Transcribed by Descript
Erin Marcus: Oh, right. Welcome, welcome to this episode of the ready yet podcast, where my guest, Mark Silver and I have finally stopped talking about working in our gardens. You thought you were coming to learn about business, but you're actually coming to learn about how to remove invasives. Species from the forest without upsetting the baby squirrel.
Erin Marcus: That's what we're really talking about today. That,
Mark Silver: that is exactly right. That's how we
Erin Marcus: do it. But before we get into all of that. Why don't you tell everybody, like,
Mark Silver: who
Erin Marcus: you are and what
Mark Silver: you do? All right. Well, my name is Mark Silver. I'm the founder of Heart of Business. And for the last 24 years, we've worked with over 4, 500 business owners.
Mark Silver: We exist at the intersection of social justice, small business, and spirituality. And I have my Master's of Divinity. I practice within a Sufi tradition that I learned from my sheikh who passed in 2015. He was a Palestinian from Jerusalem who taught at Al Aqsa, the masjid there. And I'm currently fasting for Ramadan.
Mark Silver: That's what's happening. And and so all of this kind of comes together to say that every act of business can be an act of love. That's really what we're about. And I published a book recently which is worth talking about heart-centered business. Yeah. Healing from toxic business culture so your small business can thrive.
Mark Silver: And yeah, and I've, I'll laugh and say when I met somebody and they went back to talk to their team, somebody on their team said, oh, mark silver. He's the OG of ethical business. So I was, I'd like to have fun. I like to see businesses fly, especially in the face of capitalism and the toxicity of it.
Mark Silver: And like to see us all working towards something more beautiful.
Erin Marcus: And I think one of the things, like, I have so many questions and so many things to, I think there's been a shift in the energy. I want to say personally, I felt it starting in about October of last year, that the hustle culture from the 80s, the striving culture from the 90s, like, we've hit, like, that was okay then, that was the reach then, That was the expansion then,
Mark Silver: but there's, I grew up in the 80s.
Erin Marcus: It was different than the 50s where you just handed something and you settled for whatever you were given. So the next iteration was created, you know, striving for, right, as opposed to what you were handed. But I do think it's interesting to me, like, I always feel that if there's pushback, it's because that pushback is coming from a fear of wanting to keep the status quo.
Erin Marcus: So when you see more and more pushback, you're seeing, Oh, the status quo is changing. And I feel like we have this separation now of more and more people in small business and even some large businesses who see that there's a different way to do it. They see that there is. I'll call it a better way because my opinion is there's a better way to do it a more conscientious way to do this and yet at the same time, we're seeing stories of large companies doubling down on the crappy behavior, like literally doubling down on the crappy behavior as a pushback to the movement of doing it a better way.
Mark Silver: Yes.
Erin Marcus: Which to me is a good indication, right? Because it means you wouldn't
Mark Silver: push back against
Erin Marcus: it
Mark Silver: if you
Erin Marcus: didn't feel you needed to.
Mark Silver: Right. It's true. And I, I yeah, I mean, we're, my personal opinion is that we're in this, you know, kind of end stage capitalism.
Erin Marcus: Okay. People yell at me when I call it that because I'm a big believer in so much of capitalism, but I'm calling, my boyfriend gets all up at me.
Erin Marcus: Like, I'm calling what's going on now endgame capitalism. And I, and everyone's like and I'm like,
Mark Silver: well, and it's like, I, I, I don't think a lot of folks know what we mean, what I mean, you know, what, when people talk about capitalism in this way, cause capitalism is not trade and commerce. It's not business.
Mark Silver: That's not capitalism. Capitalism is new for the last few hundred years. There's been trade and commerce and what, you know, People sometimes call it indirect bartering or using some kind of currency for thousands and thousands of years, and it's looked a thousand million different ways across the planet.
Mark Silver: What we've seen over the last few hundred years is a very toxic, you know, colonialist, white supremacist, sexist, capitalist, toxic stew that has concentrated the ownership Of the of, of everything, right? Of resources into very few hands. And that's really what capitalism is about. It's about the centralization of control of resources instead of allowing a real diversity of a healthy ecosystem, a healthy economy to thrive in a, in many, many, many diverse ways.
Mark Silver: And And it's toxic, and it can only last so long because it feeds on everything.
Erin Marcus: Well, so, right, and so one of the things that I do is My version of spirituality is Mother Nature. Like, I just, that's my version, for, you can agree or not agree, but that's what I go back to, right? The natural world. What happens in the natural world, because things ebb and flow, there's symbiotic relationships that when they're left to exist, work wonderfully.
