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Today’s Karmic Workout – Expose Your ... Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue O...

Today’s Karmic Workout – The Art of Usefulness

Karmic Muscle Group: Awareness & Committed Living
Today’s Exercise: The Art Of Usefulness

[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.

What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.

Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.

The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."

For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.

You may want to print out the post about the Virtue Usefulness and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]

Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the first virtue, usefulness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about usefulness by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Usefulness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will mean avoiding unuseful things. This will be much harder than you think. Most of us are pretty oblivious as to why we do what we do during the day.
For the rest of the day, try to make everything you do useful to someone including yourself. Think about the usefulness of what you do all day. Keep bringing usefulness to mind as you work through your entire day including when you finally go to bed. Sleep is very useful.

Training Note:
There are two aspects of practicing the Virtue of Usefulness. First, there is learning to see the utility in all that you do. This helps you become mindful of the consequences of your actions and the karma that you are creating. Nearly everything you do has some use to it, but are you aware of that usefulness? By thinking about usefulness we see how what we do fans out in our reality and it trains our minds to be aware of what we think and do actually does in the world. Second there is the mental discipline of actually staying focused on usefulness. This is much harder than it looks. To do anything throughout an entire day without wandering off track is quite challenging. Do not worry if you forget for a while, but do not undertake something without taking a second to think about what your actions are doing for you and the world. What is the purpose of each action and thought? This is a huge question that can take a lifetime to answer. You will be surprised, however, to notice that there are new dimensions you can add to your consciousness when you spend a day (or a lifetime) contemplating the usefulness of what you are doing while you are doing it.

Karmic Benefits:

What The Heck Do You Think You Are Doing? It seems like a simple question, but we spend an enormous part of our day utterly oblivious of why we are doing what we are doing. It is not that we spend our days doing useless things, though sometimes that happens, but it is that we do things like robots without appreciating how it interconnects with the world. You will find that when you tune into usefulness, your work becomes meaningful and your life fulfilling.
If You Cannot See The Usefulness In A Task, Then Why Are You Doing It? Rarely do we do perfectly useless things. But when we are not focused on usefulness, we lose our ability to perfectly tune what we are doing to its intended purpose. We get sloppy and wander off to watch mind cartoons rather than appreciate that we are in a moment that actually serves a purpose. If you can’t see the usefulness in what you are doing, perhaps you should find something else to do.
Usefulness Is The Consciousness Of Intention and Purpose: Being mindful of the Virtue of Usefulness connects us mentally to our purpose. Even when we do tedious tasks, it often is inside the greater design of a significant purpose. Understanding that licking envelopes to send invoices to customers so that your company can collect money and pay you is an opportunity to be aware of how all activity fits into the whole of great enterprises, great communities and great lives.

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.