Where to Now?

Pink Floyd and the Spirituality of Work

For Christmas this year my wife bought me the essential collection of Pink Floyd, a popular band in the 70s and 80s. The collection came with a book documenting the band’s recording history and it gave some insights into what the music was all about.

Pink Floyd holds the record for having an album on the top 200 chart the longest. Their album, ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’ was on the chart for about 790 weeks. The average number of weeks a good album stays on the chart I think is somewhere between 40 to 70 weeks. Pink Floyd may hold this record for as long as we care to track such statistics.

The album was the first theme album the group created. The theme they chose to write/sing about were all the things that stress us out; Ambition, Time, Money, War, the meaning of our lives, etc. After the huge financial success of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon,’ the group began to flounder. The reason for their floundering was, as Roger Waters explained in an interview, that the band had achieved everything they had set out to achieve, but they still didn’t feel “complete.” Projecting my impressions on what the band was going through, I’d say they still felt empty.

I think a lot of us feel this emptiness, especially when we have achieved some form of success at something we’ve worked hard for. And I think spirituality is the root of the problem, or rather, the cure for our despondency.

Four years ago I started my own company, ZDocs. We provide digital printing services for our customers. When we started out four years ago, I just wanted to run my own business. In the back of my mind was always the thought that the only way to financial independence was ownership, but the primary reason I launched into my venture was to prove to myself that I could do it. I call this need, which according to Pavlov we all have, self-actualization. Self-actualization was the primary driving force behind my decision to start my own company. At least this is the story I’ve made up for myself.

When we started, we had no soul. We were just running around trying to bring in enough sales to pay our bills and stay afloat. But as time went on, it became apparent that we needed something more. After much thought, we decided to enter the self-publishing business. This decision has transformed our business and I think our soul is beginning to form.

Our soul is coming from our passion to serve our clients. Many self-publishers don’t know how best to produce their work or they have had bad experiences with printers ripping them off. In addition, many authors haven’t an idea how to go about selling their products. This need authors have is generating innovative ideas within our inner circle about ways we can help authors be successful.

We are beginning to emerge from a group of people who simply thought running a company was to become wealthy, into a group of people who genuinely care about our customers. We are more concerned with the success of their projects than the success of our own company.

This is not to say we are taking the eye off of running a profitable company. We can’t do that and continue to help our customers. To help our customers we have to stay in the game. What is happening is that we are finding meaning in what we do; we are finding our soul.

My uncle runs a chain of quick-lube stores in San Francisco. When he answers his phone he says, “Hi, this is Larry, how may I serve you.” My uncle Larry has found his soul. The satisfaction he gets from serving his customers is worth more than the financial rewards his business ventures have brought him.

I run a small company, but some of my vendors are Fortune 500 companies. One of my big frustrations is that these large companies have sold their souls to meet projections on Wall Street and they appear hog-tied by the systems they have in place to make them more productive.

America is about capitalism, no doubt about it. But why can’t we be spiritual capitalists? Why can’t we integrate our spiritual selves into our capital selves? If we could be spiritual in our work-lives, then perhaps when we achieve the success we are working so hard for, we might be able to feel satisfied and full instead of empty and lost.