I spent several years in the Navy's nuclear power program, most of it on a ship, across three deployments.
By 2005 I had rotated to shore duty in Norfolk, on the administrative side of the program. The work there was tracking things: checklists, margins, measurements of measurements. If a number moved, someone had to account for why.
Shore duty also came with a lot of empty hours. Some mornings I'd show up at seven, wait, and be told by nine that all the jobs were taken and I could go home.
So I got a taxi driver's license.
This was years before Uber, and the tools were paper maps, a Thomas Guide, and cash.
The way it worked then, I didn't work for the cab company. I rented the car from them and paid upfront for a six or twelve hour shift. The first fares covered that cost, and everything after was mine. From the moment I pulled out of the lot, I was running a small business with my own money at risk.
Everything the nuclear program had taught me said to watch the numbers and know my margin at every moment.
Before every shift I decided the opposite.
For the next twelve hours I was not going to think about the money. I would take the calls, serve whoever got in, and charge whatever the meter said.
I can't tell you exactly why. Something about it made the other approach feel wrong, like it would poison the shift before it started.
It worked. Those nights were some of the more interesting hours of that whole period. I kept getting pulled into parts of Norfolk and Portsmouth I'd never have seen from the base. People in the back seat talked like I wasn't there (when you're the driver, you're part of the car), and I got to see what a city looks like when nobody is managing their impression of you.
At one in the morning I pulled into a gas station in Portsmouth. The attendant behind the glass looked up and said, what you doing here, white boy. I held up my taxi license. Oh. Cool.
She was asking whether I belonged there, and the license answered it.
Years later I came across Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
The nuclear program never taught me that. The cab did.
Profit is a measure, and so is happiness. Both are useful until they become the destination. Then the attention goes to the dashboard instead of the road, the work narrows, and the person in front of you becomes a transaction.
Pricing and margins still matter. You set them carefully and then let them do their work in the background. Watching them after that doesn't help.
What helps is turning full attention toward the person, organization, or cause you're there to serve. When that happens the numbers tend to follow, and so does the feeling that the work was worth doing.
There is a concept in Buddhist thought called interdependent co-arising: nothing emerges on its own, everything shows up via relationship.
Profit isn't sitting out there waiting to be captured. It emerges from service, which emerges from attention, which emerges from having decided (actually decided, not just said) what you are here to do.
I have been running a consulting firm for a long time now. The engagements where we did our best work, with the clearest outcomes and the relationships that lasted, were never the ones where I was watching the margin.
They were the ones where the problem was too interesting and the people too worth it for margin to be what I was thinking about.
That isn't charity. It is the same logic I stumbled into on those cab shifts twenty years ago, before I had a name for it.
A person doesn't find happiness by chasing it, and a business doesn't find profit by chasing it.
Both show up as byproducts of deciding what you're there to do and then paying attention to the people in front of you.
The attendant behind the glass wasn't letting me into the neighborhood. She recognized somebody working, same as her.
For those twelve hours that was all I was doing, and the people in the back seat had my full attention.