Shawn Askinosie: Generosity and Meaning as the Foundation for Our Work

The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Srinivas Rao

Society & Culture

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2018

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Too often nowadays, companies and business owners focus on scale and growth at the expense of their happiness and health and their employees’ well-being. Shawn Askinosie has seen that, and he wants to rework the groundwork of how we operate. He believes generosity gives us greater meaning, and peace should drive our business model.

In 2005, Shawn Askinosie left a successful career as a criminal defense lawyer to start a bean to bar chocolate factory and never looked back. Askinosie Chocolate is a small batch, award winning chocolate factory located in Springfield, Missouri, sourcing 100% of their beans directly from farmers. The only chocolate maker working directly with cocoa farmers on four continents, Shawn travels to regions of Ecuador, the Philippines and Tanzania to source cocoa beans for his chocolate.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In our pursuit of scale, we're losing our sense of humanity because of what you read that I wrote.
0:09.0	And it's hard to find yourself when you're distanced from others.
0:14.6	And what we end up doing as entrepreneurs,
0:18.1	as founders, as CEOs, really in any job,
0:22.2	why this would apply, and that is we grow we scale the top line
0:27.0	growth is big that profits are big and what we find we would turn around and
0:32.3	one day we realize that we have lost the thing that
0:36.2	brought us to this place to begin with.
0:38.8	We have become untethered to our vocation because we become busy managing and writing checks and delegating and
0:46.6	pretty soon we've lost to the human scale of our business that drew us to it in the first
0:52.1	place whatever it may be practicing law writing our business that drew us to it in the first place,
0:52.6	whatever it may be, practicing law, writing,
0:55.0	making chocolate, it doesn't matter.
0:56.8	It's all, it's all, the application is the same for all of those.
1:01.2	And so what I'm suggesting is that people take a step back, take a deep breath, and say, wait, what, I see the attraction here, but do I need to do this? And if I do this
1:15.0	this and if I do this how can I have a daily practice of reverse scale? That is how can I turn this pyramid upside down and say does this idea this good idea
1:20.0	can I say that this has value if it only impacts one person or what if it just impacts me? Is it still worthy? Can I ascribe the value to that and in the process am I practicing? that is it
1:33.4	practicing reverse scale that is my practicing
1:37.7	holding on to this line this tether to the thing that brought me here to begin with and is it worth sacrificing
1:46.4	some growth and scale in order to keep it. And I say yes.
1:54.0	I'm Sreni Rao and this is the unmistakable creative
2:00.5	podcast where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most
	...

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