What If Your Business Was Just a Vehicle to Enjoy Your Life?

**Matthew Gottesman** (0:02)
Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.
Welcome to episode 831 What if your business was just a vehicle to enjoy your life? What if your business was just a vehicle to enjoy your life? Now, this is not to say to not take into account about building it successfully and that it's not about giving it your best work and it's not something that you're going to constantly devote yourself to. Of course, all of that is in there. In fact, in doing that, you will find that the revenue is very lovingly a big byproduct of something you truly enjoy doing.
Now, I know there's a lot of nuances in this because there are moments of building a business, there's moments of building a brand or going after your passion where it's tough. It can feel really tough and us as humans, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves for what it has to become and how fast it has to grow and we think it's going to be all sorts of things by a certain time and we've got all these ideas and expectations and outcomes and all of this stuff. And I was watching this video by a creator online, Ben Lawton. I'm going to play the audio here momentarily. And he posed this question, like, what if we approach the business as, hey, this is something that I'm enjoying my life through. I'm becoming through, I am learning about myself through. And it's a great reflection because I want to give that reflection to all of you. It's not about the money. And the reason I say that is because if you only make it about the money, it will be easier to quit.
And then for those that don't quit and they still make it about the money, you may feel like something is missing. It's possible you may feel like something is missing. And, you know, you hear this all the time from people that were successful in certain areas, but something felt missing in the process because of a singular focus for the end result without really understanding it's all about who you're becoming during it. Now, the goal, obviously, I think, the natural goal is, can you do something that you love so long, for as long as you possibly want to? Maybe you sell it, maybe you don't. But it's something that you absolutely love in terms of a business that you're creating. And yeah, some people create businesses and eventually sell it. There's nothing wrong with that. That is one way of earning from the business. Or maybe it's something that you just keep for a legacy to hand down to family, whatever it might be. But what's something you can do for so long that also provides a life? Right? Not just what you learn about yourself, but also provides something financially, can become something financially lucrative. Like you're allowed to earn money from something that you feel deeply devoted to. You're allowed to do a business and enjoy your life. And the deeper question here, the deeper question is, and I pose this often, is does it have to be some big grandiose event? Like I have to build this business to be an X number of dollars in the world.
Or I want to build this business as something that is an expression of who I am and how far I can take my greatness. Now here's the thing, ironically, the latter actually doesn't have a cap. The latter of your greatness can yield any kind of outcome. But the point being is that you may just love yourself more during the process because you're not just tying it to an outcome as much as you are tying it to your purpose and to your greatness. So I'm going to play this video and here's what this creator Ben Lawton had to say.

**Ben Lawton** (4:21)
What if we just ran our business to enjoy our life?
What if it wasn't about the next revenue milestone? What if it wasn't about amassing loads of wealth? What if it wasn't about impressing people you went to school with 15 years ago? What if it was just purely a vehicle to help you enjoy your life? Would that be so bad? Wouldn't that be okay if you just made a business that allowed you to do everything that you wanted to do? I'm sure if you wrote down everything you want to do on a piece of paper, it would probably require a lot less money that's in your head. Wouldn't that make business more enjoyable? Wouldn't it make it more fun? Wouldn't that kind of be the whole point to this? To enjoy it. Because if the goal is just to always increase revenue, it's a fallacy. We never get there. We never arrive. It's just an ongoing infinite number. But if the goal is a subjective idea of enjoyment, we can hit that and we could probably hit that today.