Being a spiritual entrepreneur is not just about being touchy-feely

Sometimes when I mention I do spiritual entrepreneurship to people, they think it’s all touchy-feely and want to emphasize how you really need to be rational and careful and grounded in reality.

And I agree completely. Nothing could be further from me than to suggest otherwise.

What I will suggest is that most of us are already way too rational, and forget the most important part. The rational mind is meant to be a servant, but all too often ends up being our master.

Some of my personal heroes are Steve Jobs, Mahatma Gandhi, and David Heinemeier Hansson (only one of whom I know personally – who is left as an exercise for the reader). These are people who are firmly grounded in reality. Steve and David are making big bucks (one perhaps a few orders of magnitude more than the other, but nevertheless). Gandhi changed the fate of an entire continent.

But it’s people that are also not afraid to talk about zen buddhism, passion and love. Well, I haven’t heard David talk about zen buddhism yet, but I know Steve has, and Gandhi was clearly a spiritual leader.

The thing about being passionate and loving what you do is that it’s not something you can just make up, it’s not a magic ingredient that you simply add to the dish that’s already on the plate. You can’t make yourself be passionate about something. Say you’re deeply embedded in some kind of dreary or not so dreary business, and then you read in 37signals Getting Real book that you have to have passion for what you do. Great, okay, so I start typing emails IN UPPERCASE USING LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!! to pretend I’m REALLY PASSIONATE? It doesn’t work like that, right?

Passion is something you discover within yourself. It’s something that’s already there, waiting for you to find it. And when you find it, you’ll see that it’s really powerful.

What spiritual entrepreneurship is about is ways to find that passion, and ways to stay within the power of that passion, that is, to notice when you’re inclined to compromise and to stand firm, because you know your values and your core beliefs really well.

If you tap into that power, then yes, you still need the rational mind, there’s still all the practicalities, but all of a sudden, they’re easy, they’re almost an afterthought, they’re just details. The important part is being in the energy at the source.

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