You never hear (unless they're feeling really down that day) an emotive entrepreneur describe what they do with deflated, rubber door-stop descriptors like "Manager", "Financial Planner", "Consultant", "Specialist", "Designer", or "Company Owner" -- or even "CEO".
I call the tendency -- the pressure to default to such everyday-speak -- "self-inflicted commoditization".
It's easy to explain. For most entrepreneurs and company leaders, the pressure to act efficiently every moment of the day causes them to conform to the shorthand vision of what they do.
Commoditization occurs like the freaky onset of a disease. The making of all things into commonplace things is a destroyer of value -- just like when something becomes commonplace for the masses -- and becomes an actual commodity like sugar or steel, wood or corn.
The emotive entrepreneur does some kind of essential Jujitsu on the commonplace. They make the common uncommon.
The emotive entrepreneur finds a way to turn everyday sugar into a nostalgic, neighborhood bakery; common steel into fabulous architecture; wood from the lumberyard back into a Redwood forest; and basic corn into a story that's a conversation about the Earth.
The emotive entrepreneur never competes with what's already commonplace. There's no point.
Their goal -- your goal -- is to stay engaged with that higher level, that higher frequency of thinking -- the place in the mind that is open to strangeness, to new possibilities:
A) Emotive Entrepreneurs have heroes, and put their heroes to work
Every emotive entrepreneur, from bioscience company owners to green technology leaders, studies the people that have greatly influenced them. They find a way to shadow their heroes. They do things like get them on the phone and ask them questions about what they do, apologizing that they interrupted them on a Sunday, but press on in the conversation anyways.
B) Emotive Entrepreneurs get in thick with their peers
People who are good at doing what you do, who you can exchange ideas with, who you can mentor or get mentored by, should never leave your regimen. They give you the inspiration to move out of bad headspaces; they give you the inspiration to find the structures; they give you the insights that keep you focused on the elevated cause and the details to see it through.
C) Emotive Entrepreneurs perform deep-dives about what they do, to refine their relationship to what they do, to discover pathways to new ideas.
The best high-level entrepreneurs draw in journals and write pages about what they're thinking. They read their entries aloud to others in their master-mind groups. They get trusted feedback. They do things like call their satisfied customers and ask, "Wait, tell me again about what you like about working with us?"
They find ways to map out their vision; they draw colored maps on huge sheets of paper that span an entire wall; they host intimate sessions with mentors who pin them on the power and the validity of new ideas, who won't let them wiggle out of their path; they find the time to meditate on where the big picture begins and ends.
The whole point is to invent different ways to become less literal about what you do for a time so you can be literal more effectively.
Attacking everything with the hope of finding simple, straightforward and efficient answers cripples the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is where all of the answers are. So ironically, hoping for quick solutions, wastes time.
Emotive Entrepreneur, you can feel what others can't yet feel. You've been feeling all along what your audience has not yet experienced. You're ahead of them, but not like in a race -- more like in the way a conductor leads an orchestra and who unconsciously moves first to guide others to the heart and cadence of conceptual and financial power.
You rescue others from the unconscious fight between the pressure to make literal and safe business decisions and the need for the empowered magic that inspires the imagination.
That's not easy to do. And at a certain point, that becomes an act of ritualized compassion.
Interestingly, your fight to not become devalued (commoditized) is the same fight you fight for your clients, or your customers -- so they don't become commoditized either, so they can find ways to become differentiated in the marketplace.
A rather RICH business/entrepreneurial irony, don't you think?
What do great businesses do to combat this conundrum? For some, it's going to see a man about a horse. A Trojan Horse...
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