Large corporations have gone through intensive training to learn what I am going to teach you in simple terms: any business, especially small business, is an organization of people striving to attain a common goal. If that goal is different for each individual of the organization, the business will fail. The collective nature of business requires that we as owners, executives, supervisors and employees know what the mission of the business is to make sure we are all pushing toward the same goal. But even more important than that, we must be willing to find our balance in work so that both we and the organization benefit positively.

In corporate business, the most common goal of an organization is making money. Increasing financial measurements, such as shareholder wealth or liquidity, is not only a goal but a motivator in itself. The reason for this is that those involved with the organization need to be reimbursed for their time. Shareholders are giving money over time that could be invested elsewhere, so they are reimbursed through dividends and increased share prices. Employees trade their time for the good of the organization, so they are reimbursed. The business world should be willing to admit this more often, and those who work for a living, even for themselves, need to realize not the value in their paycheck but rather the value in their time. If if they did, they would work in positions that fit their skills, use that time to their advantage, and see that their success in work is also the success of the people around them.

The legislature constantly proposed to continually increase minimum wages works against that concept: give people more money who hate their jobs, don’t strive for anything and aren’t seeing the value of their time. Cry me a river if your job at McDonald’s is meaningless. McDonald’s realizes that you don’t care about the value of your time. They know that all they have to do is pay you the bare minimum and you’ll do your job just well enough to make them way more money.

If people were paid the value of their time,  poverty would be less the fault of the economy and more the fault of the individual. If you are compensated based on your presence at work and how you affect the company, there would be employees making minimum wage and those making much higher than current wages. Think of your own place of employment. You have the people who come in, complain about the day, complain about customers, do just enough work to get them by and run for the door when the day is done. Then you have the people who come in determined, expecting a hard day’s work, realizing what their role is in this workgroup, and do what it takes to enjoy themselves while they’re doing it. It may not be that they’re fitted for the job, have more skills, or even have a passion for the position. They know they are balancing the impact that they have on the organization and others around them with the impact the world has on them. The world gets ugly, you work to make things beautiful again.

The meaning of life is contextual. In this context, your purpose in life is to find your place where your time balances the impact you have on an organization and the impact the organization has on you. That is your value statement. Once you know what that statement is, memorize it. Put it up on your wall. Put it on every day of your calendar. Repeat it before and after work. It’s your mantra. If you work as a call center rep in a major corporation in the sales department, and know that your ability to improve the revenue of the company is met with the company’s ability to pay you effort-based commissions that help provide for your enjoyment of life outside of work, that is your value statement. If you’re in the same position and the impact the organization has on you is more about helping your customers achieve a desired state of mind, that’s your value statement. It’s personal, it cannot be chosen for you, and you must believe in it for it to work to bring your life into balance.

So work as a team tomorrow. Find and use your own value statement. If it doesn’t seem to work, try it again the next day, and the next. I always say life is a process, not a light switch. Never expect life-changing events to happen in a flash; there’s always a build-up to them, even if you can’t see it.