 When I asked my audience to vote for the name of my new podcast, I suggested names such as Authentic Business with George Kau, Authentic Business for Self-Employed Professionals with George Kau, and I think one other minor variation. But one suggestion came up that a lot of people liked. The suggestion was from Johannes Kleinowitz, thank you so much, who said Business Dau with George Kau. And I thought that was a fun, playful name. So I did another vote asking people, hey, do you want Business Dau with George Kau or do you want Authentic Business Growth with George Kau? And it was 37 people voted for Business Dau and only four people voted for Authentic Business. So here we are with the podcast name, Business Dau with George Kau. So a few people were rightfully concerned. Well, we'll see if it's rightfully, you can let me know, but they were concerned about cultural slash religious appropriation. You know, I'm not a Taoist master. I haven't studied Taoism in depth. I don't talk about it that often. Rarely. I mean, I do bring in a few quotes from Laozi every now and then. And never mind that I am Chinese, which is where the culture of Taoism springs from, and that I can actually pronounce Tao, better than most Western scholars of Taoism, because I know the language, at least I know how to pronounce it. By the way, Laozu, right? It's actually pronounced Laozi. Anyway, so never mind that. I do agree that. And the other thing I should say, never mind that Taoism and Laozi and Zhuangzi, they would have not cared at all who, what cultural appropriation, religious appropriation is, honestly. In fact, if you look at the history of Taoism, it was quickly bastardized with people putting things in various texts, ancient texts that were supposed to be Taoist texts, and, you know, many sects, you know, sprung out of Taoism, that were called Taoism. Anyway, it was, it's, it's, it's characteristically a philosophy that is about nonattachment. It's about, it's okay what people claim, what people say, we are not attached to, you know, what is the first verse of the Tao, De Jing, what's the first verse? The Tao that can be named is not the Tao, right? Meaning, let's not concern ourselves with definitions and lineages and giving credit to where it's due because the Tao doesn't take credit, because everything, everything is part of the Tao anyway, so the Tao doesn't take credit. And Taoists don't, I think, I think what I understand if the philosophical Taoism is credit taking is not, you know, cultural appropriation, that's not the kind of thing that Taoists would think about. Regardless though, it did inspire me, that question did inspire me to look at Taoism again, because I have read the Tao, De Jing, multiple times in my life, and it's been a while. So I thought, I thought I'd go back and go, what are some principles that I can apply from Taoist thought into business. So here we go. And speaking of effortless action, or Wu Wei, I have a blog post here, so I'm just going to kind of reference the blog post so I don't have to think so hard. It's a Taoist way of going about content creation. All right, so the first principle, not surprisingly, I'll bring up is authenticity. So that is one of the core tenets I think of Taoism is to sense into the flow of life, which maybe can be another interpretation of the Tao. And how do we merge into the flow of life and how do we apply that to business. Well, if you look at mainstream business. It's very egocentric. It's about what's first of all, it's about profit. So it's about how do I benefit myself and my business and do whatever I need to do to make more profit. And in fact, much of mainstream business is about short term profits. If you look at, well, the stock market is based on the short term profits of corporations. And if you look at a lot of small businesses that don't think in the long term, they think, oh, I'm just going to make the sale. So customer service is sometimes not very good. They just want to get the sale done and just rather than making a relationship. Now, of course, I think very savvy business owners think about the long term relationship but mainstream business doesn't really have that as a general teaching. All right, so, so authentic business, right, the kind of business that I teach is all about how do we create and sell that which is deeply meaningful and also the process of in the process through which we create and sell is also applying authenticity. So it's not about the typical way of thinking about business and even so called conscious business or heart based business. So much of it is a means to an end. We do the marketing in the mainstream ways, sales funnels, scarcity, you know, hype, selling to the clients pain points, you know, opt in bait, you know, we use mainstream marketing techniques so that we can then be heart based with our clients. In mainstream marketing, we don't have to be heart based there because we don't know how to be heart based we just do what the marketing experts tell us even though it feels kind of icky, but once we get clients then we can be all heart based and kind and, and, and long term with the clients. And the way I always say is most people who interact with your business will never buy from you. That's just statistics and the more successful your branding and marketing is the more that's true. More people will encounter your brand or your marketing through word of mouth, who will never buy from you, compared to the small percentage who do buy from you. Again, the more successful your marketing the more that's true. So, in other words, the impact that we are making in the world is mostly through our marketing. So, that's why I say it's so important to bring authenticity, not just to serving clients, but to the marketing itself and even, well let me go on to the next principle. I'm going to talk about this in slightly a different order than what I have in a blog post but the next principle I bring up is