#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personaltransformation
Do You Need to Define the Purpose of Partnership (Getting Closer to People)?
– The topic of getting close to people, partnership, is deeply important and relevant to me. We somehow call it partnership, but it’s really getting close to another person. To begin, at least with one. We often create partnerships with a specific purpose. Having done so, we say we’ve set a goal. The next task is the question: how to ensure the partnership itself happens and is sustained? What’s more important: achieving the goal I set within the partnership, or nurturing the partnership that was created for that goal?
– I always say, there’s no strict rule about what’s important in creating a partnership: the goal itself, achieving it, some internal process, understanding the actions required for results, or just living through good and right relationships within the partnership. Initially, the most important thing is to very clearly and consciously define for yourself what this partnership is based on and its purpose (not a business purpose, like organizing a business event or event from a partnership perspective).
Example: Partnership with My Wife as a Relationship Without a Clear Goal
There are partnerships where you don’t need to define goals; they can simply be a part of life itself. And when it’s like that, you need to understand certain principles or values on which this partnership is built.
Let me give an example. If I start a business, I can tell myself I need a partner because they’ll help me achieve maximum results for the company. So, I need a partnership to make the company earn 10 million dollars.
But there’s a partnership with my wife, where I have no specific goal, because it’s part of my life. It’s a fundamental structure based on certain values; it’s a natural part of my life, and that’s why there’s no goal here. I don’t have a goal to live happily with my wife, to avoid divorce, to raise four kids, to build capital, or to gain some experience. I have no goal with my wife, though someone else might. When creating a family, when people marry, they may have a specific goal. Many get married because there’s a social goal or to form a family.
Money or Relationships: What’s More Important in Business?
…So let me continue answering from a business perspective. I have an education business, where for me, the partnership is primarily about the purpose of the work itself rather than making money. Although now I’m starting to form two vectors: on one side, I want to maintain the big goal (developing this partnership and our relationships within it, having a business within a partnership with this person); on the other side, I want to create a very clear foundation in this business—that we’re doing business that should be worth a certain amount of money or generate a certain profit.
I’m saying all this because without understanding the basis, why you’re creating this partnership, it’s hard to define what’s more important: every day or a certain set of actions to reach the final result. There are businesses where partnership is just one component. It’s like an existing office or hired employees—it’s just a part of the business. The partnership, the office, the employees will all disappear when I sell the business. Don’t fool yourself about this.
How to Resolve Conflicts in Family and Business
We’ve started several projects together. I was always completely open to starting something together; maybe one day we’ll do something else, since we’ve been friends for 11 years. But we’d start something not because the partnership was formed based on business, but because we have a partnership in life. So why not bring business into that? And the same goes: why not bring in travel, mutual development, connection with family, with kids? There’s been so much of that. And why not, within the relationship, exist in the student-teacher, teacher-student dynamic, which was also abundant? And why not bring in other people? In such a way of living partnership, the important thing is contact with this person, developing relationships, hearing, and getting to know the other person, because the partnership itself is a meaningful characteristic.
Many people ask, “Do I need to be with my business partner in family situations or go on trips together?” Some say, absolutely not; business is business. Some say, you can do business with your wife or husband; others say you can’t.
Honestly, I think if I could do business with my wife, it would truly develop our relationship, not degrade it. But we can’t do it: our systems, our spiritual beings, we as people can’t interact in this way with each other. By the way, that doesn’t mean we can’t interact this way with others—we do. But with each other, we can’t interact that way. Maybe a time will come when we can; that would be amazing. I’d be thrilled to be able to share this wisdom with my children if they were mature enough that we could create something professionally together, where we would develop or help each other and work together. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge: maybe they’d work for me, or maybe I’d work for them. The important thing is to see if we have the strength and wisdom to make it happen. It’s so cool—to dive deeper into people you’re already in contact with, to learn more about each other, to accomplish more together, not to close yourself off from it.
I’ve had so many times in my life where, within a partnership, I blocked conflict resolution because of my own pride and ego, not common sense and mutual growth. It’s a very subtle question, because it depends on what kind of partnership it is. Each person experiences a huge number of different partnerships in life. Don’t just think of partnership as owning shares in a business. You need to understand the purpose and foundation of partnership a bit more broadly. Understanding this gives you the ability to make the right decisions on how to act. Did I marry my wife to constantly prove something to her or to spend happy time together? Do I spend happy time with her by proving something or when we’re simply together? What forms happiness?
Remember this when so many things fade and change. People lose relationships with their parents, children, family, friends, acquaintances over this. Sometimes it happens naturally, but sometimes it’s unnatural. Certain prejudices, old memories that are no longer needed. Time has long passed.
The Influence of the Past on Self-Development
Today, I remembered an interesting story. I recently talked about how a person lives through many aspects in life. 20 years ago, I knew how to do certain things in terms of my profession, programming, or project management in IT—things I no longer know how to do. Professions have changed; so much has changed in them: I knew so much, and now I don’t know as much. I remembered the time when I played video games. Nowadays, many people, businesspeople, play computer games, consoles. But those were different lives. Back then, when I played games, I had a certain relationship with my mom. Time passed: now I don’t play, I have a completely different relationship. I’m a different person in terms of interacting with my mom. Do I remember that? Do I leave any old scripts, prejudices, behaviors, and other things when interacting with her? Am I ready to step over certain barriers? Because I understand that life is finite. This is true human scaling. Hearing it all is what leads a person to a cosmic scale, which is often impossible to even comprehend.
We return to the point: how I, as a person, relate to other people. And awareness: the awareness of observation, of perception.