If you woke up tomorrow in a perfect world, what would you do?

Sit with the answer

If it differs from what you are doing now, that is worth noticing.

You may have decided on a purpose at some point. But deciding is not the same as knowing, and someone who cannot tell which way is up will not find out in paradise either. A perfect world cannot orient a person who is oriented around himself.

Now the harder version of the same question.

If your company did not exist in that world, would the world be poorer for it?

Be honest, because there is no advantage in being anything else here. Some industries simply could not survive paradise. They exist because something is broken, and where nothing is broken there is nothing for them to do. That is not an insult. It is arithmetic.

But if there is nothing you could contribute to a perfect world, then it is worth asking, seriously, what you are contributing to this one. That is not a trivial question, and I would not raise it if I thought it was.

What work is actually for

Work came before anything went wrong.

There was a garden to tend and animals to name long before there was a single thing to repair. Creativity. Cultivation. Service. Teaching. All of it in abundance, with nothing broken and nobody in need.

So work is not the curse. Work is part of the design — and the first man had every material thing, walked with God, named the animals, knew where the good gold was, and still could not fulfil his function. Not because he lacked resources. Because he had no one to give himself to.

Then think about how strange trade is at its origin. At some point one human being turned to another — most likely his brother, his wife, his father — and said: you want some of my bread? Give me some of your gold. Someone was the first to put a price in front of a resource. And whichever of those two it was, he had stopped being willing to simply give.

We did not make the seed. We cannot make anything grow. We arrange conditions and then wait, and however much we talk about control, almost none of the arrangement is ours.

So this is not for everybody

You cannot find fulfilment until you find your function.

If your business is a salary and nothing more, this page will not interest you, and that is fine. But if it already means more than that — or if it does not yet and you want it to; if you want to do more than show up at a desk, a factory, or a farm — then keep reading.

You will not find your function until you accept that you were designed. You did not make yourself. You could not have.

When I write an application that does not do what I designed it to do, we have words for that. A bug. An error. Does not compute. So when the creation decides for itself why it was created, it is behaving like broken code — running confidently, and wrong. And I do not mean that as a metaphor. I mean it structurally.

Good does not mean impressive. It means it does what it was made to do. That is the oldest definition there is, and it is still the only one worth using — for software, for a business, or for a life.

Which means the way out is not comfort. It is responsibility — and specifically the kind you take on voluntarily, that costs you something, that nobody would blame you for refusing. That is the only sort that has ever produced anything worth having.

Who is asking

Why I am the one putting this to you.

Not because I am better at it than you are. Because we were both made to understand things and then make them better, and that happens to be what I do for a living.

I am Rethabile Mabelane. I qualified as an accountant, started keeping books for small businesses in the evenings, and began writing software the night I found myself rebuilding a client's year by hand from bank statements. Every tool Countabil has started that way: as a problem in my own books.

Countabil handles bookkeeping, management reporting, finance control, and the systems around them. Where statutory audit or assurance work is required, that sits with your registered auditor — we work alongside them, not in place of them.

So before the coffee

Could it be that your business is leading you?

Not the other way around. Could it be that you built something to serve your life, and somewhere along the way the arrangement quietly reversed — so that now you work for it, and it no longer works for you?

Could it be that it has you occupied without having you fulfilled? That you are busy, and competent, and tired, and no closer to the thing you actually set out to do than you were five years ago?

And could it be that you came here looking for better systems — cleaner books, tighter approvals, a month-end that does not cost you a weekend — when what you are actually looking for is purpose, built into the design of the business itself?

I think that is far more common than anyone admits out loud. And I do not think it is a small thing. A business that does not know what it is for will consume the person who built it, and it will do so slowly enough that he does not notice until a great deal of his life has already gone into it.

It does not have to go that way. But it will not correct itself, and no one is coming to correct it for you.