It’s "fun" and "easy" to build an Authentic Business… at a deep level!

George Kao argues that building an "authentic business" can feel "fun and easy" when those terms are held at a deeper level: "fun" as joy, adventure, curiosity, and experimentation tied to personal growth; "easy" as a sense of deep security (rooted in his spiritual faith) that reduces fear of failure and enables risk-taking. He contrasts surface-level pleasures (video games, Netflix) with the meaningful risk and stretching required to grow, and urges viewers to "redefine reality every day" to maintain courage in entrepreneurship.
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Is it supposed to be fun and easy to build a business from your passion? What I call an authentic business. So that's what I'm going to talk about in this video. Sometimes you hear that from marketing experts, oh, join my program and it'll be fun and easy to build your business. And you join the program and you find out, oh, it's not as fun and easy as they sold it to be. Okay? And, but, and sometimes you are an idealist and you imagine that life is supposed to be fun and easy when it's done right. Let me know if you think that's the case. Is life supposed to be fun and easy when it's done. When it's done right, when you're following your purpose and going in the direction that of your best self? Well, when I put it that way, you could probably imagine that, oh, well, if you're becoming your best self, there are, you are by definition stretching outside your comfort zone. And when it's outside your comfort zone, that's how you grow, right? You know, if you were a baby and you said, well, I refuse to learn how to stand up and walk because it's scary and it's uncomfortable to learn to stand and walk, so I'm gonna just stay in my comfort zone because it's more fun and easy here, well, then you'll never grow and you'll be crawling for the rest of your life. If you never learned to read and write because it's. It's outside your comfort zone, then you won't be able to operate in society in a very effective way. So to become our best self, if you want to become more loving, that means stretching outside your comfort zone. In times when your natural current self might say, I don't want to be kind. But then you stretch your heart and you stretch your spirit and you, you know, whatever you need to do inside to then be kind and loving to somebody, you've just stretched and learned how to be more loving, unconditionally loving. Right? That wasn't fun to do in that moment. But looking back, you said, wow, that was really meaningful. So it is fun and easy to build an authentic business. If we look at the terms fun and easy from a much deeper standpoint. So instead of fun, I'm going to use the word joy, okay? And instead of the word easy, I'm going to use the word simple or maybe even secure, okay? So, for example, it wasn't fun and easy for me to start doing this video, you know, and to see the numbers of people coming in and out doing live Facebook Live videos. That's one of the, that's one of the parts of it is like, oh, now there's four viewers. Okay, now there's three. What happened to the person who left? Did I not say something interesting? Right. That's a normal part of doing Facebook Live videos and creating any content. Right? Literally four just went to three. Right? So three might go to two. And so fun and easy. I'll say it this way. I actually have a lot of fun and ease in building my business and I've had for a couple years. Even though if you looked at it from the, from the outside point of view, you could see that I'm working hard, you know, I'm doing things that are uncomfortable for me, etc, etc, but why do I feel like it's fun and easy? So again, fun. We've got to define fun at a deeper viewpoint if we ever want to grow. Because this morning I was playing a video game. It's lots of fun on the surface level, right? Surface fun. Tons of fun. And I could have kept playing for hours and hours, but I had a commitment to myself and to all of you to write a blog post and do a video on Tuesdays. So I stopped playing, put the phone down and faced the empty screen of a blog post. Blank screen. I don't know what I'm gonna. I mean, I had some idea what I might write about. Like how do I, how do I talk about this whole fun and easy thing? How do I write about it? I didn't know it was blank and it was scary. It was, I'm like, I don't know how a thousand word blog post is gonna turn out from this blank screen. I really didn't. But then I sat down and I just started typing anyway, making mistakes. And guess what? One of the things about deeper joy, deeper fun is adventure. Adventure, okay? If you look at life and your business, having fun as having an adventure, then you change the perspective of what fun means. Okay? So it was the adventure of coming up with piece of writing that I had no idea how it was going to come out. I had no idea if anyone's going to make, if it's going to make sense or anyone's going to like it. This video, I have no idea if it's going to make