PURPOSE

A Fuel for Your Passion

When you’re training for a triathlon or a marathon, you run, bike, and swim wherever you happen to be. In the summer of 2002, I happened to be in Colombo, Sri Lanka, exploring a new business venture. I was training for the New York City Marathon, and I started my eighteen-mile run in the capital. By the time I completed the distance—gasping, sweating, endorphins pumping—I found myself on the remote outskirts of the city, along a quiet lake, surrounded by Sinhalese kids and friendly fishermen curious about my appearance. I was famished. I had a bit of money with me to get back to town. What I did not have were healthful portable snacks to refuel. It was a long trip back to the hotel.

The search for healthy snacks had formed the backdrop to my life since law school. I had started my first food company in 1994 after I sampled a delicious sundried tomato spread in Israel. Given my passion for building bridges between people and cultures, I was focusing at that time on fostering Arab-Israeli relations. My company, PeaceWorks, brought together Israelis, Palestinians, Turks, and Egyptians to make delicious foods and encourage economic cooperation among neighbors striving to coexist. Then I started trying to set up similar ventures making specialty sauces and foods in other war-torn or conflict-ridden areas like Chiapas, in my native Mexico, in Sri Lanka, in South Africa, and in Indonesia. I traveled constantly. I was always on the run—more apt than calling myself a true “runner.” I frequently found myself in places like Colombo, miles out of town, starving, and with nothing to eat.

Healthy snack options were just as scarce back at home. I was working sixteen-to twenty-hour days—as fledgling entrepreneurs are prone to—and I didn’t have time to cook, even on the rare occasions when I was actually in my tiny apartment. But it did not matter where I was in the world; my choices for a snack to grab before embarking on an eight-hour bus ride through the Egyptian desert to visit a juice plant would be similar to the choices I had on the road in the American Midwest: overprocessed, carb-heavy, sugar-laden foods. I could eat pastries, chips, or other salty snacks. But I was tired of the empty calories, and of feeling guilty. And I could not stomach traditional energy bars, which tasted to me like cardboard or astronaut food and were filled with added sugar and undecipherable ingredients. With some planning ahead, I could bring along fruit or raw nuts, which were better for my health. But the fruit was messy and spoiled easily. And it was too easy for me to eat the entire bag of nuts at one sitting.

What I was missing was a healthy snack option that could travel well and fill me up. I didn’t want to make the choice between healthy and tasty, convenient and wholesome, socially impactful and economically sustainable. There had to be a snack that achieved all of these goals.

There must be a way, I thought, for me to capitalize on the trend in society toward food that’s convenient to eat on the go, combined with the increasing number of people who choose to eat real food. I knew that others also wanted to eat a snack that was nutritionally rich, and made with “ingredients you can see and pronounce.” (This eventually became our registered trademark at KIND.)

Additionally, it was important to me to start a business that both made money and served a social goal. I didn’t want the company to be a nonprofit; it had to generate earnings without taking outside charitable donations. A product, I believed, could serve two purposes at once. This stemmed from the AND philosophy that became such a crucial part of KIND’s DNA.

At a trade show in the late nineties, I came across an almond-apricot-yogurt bar made in Australia that struck me as meeting a lot of the criteria I had been searching for. The owners pressed me to start importing the product. I resisted because all of my products had a PeaceWorks mission embedded in them (i.e., they involved cooperative efforts among neighbors in conflict regions), and I was barely keeping up with all the PeaceWorks ventures. But their product was tasty and healthy enough to persuade me to start a side business selling the bars into natural foods stores. Within a year, we were nearing a million dollars in sales. Soon thereafter, the small Australian manufacturer was acquired by a large conglomerate. The company proceeded to reduce costs and change the ingredients, adding sulfate preservatives and sorbitol, an artificial sweetener. As soon as we advised our customers of this change, they stopped carrying the product. We were devastated because our scarce profits from PeaceWorks had helped fund investment into this new space, and all of a sudden, from one day to the next, our entire investment was lost. We were on the verge of going out of business, and seven team members were relying on me for their salaries.

It was a frightening moment for me. I pleaded with the conglomerate to make a natural version of the product, but they declined. I lay awake at night thinking through all my options—none were readily apparent. I resolved to learn from the experience and to create a premium line of whole nut and fruit bars myself. This was the dawn of KIND Healthy Snacks. But the darkness before the dawn was indeed a dark time, as well as lonely and scary.

Yet, at the same time, it was energizing because it was so purposeful and liberating. We would never again be at the mercy of someone else’s decision about what should go into our products. We would never again let anyone add artificial ingredients or make sugar or empty carbs a primary ingredient, or add fillers to lower costs while lowering the quality of our snacks. We would obsess about using nutritionally rich ingredients that can nourish your body and your soul. We would craft KIND Fruit & Nut bars to fulfill the goals I had set for myself: something healthful, delicious, and socially impactful, something easy to carry on the go that was at the same time wholesome and real.

