What Qualifies as a “Strong” Business?

I have been mulling over the idea of strength lately as we wrestle with the building of our tiny business (and tiny boys). 

With the influence of my Marxist graduate school, I cannot help but see how much of our society’s definitions of strength lie in the dialectic. Power and strength appear in the opposition of persons or entities. We see this belief shouted in our conversations of economics, race, and gender. She is encouraged to lean in, gain power. He should shut up and listen, give up some power.

Strength certainly opposes something. Anyone who barely passed Physics understands this. However, what I question is an oppositional dialectic based in materialism. Instead of strength rising from the material; it rises from the emotional and spiritual, from a place within each man and woman based on individual emotional responses to frustration, fear, and discouragement. 

This appears in universal narratives, stories of the weak overcoming the great trials of life, rising sometimes above a material power, but always over internal weaknesses.

How does this relate to business, you ask? In every way.

If there’s one thing we have learned in creating a business, it is our own fragility, our own weakness. The fears that creep into my mind, perniciously whispering all the ways that we will fail as others before. The exhaustion from thinking through too many details at once. The constant wondering, "when will I really blow this?”

Above that is the care and concern we carry for our customers. We serve many other small businesses and as we join partnership, we join their fears to ours. The care, hope, and fear for another fellow business owner can make the whole enterprise feel like too much, too much frailty everywhere. How can any of us do this? But this is where our strength lies. The strength to care for another as much as yourself. The strength to hurt when another hurts. And the reality is that all of us are weak; some of us are simply more aware of our weakness than others. But building a strong business requires weakness before it can be built into strength. We have to face something that pushes us almost to breaking in order to become the person or business we hope to be. 

There is a tree in the desert, the Methuselah tree, which stands warped and worn in the midst of hot burning sand. It is the oldest tree in the world, at almost 5,000 years old. It is not strong because it was built in a materialistically idealistic world. It is not beautiful or hovered over by caring gardeners. It is old and strong because it was given weakness and it withstood the tests. It is strong because it had nothing notably ideal. 

We are yet another young business, fighting the winds of the desert of life. We will be stronger if we persist in our weakness.