sense or if it's going to. It's going to go above people's heads. I have no idea. No idea. So I'm just going to say it anyway, right? It's the adventure of it. It's the I wonder what's going to happen. It could. I could fall into a cliff. I could fall off a cliff, right? Metaphorically speaking, this content could completely tank. Or I can make the jump and go to the other side of the gap where I made a connection, you know, that it really made sense. Right? It's an adventure. I don't know. So that's part of what I consider to be joyful and fun and turning scary and fearful and doubtful into excitement. And that's the sort of reframe that I constantly need, I have constantly needed to do in order to stay in business. Because if you think, again, business supposed to be fun and easy. If I'm doing it right, right then. And you don't define fun and easy on a deeper level, you're going to be out of business pretty quickly. Because again, business, authentic business particularly, is about growing into your best self. And that means stretching outside the comfort zone and finding fun in doing that. It's sort of like developing a taste for adventure, developing a taste for curiosity and developing a taste also for experimentation. This is all the same idea, right? A deeper level of joy. Right? Instead of just surface y fun that's like playing a video game or watching a movie or going to a concert or going by buying something that's all surface y fun. But that surface y fun is good for self care for, for renewing yourself. Kind of like letting go and relaxing for a little bit. But then you've got to get to the deep fun. The deep fun of growing into your best self and building an authentic business that you actually can feel proud of and love and see that you're making a really positive difference in people's lives. So that's what I mean by the deep fun. Now, what about the deep ease? Okay, I don't really get scared anymore. In business, even if a product or service fails, a program fails, nobody buys it, or, you know, I. If clients quit or whatever it may be, it's scary on the surface level. Again, all these things, if you only look at human emotions from the surface level, everything is so serious, everything is so scary and oh my gosh, what if it doesn't work out? Okay, I'm gonna go back and play my video game or go back and watch a movie or go back and eat potato chips, because that's the surface level. Easy and fun, right? But let's talk about a deeper level of ease. Do you believe that you are eternally secure? I think that's a really, really. For me, faith is what allows me to have Sustainability in my business. I've said this before and it sounded strange, but I'm going to say it again and hopefully connect to some of you. I don't understand. I mean, I don't want to say I don't understand atheists, but I think all of us need a deep level of sense of security. Otherwise, how do we really grow in life? You know, really, those of you who don't believe in anything after this life and the meaning of life is only the surface level fun that's currently in this life, let me know. How do you, how do you have the security of courage and like, doing things? Like, I literally, I'm not afraid to die. I'm literally unafraid to die because I have my personal faith. I'll just tell you what it is. I believe that life is. We have many lives and you know, reincarnation, all that stuff. And actually, I'm not even sure reincarnation is real. But what I do know is that the eternal security of my consciousness, like when I get hit by a truck or when I die of cancer or whatever it may be that I die, I'm going to keep staying awake. I'm not going to somehow blip out and it's gone forever. I'm going to keep staying awake and it's going to keep going and I'm going to, you know, there's the astral world and all that stuff that goes after this. But it's an, it's an eternal evolution of the soul is what I believe. That we keep on going to the next level and learning more and growing. And I think the purpose of it all to be cliche, but to be profoundly true is love. Right? Like we're learning how to be unconditionally loving and unconditionally accepting of every single circumstance, anything that happens in life, good or bad, neutral, exciting, boring, unconditionally accepting, having removed our blockages inside so that it's always joy, it's always love, it's always compassion, always gratitude. And we just keep evolving after we die in this material body. We just keep figuring out how to do that in the next world, in the next and the next and next life. And so my consciousness cannot be extinguished and there is some strange power. I believe. Again, my personal beliefs. Let me know if you disagree with me or if you believe the same or what you believe. Okay? I'd love to know. I believe that there's a. There's a. There's a power called God, however you want to call it. Witness, consciousness, the higher Consciousness, the ultimate source of all souls and life and everything that is kind of has built some rails for us that we can't