Conscious Startups Entrepreneurship for people with a soul
The lazy man’s guide to enlightenment
Just came across The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment (PDF) yesterday.
The first paragraph itself is outstanding:
I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue. That’s about the worst heresy I could propose, but I have to be honest before I can be reverent. I am doing the work of writing this book to save myself the trouble of talking about it.
But I also found this nugget which I had to share:
A willing awareness will take us to heaven, a loving attitude will make us free. Nothing else controls our fate. Good or bad behavior is secondary. Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it. Whatever you are thinking, love yourself for thinking it. Love is the only dimension that needs to be changed. If you are not sure how it feels to be loving, love yourself for not being sure of how it feels.
I seem to be learning a lot about love these days. Love as being able to accept and contain everything, including the unlovable, including the things we don’t want, including our inability to love and accept ourselves and whatever else we might have trouble loving and accepting.
Can you love yourself not loving yourself?
Can you love not knowing how to love?
Can you love the fact that you hate yourself?
Can you love the system, the government, the institutions, the man, the rich, the poor, the republicans, the democrats, the homosexuals, the thieves, the bad guys on Wall Street, the long line at the bathroom, and whatever you have trouble loving and accepting?
Can you love yourself for not being able to love these things?
It’s really all about just letting go of any resistance to what you’re experiencing, of being willing to accept everything just as it is, right now. That doesn’t mean you condone it. It doesn’t mean it’ll have to stay that way. It just means that in this moment, you let go of any and all resistance to what is, and become willing to experience love, even if you don’t know how.
A little too loudly
Jony Ive:
“And there have been times when we’ve been working on a program and when we are at a very mature stage and we do have solutions and you have that sinking feeling because you’re trying to articulate the values to yourself and to others just a little bit too loudly. And you have that sinking feeling that the fact that you are having to articulate the value and persuade other people is probably indicative of the fact that actually it’s not good enough. On a number of occasions we’ve actually all been honest with ourselves and said ‘you know, this isn’t good enough, we need to stop’. And that’s very difficult.”
I think that’s such an accurate description: Trying to articulate a little too loud.
You know it in your heart when you do it, but the fear of not being able to find a good solution, the fatigue from having worked and worked and worked at this, the desire to be done with it, to make a decision and get it out there - all of these things make us ignore the voice inside that knows it’s just not good enough.
It’s such a courageous thing to stay with it and keep yourself open till you have it right.
Businesses and the rich don’t create jobs
Nick Hanauer in his controversial TED talk:
I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.
That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a “circle of life” like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.
…
The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the median American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff.
The genius of Henry Ford was not only the invention of the assembly line, but also paying his employees decent wages, so they could afford to go out and buy one of his cars, thus building demand and making him richer in the process.
There’s work and there’s your life’s work
From The Next Web comes this beautiful note that new employees at Apple meet when they show up for work:
There’s work and there’s your life’s work.
The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.
They want their work to add up to something.
Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.
Creating a workplace where that is the reality is worthwhile indeed. And not easy. It takes special leadership.
Awesome mission from SEOmoz
Love the mission page on SEOmoz:
Generous
Gut check:
Am I being as helpful as I can? Am I giving back to the community?
Really nice way to present them, too, with gut checks for each one.
Forrester CEO on Davos
Here’s a few highlights from Forrester CEO George Coloney’s Davos round-up:
6) Desmond Tutu is one of the great men of the world. My favorite quote: ” If we are hollow morally, our world will collapse.” Some other quotes which you may, or may not agree with: “We are all made for goodness, even bankers.” ”If our world exacerbates our differences, then it will be an unstable world.” ”We need a revolution run by women.” ”The young are important because they dream.”
I love me some Desmond as well. Didn’t actually know about him (sorry, Desmond!) until Gopi at Google talked about him, but now I see him everywhere!
13) Adam Lashinsky’s new book on how Apple operates, Inside Apple, contains a sobering idea for all of the over-educated Davos elite: Apple follows none of the long-taught lessons of the world’s business schools.
Great stuff :)
Why do we want to start a business?
