The system of the Marine Foundation’s organizing principle is impregnated with 2 motivators. Education and Celebration. Education and celebration might not ring well as conventional social and corporate habits, but what else in the world would otherwise be more enjoyable than learning something new and spending valuable time with friends. Our mind works through constant questioning. We are being educated every single day of our life. Our mind craves for information and every time we learn something, a joyful energy comes out. This is love. Anyone who educates other creates love, love creates energy and the resulting phenomena produce results that call for celebration. How simple life really is, as designed 100% in its pure form to satisfy abundantly through the simple natural acts of learning and celebrating. The rest is just a distraction to me.
How would we create passion within a corporate environment? Again, Education and Celebration might then come to mind. For example, a leadership group might try to mesmerize their staff all the time with new information and create ways to celebrate every employee to each person feeling an equalization of status based on family relations. This would perfectly transform an atmosphere. These 2 life’s natural motivating incentives of learning and celebrating – will fusion the heart with passion where “routine work” itself would become secondary to the true purpose of one’s precious day. A trained manager may consider this a distraction away from focus, but with that kind of energy circulating around the office, time can finally stop and the desire to exceed becomes more exciting than the exit doors of Friday nights. When a family structured atmosphere is created out of the most rigid of corporate environments, relationships of the kind creates an energy that takes over the fear of competition and finally, everyone moves into an unbreakable chain of command where each person’s own conscience becomes his/her own true boss. How liberating.
I have tested this out in my own life. I once was working for a Japanese company where I was one of their only foreign full-time employees. I decided to test the environment to the point where I would be fearlessly breaking the rules of that corporate dictatorship of fearful moments each time the big boss walked into the floor. My strategy was first to become perfect at my tasks and after a couple of months, I heard the president said: “I wish all employees were like him”. It did make me smile, thinking to myself, “You’ve seen nothing yet!”. Then, I started to voluntarily break every office rule there was while keeping my job to perfection. I teared up my “time punch card” every time I got a new one, watch videos all day, hugged the lady boss to greet her in the morning, etc… to the point managers thought I might have a mental problem. However noticing that my co-workers were silently laughing their head off, hiding their faces happy faces behind their computers. It was like “Tomeo’s great office distraction” was on every day and it excited my colleagues while managers had me face the firing wall time and time over again.
Since my work was still irreproachable, they had to accept me or face the risk of losing me. My attitude was starting to trail and impregnated on a few others, specifically those whose confidence in their work and position was unbroken, they also started to unchain from what others thought of them, and putting aside their stress, they followed me in some crazy silly strips of waves of laughter and moments of courageous office adventures. We had fun, we brought results and there was nothing no one could do about it, except join the club or be left out. But the kick of the story came revealing when to push the experiment further, I went to the big boss and against anything she would say to try changing my mind, I decided to fire myself. That day, it was like if the floor was covered in clouds of rain, and my colleagues, men or women, I noticed, had they eyes watered in lights of sadness. That very night and just before the day’s work completion, I told everyone that “I was just kidding” and here again, we all went for drinks after hours, mocking the astonished blurry eyes and confused faces of managers when they thought I was leaving the company. Since then I would walk in every day at work and jokingly shout “I quit” at the managers’ faces to soon have others therapeutically do the same and every single morning it was touches of laughter to hear these words out of timid Japanese salarymen as if they were in control of their destiny for the day. It was like a celebration in the air at the thought of still being together at the end of troubles, like living life to the fullest… at the office.
It was refreshing to see how simple life can transform if the spirit leans on letting the conscience lead the way for a change, rather than that ever-present heart ego uncomfortable blockade that stops us from living life in the fullest on a daily basis. If we were to listen to our conscience carefully, in real time, we would automatically stop procrastination and reform such question habits of “What the heck am I doing here?” to reasonably asking oneself: “What am I gonna do to get me out of here” or if the job pleases: “What am I going to do to have fun today”. The funny thing about “fun” is that no one has fun unless “results” come about. Education and Celebration might as well be the sources, the fulfillment and the fluorescence of all that’s good in results, whether at work or at play and anything else in between, these 2 poles attract to where we should center, every single day of our life.
Bring your youngsters information and laughter, and you will produce magic out of them. Senior leaders talk about immaturity in young people, but an inspired young mind is never too immature to perform miracles. Test it out. The largest companies in the world today were started with young people barely graduated from college. Virgin Airlines, Microsoft, Apple, Google etc… Of course, at the advantage over the past reformers, we do live in a world of high technology and the comfort of fast communications. The expansion of a thought, service or product depends much on communicative skills. We wake up with all kind of expectations but we usually are simply happy about our day if we’ve learned something new or spent time in healthy communication with others. The standard frame for conventional corporate celebration is usually based on volume or status. But in that spectrum of temporary reality, the “ego” always gets a chunk of people’s moral wisdom until it has them running like peacocks, begging for attention and praise. The achievement of a good day must prove a result I suppose because there is no freedom without result. To generate the “willpower” that it takes to bring good results, an educated mind must center around a grateful heart, and that happens only when a purpose has been learned and celebrated.
It is true that some people are able to achieve some amazing results with their personal motivation and determination to succeed with their passion or their business. It’s interesting to think about it, but what do actually successful people do to help change people’s lives, especially those who suffer. And if they do try, what is the extent of their impact on societies in which they live in or the worlds far away they try to support. For example, many use Africa and poor people as a target to feed their heart with a goodwill spirit, which of course, is well intended and would probably help make someone somehow. It seems that the more you celebrate the more you learn and the more you learn, the more the more the chances to be instructed to a path of goodness. Unfortunately, those who succeed become too preoccupied with success than the struggle of taking responsibility to a worldly cause. Since we all have a good heart at the base, we do naturally want to fix things. But really if there were things to fix in this life, it would have to start with me.