Entrepreneurship as Visionary Praxis

Note: The following content was first delivered as an asynchronous audio teaching in the first iteration of The Vision Society, recorded and delivered by Daje Aloh. Enjoy.

Sometimes, in the process of vision development, we swing too wide. We want to save the whole damn world. Or we swing too small. We build a niche so narrow we can barely breathe in it—serving one kind of person with one kind of budget solving one kind of pain point.

And both orientations leave us feeling cramped, jaded, or just vaguely off. We start reconfiguring our purpose every quarter, constantly seeking the real thing we’re meant to do because the boxes we put ourselves into or avoided aren’t working for us, if we’re honest.

In the over-contracted (small) state, we become obsessed with safety and security. And in the overstretched one (wide), we become delusional, diffused, and disconnected from the real work that wants to move through us.

But entrepreneurship—as essence liberation work, as creative process, as worldbuilding, as futurewriting—needs a middle path. It needs a rooted, liminal, listening kind of presence. The kind that knows how to court the edge. To hang out in the in-between.

Entrepreneurs are edge-walkers. We stand between worlds. We ask big questions of the Earth and the future. We listen for what wants to come through the veil.

Try this: Before you open your project management system. Before you check Slack or review the marketing plan. Ask:

What longs to be born?

Ask it like a prayer. Ask it like a ritual. Ask it like you mean it.

Call up the spirit of the work. Of the business. Of the land. Ask it what it needs. This is visionary praxis. Not as a buzzword. Not as a brand identity. But as a true and living practice.

Western culture tends to conflate the “visionary” with celebrity. Elon Musk-level disruption. Big money, big reach, big platforms. But visionary praxis is older and more nuanced than all of that. It's prophetic. It's intuitive. It's humus-level.

It comes from below, not above.

To be visionary is not just to see. It’s to feel the future in your body before it takes shape. To touch a thread of what’s coming and to walk it into the world, one act at a time.

That requires humility. And by humility, I don’t mean shrinking or playing small. I mean returning to the humus—the Earth. Becoming of the Earth. Rooting into something real enough to receive wisdom, not just push ideas.

Entrepreneurship as visionary praxis requires root systems. Context. Groundedness. You can’t vision in a vacuum. The future doesn’t come to people who have contempt for the present. It comes through those who can love the culture they’re trying to shift.

One of the best teachings I ever received was this: You cannot change a world you do not love.

You cannot change a culture you hold in contempt. If you approach the work with spite, with interference, with an agenda to fix, you are repeating the colonial imprint. Tinkering with something you haven’t taken the time to understand.

This is why we root. This is why we listen.

Visionary praxis asks: Can you fall in love with what is, so you can midwife what could be?

It’s not enough to want to build something different.

It’s not enough to name yourself anti-capitalist or “new earth” or whatever concept feels satisfying to the ego. None of that will build a living system unless it’s fed by roots. Unless it’s informed by your actual relationship to land, people, time, place.

We need the kind of praxis that slows down enough to compost contempt and metabolize nuance.

It’s why I love thinking with ecology. Mycelial networks. Desert adaptation. The weird genius of non-native plants who didn’t ask to be brought here but found a way to participate in restoration. The creosote bush doesn’t scream its vision. It just becomes the medicine.

This is what we mean at Storywork Studio when we say storyweaving, storycrafting, storybridging. We’re not just telling stories. We’re listening to the future. We’re discerning what the ecosystem is asking of us.

Visionary praxis is not black-and-white, for-or-against, good-or-bad thinking. It’s not just about planting a flag in the ground and declaring what side you’re on. It’s about holding the whole.

Everything belongs.

And we build better futures when we can metabolize all of it.

Praxis means integration. Not healing in the abstract. Not perfection. Praxis means weaving the pieces of our world into wholeness. A wholeness that holds tension, contradiction, complexity.

That’s why entrepreneurship—done with depth, rootedness, ritual—can be a vehicle for visionary praxis. A living, breathing site of change.

And that’s why I don’t care to talk about new stories unless they are rooted in relationships that matter. Unless they are cooked slowly, with time and texture and tenderness and context.

The visions I trust are the ones that emerge from people who are in it – who are making dinner with their neighbors, who are tending teenagers through grief, who are loving a place with their whole heart. Not because it’s perfect. But because it’s theirs to love.

So when we say be radical with your visionary praxis, we don’t mean be extreme. We mean: Return to the root. That’s the kind of radical I’m interested in. That’s the kind of visionary I trust.

That’s the praxis I’m devoted to.