48 Virtues for Business and Joyful Life
Learn and develop highest virtues, that you can practice on every day life to make your own and surrounding life better and more joyful. Here I will concentrate on business oriented virtues on commentary just to show one possible way to apply practicing virtuous life in that context.
1. Ability
This means ability to concentrate on productive things, getting things done and do them well.
2. Acceptance
You cannot avoid loss and fails. Consider circumstances, especially those that can not be changed, as satisfactory. That will teach you detachment too as well as accepting critics and guidance when done things wrong.
3. Beauty
Life is an art at its best. You can make your business like a masterpiece too. Try to cultivate all the aspects of the business to the highest standards possible.
4. Bravery
Be brave when meeting important well known and influential people. They are just humans like you having their strong and weak sides.
5. Caution
In you organisation, you need to have persons who deals with big pictures and persons, who deals with niches. Every puzzle are build from little pieces, which must be selected with caution.
6. Charism
This is hard to develop, but with doing things 100% devoted you gain experience and with experience you will get confidence. Being charismatic is not so far from being confident.
7. Cleanliness
No-one wants your to smell and look like a garbage, not in a work, not in a meeting. Respect your fellows and co-workers with correct dressing and hygiene.
8. Clearness
Clearness in writings and speech, articulation as well as ability to place on same wavelength is a mark of expertice.
9. Creativity
Innovation and creativity is a very respected value of modern business. Get your imagination on fly by observing surrounding world, reading inspirational magazines and interpreting dreams. Creative mind makes bad situations to good situations.
10. Curiosity
Everlasting desire to find out and know things, that may help you or your customers is the first step to the wisdom.
11. Deference
Don’t forget environmental responsibility. Be the one in your company, that takes nesessary steps to fulfill the latest recommendations of the green values.
12. Defiance
Keep your head up and straight, when you face attacks and resistance. If you are keeping all thse virtues on your mind, you have no reason to underestimate yourself and be ashamed.
13. Determination
Be firm, be steady, be cool when you have your goal on your sight.
14. Devotion
With devotion and loyalty, you’ll get respect and appreciation to your work.
15. Discretion
Share your thoughts wisely, keep secrets until they are fine to be revealed. On a top position of your organisation, it is extremely important to know, what to share and when. And it is just preventing overflow of unnesessary information, not because of obscure information.
16. Flexibility
Circumstances are always about to change, stock markets are waving all the time. Flexible is same as durable.
17. Fitness
Keep your body in condition and your body will keep your mind on a right road. Successful business gives you the time for outdooring. You can always practice functional training.
18. Focus
Concentrate and focus your effort, do not let your overflowing ideas spread the energy all around. Right focus also paves the way to the Flow.
19. Foresee
True sign of intelligence is an ability to foresee coming happenings. Better you can do this, better possibilities you have on your business. It means also to be one step ahead of others.
20. Forgiveness
Don’t let your temper mess around and burn bridges behind you. Control your angry and bitterness and you’ll become a reader of people’s feelings.
21. Frugality
Do not live over your earnings.
22. Generosity
Every profitable business is committed to share their profit in a name of equilty. Make your charity plan, visible or unvisible, it doesn’t matter.
23. Gentleness
Be nice and moderate, not rough or severe. This way, you can lower competition. Only a few people wants to argue with moderate people, because they know they are losing their faces on a long stand.
24. Gratitude
Be thankful, when you realize, how other people has helped you to achieve, what you have longed.
25. Humility
We are not living alone and we cannot achieve anything by ourselves only. When you realize the synergy and symbiosy behind every act and happening, you’ll become humble naturally.
26. Humor
Enjoy your life now, not only when you have achieved your goals. Business should not be a question of life & death. Treat it more like a play, that is meant to give us hope and joy. Develop your ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd.
27. Industry
Everyone wants easy money, but often easy living is achieved after diligent, hard work.
28. Justice
Business ethics is not only an image, that big businesses tries to keep on their face. It is a fundamental part of the rules, where our societies are build on. It means also giving gredits where they belong, being fair.
29. Indepencence
Autonomy and responsibility is a good pair, which should be developed hand in hand.
30. Kindness
Develope your friendliness and helpfulness. Well-meaning people are like magnets, that collects other well-meaning people around them.
31. Majesty
Know your role on a project and organisation. We all have something inside us, that should be treated like a King!