really, like, we can't really screw it up. That's what I believe. Like, we cannot screw this up. The. When I say this, I mean the ultimate journey of our soul. Like, no matter what sins we have and how, however we spiral down in the depression and even suicide and whatever it is, eventually we're going to keep going in the right direction. Like, eventually, it's inevitable. Like, eventually all of our souls are going to end up being amazingly powerful, creative, brilliant, loving, wise. It's inevitable. It's inevitable. Like, there are these rails that we can't go over. So because of that, I'm not scared of anything. If all my clients leave and whatever, my marriage dissolves and I become homeless, it's okay. It's gonna be okay because somehow I'm meant to experience that. And I'm gonna learn how to love more and be wiser there or not. And next life I'll learn how to. So it's like, it's all good. Like, it's all. That's what I believe. And my faith, as a result, is this deep security that makes everything so easy. Because I don't care if my program fails this month. It's like. Because it doesn't matter if anything fails, right? If my health fails, doesn't matter. It's all going to be okay. And so that deep level of security allows me to build a business with courage because I can take lots of risks and it doesn't matter, right? Because it's all about. And that's so. Therefore, you see that the deepest level of fun and ease is truly there. Because it's all fun. It's really. Life is all fun. It doesn't matter what happens. It doesn't matter if a meteor hits my house and I die. You know, it doesn't matter if, you know, you know, there's civil unrest and, you know, whatever happens, I have to. I get, you know, I have to be scared because there's militias running through the street. It doesn't matter because it's all going to be okay. I'm being, you know, facetious. Hopefully it doesn't get to that level, but you know what I mean, I'm being extreme here. It literally doesn't matter what happens to me. It's all going to be good. And so it doesn't matter what happens to my business. It's all going to be good. If I have to go and work at McDonald's. And maybe some of you do. I don't know. It's going to be okay because I'm going to learn lessons there too, that are valuable. I'll probably become a manager at McDonald's or whatever it may be, right? But, you know, and I'll get to help people and train them and see, it really doesn't matter. What, I can work at Starbucks, doesn't matter. I can go pick up poop for a living. Dog poop for a living. Lots of ways to make a living, right? It doesn't matter. And so therefore I can take risks and, and therefore I can build a business. Why not? Why not? And I can make a silly video like this that I, you know, people might find me to be ridiculous and, you know, what do you call it? Superstitious, you know, or religious or whatever. Whatever people can think of. It doesn't matter to me because I'm pursuing an authentic business. I'm being myself. I'm sharing with you my soul and my heart in a true. I believe. I hope that is truly in service to you. So that's why business is. Building an authentic business to me is fun and easy because it's at the deeper level of growth, of adventure, of curiosity. Like, I wonder what's going to happen if I do this. Will it serve more people or will it serve people less? Maybe nobody likes this video and that's okay, too. I've learned something. It's fun. It's fun to learn. It's fun to experiment. And the deeper level of ease is like, you know what? Nothing doesn't matter if any of this happens or not. And therefore, if it doesn't matter, I'm going to launch my programs. I'm going to create things that could completely flop. It's ok, because completely secure. Completely secure. And I'm not talking. I don't have a trust fund. I'm not a trust. You know, I have to make a living. Like, nobody's paying my bills except me. So nobody's financially secure. I have to keep paying my expensive living in San Francisco because right now my wife has a practice here. And if it was up to me, honestly, we would move to Mexico where costs are so much lower and I could build an online business, but she can't have her work then Mexico, because I know I literally did all the research a couple years ago where to move in Mexico, and I was like, hey, let's go to Mexico. We're going to cut our expenses by, you know, 2/3 and be able to still Run my passion business there. But then she can't work because she does, in person work here. And so we have to live in expensive San Francisco because she, you know, she feels very comfortable here. And it's okay. I feel comfortable here too, obviously. So anyway. So anyway, I hope this rambling was helpful in some way and beneficial to you. I hope that you can. Every day. I mean, I've said this before also. We have to redefine success every day. And I'll say this. We have to redefine reality every day. We have to redefine reality every day. Because you wake up if you read the news or read Facebook or look at YouTube videos or anything, the