure we’re the good kind of business and not the bad kind? Here’s a simple rubric.

There are three overarching motives for what we do in the business world: usefulness, profit, and self.

For a business to be spiritual (in everyday terms we might say “for a business to be good”), these three motives have to be in the right order and in a particular alignment of subordination.

What not to do

When the self comes first, everybody downstream suffers. Bernie Madoff fabricated a business where he secretly wasn’t doing anything useful at all. He wasn’t even technically making a profit. The entire apparatus was a complex mechanism to raise his personal profile and enrich himself to the detriment of thousands. Within any company, “star performers” that are toxically self-focused can actually destroy more productivity than they create.

When profit comes first, the customers suffer. Tobacco companies and opioid manufacturers wilfully concealed the seriousness of the havoc their products wreaked on the human body (the un-usefulness of them) so that they kept turning a massive profit. All the customers and their health were just a means to the end, which was money. Profit above all else even in its most benign form leads to endless corner-cutting until something breaks, harming the business, employees, customers, or the public.

What to do

The right alignment is to have all three in their correct places. Usefulness, profit and self are meant to stack on top of each other, with usefulness at the top. A desire to be useful should drive our desire for profit—we want revenue so we have the means to do more good—which in turn drives our desire for career advancement (self) to positions where we have a greater and greater opportunity to do good.

Usefulness has to be the most important thing. It has to be the reason your company exists and the ultimate purpose for it on the earth. It has to be the reason you get up in the morning, even if you’re not completely consciously aware of it everyday. Below that and subservient to it, you should have your profit motive, and below that and subservient to it should be the motive of bolstering our own reputation and status.

I’m not saying we have to get rid of the desire to make money and build up a personal reputation. If you have no love for profit, your organization becomes inefficient or too ideological or bureaucratic or goes out of business and so can’t be useful to the world. If you have no career advancement for employees, they won’t grow or feel pride or push themselves to be the best they can be. It has to be that love of usefulness drives a love for profit and a love for self in service of usefulness.

The proper motive hierarchy is something that entire organizations can do on a macro level through policies, incentives, and workplace culture. Any one of us working at an organization can do a micro version of this in ourselves through our code of ethics, the decisions we make, and by taking time to picture and enjoy serving the greater good.

This is good for us and for everyone else because we are also happiest when we feel like our work has meaning. One way to ensure that people feel like their work has meaning is to create a human environment for them.

Part 3: Human beings need a human environment

Perhaps you, like many others, are wondering “what can I do about my eroding company culture? Why is my company culture eroding? Am I doing something wrong?” Not necessarily, your company culture is in good company: everything in the universe erodes. It’s enshrined in the Second Law of Thermodynamics—everything, from stars, to interstellar gas clouds, to the weather-beaten cliffs on a beach is slowly falling apart.

Everything is doomed to erode. Well, almost everything. There’s only one phenomenon in the universe that defies the Second Law and reverses the erosion process, bringing things from less order into more order—this almost mystical process that we call “life.” The only things that aren’t actively eroding are things that are alive. So if you want your company culture to not erode, it has to be alive.

Life takes many forms, but the forms you need to worry about are the particular forms of life we call human beings (even if you run a zoo, the giraffes don’t need any teambuilding exercises). So the life your company needs isn’t just any life, it’s human life. To be a great place for humans to be, your company needs to be human. And there’s more at stake here than just one company’s culture and net profits. We spend our best waking hours at work—if we come to work in a place where we feel undervalued, disinterested, unsafe, and without purpose, what does that do to the quality of our life overall? How does that spill over into how we show up in our families and communities? Improving the work experience impacts humanity itself. What would it be like if people came home from work after spending a day feeling connected to their coworkers, satisfied that they had done something useful, and bringing home with them the sense that they matter? 

Work can be happiness for human beings if it happens in an environment that is human. The less human the environment is, the less it fosters work-as-happiness. Work should be happiness. And it can be happiness if the right conditions are met.

I want to use as an example a company named SnapCab that is addressing these concerns in an intriguing way through a philosophy it calls A Human Business. Here’s their philosophy and how it plays out:

A Human Business

“Start with trying to figure out how to be useful, and do something to help. The energy around that inspires people to want to work with you. At the end of the day, if I feel like we’re being as useful as we can to our customers, and we’re taking care of each other at work, then I feel like I’ve had a really good day.”

-Glenn Bostock, founder and CEO, SnapCab

Starting with a focus on usefulness creates a cascade of effects for SnapCab in how they approach some fundamental tenets of business. The first is that to create the right environment to unlock a love of usefulness in its employees, company policy is that “creating a foundation of care must come before anything else.” How does having employees feel cared for promote usefulness?

In a video produced by the company as part of a series explaining its business philosophy, Jenn Emon, a marketer at SnapCab, aptly frames the side effects of an uncaring work environment this way:

“I’ve worked at other jobs in the past and there have been some times when I have gotten to that front door and there’s a pit in my stomach when I go to open the door in the morning. I feel differently when I wake up in the morning to come to SnapCab because I feel like I’m cared for and I’m allowed to be a human being here. As a business owner, why would you want to create that foundation of caring for your employees?”

