Business Skills and Life Skills Readiness

The successful businessman has demonstrated to the world that he has outstanding business skills.  But how skilled is he in other areas of life?  How developed are his personal relationship skills, and his leisure skills?   How well rounded is he as a person?  His business is profitable and stable.  Can the same be said for his marriage and his children’s development?  Does he have hobbies?   Can he dance, or ski, or play bridge?  When did he last read a novel, or take a vacation?  Does he know his neighbors, or go to church regularly?  How often does he laugh?  Could he happily spend a week in the mountains with his family?

Ironically, successful businessmen are often quite lopsided in their skill set.  On the one hand, it might seem just fine to be skilled in business but less so in personal life.   After all, the money is coming in, the owner and his family members all have a stable routine.  The owner is enjoying the stimulation, challenge, and prestige of his daily work life.  Everyone in his family is fed, clothed, housed, educated, etc.  Since running the business is so rewarding, why rock the boat?  Why fix what isn’t broken?

On the other hand, though, businessmen achieve success by being realistic about the world, clear- and open-eyed about trends, about the future, and about known patterns in the world.  Isn’t it obvious to the owner that, with the passing years, there will be changes in his abilities, his needs, his desires?  How can a practical, realistic person like a business owner fall victim to an illusion of immortality or to an illusion of an eternal present situation? 

Further, even when the owner does start to realize that selling the business and moving on to the next stage of their life (which business brokers like to call “the afterlife”) should happen sooner than later, why do many of them do such a poor job of diversifying their skill set and creating a updated fabric of healthy relationships and challenging activities that will give meaning, purpose, significance to every day?  When this task is not accomplished, the afterlife generally proves truly painful.  The name for this challenge, this task, is “psychological readiness to sell.”