Tony Robinson OBE is "The Happipreneur" and "The Micro Business Champion". A performer, speaker and author, he has been a business owner for 40 years, and founded The Micro Business Alliance.
"THE ‘WE’ IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE ‘I’
Your purpose is the reason you keep becoming who you’re meant to be. No one wants to be on their deathbed, wondering if they’ve had a meaningful life. Avoid this by not buying a deathbed – dangerous things!
If you’re lucky enough to get to my age, 73, I hope you’ll be able to joke about impending death, because you feel you had a good go at living a useful life, a purposeful and happy life.
The Stoics were spot on with ‘Memento Mori’.
At my age, purpose, inspiration, motivation, achievement, fun, joy, happiness, gratitude and kindness, are daily things, not tomorrow things. I don’t buy green bananas.
We’ve just finished five years of touring with our ‘Be More Happipreneur’ Show based on our book ‘The Happipreneur’ (2nd edition), which is about being happy, at least 80% of the time, in your enterprising life.
Being happy and enterprising doesn’t sound like much of a purpose, does it?
But we’ve found that Happipreneurs value doing what they love doing and are good at, they value being useful and they put family and friends first. They make a positive difference.
My Mum giggled her way through life and was never happier than when a friend or family member was poorly, so that she could help them back to health and happiness.
Uniquely your purpose
Purpose can be instinctive and can be with you all your life. It makes every day joyful and meaningful.
For example, I’ve always thought, ever since I recovered from polio at 9-years-old, that I would read, write, entertain and play many sports to the highest level I could.
In my mid-thirties, I found enterprise and I love meeting enterprising people and creating something of value out of nothing. It’s why I’ll never retire.
The good news is that we all make a difference in our lives, and it really doesn’t matter how other people view the difference we’ve made. It’s our unique life. Enjoy.
This article explains why ‘purpose’ has been so important to my happiness and fulfilment – ‘self-actualisation’ as Maslow termed it, in his theory of motivation.
Don’t do as I’ve done, your journey will be different. But my thoughts are: journey, because it demonstrates, that for some people:
1. ‘Our purpose in this life is to help others’ (Dalai Lama)
2. We can have different over-riding purposes at different stages of our life.
3. We can create the environment in which we can find our purpose, and inspiration, but we’re more likely to find it by action rather than thought.
Kanya King CBE - Inspiration leads to purpose and useful, continuous activity.
The late Kanya King CBE, Founder and CEO of the MOBO Awards and Movement was my inspiration for decades. This is what she wrote to me in mid-March, this year.
“It’s been a relentless journey championing talent that deserves to be seen, celebrated, and given the opportunities they have long been denied. I’ve always believed that when one of us rises, we should lift others with us.
To have inspired leaders like you, who have also dedicated your life’s work to supporting startups and micro-businesses, is an honour. Your relentless passion for empowering underrepresented entrepreneurs has been just as inspiring.
This journey has never been easy - pushing through barriers, proving the naysayers wrong, and staying committed to a vision bigger than ourselves. But it’s worth every challenge when we see the impact we can create.
Here’s to continuing to uplift, support, and break barriers together!”
In 1996, Kanya, nearly two decades younger than me but achieving ten times more, founded the MOBOs. A single Mum, she remortgaged her house, persuaded a TV company to broadcast the event and persuaded Lionel Ritchie to perform and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair to attend.
This was the same year that Clare, my business partner, and I founded what is the SFEDI Group today.
Our aim with SFEDI, and then, additionally the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs, the #MicroBizMatters movement and today, The Micro Business Alliance, was to improve the UK's start-up survival and growth rate by improving the quality and accessibility of enterprise support and skills.
All these organisations and movements, like the MOBOs, exist today.
Since 2001, when I received an OBE for services to small firms, at Buckingham Palace from, Prince, now King Charles, I have gratefully received many national and international awards, including four lifetime achievement awards (bet they thought I’d have retired or died by now, eh?).
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Kanya's purpose was far more important and radical than ours but included the survival and growth of music of black origin and the recognition and achievement of the industry's creatives. That’s very similar to our purpose with startups and five million micro business owners in the UK.
Recognition of the talent in our sector, peer learning and influencing leaders to support us and take willing action without consensus was essential.
We shared values too. Kanya said later, “We’ve always encouraged young people to achieve not only their musical dreams but also their entrepreneurial ones,.
We’d followed but didn't meet Kanya until ten years after we'd founded our respective organisations.
By then, we'd both used sponsored awards, events and famous entrepreneurs to do our talking for us.
We learned all the above and about diversity and inclusion from the MOBOs and Kanya's energy, innovation and leadership.
We can never match her courage and determination, but we learned from her "know-how" and "know-who".
We started from nothing.
Sharing our purpose
Our first meeting with Kanya came about because our entrepreneur friends persuaded her to attend and present an award at our event at the Magic Circle.
The great Tim Campbell MBE, of The Apprentice fame, who ten years later, wrote the introduction to 'The Happipreneur', presided at the same event, along with the fabulous Victoria Lennox who has won Canada’s highest civic honours for supporting entrepreneurship and indigenous people.
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They were all so much younger than me, but I’m still learning from them and, they have continued to support all our work at no charge.
