Tag Archives: unshakable faith

How To Build A Life

I was reading a short article about a couple of entrepreneurs, Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff, who started the organic Honest Tea Company and are also the co-authors of “Mission in a Bottle: The Honest Guide to Doing Business Differently and Succeeding.”

I was interested their foundational principle:

Have an unshakable belief in your product. Build something you’re passionate about … build something you believe in, not just something that you believe in 50 percent of the time.

Doesn’t that strike at your inner core about the essence of how we should build our lives…by knowing and living what we believe in 100% of the time. In my former job, not just a few of my conversations with my employer surrounded the topic of how business analysis, objectives, and strategies best represented our core values, in both small and big decisions, and in not only business but our personal interactions as well. Of course, just like real life, we don’t always get this right, but knowing and living your core values matters!

In business and in life, we have a choice of course. We can momentarily turn away from our core values to achieve what seems like advantageous short-term gains. We can ignore those values and take the easiest path available to us that avoids conflict (temporarily). Or we can embrace our true beliefs with intentionality and use them as a moral compass to guide us through challenging environments. This latter choice is a definition of faith-based living. We live by faith in what we believe, all in, without reservation. To borrow martyred missionary Ed McCully’s phrase, we live with ‘reckless abandon’ for what we believe 100% in. In his case, it was reckless abandon for Christ, whatever the cost.

Do you have an unshakable belief in something that you are so passionate about 100% of the time? One that motivates you to intentional daily actions based not on convenience or entertainment but on the intentional path set by your moral compass? One that guides you steadily through difficult waters and fills you and others with great joy during smooth sailing? One that matters most of all at the end of this life and the beginning of the next?

Really believe God and choose wisely, friends. He believes in you.

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” Matthew 7:24-27