My name is Olivier Coquillo. I was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and I currently live in Fremont, California. Thank you for your time. I truly appreciate it.

START YOUR OWN BUSINESS

Imagine you woke up one day and received an anonymous message that read as follows:

[Your Name], no matter what your current circumstances are, you can start your own business today with the most powerful Investor and $0. Yes. In fact, you already own your own business; you just haven’t started managing it yet. You just haven’t assumed the CEO position yet, and this position was given to you on your Birth Day.

What would come to your mind?

I’ve been thinking about my wake-up time lately, and I realized that the time at which I wake up on weekdays totally depends on the time at which I want to be at work in the morning. In other words, my job determines when I start my day during the week, and because my wake-up time is consistent on weekdays, and because it easily becomes a habit, I often find myself wide awake around the same time on weekends as if my subconscious mind was programmed to send wake-up messages to my brain at a particular time. Now of course…these messages are ignored when my Friday and/or Saturday nights are full of social events…Furthermore, I would never be able to count how many oh-s**t-i-need-to-go-to-sleep moments I’ve been through after realizing that I was up past my bedtime and that I would not get enough sleep if I didn’t go to bed immediately. If you belong to the group of people who have pressed the snooze button a million times, the group of people who have cursed their alarm out in several languages, the group of people who have walked through their office building with steam coming out of their ears because they had to wake up early to come to that place, the group of people who set their alarm based on:

– the time at which they are required to be at work

– the amount of time they need to convince themselves to get off their bed

– the amount of time they need to get ready

– and the amount of time it takes them to commute to work

You KNOW what I’m talking about, and if you lose sight of God for one second, you may start believing in the Matrix. I don’t know about you but I can’t spend the rest of life like this. I am definitely not in favor of letting my job strongly influence the way I spend my life. So I need a new job; I need to start my own business, and starting my own business with the most powerful Investor and $0 sounds like a pretty good deal to me – though it doesn’t really make sense. Why would the most powerful Investor invest $0 in my business if He really wanted to help me?

This is how I’m starting to understand the anonymous message above: I am my own business. God (the most powerful Investor) invested in me with the gift of life ($0), and my role as the CEO of my business is to strive to give God the best return on His investment.

If you consider a business to be the provision of services to clients, then you are a business and every single person – including yourself – within your extended network is your client. Eating, working out, driving, dancing in front of a mirror, practicing a speech, listening to your favorite songs, reading, learning, and praying are examples of services that can be provided to yourself – and others. Cooking, talking, listening, motivating, writing, what you do at work, volunteering, forgiving, and loving are examples of services that you can provide to others – and yourself. And since God is your sole Investor, and since you can’t operate a business without keeping your investors in mind, you have to learn how to see God in everything that you do.

Are you starting to see the bigger picture? What you do at work is just part of it. So if you want to start your own business, you don’t have to quit your job if you like what you do. You just need to look at life from a different angle and realize that your job is one of the services that you provide. You can start waking up earlier than the time at which you usually wake up to go to work and create some time for you to pray, read, listen to your favorite songs, dance, exercise, watch a motivational video, write down your plan for the day, call your loved ones if they are awake, and anything else that you feel like doing in the morning to grow your business and to feel in control.

It’s obvious that money is not the return on investment (ROI). Your business can only be profitable if you provide high-quality services to your clients. Since you and individuals within your extended network are your clients, you will maximize your profit when you live to your full potential and when you devote your life to serving others to the best of your ability. But what exactly is your profit if it’s not money? And what is the ROI? To find the answers to these questions, you will have to stop thinking about profit and ROI as financial gains. Your profit is the fulfillment of your life purpose, and it is also God’s highest return on His investment.

It’s time for you to START YOUR OWN BUSINESS: strive to be the best version of yourself and help others do the same.

OC @ olisways.com