Erin Marcus: You have, you know, Different animals eat different things eat different animals. There's a lot of them. There's a little bit of those like and so when I see what's happening in our created world, if it the more it moves away from mirroring the natural world. You start to see there's problems.
Mark Silver: Yeah, exactly.
Mark Silver: Because it is the natural world. Like, we, like, it's not like we exist outside the natural world. We're animals too, right? And so, by creating a system that ignores the healthy limits in the natural world, you create a system that is inevitably going to fall to pieces, you know, and do a lot of damage in the process.
Mark Silver: You know it's you know, we see this with invasive species in nature. We were talking about before we had to have this conversation. They'll expand to the point where they collapse. Where they collapse
Erin Marcus: the system.
Mark Silver: And they collapse themselves too, right? Because they, because there's nothing left to feed on.
Mark Silver: It's interesting because Horn Farm here York County in Pennsylvania, Regenerative Agriculture Center for Regenerative Agriculture, where we've, I've learned so much from them. Someone was explaining there that Like a meadow is a competitive environment. Everything's. struggling and fighting for limited resources.
Mark Silver: But a woodland, a forest, is a cooperative environment. Everything is operating together and supporting each other and communicating. And and what we see is that meadows, when left alone, become woodland. That's what they do. They just naturally succeed into woodland. I think that you know, like the, the natural state of things is cooperation is caring for each other is sharing resources.
Mark Silver: And, you know, I, I have an ultimate hopefulness. I just hope that we can get there as a species without doing as much damage. Well,
Erin Marcus: and what I see. And here's the thing, I also don't know, because I agree, like you don't want the damage being done. But the change is inevitable, and the change isn't always bad.
Erin Marcus: Though often times the catalyst is hard. Right? Catalysts, things don't change because they're happy, and puppies, and rainbows, and unicorns seldom, you know, invoke change, but the catalyst is hard, but the outcome isn't necessarily a bad one.
Mark Silver: Right. The challenge, of course, is in this culture, the people who are going to take the brunt of it are the most vulnerable.
Mark Silver: Right. That's really the challenge. Like, you know, it's, I mean, I, you know, we live pretty rurally, not terribly rurally, but enough that we have some acres around us and woods and animals and things. And it's like, you know we let one of our neighbors hunt our land during deer season. And, you know, things die, things eat each other.
Mark Silver: Like that, like that essence of like, just the life, the cycle of life and death doesn't bother me. It's just when we've set up a system so that it's, you know, The vulnerable among us that are going to take the biggest brunt, and that's what I find the most painful. And it doesn't have to be that way.
Mark Silver: Like I, what I love about working in small business and that really fires me up and I haven't gotten bored in 23, 24 years. Is that there's so much possibility for good, you know, when you have lots of small businesses that know each other and they, you know, we can weave a tapestry of mutual aid and support.
Mark Silver: There's so much good that can come out of that. There's, you know
Erin Marcus: I think that's one of, I was at a meeting, it was the last meeting I was at before the lockdowns and it was There's probably 150 people there and 149 of them were entrepreneurs. And I don't know how the other person got there or who she knew, like why she even, like why she came.
Erin Marcus: And at the end of the day, as people were sharing their ahas and their, you know, as, as, those types of events tend to do. She stood up and she said, in a million years, I've never seen anything like this. A room overflowing with people who, down to the last one of them, wants to know who they can help and how they can help.
Erin Marcus: And that was it. And like, to me coming out of corporate, I noticed corporate is inherently competitive, right? Cause you have a hundred people on the team, five get promoted, then two get promoted, then one get it's like, it's inherently competitive, but to your point with small business, there's so much more opportunity.
Erin Marcus: So how do you explain to the naysayer who'll say, Oh, capital, you're complaining about capitalism, but that's how you make money. Because I agree with you. That's not how we make money. That's not why we get to make money. How does a small business thrive in this larger chaotic environment?
Mark Silver: Yeah they can thrive very well.
Mark Silver: The yeah. So the way we do it is we, is the way we need to do it as human beings is through community. You know, we have to, the more that we can make actual genuine relationships with other small business owners and with other people in the community. I mean, that's, I mean, everything about a business Everything in life is relationship.
