"It's so lonely in the saddle since the horse died." This title of a novel by Selim Özdogan suddenly came to mind when I read the report about the plush fire horses that are selling like hotcakes thanks to a production error. Or rather, like hot dumplings, because the story takes place in China.
No one knows whether this is actually a mistake or rather a clever sleight of hand by the manufacturer's marketing department. The fact is: the red fabric horse had its usually smiling mouth sewn on upside down and is now looking sadly into the new Chinese New Year, which begins on February 17 and is marked by the sign of the fire horse, as it is every 60 years. The last time this happened was in the memorable year of 1966, when Mao proclaimed the Cultural Revolution.
TOO LAZY TO READ ON? THEN LISTEN TO ME:
In the blogcast, I read this recent blog article to you. With emphasis, of course!
Because it no longer smiles, but instead has downturned corners of its mouth, the cuddly stuffed animal has suddenly become a bestseller. According to reports, 15,000 orders are received every day, now also from other parts of the world. The factory can barely keep up with production. To keep the cash registers ringing, even with Chinese working time models in the wake of 9-9-6 (from nine to nine, six days a week), some overtime will still be worked. Friedrich Merz would be delighted.
It seems that the red stuffed horse with a frustrated expression hits the nail on the head because, in China's extremely performance-oriented work culture, it has become the symbolic heraldic animal of many employees, representing pressure to perform, exhaustion, and burnout. Gloom from morning till night, then smiles again from night till morning.
That could be as interesting to us here as a bicycle falling over in China. On closer inspection, the story turns out to be a Chinese magic mirror that reveals a painful piece of our own reality. Because fire horses, or rather former fire horses, can also be seen at every turn in our part of the world. Not as invasive stuffed animals, but as breeds on our own cultural pastures, where we feed hard-working animals material success and careers as highly concentrated concentrated feed, but in doing so create a glaring nutritional deficiency because it lacks the essential vitamin called meaning. No wonder everything is out of balance, the corners of our mouths point steeply downward, we lose our bearings and plunge dizzyingly into an existential vacuum. Into a collective one, at that. The unlived life as an endogenous, bodily poison. "Autointoxication," Dr. House would say, and "all patients lie." When it comes to success through more, we patients lie first and foremost to ourselves.
Fire, fire!
We have let our narrative about work, success, and eternal growth as a source of prosperity run wild. It has completely lost its footing. Just like the fire horse and its inner message, which gallops through the everyday life of our society.
In Chinese cosmological imagery, the fire horse combines the zodiac sign of the horse and the element of fire. In yin-yang symbolism, it represents high yang energy, the masculine, extroverted, energetic, impatient side.
While the horse reflects freedom, movement, diligence, vitality, but also restlessness and impatience, the element of fire brings heat, passion, dynamism, and intensity, but also radicalism into play. This naturally carries the risk of aggression and conflict, including against and within oneself. Fire intensifies everything it touches. It warms. It burns. It knows no moderation.
The Fire Horse is considered extremely independent, strong-willed to stubborn, charismatic but difficult to tame, visionary but not always considerate.
And while so many who emulate the ideal of the fire horse in their working lives, or are trained to do so, express their strengths such as enormous vitality, leadership skills, and pioneering spirit, risks such as overworking, relationship problems, and confusing freedom with escape and calm with stagnation lurk behind every bush. Self-optimization, efficiency, and performance are the order of the day.
Burn or incinerate?
The question we must ask ourselves in this energy is: How can I live dynamic freedom without burning everything out and without being uprooted and burned out from the place within me where the meaning of life is rooted, where I myself have grown as a person? How can I manage not only to be physically fit, but also not to exhaust my soul? Attempts to fill the inner vacuum with external rewards are, without exception, not a suitable answer.
But those who maintain this tension do not become destructive, but transformative. They shift their focus from a successful life to a fulfilling one, and thus to a prosperous life.
To achieve this, we need a cultural revolution. But it must be a humanistic, humane revolution, one that fills each and every one of us with meaning, because we are realizing our potential beyond the logic of success, career, and self-optimization, which are only logical in one respect: they produce the poison of an unlived life within us.
But be careful! It's not that success, career, and profit are inherently bad. On the contrary! At their core, they are good and important. Breathing is also important. But we don't live to breathe, rather the other way around, and we should be very careful about what we elegantly inhale. (Spoiler alert: if it has a warning from the Department of Health on it, it's probably best not to inhale it...) It's not that people who live a fulfilling life aren't allowed to be successful, rich, and beautiful. On the contrary! Who else, if not them?
Material success and inner meaning are by no means mutually exclusive. The idea that benevolent intentions and economic success are incompatible is simply a BUST, a registered BUllshit STory. The purpose-profit paradox is indeed just that.
There is sufficient statistical evidence to show that companies that can convey meaning not only through meanwashing campaigns, but also make it tangible(!) through their actions, are significantly more successful economically than those that Milton Friedman gives a leg up to, allowing them to gallop at full speed into Shareholder Value Valley.
Meaning glows from within.
Meaning is more than just the oft-quoted "why," more than what smiles back at you from motivational posts and wall decals. Those things are good and important, too. But they are by no means everything, and anyone who leaves it at that is thinking too short-term.
Meaning only arises when purpose is realized in such a way that it has a positive effect on people's lives. The formula for impact is: Meaning = relevant purpose x tangible action. This begins within the company itself, within each individual, and first and foremost with those who are responsible for leadership and thus for communicating meaning and enabling development.
