IN ANCIENT TIMES, a king had a huge boulder placed in a roadway, then he hid and watched to see if anyone would remove it.

Some of the kingdom's biggest merchants and courtiers came by and simply walked around it. Many of them loudly blamed the king for not keeping the roads clear, but none of them did anything about getting the big stone out of the way.

Then a peasant farmer came along, carrying a load of vegetables on his back. When he came to the boulder, he laid down his burden and began trying to move it to the side of the road.

After much struggling and straining, he finally succeeded.

As he was picking up his vegetables, he noticed a purse lying in the road where the boulder had been. The purse contained many gold pieces and a note from the king indicating the gold was for the person who removed the stone from the roadway.

The farmer had learned what many others have learned since: Every obstacle presents an opportunity to improve one's condition.

Half the troubles in life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.

Every hanging head needs a shoulder under it.

When we stop waking up in the morning as though each day was going to be full of adventure, joys, and dangers, and wake up instead to the alarm clock and the daily grind, and mutter about TGIF, we lose the newborn quality of belief which is so lovely in a child.

Know what you love and do what you love. If you don't do what you love, you're just wasting your time.

We've all heard the phrase the naked truth. It comes from a fable in one of the odes of Horace, about the time Truth and Falsehood went swimming together. Falsehood stole Truth's clothing, and Truth went naked rather than appear in the garments of Falsehood.

Scott Oki went to the University of Colorado to receive his undergraduate and graduate degrees: a double major in information services/computers and accounting, and an MBA. He worked for Hewlett-Packard for about five years, then left the company to start his own software company in the bay area of San Francisco.

The company failed, but with his typical upbeat attitude, Oki says the failure of that small business taught him more than anything he had previously learned.

"In the school of hard knocks," says Oki, "you learn what mistakes you'll make in small business and you will make many but you won't make them twice."

In 1982 Oki joined Microsoft, then in its infancy. Soon thereafter he wrote a business plan creating an international division of Microsoft. Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, liked it and gave Oki the responsibility of developing the new division. Explosive growth followed and over the ensuing years Oki, paralleling the success of the company, became wealthy beyond his wildest expectations. He also began to feel the need for a more balanced life, one that incorporated a sense of community.

Ironically, it was Bill Gates' mother, the late Mary Gates, a philanthropist of national renown, who inspired Oki to turn his attentions outward, sensing in Oki a remarkable ability to blend entrepreneurs and philanthropy.

"I really think it does take being inspired by someone," says Oki. "In my case it was Mary Gates. She was such a great woman." Mary Gates pointed Oki in the direction of children's hospitals, and Oki has never wavered in his focus since.

He created the Oki Foundation, now responsible for millions of dollars in help for children in need and subsequently retired at age 42 to devote full time to its operation. Now 48, Oki spends a good portion of his time running Nanny & Webster, his for-profit business that funnels 100 percent of its profits into children's charities, and several other entrepreneurial enterprises intent on incorporating a new objective into their bottom lines-taking the needs of the community into account.

"Nanny & Webster [Oki's baby-blanket business] is the perfect marriage of entrepreneurship and philanthropy," says Oki. "A local Seattle manufacturer sews the blankets, then we use a sheltered workshop in the area that uses disabled and handicapped people to do the final assembly and packaging. One hundred percent of the gross profits go to children's charities. Every step of the way we've tried to maximize the benefit of this product to the community."

Oki says he hopes his various other businesses, which donate a percentage of their profits to charities, will inspire other businesses to do the same.

Oki's advice for small businesses wanting to get involved is similar to what he has learned about running a business: "Passion is a mandatory ingredient for doing something. I don't care what the start-up is, if you're going to do something, you should really be passionate about it, because if you don't believe me, the demands of start-ups won't let you persevere. The second ingredient comes back to people. You have to hire really great people, then make sure they're indoctrinated into whatever it is your culture is, whatever your value system is. You have to make sure your people have very congruent sets of values, and that they not only talk the talk, but walk the talk as well.

"Figure out what it is you're excited about, what gets you passionate, what issues are out there that need solving," Oki says. "It might be environment, education, or religion. It might be something in the political area. There is so much diversity in the world it almost doesn't matter what you get involved in.

"But get involved."

We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.

If you plant a tree, don't keep pulling it up by the roots to see how it's growing.

Businesspeople can't win these days. If they do something wrong, they're fined; if they do something right, they're taxed.

The burdens of leadership are great. One of them is to be unpopular when necessary.