Andreas Widmer argues that work mirrors God's creativity. He outlines three objectives: create something, help others flourish spiritually, and be profitable. A gorilla anecdote illustrates how human work transcends mere biology.
Chapters
Hey, I want to talk about business today. How do we do business? Why are we doing business? And business is a form of work. So I'm going to use work now instead of business. Just to show you a quick analogy of where work is coming from and what work means. Did you ever think about. I recently went on a safari in Rwanda, in the mountains of Rwanda. And. And I was with a group that went to see the mountain gorillas. These are silverback gorillas, huge animals, and they live in the wild. And I went out there and I was able to spend some time with them in the forest. And as I see some of these gorillas, and I'm 6 foot 9, I'm a pretty big guy, this thing dwarfed me. But I was told that this gorilla is actually 99.9% my DNA. He's a little hairier, but he's pretty much. We're pretty much the same as this gorilla. I watch the gorilla in the wild and as they eat and they wander around, do you know that gorilla has never worked a day in his life? And I worked a lot in my life. The thing is, the gorilla can't work. But you can work. I can work. So if it's 99%, 99.9% biologically, the same thing, the conclusion is that work cannot be based on biology. Work is something higher. Work has to do with who we are and whose image we're made. You know, there's a lot of analogies and descriptions and myths about who God is. One thing that God is the same in every religion is that God is the great creator. God makes stuff, it just doesn't make stuff, makes stuff out of nothing. And we are supposedly in the image and likeness of God. I don't think God looks like us. I think if you read in Genesis, the difference is that the animals are made the same as we are. But the difference is that we receive the breath of God. So we have the spirit of God. What, something that's beyond, above nature. And I think it's the spirit of creation, of the Creator that God invites us to be creative, just like God was. So the analogy goes that God created the Garden of Eden out of nothing and created us as the crowning achievement, in a sense, in his image, to continue that work, not just to play inside of it, but to continue this work. And we call that work. When we work, we create. We can innovate something. Some of my companies that I ran and started came up with an idea out of nothing, and we made a software out of it. Made a product out of it. It started with absolutely no physical ingredient. And at the end, you have a product that's almost independent of you. If you go back and read Genesis, this is exactly what God did in. In the beginning of the world. What we read is that God had an idea, wouldn't it be cool to do this? And then created it, and then turned around and said, this was good. This is good. Have you ever created something that you say at the end? This is really good. I'm proud of it. That's how God feels about us, about our creation, about creation in general. So to go back, that is the essence of work. That is the essence that gives sense to work, that we create, that when we work, we imitate God. We participate in God's creative power. That's important because then we can say that if we run a business, if we start a business, if we do any kind of work, the essence and the first objective of this is to be creative. I think there's a lot of industries and a lot of businesses today that aren't very creative and are not really creating anymore. But maybe if you're just betting on the failure of others and so on, that's not very creative. That doesn't really create. We have to think about that. That, in a sense, violates that core idea of what business should be all about. So I want to pose to you that the first objective of work, the first objective of business should be to create. Now, if you create and you imitate God like this, what happens when you imitate somebody? A lot. That's right. You become more like them. In Catholic language, we call that being holy. In a secular language, you could say you become the best version of yourself. You flourish to the maximum potential of your nature, of your possibilities of using all the opportunities, all the talents you're having. If that is what creating can do, then we have a responsibility to help everybody around us flourish the same way. So we should create companies in which other people can flourish as well, in which the customer and the investor and everybody else flourishes at the same level to, in a sense, be able to pursue that same level of holiness, of human flourishing. And we should support that. So I tell you to think about that. The second objective of work should be to support others in this path of holiness as well. We are incarnate spirits, so everything we do is physical and spiritual at the same time. This is unique. There's no other being like us. That means whenever we humans do something, it has to be physically rewarding as well. We don't just live in a spiritual world. We don't just live in a physical world. Everything we do has to be rewarding and that's the third objective of work. Work ought to be profitable. If your work doesn't produce a profit you're not allocating resources properly. There's something not right if it's not profitable. There's something not right if it doesn't give you joy, if it doesn't create an environment culturally, emotionally, psychologically, even physically that people around you who work with you are having fun or liking this. This isn't supposed to be drudgery. This is supposed to be a sad affair. This should be joyful because we create physically and spiritually. You see, when we work we don't just make more but we become more. We become more by creating in God's image, by supporting everybody to the full extent of their human flourishing to holiness. And we reward everybody around us physically, emotionally, spiritually.
