Introduction

Business - whether you are a cold-hearted capitalist by nature or consider money the cause of all evil, in our modern society, we almost all heavily depend on business both regarding the jobs but also the products and services businesses provide.

For many people, this is where their relationship with business ends.

In this post though, we are taking a look at another way of how business relates to life and how we can use business knowledge and principles to make the most of our lives.

This post covers...

1. 👔 What a business even is
2. ❓ What treating your life like a business means
3. 🚀 Why we should treat our life like a business
4. 🛠️ What it looks like practically
5. 🌍 Conclusion

What a business even is

In order to understand the idea and benefits of treating your life like a business, we first need to clarify what a business even is and what characterizes it on the most fundamental level.

When I asked ChatGPT, this is what it came up with:

A business...

• is an organization
• pursues a purposeful activity
• has an organizational structure made up of departments with different functions
• operates in a competitive environment of uncertainty
• therefore has to invest and take risks
• has a profit motive
• is accountable for its actions and the corresponding consequences

This may be a heavily abstracted list of what characterizes a business, but fundamentally, I think ChatGPT nailed what constitutes a business on the most basic level.

What treating your life like a business means

Look back at the list. Isn't there something strange about it?

When you look closely, you might notice that many of the points more or less match the characteristics of human life.

When broken down fully, treating your life like a business simply refers to the idea of looking at the whole of your life and all the components that make up that life and acknowledging the greater structure formed by all of these individual components.

When we think about our lives, we tend to isolate their different components from each other.

We talk about work, family, hobbies or health. But rarely do we talk about these topics on a meta level to discuss how they relate to each other and collectively influence and determine the output and experience of our lives.

As a business owner, your primary job is to make sure that all the different functions of your business (finance, legal, human resources, marketing, sales, operations, ...) work together smoothly to sustainably keep your business running.

A dominating marketing department in combination with a poor sales department is just not going to get you very far.

Relating this to back to life, treating your life like a business is about understanding that you don't just have to work on improving each of the components of your life individually to ensure a smooth ride, but that you also and more importantly need to make sure you build and create a harmony among them collectively.

Why we should treat our life like a business

The benefits of treating your life like a business again may seem a bit abstract at first.

But really, it comes down to basic reason.

By definition, a functional business "purposefully pursues some activity". It does so by very intentionally building and putting together different departments fulfilling different functions that complement each other in a way so that there is a meaningful (financial) output in the end.

The average approach on living unfortunately seems much less intentional than this. And as a result, many live their lives in an unbalanced and unadjusted structure of messy and disconnected departments. Not only does this make it difficult to move forward productively but it also creates little to no or just not much of an enjoyable output.

Treating your life like a business aims at building your life more intentionally by adapting the same level of intentionality a growth-oriented business would have.

What it practically looks like

There is no specific manual to treating your life like a business.

Understanding the idea and having the awareness of how individual components of your life affect the whole of your life is ultimately the primary goal.

A simple gateway trick though is to give your life a project or business name. This way it becomes much easier and more natural to look at your life from a third person point of view to get the necessary distance to see the bigger picture.

After giving your life a project name, you might want to try to visually map out your life to gain clarity on how the content of your life spreads across broader categories characterized by specific functions.

By doing an exercise like this or talking to a friend about it, you may begin to notice relationships between areas and aspects of your life, you may start to see where your strengths are concentrated and what underdeveloped areas are holding you back.

Afterwards, you should have all the knowledge to adjust behaviors and delegate time and energy to develop your life much more intently and effectively.

As always, it's a process.

Conclusion

Life is complex and even if you are privileged enough to concern yourself with questions like: "What do I actually want to do with my life?", the answers to these questions can be quite the challenge.

Treating your life like a business is a mental model for approaching the building process of your life as intentionally as a business treats its development and growth.

This is possible because the human life and the way a business works share many similarities.

As a result, much of business knowledge and business principles are useful tools to not just apply to economic endeavors but also to the individual pursuit of a meaningful life.