The 8 Purposes of Being in Business | Robin Sharma

Hi, this is Robin Sharma. Welcome to this mastery session. I know you're going to love this one. It's called the eight purposes of being in Business. And yes, I come bearing props. I think it's a first for a mastery session and I'm going to get to it in a few minutes here. But you know, I'm very excited to share the eight purposes of being in business with you because this doesn't come from a book I read, conversation I had. It comes from almost two decades, boots on the ground in, I don't know, 75 different countries, working with many of the Fortune 500, whether it's Nike in Israel, FedEx in Canada, Microsoft in America, IBM, Oracle, and it goes on and on, as well as personally advising fair number of billionaires and industry titans, along with having people in the NBA and the NHL and other professional sports teams consuming my material and me coaching them. So this mastery session is really a deconstruction of the eight reasons to be in business or the eight focal points as you scale up your business or scale up your team or grow your organization. And I'm going to get right into the first one. The first purpose of being in business is a simple one. And you know, I believe in simplicity because mastery is simply a monomaniacal consistency around the fundamentals. And the first purpose is to fulfill client dreams. I mean, you are in the dream making profession. Your job is to look at the people who you are blessed to serve. Your clients, your customers, the people who put food on your table every night, who allow you and your family to eat, and to be ridiculously centered and absolutely obsessed with making their dreams come true. So, you know, if you look at average producers in business, it's the cash grab. How can I get the most money from as many people as possible? And people feel that but for the A player, the titan, the icon, they operate in a totally different league. And it's very much about how can I fulfill the dreams of my clients. And if that becomes your dominant focus, you're going to just operate in an otherworldly way that is going to differentiate you from your peers in your marketplace and it's going to make you an A player. And so just dial in on that, you know, what is my market? What are the three top dreams of my customers? And how can I, through the work that we do and the value that we supply, allow them to really live their dreams? And if you do that, your customers will fall in love with you. I mean, they call it the cult of Apple for a reason. You know, people line up for days at times to get that first new device because it's a badge of honor, because people love. Certainly under Steve Jobs, there was a cult of Apple. I encourage you develop your following of fanatical fans across the globe who love what you do, who would follow you and your brand and your team to the end of the earth. And how do you do that? You really get centered. Not only an intellectual place, but an emotional place. That's where the real game changing happens, right when you really feel it, that's how you get the fire in the belly. You really say, how can I make their dreams come true? And if that becomes your dominant focus, then the product. Right, the poetry, which is, you know, my word for work. Your poetry goes out there and it just impacts.

At a deep, deep level. Second reason to be in business is to remove client frustration. I'm going to repeat that again because it's so ridiculously and acutely important. You are in the business of removing the pain your customers feel. You're in the business of removing their frustrations. I was at a hotel recently. They added to my frustration. They wouldn't answer the room service call. I had to do not disturb. And they knocked on the door to deliver my laundry. Well, what does do not disturb mean? So how many times have you got on an airplane or you've gone to a restaurant, or maybe it's a hotel or maybe it's some kind of a clothing store? And rather than being helpful to you and understanding your dream and removing your pain, what do they do? They add to your frustration. Number two, the second purpose is really to remove your client's frustration. So here are my props. These are the. I love to run and work out when I'm traveling or at home. And, you know, audiobooks have been an absolute needle mover for me for many, many, many years. And, you know, I call it walking or running university or traffic university. But through audiobooks, you can go for a run and you can read a book through audiobooks, when the average performer is complaining and experiencing road rage in a long commute, you can go through one or even two books or podcasts. So I just have consumed so many books and so many podcasts because of my addiction to audiobooks over the past, let's say two decades. So I used to use these, and I'm not going to show you the brand because I never, in anything I do, I never want to hurt anyone. So I'm just going to sort of wave these here. But these are the usual earphones and they were pretty good, you know, but they used to keep on popping out of my ears on long runs and roam past the Coliseum or Trevi Fountain. And not only that, they always got tangled. You know, I've got like five pairs I believe in, like, you know, buying one for the car, one for here, one for there, one for the office, one for my travel kit, and they always got tangled. And so I asked my trusted EAPA executive assistant, personal assistant, and I just said, research the absolute best pair headphones that I can use when I go on long runs or experience long workouts. And she came up with these. And so I was in Barcelona last month and waiting for me in my hotel room, because I was on a tour were these Beats headphones. And I'm going to actually open