Mark Silver: It's our relationship, our heart's relationship to, in my point of view as a Sufi, to the source of love, and everything is an expression of the source of love. And so I'm wanting to be, you know, in the Allah, the Divine, wanting to be in connection, in relationship with everything, in that sense. And when my business I can through my business be in relationship both to people that I can help and people who can help me and people who can, we can just also just be a network, a tapestry of support.
Mark Silver: I mean, that's, that's where the thriving is like, and I want to say you don't have to be an extrovert. I'm talking about relationship and knowing all these people like you don't have to be an extrovert. There's so many. It doesn't mean running around
Erin Marcus: screaming on the top of your lungs to everyone who will listen.
Erin Marcus: No, no,
Mark Silver: it doesn't. It doesn't. And it doesn't mean having to spend a tremendous amount of time with lots of other people if that's not your thing. But we do need relationships. And weaving those relationships comes from a combination of sovereignty and strength in ourselves, like developing a a confidence and a clarity in who we are, which I think also arises out of a humility.
Mark Silver: Because when we know our gifts, that usually brings us to a place of humility. It's when we don't know our gifts that people sometimes think they have to puff themselves up to pretend there's something they're not. But when you just know yourself, there's an ability to just be humble. And then a combination of that with vulnerability.
Mark Silver: Vulnerability is, I think the, the master. quality in life and in business. Without vulnerability, we can't let anything new in. Without vulnerability, we can't make new relationships. And without vulnerability, we're walled off from the world around us. And there's no real way to succeed, except through force, which isn't in my book success.
Erin Marcus: Well, and the other thing that I see happen, you're talking about vulnerability, humility, like The authenticity, right? If we label it authenticity, one of the things I see happen when you don't have those traits, when you're not confident in your authenticity, when you're not confident in your gifts, to your point, you become susceptible to other people's marketing, to other people's highlight reel, to other people's version of success.
Erin Marcus: And I don't say, those people aren't bad, by the way, they're doing their job, right? They're, they're run, you know, they don't have to be bad for this to not work for you. They might just be good at marketing, right? It doesn't, it doesn't have to be bad or run. But what happens is I watch, and I've done this, I, I'm looking at what I, where I've done it, time and time again, when that's your motivation and that's your guide, it doesn't work, right?
Erin Marcus: That's the chasing. That's the, That's the grasping. That's the chasing. That's the striving. That's the making decisions based on underlying stories. as opposed to connection.
Mark Silver: Yes.
Erin Marcus: And it's brutal.
Mark Silver: It is. It is brutal. It's so terrible for our mental health.
Erin Marcus: It's so brutal for our hearts. It's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking because I can see brilliant, wonderful people or when I've experienced it myself. Yeah. Like, feeling like, okay, I get it now. That's how you do this. not realizing that that will never come externally.
Mark Silver: Well, it's, well, it's so interesting because it does come externally. I, this whole, I, there was a meme going around social media. I guess it makes its rounds. It's like, you know, you can't You know, be loved until you learn how to love yourself. And I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true.
Mark Silver: I think we do learn how to love ourselves through the genuine love of others. Like how else does it, you know, it's like, I think, I think there's a give and a take one of the things that I think is very important that I, teach a lot on is to not prioritize the inner over the outer. You know, if we prioritize the inner over the outer, there's a, there's kind of an assumption there that somehow the inner is more sacred and the outer is not sacred.
Mark Silver: And that's how we got into this mess, this dumpster fire of a culture in the first place is by not treating the outer as sacred and holy and beautiful. And, you know, when someone. cares for me, you know, whether it's my wife or a friend or my kids or whoever, someone cares for me, I learn a little bit more about how to care for myself.
Mark Silver: And when I can care for myself, then, and I strengthen that, then I can bring that to other people. So I think we, there is a, a, There's a give and a take. I don't, I don't I don't want anyone to feel like they have to become some version of enlightened before they can operate in the world.
Erin Marcus: Yes, absolutely.
Erin Marcus: And Any great thing, and I say this about people, your best quality is always your worst quality, right? Like, that's, your greatest strength is always your biggest weakness. And I think to what you're saying, the people taken too far, focusing on the inner, ends up being to the exclusion of others. And that's not, that's not true.
Erin Marcus: That's not what we're looking for.
Mark Silver: Yeah, there's a balance. The Sufis talk about the middle way. It's like they say that we progress on two wings. The wing of hope and the wing of fear. You know, the wing of hope is a beautiful medicine. You know, my sheikh called hope a medicine. Like, we need hope. Too much hope and we end up living in fantasy land.