You guessed it: the WHY absolutely needs a WHAT FOR and a FOR WHOM in order to glow with warmth. While the WHY usually revolves around the self, the WHAT FOR and FOR WHOM point beyond it. That is precisely where meaning begins. Not as a feeling, but as an effect. This is where the real treasure of what could be called meaningful work lies. Completely detached from positions, hierarchies, and careers. Just like the janitor at NASA who mopped the floors and proudly said to John F. Kennedy, "I'm helping to get a man on the moon, Mr. President."
This creates a feeling of relevance for everyone in their field. Relevance is not abstract, but becomes tangible when you can experience that your actions, your desires, your person are important for the greater whole, which extends beyond the ego, self-realization, and profit. Then the fire horse smiles, balanced between the polarities, dynamically tense and glowing from within, instead of burning up in stress or rotting away in frustration while everyone around you shouts "Happy New Year!"
Then the story of work changes substantially. Work is no longer just another word for the painful gap between "I don't like Mondays" and "Thank God it's Friday." Then the work week doesn't end with a reward of alcohol in the form of after-work drinks on Thursday and Friday in the home office.
Then the poison of an unlived life is transformed into an elixir of life.
Let yourself be cheered on!
If the keyword "elixir" brings to mind the much-cited and often misquoted hero's journey, we are thinking of the same thing. The hero's journey, as a model for the formative stories we humans tell ourselves, always follows the same cycle. On the transformative journey toward their goals, the hero figure usually gains necessary insight through a difficult and painful process, returning to their old world in the form of a metaphorical elixir that nourishes, heals, and improves it. Only then is the journey complete, the circle closed, the task fulfilled, and true success achieved.
It's about what comes after the happy ending, after the profit, after the measurable success. It's about good companies that are good for something. Speaking of which, this applies to companies, teams, and organizations, but first and foremost to the life of each individual person themselves. And thus also to all employees.
This is where the problem lies. Many people and many companies begin their deliberations externally, asking themselves: What are our goals, what values and purpose do we need to achieve them, and how can we best sell this in our campaigns and, of course, to our employees? This is where the seeds of failure for many efforts are sown. The most effective approach is actually the exact opposite.
The question must be: What genuine values do we have, what concerns arise from them, what do we want to achieve and for whom, and how can we find people who share similar values so that we can inspire them to work with us to achieve our goals? This will lead to success, which is called "Er-folg" (achievement), just as the economy is called "Wirtschaft" (economy) and not "Ichschaft" (self-interest).
Once again: the work begins internally and has an external impact. Always! Without exception. Anything else is marketing babble, frustrating fire horse neighing, and therefore noise before defeat.
Substantial success, measurable in figures, grows from the inside out. This starts with the fact that companies with tangible, authentic, benevolent concerns see a significant increase in productivity, innovative strength, and stock market value, while sick leave, recruiting costs, and time to fill positions decrease massively, to name just a few striking examples. Who wouldn't want that?
By the way: the same mechanism applies to every person in their life, to you, me, and all of us, both inside and outside of work. You don't have to be in the workforce to feel valuable and relevant. For a policy that doesn't structurally neglect its raison d'être, but finally shapes society again instead of dealing with particularistic egos in firehorse mode, I correct myself: zeal would be called for, because this is about the big picture. Because if, sooner or later, a significant proportion of people who are of working age and in the prime of life are simply no longer needed in the completely changed work and economic processes due to AI, what then? Who will explain the world to these people, who, based on our current narrative of success, have little choice but to feel irrelevant and see no meaning in their lives? Trump, Kickl, Höcke? Or, in what might even be considered a stroke of luck, Heidi Klum, who by then will probably have made it to the jungle camp?
How is this existential void filled?
Air out, flame extinguished.
"When a person cannot find a deeper meaning in life, they distract themselves with pleasure," said the wise Viktor E. Frankl. Pleasure? Everyone defines that differently. Some read, many more watch Netflix, some exercise like crazy, many drink or get high in other ways, and most go shopping. More and more are turning on each other. Soon, not only will the horse be on fire, but the wallpaper will be too.
And it is precisely here, in chatting about school, that my personal WOFÜR and FÜR WEN blossom. I am deeply convinced that the stories we tell ourselves and each other about what is important, what really matters, and who we are and what we are (or could be) here for have gotten completely out of hand, and that our collective inner vacuum is on the verge of imploding. That's why I help with everything I can to find new nourishing narratives, stories for people, brands, and companies, and, most importantly, to make them tangible(!).
In my practice, this looks very different. It can be the blog article you are reading right now, posts with ideas and tips for my community, or my work as an author in the entertainment industry. I often bring this to the stage in keynotes and lectures, in keynote speeches to companies, including the appropriate consulting support, and even in workshops, so that everyone who wants to can quickly get started with practical action. It's always about providing inspiration for finding meaning that works from the inside out—in our jobs, for companies, and in life—so that we encourage, empower, and enable, especially in business, instead of praising domination, combat, and defeat, i.e., destruction, dualism, and gloom, as in the old stories.
Seen in this light, I am both a navigation system and a supplier of scarce goods, an instigator and encourager to intervene in one's own life and swing into the saddle of one's well-balanced fire horse, even if one is scared shitless. That's what you call courage, if you believe John Wayne, and from what we know, you can at least believe him in this case. You don't become a Western hero by taking the escape route.
And if you're wondering whether I can also support you, your team, your brand, or your company, the answer is yes! After all, I've been doing this for a few decades now for international megabrands, SMEs, not-for-profits & NGOs, start-ups, and individuals, from the boardroom to founders. You know where to find me, for example here, where you can book a free initial consultation.
There is even an ideal time to start your new story, and that time is now. Because, as Erich Kästner knew, it's never too late for a happy childhood, but the sooner you start, the sooner you'll experience: New Story. New Glory.