We worked hard to define and refine the purpose of our product. First we established a commitment to fight the diabetes and obesity epidemic befalling society by introducing nutritionally rich products with a low glycemic index. A low glycemic index means that the product you eat, because it is nutritionally rich and dense, gets digested slowly. Its nutrients and energy, including its sugar, get absorbed gradually and gently into your body. In contrast, a product with a high glycemic index tends to be characterized by refined sugars and lack of nutrient-dense ingredients—the classic example is candy, but white bread and even fruit juices without the pulp and peel can also be high on the glycemic index. As soon as you eat these foods, the sugar levels in your blood immediately spike. Products with a high glycemic index not only give you sugar highs swiftly followed by tanking sugar levels that may make you tired or hungry again, they also mess up your body balance, because your pancreas must create insulin to try to offset these crazy spikes. This can eventually create insulin resistance, which leads to diabetes and can lead directly to fatty liver disease. Complications of diabetes can include kidney disease, heart disease, stroke, and dementia. The challenge to society is serious. Healthful eating of truly nutritious foods—no fads, and no empty calories—was established as a guiding principle for KIND. And, besides being healthful, the products had to be delicious.

But I didn’t just want to make great food. Having learned from my PeaceWorks experience, I wanted to find a way to do some good in the area that most mattered to me: building bridges between people.

Initially, I thought about having the bars manufactured, as the other PeaceWorks foods were, by cooperative ventures in conflict-torn regions, but there was no obvious place where this could be accomplished. The production expertise was in Australia, a peaceful land whose only transcendental “conflict” was its painful treatment of Aboriginals by its Western settlers. (Well, a venture involving Aboriginals in the manufacturing actually crossed my mind! But it did not feel authentic. It felt forced and contrived, so I did not pursue that path.)

Initially we addressed this disconnect by donating 5 percent of profits from the KIND division to peace-related nonprofits. If we didn’t turn a profit on a particular year, we would make a meaningful donation regardless, out of our gross revenues. This was a temporary fix, but it was important to us to integrate the purpose into the DNA of the company.

As we brainstormed about our brand name and mission, we rallied around a concept that could affirm our three anchors of health, taste, and social responsibility: being KIND to your body, KIND to your taste buds, and KIND to your world. Focusing on kindness stemmed from my belief, which I inherited from my parents, that kindness to others can build trust, and ultimately, bridges between people.

My father, who survived the Dachau concentration camp during the Holocaust, told me of a time when a Nazi guard took risks by throwing him a rotten potato that provided him the sustenance he needed to go on. Although that soldier could have gotten in trouble for helping a Jewish prisoner, he acted with compassion in the darkest of moments. My dad always credited the guard’s action with helping him stay alive.

The question the brand asked was, In our modern society, where we have all these barriers between one another and are so desensitized to the suffering of others, could we find a way to build those human bonds between people and inspire them? Just as I tried to connect neighbors in conflict regions with PeaceWorks, could we use the power of kindness to get ordinary people to recognize their shared humanity and obligation toward one another? Could this be a step toward preventing what happened to my father from happening again to other human beings?

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN FOR KIND

I’ve been starting businesses since I was eight years old, but the first one I started with a social mission, and the first one in the healthy food arena—the precursor to KIND—launched in 1994. This was the first formal test, for me, of the idea that social objectives and profit-making could go hand in hand, a model I call not-only-for-profit.

When I finished law school in 1993, I went to New York to study for the bar. I spent that summer working at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell (S&C), which had offered me a job, while I prepared to take the exam. I then spent the fall at consulting firm, McKinsey & Company’s Mexico City office, where I also had a job offer. With both firms’ blessing and understanding, my plan was to try law and consulting and decide between those two career paths.

A big breakthrough in Middle East peacemaking occurred while I was in Mexico. On September 13, 1993, President Clinton hosted Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in the White House Rose Garden to celebrate the Oslo agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. As I sat in Mexico City with some friends, watching this surreal ceremony, my career direction became quite clear. I had been writing about economic cooperation between Arabs and Israelis for years, when it seemed a distant proposition. I had dreamed about peace in the region since my childhood. I needed to support these nascent peace efforts.

I applied for a year-long scholarship to go to Israel and the Middle East—the Haas/Koshland Memorial Award—to turn a proposal about Arab-Israeli cooperation that I had written while in school into actual legislation, and to try building a consultancy business to foster joint ventures. As I was choosing between the legal and consultancy paths, I learned that I had received this fellowship, a $10,000 award to help support my year abroad. Financially speaking, the $10,000 itself was not remotely as attractive as the other two job offers. But the award, along with meaningful talks I had with my mentors, who encouraged me to follow my dreams, helped me to muster the courage to pursue my passion. All human beings at some point in their lives will encounter a juncture where they can either do what’s more conventional, safe, and possibly even rewarding in the short term, or they can take a risk to do that which they truly believe in. The Haas/Koshland Memorial Award forever transformed the rest of my journey.

