What’s Next? The Road to Better
One thing I’ve found is that I’m nowhere close to the person I want to be or running the type of company I want to run or even know enough about what I’m doing to even get there. But, I never have and I don’t expect I ever will. So, the big effort is continuing to strive for better. What can I do today that is better than yesterday and what will be better tomorrow.
Running a social enterprise immediately sets a different level of expectation on a person, or on the organization as a whole. Sometimes that doesn’t feel fair. We can’t go completely carbon neutral, employ marginalized people, give away most of our profit, eliminate waste, and continue to grow our impact efforts all at the same time, right from the beginning. It sometimes feels that every decision that’s made has to run through a filter of which of these boxes accidentally get checked that will lead to a hypocritical feeling in our efforts. If anything doesn’t pass the test, it’s easy to just not push the initiative forward instead of pushing forward and realizing that there is room to grow and improve.
“The more important a call to action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel about answering it. But to yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.”
- Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
We are at the very beginning of our journey still trying to make connections and find our footing, but we are most certainly hearing the call to action. The world of social enterprise is so fascinating and full of so many interesting people and companies working to solve so many complex problems in such very different ways. The cultural, geographical, economical and political challenges that so many face in order to simply create a little success for themselves sometimes appear insurmountable. These are exactly the kinds of challenges that are expected, and in fact, frequently are the exact problems that are motivating them to exist in the first place. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to contribute in some small way to the overall success of social enterprise and that we can raise awareness and show people that they can use their everyday dollar spend to increase the level of good being done. We’ll continue to take it one day at a time and continue to strive for a better tomorrow… for us, for everyone.