Why Philanthropy Leads to Business Success

As I write this, I’m looking at an 800-year-old Chinese medicine cabinet.  It was given to me by my grandfather and each of its drawers contain magic tricks collected over many years and across many continents.  Magic is in my blood; my grandfather was an early member of the Magic Circle and he imbued in me an appreciation of the wonder that exists in the world and the power of connecting with other people.

Despite this heritage, I was the world’s worst magician – and not because I couldn’t perform magic.  The problem was, as soon as I learned a new trick, I wanted to explain how it worked to others; to share my knowledge so that someone else could gain.  In discovering this about myself, I learned from a young age that being helpful and making a difference would be central to making me feel like I was living a life on purpose.  So how does a boy who wants to give away his knowledge of magic tricks become a man for whom philanthropy leads to working alongside billionaire businessmen and coaching the President of an African nation?

Your Personal Values Are Your Business Values

My approach to life, and to coaching others on the path to success, is that you have to be absolutely honest about what your values are – what’s really most important to you – otherwise how can you define what success looks like for you?  Forget about money and status, these tend to come as by-products of pursuing a path that fulfils a need beyond material wealth.  The philosopher Alan Watts famously coached his students to imagine that money was no object before deciding on their career path – from this place we can be truthful about what it is that we want to do with our lives and define the kind of person that we want to be.  In my experience this creates the platform from which we can define our personalised vision of success.

Your State Determines Everything

Have you ever wondered if a decision that you made was right or wrong?  It’s usually accompanied by a mild sense of dread that you may just have made a massive error of judgement.  As an example, let’s say a colleague has sent you an email in which they are blaming you for a mistake that has cost the company money; and they’ve copied in your boss.  You are outraged – how dare they show you up in front of your manager!  So, fingers flying at the keyboard, you fire an email back to set them straight and right after hitting ‘send’, get the feeling that it might not have been the best decision on your part.  Here’s a quick way to check whether what you just did (or have done in the past) was a good or bad move:

3 Steps to Check if You’ve Made the Right Decision

1. In your mind, go back to when you made the decision. Imagine the setting, the physical place, what was going on around you.

2. Remember how you were feeling and what you were thinking. Were you angry and frustrated, or happy and relaxed?  Was your pulse racing, or were you clear-headed?

3. Consider how you made the decision that day. If it came from a place of negative energy such as fear, anger, resentment or jealousy, then it was a bad decision.  And one that’s likely to have repercussions.