The Noble Eight Fold Path is a Buddhist philosophy that aims to direct the lives of it’s followers. As implied, there are eight parts to the path, and each concept can be applied to how you do business.

1. Right speech.

Right speech means to only speak truth, and to speak in a nonharmful, unexagerated manner. This is a very important concept for business. Speaking truthfully to clients, colleagues, and prospects is important. When you exagerate things to a client or prospect, you lose credibility if they find out that you’re exagerating. This can be more harmful to your business than virtually anything else you might do. If a client doesn’t trust you, they won’t do business with you - simple as that. Lying or exagerating to colleages is just as bad. When you exagerate or lie about successes, at best you annoy people, and worst case scenario is that no one believes anything you say anymore. Either way, it’s bad news for you.

The second part of this is nonharmful speech. Make sure that any criticism that you give is constructive, and make sure that you’re not saying things to intentially be hurtful (no matter how tempting it might be).

2. Right actions.

Right action is not acting in a way that might harm someone else. This is directly related to right speech. If you tell someone that you’ll do something, then do it. If you told someone that you wouldn’t do something, then don’t do it. It’s really not much more complicated. Don’t cheat people or mislead them. Make sure that the actions to take don’t hurt anyone else. Make sure that if you’re doing something to benefit yourself that it’s not at the expense of someone else. Even though it can be tempting at times to do things that might not have the best effect on your competition, resist the temptation. Doing things that have a harmful effect on others will eventually come back to haunt you.

3. Right livelihood.

Make sure that the business that you are partaking in is not harmful to people. You have to use your own judgement in a lot of cases as to whether or not something is harmful (hint: when in doubt, you’re generally hurting at least one group of people, even if you’re helping others). Taking part in a business that is helpful to others is the ideal in this path, but at the very least you shouldn’t be overtly harming anyone.

4. Right effort/exercise.

Right effort basically means that you strive to improve yourself. You should constantly be working toward doing a better job than you’ve done previously. Continually improving your performance is a great way to increase business. If you’re constantly besting yourself, your clients will notice, and will bring you more business (both themselves and through referrals).

5. Right mindfulness/awareness.

Right mindfulness is all about having the mental clarity to see things as they are. Don’t get caught up in someone else’s fast-talking sales pitch. Make sure that you don’t get sidetracked by things that aren’t important. Have the ability to see a project or opportunity for what it is, not what you want it to be.

6. Right concentration.

Right concentration is a bit more difficult, especially for those of us striving for success. Right concentration means being aware of your present reality while not having any cravings or aversion to anything outside of the present moment. As I said, this can be very difficult for those who are striving to reach goals. The main thing to remember is that the task at hand is the most important one. If you don’t complete the task at hand, you won’t move on to the next task. And by concentrating just on the task at hand, you can complete it more quickly and to a higher level of quality than if you’re distracted by what you might be doing next week (or next year). This is especially true if you’re not looking forward to something. The distraction caused by something unpleasant that you’re really not looking forward to can have a much more negative impact on your work. If you’re dreading something, that will show in the quality of your current work. If you simply invest yourself fully in the task at hand, your work will reflect your concentration and dedication.

7. Right thoughts.

Right thoughts is really about the intention to change your pattern of thinking. Right thought is about making a commitment to being free of ill will. Being free of ill will is important in carrying out the rest of the concepts here. Without a freedom from ill will, you won’t be able to achieve peak results and productivity.

8. Right understanding.

Right understanding is, in part, realizing that things are not permanent. Once you realize that the things that you do aren’t permanent, that you yourself are not permanent, things become much clearer. The little things don’t matter as much. Things are in a constant state of change, and once you accept that, life goes a lot easier.

The Noble Eight-Fold Path is just one aspect of Buddhist philosophy (or eight aspects depending on how you look at it). There are many other parts of Buddhist philosophy that can be applied to business and life in general whether you’re a practicing Buddhist or not. More on the Noble Eight-Fold Path can be found on Wikipedia.

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Shift Happens is the winner of the World’s Best Presentation Contest from SlideShare.net. This slideshow will absolutely blow your mind. The statistics are just beyond belief (China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world, If you took every single job in the U.S. and shipped it to China…China would still have a labor surplus). If this slideshow doesn’t make you think twice about, well, everything, then you’re not really thinking about it. I was absolutely dumbfounded after reading it, and was unable to really think about anything for a few minutes afterward.

With the speed at which information and technology are growing, and the rate of that growth, humans will soon be outdated. Our brains will no longer have the capacity to understand and comprehend what is going on around us. We’ll become dependent on computers to interpret, store, and organize the data (more completely than we do now), and without those computers we will be unable to function. With the advent of more intelligent computing systems and artificial intelligence just over the horizon, are we making ourselves obsolete?

Via Guy Kawasaki’s How To Change The World.

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