Life as a business owner comes down to one question: craftsman or empire builder?
Empire builders are publicly celebrated and privately mimicked. Their hustle and grind, urgency and ambition are all as intoxicating as the chemical cocktail of dopamine, cortisol and adrenaline that fuels them.
Initially in your business building journey you embody the freneticism and rabid enthusiasm of the empire builder. You have to make it work. You need to get cash in the door. So you do anything and everything. The empire builder’s scarcity gets results and saves your bacon.
Then, you reach a stage of security where you need to decide which direction you will take your life. Thing is, you probably don’t even realise there’s a choice.
You’re conflicted about whether to be an empire builder or a craftsman because empire builders are not only worshipped by culture, but their loud and fast nature screams at you too. That’s attractive, especially in a social media dominated world. Craftsmen on the other hand are still and quiet, they exist in subtleties, nuances, and quiet.
There’s also the fact that almost every business coach out there is suggesting you need to become an empire builder to feel successful. They capitalise on your fear and scarcity. Inherent in their messaging that tells you it’s easy to make £20k per month and that everyone else already is, is the suggestion that what you truly desire in life is not worthy.
Additionally, they suggest if you aren’t constantly hustling, forcing, and crushing, that you’re going to fail, and you’re lazy.
I recently worked with a business mentor who shall remain nameless. I looked up to him initially, but his empire builder mentality revealed itself after a while. “It’s not the best who win, it’s the best known,” he said to me. This was followed by instruction to decrease the focus on being excellent at what I do, and focus on marketing exclusively. I believe this man and his clients will win a game, it’s just not the game I want to play.
The craftsman vs. empire builder choice is one of which game you’re going to play. It’s a question of which game your psychology is optimised for too.
Success Metrics & Your Psychology
You need to know your success metrics. These are what make you feel successful. Different success metrics resonate with different people. What resonates with you depends upon your individuality.
For the craftsman, the harder to quantify their success metric is, the more valuable it is. Revenue, profit margin, and market share are superseded by quality, presence, freedom and mastery.
Those who build empires seek scale, dominance, and profit. Those craftsmen amongst us seek a rarer and harder to quantify success metric: quality. Their product is considered a success if it (a) delivers an experience of quality to the consumer, and (b) delivers an experience of quality to the craftsman himself during creation. His work is driven by meaning, not expedience. It’s intentional and deliberate; conscious and purposeful. It’s with this level of active engagement in his craft, that the craftsman notices the subtleties that allow him to create things that move the recipient. His product, whether an espresso roast, a coaching session, or a punchline is a gift.
His creation comes from stillness, not the urgency and scarcity of the empire builder.
His ultimate priority is quality, not just in his work, but in each moment of his life. So his time with his spouse and children, his training regime, and his self development, all point at quality as their success metric. Profit is both enjoyable and necessary, but it’s a byproduct of quality and supports freedom to create quality in his entire experience. Profit is not the only goal.
The essential difference between the craftsman and the empire builder is the former seeks to contribute with their creations, the empire seeks to extract.
The Inner World of The Craftsman
The act of creation is a dojo for the craftsman’s character. His work works on him, as much as he works on it. As he fights a technical battle, the internal war rages too. His impatience, fear, or immaturity becomes part of his product and detracts from quality until he masters that part of himself. He walks two paths simultaneously: the path of creation, and the path of self development.
The empire builder seeks profit margins and power. Life has a business priority, and everything else is secondary. Family, health, and peace of mind are all afterthoughts. Sacrifice and its inherent scarcity dominant. One day, they will rest, but not today. Empire builders create a vital part of our world. You don’t build Amazon, or record the most PGA tour wins without some kind of cost though.
Self-Knowledge and The Craftsman
My craft is helping Adventurepreneurs become who they’re meant to be. They come to me when they’ve hit a glass ceiling and realise that their self development plateau is restricting their real world attainment.
What they’ve been doing is looking out at a world of empire builders and attempting to mimic these people’s attributes. What this misses though is the individuality of the Adventurepreneur. They’re forging themselves into someone else’s mould instead of the void of potential that is unique to them.
They distance themselves from their oddities and quirks that are actually their greatest assets. There can be many reasons we do this: fear of standing out, a busy mind, or simply lacking the means to develop ourselves consciously.
What is uniform amongst all of these people’s journey though is this: to choose your path you must know yourself authentically.
If you’d like help discovering what this looks like to you, just shoot me a DM on Instagram and we can chat.
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