Figuring out your purpose requires actual reflection on both your own desires and the audience you want to serve. After all, doing business boils down to serving others in a mutually beneficial way. Customers give you money, gratitude, and a shared passion, and you address their problems by applying your unique skills and knowledge to what you sell them.

As long as someone is already perceived as competent, acknowledging mistakes can be beneficial.

Utilitarian things are often more cognitive or instrumental in nature, purchased to fill a need.

When hiring, try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. Genuine decency—an instinct for fairness and openness and mutual respect—is a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.

The Way It Should Be

One thing that you may have noticed is the conspicuous absence of job descriptions that sound like this:

• Looking for candidates who would like to connect their Workview to their Lifeview

• Looking for candidates who believe that good work is found through the proper exercise of their signature strengths

• Looking for candidates with high integrity, the capacity to learn quickly, and high intrinsic motivation; we can teach you all the rest.