whole world, society, is telling you that this is all there is, right? And therefore you should be very scared because that's what the news does. The news says, oh, this bad thing happened in the world, you know, and this bad thing, be careful of this. Oh, now if you. If you do this, this is bad for your health. Oh, don't you know, if you raise your kids this way, it's gonna be bad for them. There's so much scary stuff. That's what the world keeps telling us. Everything is so scary. And you have to be so careful, right? Oh, people might reject you if you don't dress the right way or say the right things, right? Like, oh, I don't want to be rejected. Everything's so scary. So that. Therefore, those of us who want to live at a deeper level of fun and ease at that deeper level, if you just live at the surface level, everything's so scary. No wonder we just want to play video games and do nothing but sit on the couch and watch Netflix. Because everything's so scary if we just step outside the house and try something, right? But instead, if we watch at a deeper level, redefine reality every day and say, no, no, no, no, no. This is not the only thing. The news. I don't like Donald Trump, but I agree. Fake news. Most of the time, when I say fake, what I mean is the news is reporting at a very surface level what's happening in the world when there's a much deeper reality that's happening, I believe. And the deeper reality is, it's all going to be okay. You're going. Your soul is going in a direction of unconditional growth and positivity, you know, and love and wisdom. That's where you're going to go, that it's inevitable. And so therefore, you can experiment in this life. You can try and risk courageously and in your business, you can build a business that you love because you know that it's all going to be good even if it completely fails. Yeah, you know, go work at McDonald's or whatever. Like I said, I'll be there with you if it completely fails. We'll work at McDonald's together or whatever it is. You know, we'll go, you know, go knock door to door and knock and deliver food, whatever it is that jobs that we're going to be doing. Right. If everything fails. Right. So go and build your business with courage, knowing that it's all good. Redefine reality every day as the deeper level of fun and ease. That it's about growth and experimentation and trying things, not blaming yourself. There's no self blame and self criticism and all that stuff. It's just growth. It's just experimentation. It's just learning. So that's all it is. So anyway, I'm going to end the video now. I want to thank those of you who are able to join me live. Captain and Carolyn toward Karen and Gord here Captain wrote, you're right. I think this view is possible only when someone has a deeper sense of being beyond the here and now. Yeah, redefining reality every single day. You know, Gord says, hey George. My reality was changed after a recent life threatening emergency surgery. Ironically, this type of experience has changed my outlook to not worry about so much stuff like I used to. I'm going to be more at peace with taking more risks too. Focus and fear is waste and limiting. Yeah, absolutely. Don't worry about anything. Seriously, it's all going to be good. Take risks. You know, like another, another thing that people are so scared of is oh, Facebook, Facebook has all my data and I'm so scared of privacy and all that stuff. And I get it. I. Yes, if this was the only reality and people are spying on you and all that's left in stuff. Right? Yeah, you should be scared. But again, I define everything deeper. I'm like, who cares? Take all my data now. Of course I'm careful about my bank data. I'm really smart not to log into websites that are not actually the bank. So I'm kind of tech savvy, so I know what stuff not to do. But Facebook, you can have all my things about the mistakes I make and all my data. Go ahead, who cares? Like I'm building an authentic business here. Facebook is creating so much more value for me than it is taking my data and selling it to whomever while selling it to other advertisers. That can get to me. Fine, go ahead. You know, because I'm also getting data that I can reach people like you so that you know, Facebook is matching people like you with me because of your data. Right. So. So to me the whole privacy thing and fearing all that stuff is, is a wasted effort and to be honest, even you try to fight it, it's. It's already too late. Right. Anyway so we already going towards a complete transparent society at some point surveillance everywhere and everything like that. Unless you're, you know, you're going to be a politician and unless you, you know, kind of. I don't want to go in that area that's a totally different video. So I hope that you will redefine reality every day in the way that you feel is deeper and gives you a deep profound peace and joy about, about everything that's happening and so therefore you can take risks. I wish you well. I wish you courage. I wish you an authentic business take care of.










