I am going to be traveling a lot in the next 6 weeks – to the Integral Theory Conference in Oakland, then a week with Mike Jay in Las Vegas (see below), and then Burning Man – and reporting on all these events – so I am leading off with a long piece on entrepreneurship, happiness and success, followed by an offer / invitation.  You can skip the narcissistic ramblings and head directly to the invitation below, if you want, which is a pretty good one. 

The ups and the downs of being an entrepreneur

I got a mixed response to the Entrepreneur test piece, with people asking me “is this really you”?  Well, in many respects, sadly, it has been.  I am actually not a natural entrepreneur, yet I have spent a large chunk of my life  looking for some way to support myself that would also feed my happiness and allow me to do the things that have been most important and vital to me (my adventures in relationship and community and “experiments in consciousness”).  I became an entrepreneur by default – I couldn’t think of any other career that would give me the freedom that I needed.  When I met Rebekah, after a lifetime of seeking in both the relational and business arenas, I became happy for perhaps the first time in my life, because I had found a path to sustained sexual intimacy with a person of the female persuasion (don’t laugh – it’s actually not an easy thing). 

With this triumph, and flush with excitement, I then created or participated in 4 different businesses over the next 6 years – all of which failed, and two of them spectacularly so (the first web business and Trellis).  My current business, WordPress Academy, is the first one that is successful.  Maybe because it’s more related to an area of desire (or intrinsic motivation), for me: WordPress Academy is a type of conversation for transformation, which is the thing for which I live. 

And yet I continue to struggle with this – either sacrificing happiness in the pursuit of success, or, as of lately, sacrificing success in the pursuit of happiness.  This, I have come to learn, is very common.

On this topic, I just recently re-read Gurdjieff’s Meetings with remarkable men, that relates extraordinary events in Gurdjieff’s life that happened 100 years ago but which are extremely relevant to my condition.  For the first half of his life, Gurdjieff conducted extensive travels and meetings throughout Asia with a group he called the “seekers of truth”.  He was also a very astute businessman and trader, and he supported himself throughout this period by a series of business ventures and schemes which included (in a moment of desperation) snaring live sparrows, clipping them and painting them, and selling them in the market as “American canaries”.  Laying aside the ethics of some of these activities, the story was extremely inspirational to me, first because it legitimized my own struggle to support myself financially as a “seeker of truth”, but also because it reminded me that it is possible to be a spiritual person and smart and resourceful too.  In other words, that the pursuit of enlightenment and the pursuit of business are not inherently contradictory.  Another great guru and teacher of mine, Swami Rudrananda, ran a very a successful art import business his whole life, and firmly believed that a spiritual teacher ought to have an independent means of support.  He would sit in his Manhattan storefront and teach his students in between visits from customers. 

Enter Mike Jay and Flawless Living Design System (FLDS)

The basic idea of FLDS is that happiness is natural – happiness comes from following our desires and intrinsic motivation, where we can exist in a state of flow while creating those things that we value – whereas success, for most people, is not.  I define “success” as the ability to provide what we need in life while following the path of our happiness.  Unlike happiness, success comes from executing the success requirements of our business or profession, which may or may not be inborn, and which may or may not be part of our intrinsic motivation.  This is why it’s so hard and why so many of us are under great tension around this.  The situation is actually made worse by all the self-help gurus (Tony Robbins, Steven Covey, etc.) because they teach systems that work well if you work them, but that only 1% to 5% of us will actually apply – thus funding a billion dollar training industry that does nothing, and leaving many of us struggling our whole lives trying to mold and adapt ourselves to some standard that just doesn’t fit with who we are, and then wonder what is wrong with us.

The fascinating thing (to me anyway) is that I have been discovering many of the ideas of FLDS on my own, through my own life and research; but Mike Jay has actually made an entire developmental system out of this, that he calls a “memetic operating system” (or values-based program), that is backed by a ton of psychological research and theory, along with his work with thousands of coaching clients over the last 20 years; and what’s more that there is a business community being created around this, a movement really, of people committed to exploring their happiness while expanding success – of people committed to living more inter-dependently and with greater passion and contribution.  Because the solution, of course, to our inability to do the things that are required for success, is first to accept our limitations, and then to ally with other people who can do those things naturally that we cannot. 

