What a great post by Mark Silver at the Heart of Business blog. His post, “An Ode to Diapers: Finding What You’re Truly Passionate About,” offers some heartfelt advice about why you started your small business in the first place… to help some group of people. Whether it’s an insurance company or being a plumber, at some point you realized that your skills could help someone who needed some kind of assistance they couldn’t provide themselves.
This really clicked with me since I just started up Life Is Local and the reason I started this site is to help small businesses do a better job of marketing, both online and offline. To me, marketing is more than just something that needs to be done. Marketing gets me jacked up and excited. When I see a truly inventive marketing campaign, I think to myself, “How can I modify this to help out one of my friends?”
The Only Reason a Business Exists
As Mark puts it so eloquently in his post:
“The only reason a business exists as a business is to help certain someones solve a certain problem they can’t easily solve for themselves. That’s why people are willing to pay their time and money, because they get help.
It can be big help, like facing terminal cancer. It can be smaller help, like getting your house painted just the right combination of colors. Whatever it is, it’s worthwhile if it’s helping people and not harming others.”
Just like poopy diapers, sometimes the tasks you need to do in your business don’t get your heart pumping or make your soul sing. There’s drudgery in any business, and even if you don’t enjoy doing the grunt work, you know at the end of the day that in order to keep helping people, you have to do some things you don’t particularly enjoy. But, if you remember why you got into your business in the first place, perhaps changing that “poopy diaper” can be a little more tolerable.
Check out Mark’s “An Ode to Diapers” today.