I declined the McKinsey offer. S&C encouraged me to take a leave of absence, instead of turning down their offer, in case I wanted to come back after completing my fellowship. The partners at S&C suspected that after I got the bug out of my system, I would return to the law firm. I (naïvely) thought I could set up the company and then come back to be a full-time lawyer on Wall Street and run the consulting company on the side. (Both of my mentors, S&C’s Richard Urowsky and McKinsey’s Jacques Antebi later joined the advisory board of my company. Later, Jacques would join KIND as our executive vice president for strategic and international development).

In mid-November, I rented a small studio apartment on HaKerem Street in Tel Aviv. I started delving into legislative research as well as setting up my new consulting firm. I began by looking into sectors where complementary comparative advantages and symmetrical respectful relations among equals could be fostered: agriculture and food processing, Dead Sea cosmetics, apparel and textiles.

I had so much conviction about my ideas that, through sheer determination, I was able to persuade people to open doors for me. Most, while skeptical about my prospects of success, were warm, encouraging, and supportive.

Despite this can-do attitude, I struck out with the consulting company idea. I quickly discovered that nobody in the Middle East felt they needed a consultant. “Why would we pay you?” they asked with typical Israeli frankness. “If we wanted to do this, we would just do it ourselves.”

THE BUSINESS OF COOPERATION

One night, as I was doing research, I stopped at a small grocery store on Ben Yehuda Street. On one shelf, I noticed an obscure-looking jar of sundried tomato spread. Sundried tomatoes were not widely known among American consumers at the time, and I was curious. I bought the jar and a bag of pita bread. Later, sitting at my desk, I devoured the whole thing in one sitting. It was totally addictive.

The next morning, I went to the store to buy some more, but was told that they had run out of product. The company had gone bankrupt and was not making more. I had bought the last jar in stock.

After a few days of craving, it dawned on me that maybe this could be my vehicle for turning theory into practice. Instead of consulting others on how to launch businesses that fostered economic cooperation, I should create one myself.

I went back to the store, hounded the manager, and got the name of the distributor that supplied him the sundried tomato product. I called the distributor, and in my broken Hebrew, tried to explain that I was a crazy Mexican Jewish lawyer who wanted to use this sundried tomato spread to prove a jointventure model for bringing peace to the Middle East. The distributor was perplexed, to say the least. But he agreed to give me the number of the manufacturer who had just gone bankrupt, Yoel Benesh.

When I called him, Benesh invited me to meet with him at his factory. It took me a few hours of long walks and bus rides from Tel Aviv to an industrial zone in Even Yehuda, near Netanya. I arrived at an empty building with virtually no equipment. Yoel’s workers had been making everything by hand. They would manually mix the product in big kitchen vats, fill the jars, seal them, and immerse them in a gigantic pool of hot water to pasteurize them. They then would dry them and apply the labels one by one.

Yoel explained that he had been sourcing their glass jars from Portugal, their tomatoes from Italy, and other inputs from across the world. He had tried to penetrate the U.S. market, but it was too costly. He could not compete with Italian and Greek brands.

I’m sure Yoel wondered what a lawyer with no experience in the food business would be able to contribute, but he had nothing to lose. And when I told Yoel about my ideas, he sincerely and passionately connected with my philosophy. His father had developed good relationships with some Palestinian olive growers. Yoel had several Arab Israeli friends, including his accountant Imad Salaimi, who’d go on to be part of this journey. The idea spoke to Yoel on a deep level, probably as much as it spoke to me—as a social mission more than as a business. Was it fate that I met Yoel of all people?

I introduced Yoel to a glass jar manufacturer in Egypt, who would charge a much lower price than his Portuguese supplier. Together, we worked to identify a supplier of sundried tomatoes in Turkey that would be far more competitive than the ones in Italy. And we sourced olives, olive oil, and basil from Palestinian farmers in Ouja and other small villages across the West Bank and from Palestinian citizens of Israel in the village of Baka El Garbiyah, near Umm el Fahem, including Abdullah Ganem, an eternally jovial grandfatherly figure. With geographically closer and more competitively priced ingredients and jars sorted out, we decided to give this business a shot.

In parallel, I had been researching skincare products made with Dead Sea minerals. I had met a group of French and Israeli entrepreneurs who purchased mud soaps from a Bedouin family and Dead Sea minerals from Jordanians. I agreed to do a pilot with them to see if we could market the products in the United States. I ordered five hundred samples of each of their products, including seven varieties of mud soaps, hand cream with vitamin E and avocado oil, mud masks, and big tubs of Dead Sea bath salts with aromatherapy essential oils. (If you read Chapter 1, you know where those will end!)

