On Lightworking and Business

[ahimel]

I'm responding to a question sent to me by private message, but I'm doing so in a public forum in case others have similar questions, and so the questioner can get answers from more people than me.

The question was What are the business options available for a Lightworker? As most of the business are already filled with darkworkers.

Some caveats before I begin. I am only very slightly polarized towards love, having made a conscious decision to polarize only a few months ago. So my understanding of lightworking may be flawed. Also, although I am currently owner of 3 businesses, none of them make me enough money that I can quit my job. So I don't have any personal experience in building a successful lightworking business, only in trying to build a lightworking business.

That being said, here's how I see it based on what I'm trying to do.

Lightworking and darkworking aren't inherent in the actions you take. Running for office may be darkworking (if you're doing it because you like the sound of "Senator" in front of your name or want the power to run your country) or lightworking (if you're doing it because you hope the authority will give you greater power to help others.) Most actions, such as eating breakfast, are polarity-neutral, or a fractal-quantum-mixed-up polarity so complex that no one could sort it out in a single lifetime. Am I eating breakfast for me, or for others? Well, I'm doing it to survive, so that's for me. But part of my life's purpose is to help others, so eating supports that, so that's for others. But some of those others are my family, and making them happy makes me happy and keeps my relationships alive, so that's for me... it's a long and complex tangle, and you don't actually get any benefit out of sorting it out, so I choose not to engage in it. But the point is that most people treat all of their actions this way. They choose their actions based sometimes on self-love and sometimes on other-love and sometimes on a complex mixture of both. They go to church but they also gossip about their coworkers. They go to college out of some vague notion that they ought. They are neither lightworkers no darkworkers because they haven't chosen one or the other, and their actions are neither lightworking nor darkworking.

Most businesses, to be honest, are the same, and the people in them are mostly non-polarized. But for some reason I have yet to ascertain, nearly all monetary education (in the US at least) is from the darkworker perspective. Economists (who are experts, and must know the truth ) choose to treat the subject from a perspective of limitation, and so all our accounting, all our managerial classes, all our marketing textbooks teach people to focus on the lack of money, to view business competitively, and to fear their customers, their competitors, and everything else in their market environment. So a good many people who are perfectly nice people that you'd love to meet at a dinner party.... *shrug* show a lot of their darkworker aspects at work.

Definition of Lightworker Business
To run a lightworker business then, you need to (probably) overcome the darkworker money training you've picked up, replace it with lightworker approaches to finances, and spend your days primarily concerned with helping people.

Note that just about any business could fit that description. If you open a McDonald's and you can wake up every morning thinking, "Oh boy! Today I get to help hundreds of people get food quickly so they can get on with their lives without having to worry about caloric intake!" and spend your days looking for ways to provide people with more options and better or faster service, then it's a lightworker business. If you open a McDonald's and think, "Tee hee! Every day hundreds of thousands of Americans buy hamburgers, and that's going to make me rich!" and spend your days coming up with ways to make greater and greater profit, then it's a darkworker business. If you open a McDonald's and think, "Well dang... now what?" then you're probably unpolarized. It has nothing to do with the business.... the difference is in you.

Just about any business opportunity, then is a lightworker business opportunity (although I grant that drug dealing, for example, is probably impossible to make lightworking.) So look through the Wall Street Journal. Check out your blogs. Listen carefully to your friends’ discussion over coffee. Every problem you find is a business opportunity if you can figure out how to solve that problem at a profit. And if you’re a lightworker, then that business opportunity is a lightworking opportunity.

FRO (Frequently Raised Objections)
Before I begin this section, I’d like to remind you that a lightworker believes that there is an abundance of love, power, wealth, and goodwill in the universe, and that no one has to “take” any one of these from someone else in order to increase their own stock. They also believe that if you give you will automatically receive – the universe is set up so that it will be balanced over any reasonably-lengthed period of time. If you want to be a lightworker business owner, you have to accept these premises as given. If you think these statements are full of ♥♥♥♥♥, you won’t agree with anything that follows, so I’ll save you the trouble of reading it.

Isn’t obtaining wealth what darkworkers do? So isn’t starting a business an inherently darkworker activity?
An important distinction: darkworkers pursue wealth, lightworkers receive wealth. Lightworkers focus on helping as many people as they possibly can. But by the 2nd principle above, if they help people, people will help them. If they give wealth to others, wealth will flow into their lives. Value in must always equal value out. And so if your business provides value, value must flow into it. The distinction between a lightworker and a darkworker is not how wealthy they are (look at Steve) or even how they got that wealth (they must have provided value to someone, somehow) but whether they’d give up all of that money in order to help others.

Isn’t it wrong for a lightworker to want to increase profits? Shouldn’t a lightworker want to keep profits low so they don’t take any more money from their customers than necessary?
This question only makes sense if you think of wealth as being a limited resource, so that a business that makes millions of dollars must have taken millions from its customers. In fact, when a customer trades $3.95 for a McDonald’s Value Meal, they have less money, but exactly the same amount of wealth – they’ve traded money-wealth for food-wealth and time-wealth.
So a lightworker, rather than seeing profits as a measure of money taken from customers, sees profits as a measure of value provided for customers. If you can find a way to serve more customers in an hour, then you’ve provided more value and helped more people. Incidentally, you also made more money (that’s an inevitable result of helping more people at the same profit per person), but it wasn’t the goal. Ditto if you can provide more of something that people need or want. When McDonalds started offering salads, they got more money as a result, because people ate there who previously wouldn’t. Did they harm customers by this? No, they helped customers get what they wanted. Because they provided more food-wealth and health-wealth, they received more money-wealth in return.
Note that in the example above – a lightworker and a darkworker both running a McDonalds – both store owners would take almost exactly the same steps. The lightworker would work to shorten lines, provide better service from friendlier cashiers, increase the menu options and improve the quality of the food. As a result, their business would generate more profit. Meanwhile the darkworker would be trying to increase profits. The easiest way to do that is to make more customers happy, so they would try to find out what customers wanted. As a result, they would try to shorten lines, provide better service from friendlier cashiers, increase the menu options and improve the quality of the food. Although their intentions were different, the actions were identical. (A concrete example of darkworking and lightworking leading to the same place.)

What if my neighbor/best friend/coworker takes my idea?
Then I’m sorry that you lost that opportunity, but I rejoice that you were able to help your neighbor/best friend/coworker. I rejoice that your neighbor/best friend/coworker now has a (presumably) good idea, but I pity someone who has so much fear that they think they need to harm someone else to get ahead.
You have a couple of options. You can continue to work with this person on the idea, but with them in charge. You can sell them the idea and take a small upfront profit. You can wait and see if they succeed with the idea, and take it back if they do not. Or you can give it to them freely, and find a new idea. (Remember that there’s an abundance of them). Some of this depends on how the other person responds and on what they choose to do. The only option over which you have complete control is the last one. But none of them negate the possibility of being a lightworker in business.
It’s also worth looking at Steve’s recent articles on Intellectual Property.

[munish]

Ahimel,

Thanks for this post.

[Tobias Zimpel]

I still don't get it. Of course I'd have my business with the intention to provide true value to others, but also with the intention to earn money so I can pay my bills - and then some...

If I have both intentions - to help others and making lots of money on the way, would that make me unpolarized, light or dark?

You say that the difference lies in the intentions, so maybe you could clarify it for me? Or can Steve?