The purpose of a business

“We should think of revenue as the way people think of breathing; it’s necessary for life but it’s not the purpose of life.” — Twitter CEO Dick Costolo

Amen.

Making money is not the purpose of a business. Making a profit is necessary to sustain the enterprise, to reinvest in the future and provide a return to those who have invested the capital to launch it. But it's not the raison d'etre, the vision of the founders.

Too many companies forget this along the way.

A meteorological journal of the mind

I'm listening to a fascinating audio course on the Transcendentalist Movement and the role it played in American history. The movement is inextricably linked to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, so the course focuses on their lives, world views, and the important roles they played.

Both Emerson and Thoreau wrote journals where they noted their observations of the world and developed the thoughts and ideas that later took form in their essays and books.

I like their characterization of these diaries as meteorological journals of the mind. Seems an apt description for this blog.