Mark Silver: We end up you know, ungrounded. We end up like, you know, disconnected from reality. We become heedless of the cliff edge, you know, and we fall off. Fear is actually a really important quality. It's a really important thing for us to pay attention to because it keeps us awake. It keeps us, like sometimes fear is is real.
Mark Silver: Like sometimes there's a real danger or something that we need to be awake to or something we need to pay attention to, but too much fear and we become paralyzed. We become small, we become very like insular and we aren't. And so like the hope and the fear and this middle way with both is is such a, I find such a more balanced, healthy way forward.
Erin Marcus: So how does somebody use this?
Mark Silver: So what we want to do is we want to, I, I always say to clients, like whatever, and myself many times is that is that whatever you've been leaning into, try leaning into the other. So for instance, I had a I had a client who was working really hard at their marketing, working really hard doing, like, doing all the right things, really.
Mark Silver: I looked at it, I'm like, you're doing all the right things, but it wasn't, something wasn't clicking, and I'm like, so what's not happening? So I said, let's lean into the inner, and I asked them to stop, And to go into their heart and guided them into their heart and supported them. And just like, they were just started just asking in their heart and opening and just, and suddenly a workshop that they were trying to sell filled up.
Mark Silver: They need a larger room. Now that's an, that's an unusual, You're not promising those results every time. But they're like, There is that factor that's real, but then there's the other side where I've seen people like coming to me going, Oh my God, I have some issue with receiving and I've been working on it spiritually and emotionally and I just can't make it I'm like, how's your How's your marketing?
Mark Silver: Do you know how to do a sales conversation effectively? And like, and so as I teach them the outer pieces and they put that into place, they realize like, okay, so maybe they do have an issue with receiving, but it wasn't as big as they thought as they start getting clients and money. So they have an issue
Erin Marcus: with actually doing.
Mark Silver: So. And so it's just focused on the wrong thing. So it's like, if you find yourself more focused on one, like if like, and we all have our habits and the things that we go to, you know, and Notice where you spend most of your time and try spending it in this other place, you know, try backing off from that.
Erin Marcus: I absolutely love that because, so one of the tools that I like to use, I call it putting bumpers in my gutters. And so I try to, what's the extreme ends of the situation and how, because, you know, success is not a straight line. We kind of wiggle our way forward, right? We bounce our way forward. My goal is to get my bumpers close enough.
Erin Marcus: together. So when the pendulum swings back and forth, it doesn't pick up enough momentum to crush me
Mark Silver: when it
Erin Marcus: hits me, right? And that's exactly, but your example is exactly what I saw happen in my business is last year. I had a brilliant plan on paper was phenomenal. We did so many things, so many things.
Erin Marcus: It did not work the way I, that any of us on the team saw it work. Like it just didn't work the way we wanted it to work. And when we pulled the plug on it, I definitely swung to the other side. and went way, way, way internally. And now that I've, you know, the pendulum got a little too far out of control, but now that we're getting back to your, you know, to your middle ground, it can feel so authentic and connecting and easy
Mark Silver: and
Erin Marcus: light.
Mark Silver: Yes, yes. And, you know, I don't think it's possible. I don't think it's, I don't think it's even desirable to find like the perfect. balance. You're not saying this, but I just wanted to highlight that like the perfect balance point doesn't, we do kind of wiggle, like even walking, like we sway back and forth, you know.
Mark Silver: I'm only five feet
Erin Marcus: tall. I waddle more than
Mark Silver: most. Little, little hip action is good to like move yourself forward and it's healthier for your body. And so We don't want to just find the stasis point and stay there because that's stagnancy. You know there's going to be times where we do more. It's like, again, with the natural world, if you're, you know, we we have all this hickory on our property and the hickory nuts drop in the fall and I'm collecting the hickory nuts.
Mark Silver: You're rolling it. Are they as bad as the
Erin Marcus: black walnuts here where you like roll an ankle walking around?
Mark Silver: No, no, no. They're smaller and they're much tastier. But the, You know, but then once they're all cracked and put away, you know, then there's time for rest, right? It's like the harvest and then the planting and then the times between.
Mark Silver: I think that we have that, you know, that piece. I mean, this is this piece we were talking about a little bit before we started recording it's like the, the truth. The hustle culture, you know, hustle culture says you must amp it up to here and then live here all the time
Erin Marcus: here. Right. Meanwhile, my nervous system is having a absolute breakdown,
Mark Silver: totally fried, cannot do that, cannot do that.