I invite you to come experience FLDS with me in Las Vegas on August 20-23

I invite you to experience the first (beta) Flawless Living seminar in Las Vegas from Friday August 20 at 6pm, to Monday August 23 at noon.  The first FLDS seminar – and probably all of them – is going to be free, except for an administrative fee for various assessments (that are key to the discovery process that happens during the seminar).  During the first two days, we will each create a blueprint for success, unique to us, using Mike’s inquiry methods.  On the third day, there will be an offer to buy-in to the business network, at guaranteed rates of return or money-back – it’s truly an unusual and extraordinary offer.

If you can’t come to Vegas in August, there is another in Philadelphia in late November.

Much love,

Marc

PS: here is the brochure I designed for this event – first-draft, but not bad IMHO, especially considering it’s my first brochure, what do you think?

1. I am willing to lose everything.
2. I embrace failure.
3. I am always willing to do tedious work.
4. I can handle watching my dreams fall apart.
5. Even if I am puking my guts out with the flu and my mother passed away last week, there is nothing that will keep me from being ready to work.
6. My relationship/marriage is so strong, nothing work related could ever damage it.
7. My family doesn’t need an income.
8. This is a connected world and I don’t need alone time. I want to be reachable 24/7 by my employees, customers, and business partners.
9. I like instability and I live for uncertainty.
10. I don’t need a vacation for years at a time.
11. I accept that not everyone likes my ideas and that it’s quite likely that many of my ideas are garbage.
12. If I go into business with friends or family, I am OK with losing that relationship forever if things end badly.
13. I don’t have existing anxiety issues and I handle stress with ease.
14. I am willing to fire or layoff anyone no matter what how good of a friend they are, if they are my own sibling, if they just had a baby, if they have worked with me for 20 years, if their spouse also just lost their job, if I know they might end up homeless, if they have cancer but no outside medical insurance, or any other horrible scenario millions of bosses and HR people have faced countless times.
15. I am OK with being socially cut-off and walking away from my friends when work beckons.
16. I love naysayers and I won’t explode or give-up when a family member, friend, customer, business associate, partner, or anyone for that matter tells me my idea, product, or service is a terrible idea, a waste of time, will never work, or that I must be a moron.
17. I accept the fact that I can do everything right, can work 70 hours a week for years, can hire all the right people, can arrange amazing business deals, and still lose everything in a flash because of something out of my control.
18. I accept that I may hire people that are much better at my job than I am and I will get out of their way.
19. I realize and accept that I am wrong ten times more than I am right.
20. I am willing to walk away if it doesn’t work out.

Courtesy of Seth Kravitz.

I am in part reluctant to write today, as I have so much to share, as my life has taken a definite turning point, a crystallization and falling-into-place and making-whole of all the experiences, triumphs and tragedies, joys and sorrows of my 3 years with Trellis, 6 years with Rebekah, and indeed the entire stream of my life to this day.  I am half-reluctant to share because although there are some very exciting external events, which I will share momentarily, and upcoming adventures (I live for adventures), the essence of this transformation is still internal and in-process, and may therefore be difficult to convey in writing.

I am encouraged to write by a beautiful book I am reading, My years with the Qutb by Sharon Marcus, about her time with the great Sufi saint Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who spent the last 16 years of his life in Philadelphia (!).  I must be a natural Sufi because every time I read anything on Sufism (previously Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s fascinating lectures Love is a fire and I am wood) something inside me responds with a powerful “Yes”; and Sharon Marcus’s book is no exception, I start to cry on every second page (tears of recognition and tears of relief).  Sufism is about the primacy of love, and the burning away of everything that is not-love, and the everyday ecstasy that can be had from the intimate meeting with God and all of God’s creatures, including oneself and one’s fellows.  This is the experience that was at the core of the design of Trellis (and the design of Morehouse as well, that is Trellis’s spiritual parent), it is the same as Jerry Jud’s Love is an intention and “more than anything else, we seek to love and be loved”, it is what happens most weekends (predictably) at Shalom Mountain Retreat Center. It is an experience that has always been with me and called me, that has expressed itself most potently for me in intimate relationships of all kinds, and sexual/romantic attractions; and it’s an experience that is growing deeper and stronger with me every year.