32. Moderation
Avoid extreme and fundamentalism in actions and opinions. Again, do not burn bridges behind you. Returning customer is as worthy as first contact.
33. Obedience
There is nothing humiliating to be controlled when necessary. sometimes you need to carry out orders because of bigger plan.
34. Openness
You need to be ready and open for new ideas, always. Don’t close your mind from new inspirations. Just don’t be so open, that your brains spills on the floor.
35. Optimism
“Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud, and one the stars.” – Frederick Langbridge
36. Order
Organisational abilities in personal and corporate life become more and more important, because we need to control increasing amount of information. This means doing right things in right order at right time.
37. Patience
Work to be done may have its hard and painly points. Be patient and imagine the glory after despair.
38. Resolution
Skill to separate meaningful actions and decisions from irrelevant is crucial. Resolution mean also being distinctiveness, separate from masses.
39. Silence
Speaking on right place and at right time can’t be denied to be a good virtue. Listening your clients is the key to the success.
40. Sincerity
Be honest and you’ll find sleeping good nights even if your were not profiting.
41. Spontaneity
Develope your natural side of acting and speaking. On certain situations people tend to trust more when the act is not planned.
42. Temperance
Don’t let your feelings disturb your thinking, when brain work is required.
43. Tranquility
Tide and low tide varies in every aspect of life. Remember, actual development is happening on a passive state, that follows an active state. Vary active and passive states on your business, let some part of the business rest, when others are pushing hard.
44. Trust
If you suspect everything, you’ll get nothing meaningful done and find you trying to do everything by yourself.
45. Trustworthiness
It cannot be achieved in one night. Keep on constructing long, lifetime relationships on your business.
46. Understanding
Grow your understanding and ability on various things, as widely as possible on every subjects of life. Business is grown upon communication and communication upon understanding the needs and the demand.
47. Unselfishness
Golden Rule of the good business comes from the fact, that more you can move your eyes off your own navel, more you’ll get under your own belly.
48. Wisdom
See the difference between genious, reasonable, intellectual and wise. Wisdom in business is made of unselfish, almost altruistic principles.
Some informative websites of science of virtues:
See also these writings from my blog:
- Business virtues auctions from eBay
- Auctions for Business Virtues
- The only path to a tranquil life is through virtue
- Business Virtues Auctions
- Latest Business Virtues Auctions
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Hi Marko,
Your thoughts on business are great.
With kind regards,
Bill Erfurth
SwissToursim (twitter)
Happy to read that you liked them. Many of them are difficult to apply, but its better to aim high. Hope its all right in Switzerland.
Very informative!!
I’ll definately keep up with your blogs!
I love these simplified statements of truth. They’re like a modern day version of the 10 Commandments – only now there are 48 of them. Oh well we live in more complicated times.
Did you create these? If so congratulations. If not could you refer me to who did?
Many thanks – love your blog.
Yes, you can really think them as modern version of commandments. Sometimes its hard to see, if there is really any real improvement on human behaviour apart from modern technical development, but we can quite clearly see, that ethical codes has been evolved from “eye from eye, teeth from teeth” mentality to the higher dimension. Compiling the list was interesting but hard work because many of the virtues goes over each others, there are a lot of synonyms and sometimes its hard to make a line between virtue, value or other aspect of spiritual activity. And even then a lot of virtues had to be left out. I think I could make a list of 100 virtues if using more time and effort. Its just observation and definition process.
I have used so many sources, that I cannot remember them all, some links I already gave at the end of the post. Then there is a 10 business virtues on top of Google ranking.
VirtueScience.com is a great source. These is some problem on their site at the moment, but you can always see the cached version.
I just found these 48 virtues easy to comment from the business view of point.
Many thanks for taking the time to give me the link through twitter. I luv your viewpoint and bringing ethics into business. I’m all for that.
Now my next questions is what blogging service do you use? I’m having trouble with blogger.com and wordpress due to formatting issues. Any advice?
Many thanks again for the taking the time to respond.
Sharon: I’m using WordPress on my own host and free version of wp_premium theme. I feel blogger is too limited, but easy to start however. What kind of formatting issues do you have?
Btw, your examples of body and facial expressions were awesome. It seems an art itself. We are quite monotonic with our speech and expressions here in Finland, could learn a lot from you.