Glenn responds:“Going to school, I had that feeling of a pit in my stomach. I had a bunch of learning disabilities, but what I found out was that my low performance wasn’t because of my learning disabilities, it was because of how my classmates were treating me. It just takes one person, who really doesn’t like you, to walk into the room and you just shut up and think ‘I just want to get through this moment until I can go and hopefully be myself somewhere else.’”

The last thing a business needs is an environment where people are just trying to get through the moments. Glenn continues:

“What better place to be than at the place where you’re being useful? Because isn’t the purpose of being here to be useful to somebody else? That’s the purpose of a business. And what it’s turned into is to make money for the owners as opposed to doing something useful for the customers and for the workers in the business.”

Jenn: “When you have an employer who genuinely cares about providing a happy and safe place for you to work, the things that you can do are amazing!”

SnapCab takes steps to institutionalize this culture of caring and unlock employee potential in the systems they implement:-work anniversary videos

-employee recognition programs

-rewards for mistakes

Yep, you read that last one right. There was an employee whose mistake botched an order that was shipped to Hawaii. The consequences? The company gave that employee and his wife tickets to Hawaii and a hotel for seven days (knowing full well that the repairs would only take one day.)

To further unlock the full potential of each person’s usefulness, SnapCab places significant emphasis on people being aware of their “central love” or “ruling love.”

As Glenn put it in another video in that series:

“There’s something that you love to do in life. That thing where you lose track of time when you’re doing it. It’s that thing where you wake up in the morning and say ‘oh my gosh, I get to do that thing I love to do!’ But what if at work, you’re like ‘oh I get to go to work and do the thing I love to do!’ So if you understood your ruling love, you’d be able to work your like around what you love to do.”

They call that “something” people love to do their ruling love. This principle directly impacts hiring and corporate structure: 

“The first criteria we’re looking at is ‘what do people love to do?’ We filter people not based on experience, but based on their ruling love.”

SnapCab asserts that cultural fit matters more than skills. That’s because human beings are driven by what they love. Ultimately we are creatures of love, or to put it another way: what we love makes us who we are. Someone who has a passion for what your company stands for and the service they provide is the important thing to find. People with that passion will be able to learn the necessary skills to accompany it and end up being better for the organization overall than someone who comes in highly skilled yet doesn’t have a desire to fit the company culture. 

Once you’ve got the right people in the organization, their true potential is unlocked by putting them in the right place. What is the “right” place for someone? Depends on what they love to do. What people love to do they can do consistently and continue to improve at. Having people in a company put in a position where their joy consists as much as possible of the thing they love to do leads to endless productivity rewards.

Part 4: The Divine Intent

You could stop reading this article now. You won’t lose anything. Everything I’ve said already should be self-contained and should work just fine. The principles can be applied and the results will be self-evident.

The following is just my personal opinion on why these principles work like they do.

These principles work because when we act on them, when we live by them, we are participating in something larger. These aren’t just business tips that were cooked up by and for 21st-century management in developed countries and multinational corporations. They are one distillation of what I would call the Divine Design.

We live in a world full of design. The building you’re in right now, the device you’re reading this on, the neighborhood you inhabit, somebody thought these through and laid them out to accomplish a specific purpose, but they have to be used in the right way to achieve the desired result. There is a design to human life. There is a way it is meant to be lived. And that way revolves around usefulness. Life inherently looks toward usefulness.

Usefulness is not just a goal, it is the goal. It’s actually the goal of existence itself. You could call it the Divine Goal. If you don’t believe me, just look at yourself for a minute. Usefulness is written into the bodies we inhabit. All the instances of working together, pursuing usefulness, and benefitting the whole play out in the human body constantly through the interactions of cells, tissues, and organ systems.

Sacred traditions from all over the world and across time converge in saying that we are made in the image of God. I think they’re onto something. All the design-wisdom we could hope for is right there at our fingertips (in our fingertips I should say) for us to learn from.

We can bring this human model into the work we do too. The more our organizations mimic the cooperation, coordination, shared purpose, and selflessness modeled by the systems in the human body, the more we participate in this sacred design, and the better things work.

The most spiritual thing you can do to your workplace is make your business into a place where everyone is useful, knows where they fit, and buys into the larger vision—just like all the different parts of the human body contribute something useful, have defined roles, and all benefit from the total health of the body. People can and should feel that “work” is the ultimate expression of bringing to life what is most sacred. Think of what the world would be like if everyone lived and believed that. Now’s a great time to start!

About the author:

Curtis Childs is an international speaker and influencer, the Chief Visionary Officer at the Swedenborg Foundation, and the creator of the Off The Left Eye brand, which has amassed over 45 million views on YouTube and more than 600,000 followers across social media.