They’ve supported us for the last 17 years because of our shared values and similar purpose – priceless.
Kanya said, "We are far more powerful than we realise."
The publicity will say that the MOBOs, which is only one of the celebratory movements Kanya founded, have been THE platform for music of black origin, including Amy Winehouse, Stormzy, and even a genre called Grime.
Still, the reality is that Kanya proved that her purpose and passion significantly reduced discrimination, promoted creativity, and restored our faith in humanity.
Kanya also said, ‘I’ve always believed in finding purpose through adversity’, and I agree.
I believe that it’s the discrimination, injustice and unfairness that strengthens purpose and continue campaigning for #PayIn30Days or less for thirty years and for the 3.8 million #ExcludedUK from income support during Covid, for the last five years.
Inspiration without action is useless. Kanya King inspired me and thousands of others to believe that we can change the world with nothing but our beliefs, passion, skills and perseverance.
Purposeful partnerships
Helping at least 8 in 10 start-ups to survive their first three years of trading (only one in 1019 survive in Silicon Valley) is what my peers see as my main purpose.
We’ll never achieve this nationally in my lifetime, but we’ll keep trying, and we do achieve this on the Yorkshire Coast, through Yorkshire in Business Limited, which I Chair.
It may not sound that exciting as ‘a purpose’, but I have others that are.
I’m an accumulator of purposes by partnership. Why?
I had an incredibly lucky break, when I was 19. My philosophy lecturer on my English and Philosophy degree, was Jonathan Sacks. He became Chief Rabbi and then as Lord Sacks, he mentored our King.
He spent a lifetime explaining why the ‘We’ is more important than the ‘I.’
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I learned at this very young age that well over 2000 years ago most Greeks would have understood that living a virtuous life was their purpose. This included helping others and not coveting material possessions. Philosophers like my favourite, Diogenes the dog, posed and answered questions on the 'how' and 'why' - they did not change the purpose.
Philosophy, occupational psychology and the great writers, such as Camus, Beckett, Dickens, Elliot, Hardy, Woolf, Melville, Orwell and Anne Bronte have laid the path for my journey.
All I’ve had to do is pick up partners and purposes along the way.
In summary, here’s how it has worked out:
Eileen and I met on this English and Philosophy degree, at 19. Eileen was an orphan, brought up by Nuns in a Nazareth House in Derry. Her religion has always given her purpose and her devotion to our family has become my purpose too.
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I wouldn’t have been able to pursue any of my ventures and causes without Eileen’s support. For example, after resigning as a CEO of an American multinational in 1986, we’ve had to downsize several times. Running your own businesses is all ups and downs and no-one succeeds alone. Eileen’s clear sense of purpose in the face of adversity, ill health and tragedy has inspired me for 54 years.
Clare Francis and I founded our business in 1986 and we’re best friends and partners to this day. Clare taught me the ‘common sense’ of running your own business, and the importance of continuing our sport and culture, despite the long hours. Clare also taught me the importance of working at ‘friendship.’
I made it my purpose to get back in touch and regularly meet with school and uni friends. These are people who keep you honest and authentic. It’s a lot of laughs too. Last week I met with a musician friend who has known me since birth, and a few weeks ago I met with 7 of my school friends. Wonderful.
In 2010, Clare and Eileen allowed me to go to Malta, on my own, for a year, to do some novel writing. I came back, refreshed, creative, fit and with renewed and new purpose.
I resigned from all the companies I’d founded that weren’t giving me joy or fulfilment and founded some movements instead.
In 2014, I started running half marathons and marathons, for Macmillan Cancer support and have raised many thousands in memory of five young friends, who died between the ages of 28 and 57. I ran the London marathon last April.
For the last 20 years I’ve worked in partnership, with my favourite entrepreneur, Jenn Crowther, CEO/Founder and Co-Owner of Yorkshire in Business Ltd, starting new ventures and building enterprising communities. We also have five buildings of workspace and two café-bars.
For the last decade, I’ve been improving my writing, in partnership with Taryn Lee Johnston. Our purpose is to write great literature which changes readers’ lives for the better.
A simple poem about one of my friends I run in memory of, who gave me purpose.
ONE SAINT JUDE
Not had much luck
Spotting Saints
Just the three
One was my philosophy lecturer
Became Chief Rabbi
Then a Lord
Barred from sainthood, obviously
Two was one of my Aunties - Dolly and Annie
Lived in a prefab in Hull
Dolly looked after Annie
Auntie Dolly’s body was bent
She was so old - about my age now
And I was seven
So, I didn’t record her miracles
Like bowling mystery off spin
For hours
To knock my forward defensive
Into shape
Which just leaves
Three, the only one that counts
Saint Jude of Willerby High Street
Where Saints are not plentiful
So, it was a right good spot
By me of this 16-year-old Saint
Willerby High Street Saints
Don’t use their halos
They use mugs of coffee
As she hands you a mug
She tells you ‘what’s what’
Sorts you out
Dry cleans you
Stands up for you
Suffers ridicule
Stifles bullies
Shows you the way
To help all the people
Everyone else
Avoids
One Saint Jude
Of
Many safe havens
