Apr 29 • Journal Entries
The Symbol of Healing That Isn’t Handed to You but Forged in Your Work
I was thinking about impact the other day. Specifically, the kind of impact that comes with a title, a role, a public responsibility that you didn’t just stumble into but swore yourself into. When you take the oath to be a doctor, a lawyer, a police officer, an army recruit, a veterinarian, an accountant, these roles all carry certain oaths. Standards that are considered norms as part of their practice. You step into them knowingly. You raise your hand. You make a promise. And from that point forward, people hold you to it. Society holds you to it. And if you’re worth anything at all, you hold yourself to it.
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That got me thinking about something bigger. What about one’s own oath? Not the one handed to you by a licensing board or a branch of the military, but the one you write for yourself. The oath to your community. The truths you uphold. The things you want to make right in the world. Because we all have roles and responsibilities whether we signed a paper or not. We all hold certain moral ethics towards not just the landscape of our personality and our upbringing, but towards our personal achievement in what we do on a daily basis. Our influence. Our output. The ripple we leave behind when we walk out of a room.
The easiest way I could frame this whole thought process was to think about the oath of a doctor, and that symbol, the medical caduceus. You see it and you connect the dots in your mind immediately. Healing. Treatment. Remedy. Relief from what ails you. What’s fascinating about that symbol is what it represents beneath the surface. It carries a level of trust and mental significance to the one who upholds that specific doctrine. In this case, we’re talking about the Hippocratic oath of ethics. It’s also known simply as the do no harm theory. Now there’s plenty of dialogue around medical ethics all the time because there’s so much interpretation baked into it that it’s difficult to just leave it at one line. Do no harm can mean a hundred different things depending on the context, the patient, the moment. But having dealt with many doctors over the course of the businesses I’ve grown over the last fifteen years, I’ve come to see a real level of responsibility in each of them. A specific lineage of what they’re trying to do. What they’re passionate about. There is a set of instincts around their output that goes deeper than the textbook, and that is very interesting because it correlates directly to things that you and I may do on a daily basis without ever thinking of it in those terms.
And that’s where this got personal.
It made me think about the civic responsibility we all carry to make things right around us. To make situations better in general. That same do no harm theory, applied not to a body on a table but to the world we walk through every single day. And there were a variety of topics yesterday that brought me to this realization. I have a civic responsibility of my own. The difference is, I already practice it. I do these things on a normal basis as part of my work, which is exactly why this became so relevant when I sat with it. The main important part of giving back and the essence of my body of work is not just some theory I carry around. It is in play every single day. I am improving businesses. I am improving production. I am improving thought and relevance to help organizations move forward with the things they need to do in order to heal and become vibrant and have good vitality, much like a body. The parallels are almost too clean. A business that is bloated with waste is sick. A business that can’t communicate internally is suffering from a breakdown. A business that doesn’t know where it’s going has lost its vital signs. And I walk in and I start the work of putting it back together.
That was interesting enough on its own, but then I started to think even deeper. Does it make me happy to do this? And that’s a big statement, because if something truly makes you happy, you’d do it for free, wouldn’t you? That realization led me down the next path. If I’m genuinely happy about making businesses operate faster, if I’m proud of the work I’ve done and I know more about this than the average person walking down the street, and that’s not arrogance, that’s just fifteen years of showing up, then why wouldn’t I do it for free? And if I’d do it for free, why wouldn’t I teach it openly? Why wouldn’t I bring that knowledge to the community in a way that lifts everyone’s standing, including my own?
That’s when it hit even harder. I started thinking about the lives I’ve changed. I’ve helped hundreds of businesses get better. Which means I’ve helped hundreds of people make more money. Which means their families are more secure. Which means the communities those families support are more productive and more stable. The actual healing of a business so that it can be more profitable and thrive and support a community around it, that’s not a small thing. That’s generational. That’s real.
It got very deep very fast. I have an oath. I have a responsibility to hold up every single day what I believe is my truth. My caduceus is a symbol of healing businesses and fighting the evils of wasted money and reckless spending and poor engagement and broken systems. And that brought me right back to the original question. What is my caduceus? What is the symbol I represent in the things that I fix, so that people know if they come to me, I can heal them? Their businesses, that is. I would wear that pin on my jacket and be proud to represent it. Proud that people could walk up to me knowing that their business challenges have a remedy.
Now let me put this into perspective, because just like any doctor, I can’t cure everybody. But my track record is pretty darn good. In fact, like a doctor who has healed so many patients that the reputation precedes the practice, I’ve healed so many businesses over these years that it’s put me into a different wealth category entirely. Not because I chased the money, but because the work was that effective and that consistent.
I guess what I’ve learned from this entire last fifteen years is that I’ve got to start being more proactive about publicly training, teaching, mentoring, and being an ambassador of goodwill towards businesses so that they can learn to self heal. It’s an interesting conclusion to arrive at, because it really puts a framework around planning out my weeks to include volunteering. Not the kind where you show up and sort cans at a food bank, though that has its place, but the kind where you bring your highest skill to the table and offer it freely. From a personal fulfillment level, with something I can genuinely impact, this might be one of the most important things I can do with my time going forward.
It’s quite interesting how I’ve come to these conclusions, because I think there’s a helper’s high that most people never talk about. There is something that happens inside of you when you find meaning in strengthening others. When you show up and put someone else’s problem before your own comfort. When the act of service becomes the reward itself. That’s not burnout. That’s not sacrifice. That’s alignment. And when you’re aligned like that, the energy doesn’t drain. It compounds.
Lesson Learned
Everyone talks about finding your purpose, but purpose without a public oath is just a private opinion. The real shift happens when you stop keeping your gifts to yourself and start practicing them in the open. When you realize that the thing you’d do for free is the thing you were built to do, and that teaching it freely doesn’t diminish your value but multiplies it. Your caduceus is not given to you by an institution. You forge it yourself through years of showing up, healing what’s broken, and deciding that the work matters more than the credit. The moment you pin that symbol to your chest and say this is what I stand for, this is what I fix, you stop being someone who happens to help and you become someone people seek out to be healed. That’s not a career. That’s a calling. And the fulfillment that comes from answering it is the only wealth that never depreciates.
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The Symbol of Healing That Isn’t Handed to You but Forged in Your Work
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