Your Business’ Ancestry

You’re a part of it.

You may not feel it right now, but you’re a part of your business’ ancestry.

Your business may fizzle and die in your lifetime. Perhaps it was designed to. Or perhaps it was designed to outlast you and continue for many generations.

One thing is certain: unless it was designed for the latter, it was designed for the former.

While reading a longnow.org essay this evening, I was reminded of such “cathedral thinking” by remembering how they format dates. In their blog, the date isn’t 2020. It’s 02020. That leading zero is an indicator of how long we should consider and plan our work (in their case, “life as humans”).

When I started writing this daily blog, I marked the first post as “001” with an expectation of continuing for a long time. Today, as we fast approach post #1000, it’s clear I should have marked it “0001”.

In the pursuit of better messages and better business practices, another great reason for making it less about yourself and more about your audience exists in the temporary nature of you.

After all, if you’re building something to last, why build it around something that isn’t?