them up to give you the user experience. So I open them up and look, first of all, they're fantastic. Like, everything Beats does, they're very well designed. But look, they don't tangle. They don't tangle. So, like, see that someone had asked themselves, what's a frustration of people in this marketplace? And some mastery, some master thought about, you know, what most tangle. And so they came up with a material which is like a tangle free wire. And then not only that, through the design. Like, I'm a fanatic about design. That's why I love, for example, flying Lufthansa. They just have really well designed cabins where the light falls just in the right way on the book I'm reading or on the, the plan I'm working on. And then I can put these on my ear and put them in and I can go for a 45 minute run and they don't pop out. And so I thought I wanted to give you this. I hope that's been useful. But you see an example of a company thinking about the user experience and removing client frustrations. The purpose number two of being in business, you being in business, remove them, make clients happier and they'll fall in love with you. Which brings me to the third purpose of being in business. To fuel their joy. You want to look at your customers and you want to be so focused on making them happy that you're going, how can I be an instrument to fuel their joy? So I love Rome. I'm spending a lot of time in Rome these days writing. And there's a restaurant that I love, and it's called Tullio. And my favorite dish at this Roman restaurant is tagliatelle con tartuffo. And it's basically pasta with black truffle I mean, it is just off the hook, Absolutely delicious. There is a server in Tulio, I think he's been there probably 30 years. And his name is Alberto. And every time I walk in there with my loved ones, with one of my best friends who I also love, of course, and I have this meal. Alberto takes great care of us. And I gotta tell you, Alberto works with love. There is a sparkle in his eye. He is like this Roman, you know, I don't know, he just works with such incredible passion and it's contagious and it fuels my joy. And I was there recently and I shared with him, I said, I can tell you're not working for the money. I can tell you're working to make people happy. And he started to cry. I mean, tears came to his eyes. And like so many Italians, they're just such loving, heart centered people and they work with such love. I mean, if you go through Rome and you see the right trattoria or you go to, you know, the right perfume store, there's one called, it's something like Profumo di Roma, I think that's what it's called. It's relatively close to the Spanish Steps. And you go in there and you just talk to them. You know, they're known as like mastery level producers of perfume. And all I'm trying to say is they're not working for the money. Because if you work for the money, people are going to feel that you work for the money. You got to work for the love, work for the craft, work to fuel people's joy. They will feel it, they will fall in love with you and they will go to the end of the earth to do business with you. Because people love doing business with people who love doing business. The fourth purpose of being in business is to distribute value, right? So when I run my annual flagship event, the Titan Summit, my team and I get around a table and when I mentor and coach them, there's really one obsession. It's how can we give them 10x value? I've been teaching this for years. I call it the 10x value obsession. It has helped so many of our clients own their marketplace. Don't worry about being liked in your market. Don't worry even about building your great brand. Let your followers build your brand for you. Make your domino recession being how can I give my clients 10 times the value they're paying for? Like, give? That's the way the world works. It's like the more you give, the more you'll receive. So you Want to flood and almost overwhelm your customers and your clients with the value so that they're going in a world of scarcity, where so many times you go into a restaurant, it's, we'll give you a small portion so we can increase our profit margin. We will, you know, maybe it's, whatever it is, a taxicab. I'm not going to buy a newspaper or buy water for people who are in here because that will cost me more money. I encourage you to go perpendicular like Christopher Columbus did. Shift from the generality of scarcity, which is the way most people operate in business, right, to generosity. How can I give them 10 times the value? Like, I teach that to the people at the Titan Summit. They go up there. I wish I could share with you how they are rocking their games in their fields, in their markets, because they have really dialed into the 10x value obsession. My point is simply this. The fourth reason to be in business, or the fourth purpose is to distribute value. And if you do that, you shift from being in a business to building a movement. And that's really the inflection point for you. The fifth purpose of being in business is tcm. You don't know what TCM is yet. You're about to learn in a second. One of my favorite acronyms, if you've been with me in previous mastery sessions, you know I love acronyms. TCM is Total Craft Mastery. And I think about a visit I had to a relatively small community in South Africa, one of my favorite places on the planet, and I heard about this iconic artist named Lionel Smith, and I just fell in love with his work. And Total Craft mastery is really about not seeing your work as work, seeing it as your craft. And when I watch him in action and when I look at his sculptures, when I look at his painting, I see a man pursuing mastery, working at mastery of his craft. And I really think that is the fifth purpose