Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. ― Aristotle

There was a time when happiness was just an understatement. It was not the time of contemporary happiness, but a higher level of satisfaction and a deeper level of fulfillment. It is when you can tell who to be trusted, what to be done, how to live a useful life, and in where the meaning of one’s life lies. This state has been given two names: Customer Satisfaction (business), or Eudaimonia (philosophy).

Everybody just wants to be happy, but most people end up becoming slaves of the money. It is like running endlessly in circles while the things you truly want to chase is outside. It is like a secret breath you have yet discover how to take. It is the feeling of running so much only to be told that you are stuck in the same place. Here’s the fault in our modern world: we will never be enough.

We no longer trade for flourish and wisdom. We buy nonsense objects just because they would make us look cool to others. They never taught us to buy the things we need in order to have a good life. We have to want what they want us to want. We live to fit the moving pattern. We have been manipulated to buy what we don’t need just to look nicer, cleaner, prettier, richer, and happier.

You see, businesses are failing as they are selling us things of temporary value. We are always looking for the better because we are never even good enough ourselves. We may buy the product because of its awesome advertisement, but it is not the same as loyalty. The reason is those products do not deliver their ultimate promise. Why?

We are taught to be selfish. We have been told to suck out the best energy from people, take advantage of them, kill our competitors, steal from our partners. We choose the head so much that we forget about the customer’s heart. We think copying someone’s business is okay. We lack psychological intelligence and we create things that can be replaced in a blink of an eye. We do not consider Eudaimonia.

One flaw about dreaming big is that your dream may come with a twist. You may wish to be famous, but you will hate the paparazzi. You may wish to be the fairest of them all, but you will not know where your true love is. You may wish to be an entrepreneur or a billionaire, but you may not be working on what you are most passionate about. Truth be told, successful people focus on what they are good at, instead of trying to sell themselves for money.

The new approach is to climb up the Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs [1]. The bottom pyramid, where most businesses are, demonstrates basic needs such as food, clothes, shelter, and water. The top pyramid, self-actualization, will make the business become the most that it can be. It ensures Eudaimonic promise, introducing people to pivot on not what it wants to sell and buy but what provides more than just happiness and welfare to buyers.

Imagine if you book a flight to another continent. You settle for a low price. You travel to relieve stress. You travel with your spouse in the hope to fix a big argument between one another. But it does not work that way. That cheap flight is not comfortable. You are still stressed. That expensive dinner at another place on another continent would not heal the broken wound. You should only travel only if the act gives you fulfillment―not expectation or attention. The businesses’ mission should never be just about selling. That cheap travel might be cost-efficiency, but you totally would never ever want to choose that flight again.

Today, Eudaimonia seems to be forgotten in the economy because people think philosophy is long dead. People are too busy trying to slide after the advancements of the world that they forget to advance their inner selves. The absence of the psychological elements produces the wrong jobs for the wrong talents. People are good at everything that they do not know what they want to do in life. Everybody forgets the ultimate paradise of their mind.

Paradise of the mind does not only exist in the mind. It is the combination of the head and the heart. He who is too ashamed to admit that he feels is a coward. Everybody feels. After all, every business operates at the fuel of their customers’ hearts.

There is a paradise within. Only those brave enough are able to dig them out.

© VITAK CHEAV