You have to be very careful. If you over-commercialize a social mission, it completely loses its soul.
Interpretation
Commercializing a social mission can undermine its core values.
This quote suggests that the essence of a social mission can be compromised if it becomes too commercialized. The act of prioritizing profit over purpose can lead to a loss of authenticity and the original intent behind the mission, emphasizing the need for balance between financial sustainability and social impact.
In practice
Using this quote in a social entrepreneurship conference to highlight the importance of maintaining values.
We need to understand the other side to impact the other side. We become much more effective as humans and leaders when we engage in hearty conversations with those who are different from us, not necessarily to change our opinions, but to build the empathy muscle.
Civilized discourse demands critical thinking, self-reflexiveness, sober-headed analysis.
The ideal is to build a culture of healthy discussion, where everyone's ideas are valued. At KIND, we want everyone to be comfortable challenging my or anyone else's ideas without ever feeling or making someone else feel that the questioning is a personal attack.
My dad had this incredible kindness that oozed through every part of his body. He had the ability to look at life positively in spite of what he went through. He was a Holocaust survivor. When he was 15-1/2 years old, he was liberated from the Dachau Concentration Camp by American soldiers who risked a lot to save people they had never met.
To maintain our entrepreneurial spirit, we have to create a culture in which everyone remembers that every order, big or small - and every interaction, every moment - will define what our company is today and what it will become tomorrow.
The rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of expression - we cannot take them for granted. They do not exist willy-nilly across the world; they are very rare.
The ecstasy is so short but the forgetting is so long.
Take a pitcher full of water and set it down in the water-now it has water inside and water outside. We mustn't give it a name, lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.
Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one had only to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.
My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.
I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.
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