The business idea behind Yoel and my sundried tomato effort came directly from my college thesis and the legislative proposal I wrote thereafter. Both built on the existing theory of economic cooperation, which holds that warring populations will be more inclined to a lasting peace when economic links exist between them. Setting up ventures owned and staffed by people from groups in conflict gives them a reason not to fight, and, eventually, a reason not to hate one another. When people work together or trade with one another, three distinct benefits emerge. At a personal level they discover their shared humanity and shatter cultural stereotypes. At a business level, they gain a vested interest in preserving and cementing their relationship because they are benefiting one another economically. And at a regional level, success gives people a stake in the system.

I get a lot of questions, then as well as now, about this business model. Usually people are polite, but the gist of their questions is this: How can you be so naïve as to think peace in the Middle East will come as a result of selling little jars of sundried tomato spread? My answer: It won’t, but it will be a start. None of this was ever intended to be a substitute for the necessary geopolitical solution: ending the occupation and achieving a Palestinian state that recognizes the right of Israelis to have a Jewish and democratic state at peace with it. My little effort was always meant to build cooperation and collaboration, to give long-warring cultures peaceful and fruitful experiences with one another. I simply wanted to build small bridges that could perhaps serve as foundations for larger ones in the future.

What became my core passion and expertise was the idea of business with a social bottom line along with the business bottom line—built right into the DNA of the company. What excited me most about this model was and is that the social and business missions are not only in harmony, but also reinforce and advance one another.

The more sundried tomato spread I sold, the more Yoel could scale up his venture and increase the impact of the cooperative footprint. He would find more Palestinian farmers from whom to buy olive oil. He would have more Turkish, Egyptian, and Arab Israeli trading partners. And each of them would have more staff impacted by this cooperative venture and exposed to working with the other side.

Market forces are among the most powerful drivers in our society. If you’re able to structure your ventures or give validity to your dreams through a business model that is in true harmony with the social objectives it sets out to address, you can scale faster, you can do so in a self-sustainable fashion, and the impact can be measured. This is a perfect application of the AND philosophy. Social enterprises challenge assumptions and refuse to compromise between social and financial impact.

PURPOSE GIVES YOU STAYING POWER

After a couple of months of working with Yoel, I wrote to the Haas Koshland family to update them on my research. I explained that the consulting idea had gone nowhere, and shared my plan to start a company that would try to foster those joint ventures itself. I requested their permission to return to the United States earlier than planned so I could start setting up the venture. They were very supportive. By the spring of 1994, I had rented my tiny studio apartment in Manhattan and was by then deep into my Dead Sea soap idea as well. I was getting ready to start making the biggest business mistakes of my career, as well as to set the foundation for what would become my successes.

To say PeaceWorks had modest operations at first is to overstate its size. When product shipments arrived, I brought them down to the “warehouse”—the basement storeroom of my apartment building—by sliding the boxes down the stairs on recycled planks of wood. I equipped my basement cubbyhole with used furniture that I scavenged from curbside garbage piles. The same windowless storeroom also served as my office. My friend Andy Komaroff came to visit and humorously gave me a “tour” of my own facilities. “Welcome to the worldwide headquarters of PeaceWorks Inc.,” he said proudly as we walked down the building’s back service stairs into the dark basement. “Here we have the finance department,” he said as he pointed past the laundry machines in the basement. “And here we have operations and logistics,” he indicated as we walked through the room housing the garbage compactor, ignoring the stench.

What kept me going was my sense of mission: I was in this to help build a footing for peace. Although PeaceWorks floundered as I paid for my failures and lessons in inventory control, marketing, new product development, and strategy, what never wavered was the company’s purpose. That was essential because it enabled me to persevere and to view every setback as an opportunity to learn and improve. After all, I had to make a difference. I had to help my Israeli, Arab, and Turkish partners. Failure was not an option.

Every time I had to struggle out onto the street at dawn with my heavy bag of samples, ready for another twelve hours of cheerful door-to-door selling, I remembered the scenes I had observed in Israel and Palestine. The people there deserved to live in peace. I also thought about my father, and what he went through as a child during the Second World War and as a kid in a concentration camp. That put my problems in perspective—and reminded me of my mission.

If you can find a purpose that defines you and imbues you with meaning, then channeling that passion and energy toward your business or vocation can be a source of near invincibility. Pursuing what you believe in already constitutes success regardless of the outcome.