effortlessness, right effortlessness, which is what everyone wants oh I just want to go with the flow. I just want to be able to just show up as my authentic self and everybody wants to buy from me or hire me or work with me. And it's effortless. That's all we all what's what we want, right. Now, I think it's unfortunately not applied correctly, at least if you want to be in business, you can be, by the way, I should say, the most Taoist person that I that I've known in not personally know but the most Taoist person in modern history that I'm aware of that who lived in modern times and really lived in a Taoist way is peace pilgrim. If you've never heard of her, I highly recommend going online and search peace pilgrim audio book. It changed my life. It was what one of the things that really made me have a spiritual break down and breakthrough. You know, about six, seven years ago that made me totally shift how I do my business from mainstream to authentic business so peace pilgrim, but peace pilgrim didn't have a business. She didn't take any money at all. But she lived truly like Lao Zi talked about in the Dao De Jing, right. She really lived like that, fully with the flow of the Dow. And she had so much peace. Well, her hence her name, but she also got so much done, but it was there was no business involved. So already trying to apply Taoism to business is, it's a corruption of it. Truly, I think it's a corruption because I think once if and when our society truly moves into the Dow, I don't think it's there's going to be business as an exchange of, oh, I will only give you that if you give me money. That's going to go away. But while we are still living in the society where we do need to exchange things for money. I think we can do our best. And I think Lao Zi and Dao De Jing would be okay with that. It's not, I don't think I don't think that was them is a perfectionist perfectionist type of religion to say oh if you didn't do it that way. If you didn't do it right, then you are, you know, you should be cast out and you should be judged. No, Dao De Jing is is actually quite quite gentle. I mean, that's as the Dow is so even though it's a corruption of that was to bring it into business. I'm going to try. I'm going to try to bring some of it into into business as much as we can. So effortlessness, Lu Wei, you can't really be effortless. Right. This is also a corruption of, you know, the law of attraction that, oh, sit on the couch, imagine the red Porsche imagine money showing up in your mailbox and then so that's that's a that's a bastardization of effortless action. Right. What I mean what I think effortlessness is as applied to business is to look at what we do as worthwhile in itself, rather than as a means to an end. So, if I, if I am doing this as a means to getting you to do something, call to action, you know, buy from me sign up for my news or whatever. Then I am going to be performing and not within my authenticity and it's not going to be effortless because it's going to be hanging on grasping energy attached energy to what what you do. This action is connected to authenticity and connected to detachment, which is the other principle I'll bring in, in that we are doing the action out of love, or doing the action and love capital L with the biggest sense of the word which I think is the love capital L encompasses joy, it encompasses service, it encompasses gentleness, compassion, the heart. The action I'm taking is from that place. It's like when a child is in love with a game or a toy or a person or a an action. It's that kind of childless childlike loving play. Then you can also say it's when an adult and mature adult is doing volunteering, right there in and it's it's done out of love and service. That is what I think effortless action is in business. Now, we do have a desire, which is why it's corruption of Dallas principle we have a desire for profit. It's true. The way that authentic business done is that we are detaching profit from any one action that we are making. So, when I'm writing a blog post when I'm making a video, I don't attach an outcome to say, ooh, people better like this video subscribe share. And sometimes I might even say that but it's like, I don't I don't care. If you do, essentially, I don't care it's effortless it's detached. It's authentic. I don't care if you like my stuff. Okay, what I do care about if there's any care. It's how I am coming into this moment. So out of Dallas principles came Zen Buddhism, it came, you know, when I don't know about stoicism but stoicism is very much connected to Dallas principles as well. And it also came. I don't know I might my guess is that some Christian saints and scholars like you know, St. Francis, right of a CC had the Dallas aligned with the Dallas principles even though they might not have studied it or whatever right. So there is something to be said there with the universality of the Dallas principles and that's why we can bring some of that as much of it as we can into business so thank you for being willing to engage in this conversation with me. And a lot of you are listening to this as the first episode. I think this might be the first episode of the podcast, and some of you are watching this on YouTube or on Facebook or somewhere else. Thank you. Thank you for engaging in this conversation. And if you have any thoughts, please go ahead and add them below on how what other Dallas tenants principles spirit can be applied to business. That you have seen in your own life. Maybe you've seen how I do certain things and some things are so obvious to me that I don't even think about talking about it so you may. If you notice something I do that is has a Dallas bent to it, you might want to mention that I'd love to know. Anyway, I hope this is helpful. I hope this adds a little bit to the how Dallas and applies to business conversation. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video or podcast episode. Thank you.