Business does not need to be Busy-ness: the rise of Calm businesses

Frenzy. Mistaking activity for progress. Focussing on time spent. This is all Industrial Age thinking. This is why so many incompetent people rise through the ranks in Big organizations like Fortune 500 companies & government bureaucracies. I also think this is the reason people keep their schedule so packed.

One of my favorite quotes is from French philosopher Blaise Pascal “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

The hardest part for most people is sitting alone with lots of time to think. The first and most critical part is finding the time to do so. That is also why beyond the personal and financial reasons, I spend as much time away from the SF Bay Area as I can. I tend to have more control of my schedule with the weird times zones & it makes me more considerate about where I open up slots or set up calls. Or even if I choose to have calls that day at all.

Whenever I am back in San Francisco which is arguably where a large part of my network is, I end up with a frenzy of back to back calls and meetings. I end up feeling harried. End up being mentally tired with very little time to read, write, process things and most importantly think.

You need silence to think more clearly. Multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett is known to have a completely empty calendar. Not because he is not doing anything. But as his friend Bill Gates was quoted to say.

“I remember Warren showing me his calendar. I had every minute packed and I thought that was the only way you could do things….

The fact that he is so careful about his time, he has days that there’s nothing on [his schedule]… [I learned] that you control your time, and that sitting and thinking may be a much higher priority than a normal CEO, [where] there’s all this demand, and you feel like you need to go and see all these people…

It’s not a proxy of your seriousness that you’ve filled every minute in your schedule.”

This thinking piece will be the edge for the creative class as the world gets faster and more complex. Calmness as paraphrased from rising investor Tyler Tringas. (Read more on the cool stuff he is working on: https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/calmfunding)

It’s about being effective versus efficient. Are you even working on the right and most important things? But even more importantly for me, do you have the freedom to choose what to put in your calendar? This is a reflection of what you choose as your life’s work and time.