Incorporating both a social and a business mission into a venture’s DNA does not happen overnight. It can take days, weeks, months, or years to decode how to let those objectives reinforce one another harmoniously and authentically. It requires out-of-the-box thinking and disciplined questioning of assumptions. It would be disingenuous to guarantee that, by reading about my experiences, every reader filled with purpose will come up with a magic formula for making money while solving society’s ills. It took me many years to figure it out and it involved making big mistakes and being willing to learn from them. But what got me there was sincerity of purpose, and the steadfastness that comes with it.

It was purpose that helped me overcome the gravest doubts and the biggest challenges. In the mid-nineties, a spate of terrorist bombings that targeted the Tel Aviv bus routes made me question the feasibility of my work to advance peace in the Middle East. I was trying to bring together two populations through the slow build of a linked prosperity, while an act of violence from one individual could cause such carnage and change the mood of the region overnight. Images of devastation from a terrorist bomb in Dizengoff shopping center shook my commitment and made me question whether our work was a mirage or even a lie. I called Yoel, Abdullah, and other trading partners, and asked them if they, too, felt that perhaps we were making a mistake, and we should suspend our efforts, at least temporarily. “Daniel,” Yoel instantly retorted, “these are our lives we are talking about. This is not a game or a school project. Now more than ever we need to continue our work and deny terrorists a victory.” I never questioned the value of our mission again.

In those early days, I spent long hours on the road pitching my wares to stores. Sometimes my gas and travel expenses outstripped what I had sold for the day. Life as a traveling salesman is not easy; it undermined my motivation at some points. I once found myself sitting on a vinyl chair in a dingy Waldbaum’s purchasing office on Long Island, waiting my turn to see the grocery chain’s buyer. At my feet was the dilapidated fake-leather briefcase left over from my days as a law-firm intern, now stuffed with jars of sundried tomato spreads. I looked around. Elderly salesmen sat with kind but tired faces as they waited for a chance to be seen. I sensed they had been following this routine for several decades. Was this Death of a Salesman tableau my future? Could I turn the company around, both in profitability and in its social mission, or was it doomed to mediocrity? During the worst periods, when I had trouble meeting payroll and could barely afford to pay myself my $24,000 salary, I thought seriously about taking a job as an attorney. Overarching purpose gave me determination not to give up.

PURPOSE IS NOT A CRUTCH

While a social mission can fill you and your team with purpose, and can generate loyalty and support from consumers and customers, it is no replacement for ensuring that your product or service wins on its core features. A social mission should never serve as a crutch to bypass quality, nor serve as the basis on which to try to attract consumers. Studies that indicate consumers buy products because of their social mission, in my experience, are wrong. Consumers may want to think they do—and indeed, a company’s social mission may be a reason to buy once—but, in practice, they repeatedly buy what they truly need and feel fits their lifestyle best.

The mission does not sell the product; the product sells the product.

Yes, increasingly consumers are focused on ensuring that the companies they buy products or services from are genuine members of their communities, doing their part to make this a better world. But that is not a substitute for delivering on the functional merits. First and foremost, the product must stand on its own. And if your social mission gets too far ahead of itself on the marketing front, consumers may feel it is masking inadequacies in the product.

I was so passionate about the PeaceWorks mission, that initially I put it front and center on our products. We branded that first sundried tomato spread “Moshe & Ali’s.” The marketing story featured Moshe Pupik, a fictional Jewish chef, and Ali Mishmunken, an Arab magician, who concocted a Mediterranean spread so delicious that it hypnotized rival armies and put them in a friendly trance. Instead of fighting, the warring armies would then drop their weapons, melt them into spoons, and use the spoons to partake of the entrancing spreads. I crafted a video and booklets telling this story in my attempt to explain, in a disarming way, how the PeaceWorks model functioned and how we were using food as a common bond to help people work together. “Cooperation never tasted so good” was the motto. People appreciated the story, but the tongue-in-cheek marketing and social emphasis didn’t properly celebrate the high-end specialty spreads and their premium ingredients.

Fortunately by the time I launched KIND, I had incorporated this lesson from my experience with PeaceWorks. While KIND’s mission of inspiring kindness means a lot to our team, from the beginning we decided it would not be a basis for how we position or sell the product. At least prior to the publication of this book and the concomitant decision to begin sharing the full story behind KIND, probably less than one percent of our consumers had ever heard of that part of our social mission; to sell more, we emphasize our products’ healthful premium ingredients and delicious taste. We do want our community to learn more about our efforts to make this a kinder world, because we want them to join us in its pursuit, and because we believe this will engender loyalty and passion toward KIND and its products. But we drive our sales by focusing on being number one in how we solve the needs our consumers have.

Our company motto, “Do the KIND Thing for your body, your taste buds & your world,” highlights our business and social priorities. Healthful products—and the implicit social purpose of fighting diabetes and obesity—are a prerequisite to anything we make: Be KIND to your body. Taste is the corollary prerequisite: Be KIND to your taste buds. Only after those two product features do we have the luxury to commit to be KIND to our world through the work we do to inspire and celebrate kindness.

