Maybe Not an Empire But How About a Kingdom

So, I was catching up on my feeds after a school overload and caught an interesting guest post over at IttyBiz called No Bullshit Branding & The Sustainable Empire of You. By happenstance I was listening to my favorite VNV Nation album, Empires, specifically the song Kingdom and it struck me how the lyrics might apply to someone trying to build a system for living life on their own terms.

Consider the chorus:

I believe that we’ll conceive
to make in hell for us a heaven.
A brave new world.
A promised land.
A fortitude of hearts and minds.
Until I see this kingdom is mine,
I’ll turn the darkness into light.
I’ll guide the blind.
My will be done until the day
I see this kingdom has been won.

While I’m not sure it’s exactly the phrasing she’d have chosen it’s hard to have read Pamela Slim’s open letter and not hear those lyrics.

But it should also be lyrics you hear when you set out to find that life. Let’s go back to the post that inspired this and the rules for one person empires presented:

• Empires are rooted in their true strengths – The entire song is about choosing truth over false idols and tearing down what is false to build a better world, as the second verse points out:
  

  Are you ashamed, are you afraid,
  of the gods and idols you have made?
  Did you think you would be saved
  by the gods and idols you have made?

• Empresses don’t apologize. They just get prouder. – One gains true esteem (often called pride) as opposed to sinful pride by accomplishment:
  

  Until I see this kingdom is mine,
  I’ll turn the darkness into light.
  I’ll guide the blind.
  My will be done

• Emperors serve by leading. – A leader inspires his followers by a vision of their common success:
  

  I believe that we’ll conceive
  to make in hell for us a heaven.

Choosing to set out on your own is a leap of faith in many things but mostly in yourself. You are often choosing to destroy first in the grand tradition of capitalist creative destruction. The very first thing you have to destroy is the false idols of modern work: security, “a good paycheck”, “but I have benefits”, and so on. Perhaps for a brief period these were truths but they are not. They are false idols of the work world that will not save you.

In the end the true things to build a life and a career on have remained unchanged: a true assessment of your strengths, needs, and desires; a willingness to hone those strengths and a righteous pride in using them to good ends; and finally a recognition that to lead is to serve by providing a common vision for the good of all.

Perhaps you can’t build an empire on that but you can certainly build a kingdom.