The power of work to be one of the greatest goods in our lives has, for most people, been totally lost, buried under a web of lies that has been spun around us from the day we first go to school.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. He created everything around us, and then He created us. He gave us several blessings – one of which is to work. We've been designed and created to work, and in the process of working and overcoming challenges, to learn, to grow, to create – and like our creator, to regularly look back at the work of our hands, and the experience of having done that work, and to be able to say, “It is very good.”

Finding a different world to live in

One of my favourite places to work (condemn me if you want) is the MacDonalds on the corner of Zhongshan park in Zhangzhou city in China. I would often wake up before dawn, walk through the sweltering early morning heat, through the local fresh-market where vegetables, raw meat, and goats being milked on the spot jostle not only for marketshare, but also for a share of how many smells my nose can interpret at once. The market is next to a beautifully architected Catholic church built on top of a movie theatre. On the other side of the market I walk into a park where groups of old people are doing Tai Chi and slow-dance movements to the nostalgic notes of two-string chinese violins.

By the time I get to the MacDonalds on the other side of the park, I would gratefully step into the airconditoned space, order a standard McMuffin and coffee, and make myself at home on the second floor, on a rounded corner with 180 degree views of an intersection slowly waking up to the kind of mixture of traffic that can only be found in a developing Chinese agricultural city. Their coffee is nowhere close to artisan, but it is always freshly brewed, hot, and strong.

Here is an excerpt of some thoughts I had about my work, while I was sitting there one early morning, around the time that the dark of the night was slowly making way for the light of dawn:

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Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.. In the First Circle: The First Uncensored Edition (p. 39). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

This is one of the many places where Solzhenitsyn does this. He shows these prisoners mentally having transported themselves literally to a different world – a world in which mental and spiritual questions become the thing that they focus on, and this provides for them a momentary freedom from some of the worst circumstances mankind could think of.

In a way that is what happens to me when I am sitting here. For an hour or two or three, the need to earn money, the need to get “real work" done, or to figure out how to “make a living” becomes emotionally irrelevant, as I sit here and just live in this moment, experiencing the bliss of mental and emotional exercise of reading, and thinking with one of the greatest minds that had ever lived – and seeing into and trying to understand how this mind was shaped by the suffering that he had gone through. What wisdom he found, and how he wrote about it. This is not light, “feel good” philosophy. These are thoughts that were shaped and forged in the crucible of soviet war camps, even in Nazi concentration camps, where death and suffering had been as normal a part of life as what going to work is for the average person living today.

And in all of this, as much as Solzhenitsyn shows the horror of Soviet Communism, with glimpses of the horror of Nazism, he demonstrates the power of the human spirit to soar above all of this. He shows how as humans we can wrest a bit of heaven even from the first circle of hell on earth.

Doing the work we're meant to do

Deep thought is an important part of my work. In the process of getting to the point of writing this article that I am writing now, I scanned through hundreds of pages of my journal entries to find the idea that I wanted to write about today. When I run a strategy session, I spend time deeply thinking about my client's business, the challenges they face, the team that they have, the products and services that they offer, the markets they operate in – all to prepare the questions that I believe will best uncover the best possible strategy to take that business forward. After the session I spend days pondering the output, to really try to grasp the core of what is most important, because a good strategy can always be summarised in a few bullet points that distill the essense of all the conversations that had searched for, and finally revealed the way forward.

When I do this work, I lose track of time. I literally experience that I wrest a bit of heaven from life on earth.

Entrepreneurship offers a unique opportunity

Very often when I work with entrepreneurs, I can see this same thing happening with them. When they talk about the business they are building, the work they are doing, I can see them literally losing themselves in the passion they have for their work.

In his book, “Anything you want,” Derek Sivers writes about how, as an entrepreneur, you should continually work at delegating the work you don't enjoy doing, and become more and more focused on the work you love the most – literally build a business where, every day, you can do “anything you want.”

As entrepreneurs and creators we have a unique privilege to do this – to shape a world in which we can discover and do the work for which we have been designed and created. When we do the work for which we have been designed, the work that comes naturally to us, the work that causes us to lose track of time and go into a state of flow – we are most likely to also do our best work. We are growing into the full potential of all that God has created for us to be.

I am not saying that this is easy. It is still very hard. But it is possible, and I've seen many entrepreneurs build businesses that enables them to do work every day that they love, work that they find deeply inspiring, work that has real meaning, work that is building a future that they are excited about.

Doing work you love for someone else is much harder

However, for the average person working in your business, this is a lot harder. For the average person in some corporate career, this is nearly impossible to do. I have spent some of my life in the creative world, some time in the entrepreneurial world, and some time in the corporate world, and some time working as an employee in small businesses. My experience has been that it is infinitely harder to shape your work and your career around your design and your strengths when you are just a human cog somewhere in the layers of corporate hierarchy, where your name does not even feature on the org charts – you're just part of a block that represents a group of people doing similar work to what you are doing.

Build the opportunity

I believe we are in the beginning of what I often refer to as “The Workplace Revival.” A period where God wants to restore the blessing that work was designed to be. He wants to restore that to you as entrepreneur and business leader, as you build and shape your business around your strengths and passions. However, I want to challenge you to also build a workplace where you make it easier for people to discover their design, purpose and calling, and to integrate that with their work.

Create a recruitment process that checks for this, before simply employing someone because they seem to be able to do the job. Ask penetrating questions to help them see whether or not you are putting them into a position where they will be able to grow more into who they were truly designed to be.

Create processes wtihin your business where people are able to explore and grow.

When your people are growing and doing the work they do best, you will find engagement levels rising, you will find culture strengthening, you will find yourself attracting more of the best talent – and you will build an unfair competitive advantage in the form of the people you have working with you in the business God has given you to steward.

Creating a world in which work is good

I want to go as far as to say that this might be the ultimate purpose of entrepreneurship – to create a world in which people can do the work they've been designed to do – To restore the blessing that work was designed to be, to your people. To build a workplace where your people can look back day after day, week after week, and see that it is good. Every week to look back and to see that it has been good to do the work, and that which the work has accomplished is good. And this work has created a platform on which we can build an even better future next week, where we can do more good work.

To your success

Ashton

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5-2-50 is a Movement dedicated to creating a million good jobs by growing 25 000 small businesses of at least 5 people, that have been running for at least 5 years, to 50 people or more.
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To achieve this, we need founders, facilitators, coordinators, creators, influencers and church leaders.

If this excites you, see how you can get involved: https://www.5-2-50.co.za/​