Should Your Business be Your Life’s Work?

When you’re in business for yourself, it can easily become an all consuming passion.  If you’re spending most of your waking hours doing what you need to do to be successful, hopefully you are enjoying those hours and they are feeding your soul as well. 

In the January 2008 Science of Mind magazine, I read an article in which Stephen G. Post was interviewed.  Mr. Post is a bioethicist and professor of medical ethics with Case Western University School of Medicine.  In this article, Post recalls a study that began in Berkeley in the 1920’s with adolescents and college students.  These participants have been followed all their lives, and it has been found that those who made helping others a major motive in their lives tended  – over the entire course of fifty years and beyond – to be happier, shielded from depression, and healthier.

Another example of the importance of being happy, mentioned in the same article, was a brain study in which research subjects were hooked up to a magnetic resonance device in a laboratory environment.  This device measured brain activity.  When the subjects had a list of charities put in front of them and checked a box next to the charity that interested them most, the mesolimbic pathway in the brain lit up.  That’s the deep emotional part of the brain that puts out good chemicals like serotonin.

So, the findings in these two examples says to me that when you are spending many, many hours on your business, it’s extremely important that you’re working on a business that you love – one that feeds your body, mind, spirit, and bank account…

If you’re having challenges in this area, you may want to seek help from an outside source that is impartial and can give you first hand business building guidance.