Balancing how we speak about and structure our social work requires tact, thoughtfulness, and humility. If you get it wrong, you lose legitimacy. Third-party studies have highlighted that KIND commands the highest level of trust and belief in its integrity, transparency, and authenticity among brands in the nutrition, cereal, and granola bar categories. This is of foremost importance. We constantly remind ourselves that, after all, we are a business—not-only-for-profit, of course—proud to be competing in the marketplace on our own merits and winning on commercial and financial terms. We have to be up front about this, and never try to leverage our social mission in a way that seems inauthentic or manipulative. We never do good to improve our sales; we do good to do good. If we follow this formula, we believe, KIND karma takes care of the rest.

AUTHENTIC PURPOSE VS. SHALLOW “CAUSE MARKETING”

“Cause marketing,” in contrast, is something I am quite wary of, both as a consumer and as a social entrepreneur. Over the last couple decades, it has become trendy to append social causes to a product’s marketing campaign to get more people to buy the product. Rather than trying to tackle a social ill through a sustainable business model, some “cause marketers” attach some shallow bells and whistles to make brands or products seem socially conscious. My sense is that consumers are extraordinarily savvy and can detect and ultimately dismiss these marketing gimmicks. Perhaps in the short term a shallow campaign may achieve tactical objectives; but in the longer term consumers catch up. To build enduring brand value, the social effort needs to be authentic and permanent.

Corporate social responsibility comes in two flavors. Some large corporations genuinely see the imperative to act responsibly in society and take steps to do good. A lot of good deeds come from some of the largest corporations, and frankly they often don’t get credit because consumers question their motives, even when they are sincere and sustained. Then there are artificial and shallow initiatives that are clearly designed to create a semblance of goodness. These often feel forced, particularly when the underlying business is at tension with the social mission to which it claims to attach itself. If you are making un-healthful products (say candy or sugary beverages), trumpeting a donation to a charity that fights childhood obesity, for example, may actually hurt the brand because it will seem hypocritical and may actually highlight the brand’s detrimental impact on society. (There are also business leaders like Warren Buffett who feel it is not for the corporations to decide how to do philanthropy, and they should disburse dividends and let their shareholders determine how to allocate their resources; I respect the viewpoint intellectually, even if I feel that in this day and age, where market forces and the private sector dominate our lives, corporations themselves have the power and responsibility to be positive actors in society.)

Here is how I see it: If your product’s features fall short of those of your competitors, consumers will reject it even if it had been made by Mother Teresa and aimed to do a ton of good. If consumers are choosing between two products of equal quality and features, one of which has a sincere social purpose, the majority will opt for that brand. But if the product feels inauthentic, that will backfire and turn consumers off and prompt them to reject such brand. Consumers will choose a “fun” brand (say Doritos) that is authentic in just being indulgent before they choose a “fun” brand that pretends to be something it isn’t. At the end of the day, if your goal is to sell products, focus first and foremost on winning on the product’s merits. Then ensure that any stated social mission is genuine.

Take Maiyet, a luxury apparel brand I cofounded with Kristy Caylor and Paul van Zyl, initially borrowing on the PeaceWorks concept I had pioneered in the food arena. Maiyet elevates the crafts of artisans in conflict regions, involving Christian and Muslim women in Liberia, Hindu and Muslim weavers in India, and jewelers with complementary techniques from the Hutu, Kikuyu, and Luo tribes in Kenya. Kristy and Paul have received wide praise for their aesthetic excellence. Maiyet products sell at Barneys and high-end boutique chains. It has been praised as the first upscale apparel brand to have truly melded a deep social mission with uncompromising craftsmanship.

Shoppers may appreciate that Maiyet strives to alleviate tensions between Indian Hindus and Muslims, but they buy the clothes because they are beautiful and well made. Customers do, however, understand the brand and what it stands for, and that makes them more loyal and more likely to look for Maiyet in stores.

MONEY IS NOT A PURPOSE

Here’s where some people will say: “But my business doesn’t have a purpose. Its goal is to make money.” It’s true that not every company is set up as a social enterprise. And it is true that financial health is vital for any business. But every successful company has a purpose and a value to give to society, beyond making money, or else its products or services would not be attractive. Beyond generating jobs and incomes for employees, successful businesses solve needs in the marketplace. People pay them money precisely because they are addressing a need they have. Social businesses identify opportunities that also address societal problems. But every business, if sustainable, addresses existing needs.

Whether you are thinking about your business or about yourself, striving just for money will limit your potential and never fulfill you because money is just a means to track and trade value.

To keep myself grounded, I constantly think about the parable of the forty-nine coins:

In a faraway kingdom, there was a humble man who cleaned the floors of the king and was always smiling and happy. The king approached his senior counselor and complained, “How come I am the richest and most powerful man in the kingdom, and I am always worried and down, yet this pauper is always beaming with happiness?”

