The Harder Path Is the Only Path That Leads Somewhere New

I had a moment during my conversation with Erin Axelrod that I haven't been able to shake.

We were talking about retirement savings. $44 trillion, sitting in funds managed by Fidelity, State Street, and Vanguard, invested in extractive mining and surveillance tech and carceral systems. And I asked her the obvious question: How do you think redirecting that kind of money is even possible?

She didn't flinch. She said, "I don't do things because I think they're possible. I do things because I think they're necessary."

I wanted to set off confetti.

Because here's what I've noticed in over a decade of working with mission-driven business owners: the biggest barrier isn't information. It's not access. It's not even capital, though capital is real and hard and gatekept. The biggest barrier is the quiet voice that says, "That's too big. That's not realistic. That's not how things work."

And I get it. I hear that voice too. When I talk to founders about using their business as a tool for systemic change, I sometimes get blank stares. "Is that possible?" they ask. "How does that actually work? I've never seen this before."

That's when I realized something that changed how I approach this work: people can't dream of something they've never been shown. We're not suffering from a lack of ambition. We're suffering from a crisis of imagination, as Noni Session, the Executive Director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, puts it.

Erin is an antidote to that crisis. Not because she's an optimist. Because she's a practitioner.

She told me about her work with Winona LaDuke, building a vision for an Indigenous-owned, cooperatively stewarded hemp textile network in northern Minnesota. The land was degraded by toxic potato farming for McDonald's. The vision is to regenerate the soil, grow hemp, blend it with locally raised wool, and produce high-performance textiles, with Indigenous communities owning every stage from farm to finished garment.

That vision might take a decade. And they already have a proof point: a tool bag produced through Patagonia's supply chain, made with Winona's hemp, that sold out completely.

Here's what I keep coming back to: the default path is always easier. It's easier to put your retirement in the default fund and not think about where that money goes. It's easier to pitch your idea to any investor who will listen instead of qualifying your capital. It's easier to build a business that serves manufactured needs because that's what the market rewards.

The harder path requires immense fortitude and persistence and dedication. And that's exactly why you need community. You can't do it alone, and you shouldn't have to.

That's why LIFT Economy built communities of practice around every piece of their work: the Next Egg community for retirement redirecting, the Next Economy MBA for regenerative business design, the Next Economy Living community for personal life alignment. Because the systems are designed to make the values-aligned choice the hard choice. And community is what makes the hard choice survivable.

I think about this every time a founder tells me they're waiting until their business is big enough to start making an impact. Erin's response would be: it's actually easier when you're small. Big ships are hard to turn.

So here's my challenge to you: this week, look at one financial decision in your business, whether it's where your retirement funds sit, who you bank with, or which vendor you chose because they were cheapest, and ask yourself, is this aligned with what I say I believe?

If the answer is no, you don't have to fix it all at once. But you do have to start.

The harder path is the only one that leads somewhere new.