Our humanity flows from the heart. Our life work, therefore, should be mindful of the needs of the heart or it will be about survival rather than fulfillment.

Early in its history, mankind set up communities. There was a division and sharing of skills, of labor. Men participated in the hunt; women participated in gathering food and child care. Both were vital, important to the whole. Eventually, there was a sharing among tribes.

Mankind builds society and then is influenced – determined, really – by his own creation, without realizing it. He is born into a society and has to build a life, create a life, from the social structures or circumstances handed him by those who set up his society.

We engage in enterprise – enter-the-prize. What is the prize? In business, in today’s economic life, the prize is an accumulation of wealth, money, what is now synonymous with security and power. Money was first introduced as a means to simplify the bartering of skills or goods. Money is now considered an end in itself. Having has become ownership of a thing rather than acknowledgment of a personal quality or gift within a person. This confuses the human heart.

This dilemma can be addressed early in a person’s life, within the family. A vocation, the calling forth of a person’s gifts and talents, must grow out of solid ground, in a strong sense of self — self esteem. If a person feels cherished, encouraged to discover his natural gifts, talents, skills early in life through the positive mirroring of his parents, his community, his social world, he will know early how he can contribute to the society in which he finds himself.

The prize is already within him — his self-esteem, his self-awareness, his self-motivation. He can move out into life with enthusiasm, with breath, enlivened, and take on whatever venture best allows him to express his creative energies. This nurtures the heart rather than depletes it.

If a person emerges from family life feeling less-than, demoralized, repressed, he has already received the message he is damned. His anxiousness will be the ground from which he acts. The energy with which he approaches an enterprise will be the drive for survival rather than an expression of his gifts. The “sweat of his brow” will be, for him, the only way he attains the prize.

The prize was deprived him even before he left home. He sees the only way of being saved, of saving himself, is by the doing. Work becomes a sentence, a burden, rather than a fulfillment. When a society is condemned to this level of survival, it places mankind in danger. It drains his resilience; he becomes depressed, jaded. Bad times become a threat to his existence rather than a natural balance in the up-and-down flow of life.

Work, as all of life, has its healthy aspects and its unhealthy aspects. A person with strong self-esteem can draw on his inner resources and not be dependent on the fickle economic roller coaster. He knows what nurtures his humanness — his family, his friends, his connection with the universe, not his economic stature. He can use his gifts anywhere.

Real poverty is a poverty of vision, when a person looks at life, defeated and pessimistic, without any hope of opportunity. Real poverty is a poverty of spirit, a spiritual malaise that so deludes a person he doesn’t even realize he is poor in the true sense — devoid of heart. He is led to believe that money rather than the quality of his relationships will nurture his humanness. 

How do we structure the work environment so we have truly human experiences within it — so we can fully develop and express ourselves as human beings — keeping an eye on the welfare of the whole? This is a question that has dodged a complete response since the beginning, for it includes society, the individual, the environment, the globe, and the future of mankind. The question itself and our attempt to imagine such a reality are part of our creative genius.