Mark Silver: And Sometimes there's work to do. You know, sometimes you do have to push a little, but even when you're pushing, we can stay connected to our heart and we can be aware that, Oh, this is not permanent. This is just a project. And when this project is over, there's time for rest. And we don't, we don't, we can't, we shouldn't live there, but sometimes we can go there.
Mark Silver: You can visit.
Erin Marcus: Well, and the other part of it is. With the whole analogy with the natural world that I try to remind myself, sometimes our businesses in winter and things just aren't growing. Like things are buried here. We had two and a half feet of snow in 36 hours. So right, like in January, but it was the only like, sometimes the business is going through winter and it doesn't mean you don't do work on it, but I love the idea of don't make it.
Erin Marcus: Don't make it a failure. Don't make it wrong. Don't beat yourself up for going through, right? If you're going through hard times, what do you do? You gotta keep going, right?
Mark Silver: Like,
Erin Marcus: don't, don't wallow in the winter, right? Seasonal depression,
Mark Silver: you know? And you can construct, you can develop a business to the point where the low tide and the high tide, to switch metaphors on you, where the low tide is still high enough to float you.
Mark Silver: You know, that's, I mean, that's what we're really trying to do. We're not, we're not going to get rid of the ups and downs, but you can develop a business if the low tide is still floating you. And and even if we stick with the trees, like the trees are still nourishing themselves during the winter.
Mark Silver: It's just different. Yeah, yeah,
Erin Marcus: absolutely. Absolutely. So how did you get to do this? What made you
Mark Silver: go this route? So it was the natural next step after being a paramedic in Oakland. Clearly,
Erin Marcus: like there was no other path that could have happened.
Mark Silver: So I got burned out on being a medic and in the 911 system in the Bay Area.
Mark Silver: And I I had also been volunteering for a non profit. magazine, I was the managing editor for the small nonprofit magazine. And and I was and I'd learned enough about marketing growing up. And I just, we had friends who were self employed, organic gardeners and other people. And like, Oh, you know, this was the nineties, you know, can you help me with my trifold brochure?
Mark Silver: If you remember those and as a world's worst designer, but I knew something about business evidently. And And so I just started helping people and I knew more than I thought I did. And then that intersected with Sufi healing. And because I'd been an activist, I'd had a passion for social justice since I was a teenager and rock against Reagan and DC, DC punk scene.
Mark Silver: And so You know, with this all, this all kind of came together and turned into Heart of Business and it's been a very surprising journey because it's not something I could have mapped out, but it's it's been absolutely beautiful. I, one of the big things that happened for me when I was starting to study with the Sufis and learning spiritual healing, learning business healing in particular, because one of the teachers there was a business consultant who had, was adapting it to business healing was that I was seeing that these, there were these really esoteric spiritual teachings that mapped onto business practice, some business, business, business practice, that had integrity.
Mark Silver: And I'm like, Oh, marketing can actually be healing if it's done a certain way. And instead of being toxic. And so, yeah. And so that started to kind of seep into my work and we've created an entire, I've created an entire body of work around this where we have access to love it. It's not like a spirituality where you kind of go fill your tank with spirituality and then you go do business, then you go to work and go back.
Mark Silver: It's like, no, the work itself that this has, the, the love infused in it so that it can really nourish us as we go.
Erin Marcus: Love it. So if people want to learn more about that and continue this conversation with you and learn about invasive species and how to chop down, how to clear, how to clear land without bothering babies girls and birds, we're having the same problem here.
Erin Marcus: Brush cutter. You want a brush cutter.
Mark Silver: I
Erin Marcus: am literally going through an acre of forest and individually choosing things. This is taking, this is not a shortcut.
Mark Silver: No, it's not.
Erin Marcus: It's not. But it's healthier. There's no nests.
Mark Silver: There's no babies in there.
Erin Marcus: Right.
Mark Silver: Yes. But how do
Erin Marcus: they get a hold of you? How can they find you?
Mark Silver: Heartofbusiness. com on our homepage is a place where you can get the first chapter to my book. If you want to see it, you can just check out who we are get on our email list. You can also find me on Facebook or LinkedIn and yeah, socials. And
Erin Marcus: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing your energy and your insights and your experience and your trees and your metaphors.
Erin Marcus: You talk like I do.
Mark Silver: So awesome.
Erin Marcus: But thank you so much for joining me here.
Mark Silver: I'm so delighted. Thank you for holding the space that you do.