If we’re going to do anything, let alone start a business, something that’s so demanding and difficult, almost as hard as being in a relationship or having kids, we might want to start by asking ourselves: Why?
Why do we want to go through all that pain and agony? Why put in all that effort, why suffer through those long hours, sleepless nights, and countless hours of worry and struggle?
Okay, so I guess it doesn’t have to be quite that bad, but then again, it often seems to be.
So why?
There’s only ever two reasons we do things: Fear or love.
Is it because we fear that we’re not enough unless we’re successful? Rich? Famous? Rockstardom? Is it because we fear our own death or lack of worth so much that we need a lot of money to prop it up?
I remember reading in Ted Turner’s biography about his dad. His dad had set himself what he thought was a really high goal in life. But it wasn’t high enough. Why? Because he achieved it. And then he went ahead and killed himself.
It happens more than you’d think. There was an article in Inc. a while back about the exact same thing. The young rising star rising fast, making it - and then killing himself.
I got an email a while back from a guy, let’s call him Janneck, who was in his mid-20s and close to having his successful startup acquired by a big company for a lot of money. Woohoo! Success! But Janneck wrote me, because he felt completely dead and empty inside. Here’s the big prize he’d been chasing all of his life, and now that it was within reach, it was clear to him it was nothing. It was a mirage.
He thought it was going to give him the feeling he was after. But really, it’s just there to take your eyes away from the prize we’re really after.
What is that prize?
It’s love.
Pure and simple.
What we all want is love. Not love from other people. Not even love from ourselves.
We want to be love.
Now this is coming from a man who has probably the closedest heart of anyone you can think of. I’ve had to discover this the hard way - like we all do.
What we’re really seeking is to be that love that we are.
And when you are that love, you don’t actually need anything else.
And that means you can focus on creating and giving and sharing what you feel compelled to create and give and share.
And then people might want to start giving you money, either for that, or for something else that you do.
But it all starts from a place of love and security and generosity.
Look at the way DHH created Rails.
He created it out of love. Pure love. Love for himself, love for developers, love of programming, love of creating things out of thin air, love of beauty, and just plain old love.
And then he gave it away, freely. Not even with the GPL of “everything else must be free”, which is just another form of chains.
He gave it away under the MIT license, which basically allows others to do with it as they please.
If you’re creating your startup from lack - lack of worth or lack of security, for example - then you’re not going to get what you’re seeking.
Find that worth and that security inside of yourself first.
Then we can talk business.
The man who quit money
Money is not real. It’s something we invented. It’s juts paper, pieces of metal, and numbers in a computer, that we have endowed with power and meaning.
Richard Feynman: Doubt
Richard Feynman in “The pleasure of finding things out”:
I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask “why are we here?”, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little, but if I can’t figure it out, I go on to something else.
But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
How and why I changed my name
On Friday, I got a letter from the authorities in Denmark that my name is no longer Lars Holger Pind, it is now Calvin Jeremia Conaway.
That naturally begs the question: Why did you change your name? And how did you come up with that particular name?
Here’s the story.
I’ve never been really happy with my old name. “Lars Pind” has a certain graphic quality to it that I like, a punch, but it also just feels quite “not me”. Add in my middle name and it becomes a joke.
When last year I got divorced and moved to the US, that was a welcome opportunity to revisit the issue. Besides, try being named “Lars Pind” in the US.
At Starbucks when I order a green tea soy frappucino, they usually write “Larce” on the side of the cup. When I subscribe to a magazine by writing my name on a form by hand, they almost always change my last name to “Pino”, because they’re convinced the d in “Pind” must be a typo - how would you even begin to pronounce “Pind” in English? Like “Pint”? Or “Pinn”?
Anyway …
So I wanted to change my name, and so naturally I consulted with a numerologist, my friend Ruben.
I’m not sure I “believe” in numerology, but I’ve experienced enough by now to just trust in things I don’t “believe” in. If my aunt Tonna believed in it way back then, and people I trust believe in it, then there’s probably enough to it that it’s worth it to just trust life and go with it. Almost everything I now believe or know to be true is stuff that was right there all along, I was just very very busy resisting and pushing it away because of spiritual betrayal.
