We live in an era where personal improvement and earth-friendly activities are major focuses of the public spotlight. These concepts revolutionize individual lives, bringing a sense of purpose, consciousness, and awareness that permeates through all aspects of life.
What is less often addressed, though, is how these personally-focused, self-improvement activities can easily translate into effective business strategies. Below are three powerful modern concepts — minimalism, the Marie Kondo Method, and sustainable living — each of which, when applied to your entrepreneurial endeavors, can revolutionize how you do business.
Using Minimalism in Business
Minimalism has been intensely stereotyped in recent years as a lifestyle that obsesses over restrictions. However, while having less things is certainly a side effect of minimalism, it’s hardly the primary focal point. The focus of minimalism is to assist you in finding freedom from things like fear, worry, guilt, and the various artificial needs that come with living in a consumer culture.
In other words, minimalism is about avoiding finding your purpose in your stuff.
When applied to business, this can have the rather dramatic effect of reorienting your priorities. Rather than focusing on maintaining an unnecessarily large workspace, stocking an excessively oversized warehouse, or purchasing endless bells and whistles for your office, minimalism helps you stay organized, focused, and efficient. Minimalist activities like decluttering your workspace, creating paired down “to do” lists, and organizing your internal communication channels can all help to increase your business’s efficiency in dramatic ways.
Using the Marie Kondo Method in Business
The Marie Kondo Method — also known as the KonMarie Method — is a fascinating concept that is akin to, but not identical with, minimalism. Rather than focusing on freeing you from the physical needs of a consumer society, the KonMarie Method emphasizes encouraging you to get rid of anything that doesn’t “spark joy” — i.e. have a purpose or a meaning in your life.
This can be directly applied to your business in multiple ways. For instance, the concept of sparking joy can directly impact your company culture, foster a sense of gratitude, and help your staff find greater meaning in their work lives.
In addition, many of Marie Kondo’s basic principles, such as staying committed and imagining the ideal ending before you start, can be extremely helpful as you comb over your business and strive to keep your operation efficient, productive, and ultimately focused on what’s important.
Using Environmentalism in Business
Finally, we have environmentalism. The earth-conscious concept championed in so many individual lives can directly impact your business both inside and out.
Internal Benefits of Environmentalism in Business
Internally, your business can take advantage of the benefits of environmentalism by investing in sustainable practices like using renewable energy — that is, energy that is produced with little-to-no environmental impact. Businesses that are built on environmentally friendly principles are ideally situated to survive and thrive as green energy becomes more readily available and fossil fuels become more scarce.
External Benefits of Environmentalism in Business
In addition to the operational benefits of sustainable energy investment, the mere act of adopting an environmentally-friendly posture as a company does wonders for your public image. You situate your enterprise as one that takes corporate social responsibility seriously, which can increase brand awareness, boost sales from loyal patrons, and ultimately benefit your bottom line.
Using Self-Improvement for Business Improvement
Whether you’re talking about minimalism, the KonMarie Method, or environmentalism, there are many self-improvement philosophies that can have a tremendous impact on the success of your business. The important thing is that, as a business owner, you take the time to study these methods and discover how they can be inserted into your operational model.
If you can do this, you can improve your small business’s efficiency, focus, and sustainability, all three of which are excellent attributes to hone as the post-COVID-19 world faces a very uncertain future.
Noah Rue is a journalist and a digital nomad, fascinated with the intersection between global health, personal wellness, and modern technology. When he isn’t frantically updating his news feeds, Noah likes to shut off his devices, head to the beach and read detective novels from the 1930s.
Plant stock photo by Freebird7977/Shutterstock