“Don’t worry, Your Majesty,” said the adviser. “I will take care of this.”

That night, the adviser traveled far into the poorest reaches of the Kingdom, where the happy man lived in a little hut. He peeked through the window and saw him playing with his children on the floor as his wife cooked dinner.

The adviser took a pouch with fifty gold coins, and placed it on the floor in front of the poor man’s house. But just before doing so, he removed one of the gold coins and put it in his pocket. Then he knocked on the door and hid.

The man came out, saw no one, but noticed the little pouch, and opened it. He was in shock. Gold coins. Just one of these gold coins was more than he could have ever hoped to see in his life. And yet it wasn’t just one. It was two, and three, and four, and he counted them, forty-eight, forty-nine. FORTY-NINE GOLD COINS!!! “Wait a second,” he thought to himself. “Forty-nine? That is an odd number. I must have miscounted.” So he counted again and found, again, only forty-nine coins. How could this be? He was missing one. Where was it? He opened the door and looked in the porch. He ran back in and asked the children if they had taken one of the coins. He shook his son and pressed him, “Are you sure you didn’t take a coin?” He didn’t understand where the fiftieth coin had gone. He had forty-nine. That was incredible. But if he just could get to fifty! That should be the goal. If he could round out to fifty gold coins, he’d be immensely rich. He hid the coins under the earth and went to work the following day.

Throughout the day he was preoccupied with how he was going to save enough money to get to the fiftieth coin. He should take a second shift. His wife could take another job. And maybe his kids could stop going to school and help out. The king passed by and said hello to the janitor. But he was too preoccupied and irascible to be warm. When he got home, he was anxious and nervous—what if someone had stolen the coins? He ran and checked: Okay, they were safe. Then he proceeded to instruct his wife and children on the new jobs they would be assigned.

He took on two, and then three, shifts at work. His exhaustion and paranoia made him so irritable and unpleasant, that at some point the king just had him fired. He was so obsessive and demanding that his wife and children left him. The pressure made him lose his mind. He ended up all alone, searching for his fiftieth coin.

I was brought up not to care about money as a scorecard. But it gets harder for me not to keep count, because the more successful KIND has become and the more that money has become available, the more it becomes a dangerous poison that can seduce me into defining myself and my success by the amount of money I make.

As a kid, I had no financial needs. I was lucky that my parents were able to provide for me and my siblings, especially after they had struggled greatly. I always had a job or a small business that I was running, but I did it because I enjoyed the entrepreneurial pursuit. Making money was a source of pride, but it was never the money itself that gave me meaning or pleasure—it was the sense of accomplishment. I did track my earnings, because my dad taught me that as a businessman you have to keep records. And I was tenacious and focused on both the top line and the bottom line. But the money itself was just a means to measure my effectiveness.

Now that KIND has become a significant business, I never lose sight of the importance of financial performance, but I strive never to concern myself with my personal net worth. And I do my best not to let financial success change my lifestyle. Particularly now that I have kids, I constantly remind myself to set a proper example for my children and not create a culture of abundance, but one of self-imposed limits. I try to stay focused on what matters, and not to glorify wealth for its own sake.

I also have to be careful not to forget my personal commitment to build bridges and press for Arab-Israeli reconciliation. As my business grows, it places more demands on my time. I try not to let KIND, even with its important social purpose, become an excuse for me not to pursue the harder challenges. I have to remind myself that I can’t retreat from those responsibilities.

Does having a sense of purpose mean that you are deluded into thinking you are so special that you will necessarily achieve what nobody else has? I often get asked, “Why do you think you can help bring peace to the Middle East when so many have tried and failed to do so over half a century?” Well, I actually do think every one of us is special in his or her own way and can bring some specific strengths to the table. I bring tenacity, creativity, and sincerity of purpose. But I certainly do not believe I can do what others can’t. I just believe I can be one of the many who need to join forces to seize back the agenda for conflict resolution; at best I can be one of the catalysts to get others to join in. And I know that it won’t get done if we moderates keep making excuses about why we don’t need to play a role to stand against violent extremism. I have a responsibility to do my part.

More important, the question misses the point about purpose. Once you’ve found your purpose, it doesn’t matter if you are certain of whether you are going to solve the problem. If that is truly the mission that gives you meaning, how can you not pursue it? Meaning and fulfillment come from doing what you know you need to do—you can be at peace when you know you are giving it your best. You certainly can’t wait for others to do it for you. As the celebrated Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?”