of being in business. It's not just to have a job. It's not just to have an income for your loved ones and yourself. It's to use every single day as a platform for mastery. To use every single opportunity in front of a customer or maybe silent anonymity, pursuing a craft, getting better at your game, calibrating the way you work, building insight. You see, we live in a world where there's this mass deprofessionalization in business. Very few people are going, I'm going to go to work today at this clothing store or on this airplane or in this restaurant or in this school or in this factory or at this tech startup or be the master of my craft. And then when I go home after dinner with my loved ones and maybe, you know, hanging out with my friends or going for a run or a swim or my yoga class, spend an hour in deep, quiet studying, I mean, how many people do you know? Like, they go, I'm a student of this game. I've read every book there is to know about being a manager in this industry. How many people do you know who say, I have a mentor and every three months I go to a conference to learn more. And, and I've read every audio book on this subject and as much as I can in my free time while I'm commuting any downtime, standing in a line in bank, in a bank, I am learning because I am a student. You know, I mean, the thing about a professional is she always thinks like an amateur. And so my point is, total craft mastery is a fundamental reason to be in business. The sixth purpose of being in business is to grow a team of Picassos. So I had someone recently at the Titan Summit tell me, Robin, this idea of building a team of Picassos was the single most valuable idea I've learned. He's taken it, used it in one of his many businesses. And what he did was this. He understood my idea, which is the job of a leader is to build more leaders. You can't have an A level business with C level performers. So if you want to have more impact on your marketplace, develop your people to have greater impact. And the quickest way to grow your company is to grow your people. I'm going to say that again because it's ridiculously important. You might not need more people. You might not have to fire any people. Maybe you're just not mentoring, coaching, inspiring, developing the latent talent in your people enough. And so you want to develop a team of Picassos. It's a great reason to be in business, to grow people, to help people who have never seen their gifts and talents start to own their gifts and talents. That's a great reason to be in business. That's a great legacy you will have. I mean, imagine you get to the end of your career and you say, here are all of the people I developed, I coached, I inspired, I built, I made. Stronger, faster. One of the greatest compliments I received from someone on my team, when I spoke to them yesterday on the phone, they said, thank you. Over the past 12 months, you have helped me become a better human being. To me, what's More important than that, the seventh purpose of being in business is to scale a beautiful personal life for you and your loved ones. I mean, the more value that you give to people, the more you serve, the more you love your customers, the more you help them fuel joy and live their dreams. What's going to be the reply? The marketplace is going to fall in love with you. And so that's going to allow you to live the life that you want to live. It's going to allow you to create a life that you adore. It's going to allow you to travel the world with your loved ones and do beautiful things, maybe for your parents, maybe for your. Your spouse, maybe for your loved ones, maybe for your friends. You're going to be able to do things like fly your best friend to a Golden State warrior game. You're going to be able to do things like take your family to Mauritius and swim with the dolphins. You're going to be able to do things like take a month off from business and go backpacking at the age of 73 and hang out at the coliseum as the sun sets. I don't know what your dreams are, but when you really dial into this purpose, okay, you're going to be able to do amazing things with your life. Which brings me to the eighth and most important reason to be in business. To serve humanity and to pursue immortality. I'm going to repeat that again because it's so fundamentally important. Why are you in business if not to be an instrument of service? Why are you in business? Not to inject value into communities, to make those communities better. Why are you in business if not to make the world a better place? Because you have rocked your craft and owned your game. Why are you in business if not to make the world better? And as you do that, you get a shot at immortality because when you help people live their dreams, when you build people up and build a team of Picassos, when you distribute value, when you build a movement, when you are a really good person in business, what happens? You build a legacy. And then even when you die at the age of 273.

Your reputation lives on so much longer than you do. You know, my dad is going to be 78 years old this week. And after 52 years as a family doctor, he retired last week. And one thing my father taught me is you cannot put a price tag on your good name. And to me, that's your chance at immortality. You know, never do anything that will tarnish your. Your good name. I forget who it was who said young man, make your name worth something and that is how you rise to immortality. Hi, this is Robin Sharma. I hope you received great value from this mastery session. If you'd like to receive potent training videos, blog posts, learning tools and information on my two live events, Personal Mastery Academy and my flagship four day experience, the Titan Summit, go ahead and visit robinsharma.com.