So Ruben did the math, and he was like “Holy shit, this is bad!” Apparently, there’s some number that is really crap, that he said corresponds to the Tower in Tarot. Don’t know much about this, but he says it’s really bad, and I had like four of five of them in my numeroscope. Bad shit.
So he came up with some new numbers for me - 19, 19 and 24, respectively - that my names needed to match.
That was in February of last year. We spent about an hour together in my friend Yon’s apartment in New York, when he showed me the old numbers and the new numbers, and explained to me how horrific the old name was and how great the new one was going to be. And it sounded awesome. Then he got to the part about actually changing my name, and I was terrified.
“Wait, you’re not saying I need to actually change my name, are you?”
“Yes I am, that was kinda the point.”
Crickets.
“But what are all my friends going to think? What about all the people who know me by my old name? What about my parents? What about my children?”
And then it took me over a year before I finally changed my name.
First I had to come up with a new name I wanted. That took me 3 months. Then I had an immigration lawyer that said “let’s not change your name until you have your visa”. That was a convenient excuse. Of course, I still don’t have the visa, but, hey.
It wasn’t until earlier this year that I had finally had enough and just filed the papers.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. How did I come up with the new name?
Armed with the numbers, I did what any respectable person would do: I downloaded lists of male first names and last names in the US, and wrote some Ruby code that’d run through the list and extract all the names that matched my numbers. I also wrote some HTML and Javascript that would let me type in names and give me the corresponding value to help me test out various funky spellings of things.
About the funky spelling thing. It’s common practice when you’ve consulted with a numerologist, to try to keep your old name, so I’d become “Larrss” or “Larrce” or “Lahrse” or some other funky variation that would allow people to pronounce it the same but it would have the right value. That didn’t feel right to me. If I’m changing my name, I might as well go all the way. That’s the kind of guy I am. An all the way kinda guy.
It’s also common to pick very descriptive, spiritual-sounding names - “Abundiencia” or “Loveiam” or whatnot. That didn’t feel right for me, either.
I wanted a name that was a relatively “normal” name, but distinct, and something that felt me.
So I looked over the lists of common first names that matched my number, and I liked the sound of a few of them. Calvin was one, obviously. I also like Jannek, Paco, and Pascal (my first real programming language). I briefly considered “Villars” as a way of keeping my old familiar Lars, but like I said, I never liked it, and didn’t see any good reason to keep it.
With a choice of Calvin as my first name, it was time to search for a last name.
I liked the sound of Calvin Coolidge. He was the 30th POTUS (President of the United States), and author of one of my favorite quotes:
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
I didn’t want to take his name, obviously, but I liked the sound of it, so I started to look for last names that started with the letters “co”, and liked the sound of Conaway. Calvin Conaway. It had a certain ring to it. I felt like it sounded and felt big enough to match my energy.
With Calvin Conaway in place, it was time to find a middle name. The number was 19, or 10, or 1, with 19 being the best. I started by which initial letter I wanted, and settled on “Calvin J. Conaway”. It had a certain rhythm to it.
Then I remembered my friend and former colleague, Joel S Aufrecht. His middle name is the letter S. It’s not short for anything. I thought, “that’s what I want to be named, Calvin J Conaway”.
Alas, that’s not legal in Denmark. Also, Ruben said 19 was better than 1. So I searched for a name with a “J” that would add up to 19 and settled on “Jarrett”.
And then, as I said, I just sat on it for about a year, until finally, this March, we’d had enough. Meanwhile, my wife Cecillia had also consulted with Ruben and had her numbers. She’d changed her name before, but it was time for another change. Luckily, we could share our last name.
So we filed the papers, only to have them handed back to us. We got married last summer in San Francisco, and never told the Danish authorities about it, so we had to do that first. Then we had to file on paper, not electronically, for some reason. Then … blah blah … bureaucracy … blah blah … and finally I got a letter back saying my chosen middle name had been rejected, because it’s not an approved first name in Denmark, and because 6 people in Denmark have it as their last name, which means I would have to have the approval of each and every one of them. Too fucking complicated.
