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In This Episode:\n\n\n\n* Wanderwell founder Kate Strathmann and I unpack how our personal values often don\u2019t line up with economic forces\u2014and how that impacts our business* Why rethinking the purpose of your business might help you rethink your goals to be more aligned with your personal values* How expanding your vision to include taking care of others as well as yourself can create a paradigm shift in your business\n\n\n\n\n\nMarketers love to tell you: do this and you\u2019ll make more money.\n\n\n\nOr, do this and you\u2019ll have more freedom.\n\n\n\nOr, do this and you\u2019ll get to be more you.\n\n\n\nIf you do what I tell you to do, your life will significantly improve.\n\n\n\nThe reason for this is simple: capitalism turns life improvement into a task of consumption.\n\n\n\nWe\u2019re convinced we can buy our way to an easier, more satisfying life. And that means many of us are convinced we can work our way to the money we need to do that.\n\n\n\nFurther, the more we improve ourselves and enhance our lives, the more we can use our selves as a form of capital to reinvest in the market. As Jia Tolentino writes, selfhood is capitalism\u2019s last natural resource.\n\n\n\nNow, I\u2019m not meaning to pick on marketers here.\n\n\n\nBecause the way we (and yes, I\u2019ll include myself here) market our products and services is only one very small part of a systemic problem.\n\n\n\nThe larger, systemic issue is how most of us are conditioned to focus our effort on the individual pursuit of success. We focus on our individual challenges, our individual needs, and our individual opportunities.\n\n\n\nAnd that\u2019s great because businesses can sell us answers to the questions of individual success and the solutions to individual challenges.\n\n\n\nWhen their solutions don\u2019t bring about the results we\u2019re looking for? Well, it\u2019s likely because we\u2019re just not as capable as we need to be, right? Ugh.\n\n\n\nIndividualism is insidious.\n\n\n\nOf course, just because individualism is insidious doesn\u2019t mean we don\u2019t have individual needs, goals, and desires that are absolutely worth pursuing.\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s just that individualism as a system, along with the personal responsibility doctrine and the false promise of meritocracy create a series of assumptions that ultimately pit my success against your success, my needs against your needs, my desires against your desires.\n\n\n\nWe can talk about wanting business to be a win-win all we want but, as long as we\u2019re working in these systems, it\u2019s incredibly difficult to make it happen.\n\n\n\nSo what that does is put our personal values in conflict with economic forces. It puts the way we want to see the world in conflict with the way the world works.\n\n\n\nOver the last 5 years, I\u2019ve been trying to imagine and build ways of doing business that meet & exceed my individual needs while also broadening my focus beyond only my individual success. I still have many more questions that I have answers\u2014and I\u2019ve peeled back many layers of privilege and conditioning to see things in new ways.\n\n\n\nLast spring, a new layer to peel back started to emerge. My friend and our resident business radical, Kate Strathmann, made it clear that many of the ways we were responding to the pandemic and resulting economic shock were an attempt at \u201cindividual solutions to ...