What Is Your Billion Dollars Context?

Photograph by Austin Distel

What Is Your Billion Dollars Context?

If you observe life carefully, you will realize that you are always inside of some situation that is showing up in your life in a certain background, in certain circumstances, and in certain settings. This ‘background setting’ is what we call context. This context gives meaning to the situation and informs you on how to be, how to act, and how to behave in that situation. Context is like a lens through which you see life. 

If some situation shows up in your life where you see the situation as “me vs him”, or “me vs her”, or “us vs them”, however you react and whatever you do, has a certain reactive quality to it. 

However, if your context for the situation is that “we are in this together”, then the same situation shows up very differently, and what you do has a very different quality to it. 

Now, let’s say you meet a potential business partner with the idea that I'm going to use him and I'm going to get the most out of him and I'm going to get this deal done in the way that I want to get it done.  That way of thinking gives you the context for that relationship. 

Or you can have the context that, “I'm going to start a new partnership, my power is going to grow, his power is going to grow, and her power is going to grow. And this is a new beginning, and we will have challenges, but I have a mood of anticipation in this new partnership. And we both are going to be great together.” Now that way of thinking gives you a new context for a whole new world of possibilities.  

Context is about your mood and about the background mood of the relationship with others. And, that mood is about trust. Your capacity and your skill for navigation, of maps of power, are directly proportional, to your capacity for Trust. The capacity for authentic trust and for setting your own context is the super-skill for gaining and managing power in business. We will discuss Trust in detail at another time. For now, let’s turn our attention to the phenomenon of care and how it can help set a billion dollars context. 

The phenomena of context are related to the phenomena of care. Care is the hidden secret of power. When you set a context for your business to give an opportunity to all small businesses or provide an essential service of one kind or another to a large community, that context can deliver you dancing bears that become yours without a leash—very loyal, skillful, and hardworking employees, partners, and investors. All manners of help arrive from sources never imagined before. Your context of ‘how am I going to make money for myself’ pits you against everybody else, and all manners of enemies and difficulties arrive. As long as you are operating in the larger operating system of democratic capitalism, you are going to make money proportionately to the value you will create. Innovators such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and so on were never concerned about how much money they were personally going to make in every single deal. Their context from the start was about much larger care i.e. how am I going to enable all merchants to take email-based payments, or, how are we going to create a cool club for young people to have fun, and so on. Care is not about being good or being bad. Care is about some dissatisfaction about which there is a great deal of resignation in the community. 

Your power is directly proportional to the size of the context available to you. It is perfectly well to operate with all your focus within your local environment, but your power is then limited to the local environment, and when the larger context changes you find yourself unaware, unprepared, and at the mercy of change that is happening at the larger context. 

If you want your power to grow you have to be willing to see a context that is larger than your specific needs at this moment. Seeing that context, seeing the possibility of that context, and creating for yourself a new context, gives you a brand new source of power. 

In the times that are coming, we will have to re-generate many new contexts for ourselves. 

We may have to reconfigure our families and our ways of being in our works, our identities, and offers and our living situations. The rate of change is increasing in our times, and it will continue to increase as technological innovation accelerates, and the climate and the mood of the planet and the people continue to turn hot and sour. And the general anxiety and unrest continue to reinvent us as beings and confront us with new contexts for earning a living and caring for those we care about. 

In the midst of all this change, many new possibilities for new contexts are becoming available on the foundations of which the next generation of hundreds and thousands of multi-billion dollar enterprises will be built. These opportunities are not available to entrepreneurs and leaders that simply want to repeat well-known models for extracting value. These opportunities are available to leaders that are awake and alert to the changing conditions of our worlds and have the skills for inventing and mobilizing new contexts. 

Thank you for reading or listening to this. Now, I invite you to consider the following questions and share your thoughts. 

• What is your billion dollars context? 

• What new ideas and perspectives are opening up for you? 

• Is your context visible or invisible to you? 

• What new missing elements and conflicts are you now becoming aware of in your business (and life)?