Back to the drawing board, and I settled on Jeremia. It starts with a J, has a nice sound to it, and it’s got an interesting spiritual angel. Jeremia is a prophet to both Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and Jeremia was called “the weeping prophet”, which sounds an awful lot like me. Also, he “spiritualized and individualized religion and insisted upon the primacy of the individual’s relationship with God” according to Wikipedia, and that also sounds like me. And it’s a pre-approved first name in Denmark, so it should sail right through.
We sent in the papers a second time so they had them last Monday, paid another fee, had them rushed to the person on our case, and rushed through the system. Thursday I called and checked, and she said she was right in the middle of updating the central registries. Friday we got the letter in the mail, and I got this wonderful email from my mom (who receives my mail because I’m basically a nomad without a permanent home anywhere):
Dear Lars,
I congratulate you on your name change and bless your new name.
Sincerely,
Mom
To which I obviously replied
Thank you so much, Mom!
“Dear Lars”?
:)
And it just so happened that that same day I had invited 100 people to attend a “friday bar” event in Copenhagen, so what was more natural than to turn that into a celebration of my new name.
Thank you to everyone who was there to celebrate with me!
-Calvin
Critical thinking, followed by action.
The Dalai Lama, quoted in I Am, the movie:
Question for the Dalai Lama: “What’s the most important meditation we can do now?”
Answer: “Critical thinking, followed by action. Discern what your world is. Know the plot, the scenario of this human drama. And then figure out where your talents might fit in to make a better world.”
Sobriety in the white house
Timothy Egan for the New York Times:
Sobriety, laudable in many respects, does imply rigidity of thought. The best presidents were open-minded, and generally open to a drink. The nondrinkers, at least over the last century or so, were terrible presidents.
Too much alcohol, or alcohol for the wrong reasons is definitely not a good idea. Rigidity of thought is probably worse.
Reminds me of the scene in Peaceful Warrior where Socrates (Nick Nolte) suddenly smokes a cigarette, to the astonishment of Dan Millman. The dialogue goes something like this: “But isn’t smoking bad?” “Only addiction is bad. Choose what you want moment to moment. Only when you stop being in control is there a problem”. Or something to the effect.
Dave Winer: What is the truth?
When people ask why you feel blue, if you pile up enough of these experiences you realize there is no reason. It’s not about reason. Feelings come from somewhere else.
So then the big question — what does it all mean? Why are we here. What’s after death. And fear of all that. It’s always waiting for you when your mind pauses. So you try not to pause! But eventually you do have to stop.
I suspect our ancestors weren’t as afraid of death as we are, though. I think it’s related to our not being willing to feel our feelings. We have to rationalize them or drug them away with overwork, alcohol, romance, etc.
All fear is ultimately fear of death, and we live in a society that’s obsessed with fear, in large part thanks to the media who profit from making us fearful, and from the level of stress, lack of sleep, poor nutrition, lack of fresh air, exercise, time in nature, and all of the other things that combat fear.
It’s like there are two radio stations you can tune into: Channel fear or channel love. But when we’re running on empty, like we are, channel love is simply drowned out.
I’m pretty sure our ancestors did a much better job staying in touch with nature, including their own.
Creating waves
Jonathan Mead on Illuminated Mind:
Don’t try to be the next Steve Jobs or the next Maynard Keenan. Be the next you. Explore the uncharted stretches of your own path — the one that’s waiting to be released inside you. The one that’s dark, expansive and blissfully terrifying (yes, bliss and fear can actually coexist).
Monsanto responsible for the bee deaths
Alex Bogusky on the Fearless Revolution blog:
If we were talking about some subspecies of toad that lives in one cave system in Arizona it would matter. But it probably wouldn’t impact the lives of the average person. With bees it’s a different story. They are the great pollinators of this planet. They don’t do it all but they do enough that it might be impossible for other species to pick up the slack. That means we would need to manually pollinate what we wanted to grow.
I’m sure Monsanto has already come up with a way to make money off of that too.
This is pure insanity. The fact that power has gotten so concentrated and so corrupted is scary.
