DailyJim: Business models of no to high love

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, February 20th, 2024.

Today I want to talk about business models of no to high love. I don't know if the title is the best, but I wanted to start riffing on this concept. So I was thinking of this idea that there are some models, some business models have varying levels of love involved in them. Some people may call it trust, and maybe we can explore that a different day. But this idea of some models have no love, some have low love, some have medium love, some have high, some have super high love. And so as I've thought about running classes, as I've thought about teaching people how to respond to any situation with love, any emotional attack especially, I've thought a lot about this. And I think I've struggled in some ways to come up with a business model that, aligns with the level of love that I feel for myself and for other people.

So let's start. Let's think of in a situation, what's a business model that requires no love? When there's no love between the people, what's the business model? Frankly, I think it's war. It's conquest. I'm going to come in. I'm going to kill you. I'm going to take what I want. I get the resources by physical violence and killing. I'm going to steal this from you. I want to take it from you. So I think war may be one of the lowest if no levels of love between people or amongst people. What's slightly higher? Maybe it's direct exchange. But in a very suspicious, I think these people don't care about me. I'm going to try to cheat them every possibility that I can weigh.

It's trying to negotiate super, super hard to always get the absolute best situation for myself in every scenario. There's no give and take. It's I want everything I need right now. It's lying through and through to try to get what I need because I believe they don't care about me. So I might as well get everything I can right now. Now, slightly more up, I would say, is kind of what we consider maybe normal business. I have a product, a service that I want to sell to you, and then you pay for it in direct exchange. So I package it in a way, and then you pay for it. I'm mostly honest with about how the product's going because I care about you. I don't want you to get hurt. I don't want you to be poisoned.

So I'm going to be mostly honest. then you're going to be mostly honest with how much you can pay because you know that I'm trying my best to take care of you, etc. I think slightly above that is going to a restaurant or something where you become a regular. So now you start to develop a relationship with the people that are working in the business. They develop a relationship with you as a customer and maybe they give you discounts or they give you a free meal every now and then. or they go, you know, he's good. He's been here quite before. I know he's going to pay next time because we're good friends. We care about each other, I know. I know he doesn't have the money today but he'll come in tomorrow.

And then maybe we go beyond that. Maybe the next level is actually employing, like employing somebody in the organization.

So, because that's actually a business model. A business model of having a job and a salary is a business model. It's how people are giving services and receiving other services in exchange.

So, in that way, it's like, hey, I know he's not working today, but he's sick. And, you know, he's got a couple sick days to take off. Often those relationships as well can be higher love. I really care about them. They got a kid going to school. Again, depends on the workplace. But some of those can be even higher love. I think going to another level might be kind of the nonprofit approach, where a nonprofit often has kind of volunteers. So from the working standpoint, people volunteer their time. But also with the customers or the beneficiaries it's often giving services for free and then receiving money for free or in other words receiving services for free without that contingency of forcing kind of the exchange and i think this happens in most non-profits but i think there's non-profits have different levels as well so non-profits that are trying to to raise funds, often we'll have to go through a grant making process where they'll have to write up a huge grant proposal, and then we'll have to write up reports based on the results of what happened with the money that they received.

And so those environments tend to have a little bit more distance, less distance and more closeness than maybe your typical business exchange, but not as much closeness as other forms of nonprofit. So, for example, the donation could be based on, well, I'm going to give you money and it's going to be a, what do they call it, this idea of like it's restricted donation, I think it is. And so I give you money, but this donation must be used for this thing.

But then you can go up to the next level when there's more unrestricted donations. I'm going to give you money because you're working in this organization, and this organization is working on this stuff. I'm giving money to this organization so that you can deliver to the beneficiary.

Beneficiary, like a TV commercial I just watched, could be the ASPCA, which is an organization that helps animals. Animals and their advertisement had a bunch of dogs who looked very sad and very, um, maybe on the brink of death and loneliness. And the appeal was basically have much more love for these dogs and have a deeper connection to these dogs and therefore donate to the organization to take care of the dogs. I think maybe even a level above that is donating directly to someone, not necessarily to an organization, but directly to somebody. Because that love is, I don't know, maybe not, but this idea of donating, giving something to an individual because of the care for that individual. Giving to a nonprofit, it's the care maybe for the dogs, but then you give to the the people who are caring for the dogs, but you may not have a relationship with the people. You may be grateful because they're caring for the dogs and you love the dogs, but there may not be that direct love with the people. Now, what if the people don't have that mission or they don't have the specific thing that they're doing with their dogs and it's much more open? Then I think that's an even higher level of loving connection to give to somebody, not knowing what they're going to do with it. This program called Give Directly which is about donating money to people in poor villages, typically I think in Kenya and some spots in East Africa. And they give them the money with, they call it I think unconditional cash transfer. So the idea is to just give them money and say, okay, what are they going to do with it? To not force the conditions on it.

And I think in some ways that can be an even higher level of connection with somebody. The uncertainty of what they're going to do with the thing that they're giving are we giving them and the uncertainty of if, when, how they'll ever give something back to us.

And I think the business model I have been doing, I've been trying to do more of kind of the low to like a medium love business model, where it's I'm going to come up with this package of classes, I'm going to sell them to people, and I'm going to force them to pay this price. And um but the problem is i feel so much love for people the more i work on this stuff i see my humanity i see their humanity on a much deeper level and so then it gets really hard, to pull back to a lower level of love to to manage the business model it's almost like Like, for example, selling sometimes a product, there's a profit margin built in and businesses can often be quite secretive about not telling the customer what the profit margin is because they don't want the customer to know because they don't know. I can't charge them as much. I struggle with this because I care so deeply about these people who have such a relationship. I want to be open and honest. But if I'm open and honest, it loses some of that aspect or at least loses some of the the medium connection aspect, medium love aspect.

And so I just want to reflect on this because I think, you know, I wonder if somebody is running a nonprofit, can they increase the level of love and connection that they have with their donors or with their beneficiaries or with their employees? If somebody is running a business, can they increase their level of love? Love, does that change the way that they do their business model? Or conversely, if the business model, if the level of love goes in the opposite direction, how does that change the business model? If people get into conflict, different groups or individuals get into conflict, how does that change how someone approaches a business and the way that we do exchange of services and goods with each other?

And what if they're not aligned? Oh, I've gone past 10 minutes. Oh no. What if they're not aligned? What if maybe we are in an industry that requires a medium level of love and we're actually operating at a higher level of love? Does that make it hard for us to operate with that business model?

Or vice versa, maybe we're in an industry that's a high level of love. Maybe we're working at a nonprofit that's very open and doesn't have very firm plans and doesn't, when people donate, they don't give them specific products back. It's more of just like, hey, you donated, thank you so much. What if we work at a place like this or we're starting an organization like this? But the way that we operate personally in those moments is at a much lower level of love towards ourselves or towards other people.

So anyways, just wanted to talk about this a little bit because I think most of us don't think about this.

And maybe the language resonates more if we say trust instead of love. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. But I want to end this because this is 11 minutes and I'm broken of rule, but sometimes you got to break the rules. Anyways, talk to y'all tomorrow.