TALKING WITH YOURSELF TO FIND YOUR PURPOSE

Many people who care deeply about a cause choose to donate some of their income. They are advancing causes they believe in in a sequential fashion: work hard, make money, then do some good with it. That’s certainly commendable. But given the amount of time you spend at work, it’s ideal if you can enjoy what you do. A lot of people now are quitting those safe jobs to find meaning. Under the right circumstances, your work can be something you enjoy and are proud to do.

I realize that it’s a privilege to be able to select a career based on how it helps you fulfill your purpose; sometimes you just don’t have those options. But even if your financial situation doesn’t allow you to launch a whole business, you are more likely to make those ends meet and to grow professionally if you dedicate yourself to a company or organization that energizes you. And if you have the time to figure a better way by following the AND philosophy—an integrative instead of a sequential approach—then you may be able to find meaning and purpose while advancing business objectives.

Finding purpose in what you do is not an exhortation to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. There is nothing selfless or self-important about what I am advocating. When I dedicate myself to build bridges, it is not an act of sacrifice for humanity. It feels like an act of self-preservation. I derive enjoyment from it.

Indeed, if you do uncover a way to find purpose through your work, then you also need to be careful to not allow your career to consume you and your family and personal life. Satisfying work can be so immersive and engaging—can give you so much joy—that you can end up sacrificing other aspects of your life that are also important. Prior to getting married and having kids, I didn’t realize how unbalanced my life was; and I could possibly have missed out on the blessing of raising kids and the meaning that comes with it (including raising them to become good human beings) because of my obsession with Middle Eastern peace and social business enterprises.

If you’re at a crossroads or starting a new business or simply want to evaluate whether you can better incorporate purpose into an existing venture, you will need to truly understand yourself. You need to know what gives you purpose before you can translate it into business practice.

It could be to make others happy. To be a good parent. To take care of others. To invent a cure for a disease. To keep this planet clean. It could be a big global problem, or one that affects your community. Or something important to your family. Or something just for you. Purpose and passion are not just about your business or your job, and they will be different for each individual.

You may not have identified what force within drives you. This is where introspection is key. Thinking hard about your life, and questioning your assumptions, will help you to be honest with yourself about what you believe and how you want to live as a person. A sense of purpose makes you happier and more effective in your job and in the rest of your life.

Talking with yourself often and deeply is not always an easy task but there are no shortcuts to understanding what makes you tick. You must take the time to ask yourself questions. Your answer most likely will not come overnight. And it may evolve as you gain other experiences. But that is why it is so important that you consciously invest the time to listen to your inner self along the way.

Knowing what makes you happy is presumably the first step to actually being happy. So why is it that so many people go their entire lives without considering it? It is tough work, actually, not just because our modern culture of tweets, blogs, emails, and Facebook posts extinguishes our time for deep reflection, but because these are tough questions that are not easy to answer. If you never ask them, though, you will never even start the journey to find the answers. And the journey itself may be the answer.

If you can find what you love, and do it, your success is guaranteed—because every day pursuing what you care about will fulfill you. But if you let societal pressure fool you into thinking that your “goals” are financial success, or power, or fame, or other empty concepts on which you benchmark yourself against others, you’ll be like a hamster running on a wheel, never quite reaching the goal.

Even though this advice may seem obvious, in a culture that celebrates materialism and consumerism, at many points we are tempted to measure our success against that of others. It happens to me and I have to remind myself of my priorities. Many talented and smart people get lost chasing the wrong goal.

To find our true north, we need to talk to our innermost selves. We need to dream—to consciously daydream. To let our thoughts and our consciousness take us wherever they may. Daydreaming helps us to visualize the heights we can reach, to imagine new worlds, to imagine ourselves in new places, to never believe someone who says “it can’t be done.” Every major accomplishment starts with some people thinking it is impossible to achieve it and naïve to try.

Our fates are interlinked nowadays now more than ever. The challenges that new generations are inheriting are daunting. From resource scarcity to global warming, tackling these challenges will require that we recognize our shared humanity and work together. We cannot look around for someone else to solve these problems. We are the ones with the power and responsibility to lead the way.

Talk to yourself because along the road, as you commit to excellence and aim high, there will be times when you fall. And the higher you climb, the bigger the fall. Sometimes that fall will hurt. A lot. And at those times, when you talk with yourself, it is most important that you love yourself and cut yourself some slack. Be comfortable making mistakes. As long as you learn from them. But don’t be afraid to keep climbing, and falling. For failures, and the lessons we draw from them, most often precede our greatest successes.

I cannot think of any venture I have initiated where an earlier failure wasn’t an important precursor to an eventual success. Failure holds the seeds for greatness. So long as you water those seeds with introspection, they can be the root of your success.

Whatever you set as your mountaintop, all that matters is that you be true to yourself in figuring out what that is, and that you give it the best you’ve got. So that when you look back, as you continue that conversation with yourself, you will know you’ve lived life fully, with integrity, passion, and purpose.