In this short monologue, business designer Donna Brown challenges the long‑standing belief that business must be kept separate from personal life, spirituality, and values. She argues that the negative traits often associated with business—greed, lack of ethics—are not inherent to the concept of business itself. Instead, she invites entrepreneurs, especially those building online businesses, to re‑author their lives by bringing personal growth, spiritual principles, and human values such as connection, generosity, kindness, and compassion into the core of their enterprises. Brown emphasizes that integrating these values does not turn a business into a charity nor prevent financial success; many wealthy leaders already embody ethical, generous practices. She concludes with a practical exercise: write down what a successful spiritual life looks like, select one element, and experiment with applying it to business decisions like offerings, pricing, or communication, observing the resulting changes.
Chapters
For decades, if not generations, we've been taught that business and our personal life are 2 separate things and that it was dangerous, negative, a no-no, would ruin our careers if we were to bring our personalities, our beliefs into the workplace. And thank goodness that's changing, right? What I really feel is that people who have chosen to work online and to create these businesses for themselves and are really sort of creating their life, they're self-authoring their life and their business, are in this very unique position to pivot from this old paradigm and understanding of business as this sort of big mean corporation that, you know, kind of eats you up and spits you out at retirement or earlier And not necessarily treat you well, where you're going to give up your soul and you're really just going to start your life once you leave the— once you go through the doors of the office building. The greed that we— that sort of greediness and the grasping, right, that we have and the lack of ethics, I guess, that we have really associated with business actually are not any intrinsic qualities of business at all. If you think about it, business really doesn't even have the quality of earning money. It has the hope and expectation of earning money, but there are businesses that lose money for a very long time and they're not, they're not, no, they're not no longer a business. Is that even English? They're not, no, they're not, they don't stop becoming, stop being in business if they're losing money. They They're a business that loses money. So when you think about it, what actual qualities and characteristics does a business really have? Not that many, or not any that I can think of. So what if we were to take a moment and bring in all the personal parts of ourselves and bring in the personal growth and the spirituality and our beliefs? And And those qualities that we value so much as human beings, values of connection and generosity and kindness and compassion. What would those businesses look like and what would they feel like? How would your business change if those became one of the defining or some of the defining characteristics of your business? And the way you did business. It doesn't mean that you turn into a charity, and it doesn't mean that you can't be paid very, very well for what you do. There are many, many examples of millionaires and billionaires that do amazing, wonderful things in the world and are incredible examples of what it's like to move with this kind of, with ethics and with integrity and with Generosity and compassion through their business. So that's my invitation for you today. It's going to be pretty short, but I'd like you to just to take a moment maybe, and maybe you'd like to write a few words down of the things that you consider what would— what a spiritual life would be like, or a successful spiritual life would be like. And then take, maybe just take one of them and see how that changes as you apply it to your business. See what changes and what you do differently and what, you know, what changes about your words or the offerings that you have or the prices that you set. And this is Donna Brown, Donna Brown, and I'm a business designer and this is the Business Design Studio. And that's my thought for the day.