Aside from this brief (rambling?) digression, I do have some news.  I have found my dream job, which is social media director and affiliate manager for a new program called Flawless Living, that is being developed by visionary coach, entrepreneur and internet marketer Mike Jay, which I wrote about in my previous article.  Flawless Living cannot be described in a paragraph, as it’s the result of Mike’s 20 years of research into business coaching, Western psychology and human development (with a smattering of the world’s wisdom literature thrown in), but I can say that it’s a seminar series, a school of consciousness, a community/movement, an integrally-inspired business network, and a training program in internet marketing and business development all at once.  The program is still in development but there is a beta launch in Las Vegas in August and an official launch in Philadelphia in November.  What it’s about for me is the unification of the two fundamental strands, or major impulses of my life, which are the drive for happiness and the drive for “success” (recognition and contribution).  These two major impulses, which I also describe as the masculine and feminine polarities of life, have been at war with each other for 40-odd years. What is so meaningful to me about this assignment, and so magical, is that it’s a recognition and validation of what I have been doing already for a couple of decades, for free—networking for transformation—and so this recognition has been profoundly calming and settling for me.  The fundamental idea of Flawless Living is similar to—but much more complex and layered—than “do what you love and the money will follow”, because many of us have tried doing what we love and the money has not followed, and this is at it should, because the idea is good but a bit naive, and Mike has helped me to understand why. 

Flawless Living is for now just a very part-time job for me, which is just as well, because of my next major piece of news: I am selling an interest in WordPress Academy, for a little cash and some help, to facilitate a big product development effort that will culminate in November with a product I am creating, which is a book/DVD on WordPress web design and internet marketing for small business.  This is my major project for the next 4-5 months, that is going to force me into a kind of focus and self-discipline that I resist and yet I know I need in order to become the person that I want to be (i.e., happy and successful ;).  The reason I am seeking partners is that I have realized that I don’t want to do this alone, I am not motivated, it’s a fundamental part of my design that I can’t bring myself to do something unless it’s fun, and it’s a fundamental principle of Flawless Living that just because we can do something (like, exercise or meditate every morning) it doesn’t mean that we will, and therefore we need to find workarounds (such as, in my case, finding a partner, even at the cost of giving up some equity). 

Because of all this, I have a very ambitious travel schedule over the next 4 months: in addition to a week-long retreat that Rebekah and I are doing at Shalom Mountain called Sexuality and Spirituality, I have four trips out West scheduled: I am attending the Integral Theory in Action Conference in Pleasant Hill CA (near Oakland) end of July, the Flawless Living immersion in Vegas mid-August, I am going to Burning Man 2010 with a group from Shalom Mountain that I put together, and then back to Vegas again in October for Blogworld where I will be promoting WordPress Academy.  I haven’t travelled much for the last 6 years, so this also is a big change.  The Flawless Living launch is in Philadelphia, thank God—I love traveling for the excitement and all, but I also find it physically challenging. 

So stay tuned for more interesting reports over the course of the summer and fall, hopefully less rambling (although I don’t promise anything ;)

Much love,

Marc

PS: If you like this, please comment

Rebekah and the kids are away for most of the weekend, and so I am enjoying “that blissful solitude, that was so painful in my youth” [Einstein].  Truthfully, the events of the last 6 weeks (starting with the book I am writing and on to extremely exciting events at WordPress Academy, that I haven’t shared yet) have been so intoxicating that I had resolved to spend the entire weekend in bed reading paperback novels and listening to inspirational audios.  But I need to share with y’all what happened yesterday.

Mike Jay is a business coach and developmentalist that I have been connected with loosely for a number of years.  I had actually started his coach training program 5-6 years ago, before deciding that being a business coach probably wasn’t for me.  He’s been pretty quiet for the last few years but has recently surfaced with a coaching / business development program that is so compelling I joined right away.  I will be doing this program over the course of the summer, culminating in an intensive in Las Vegas in late August.  It turns that he has been traveling a lot for the last few years, coaching billionaires and major third-world banks.  I think he is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, and his ideas on development are both very practical and timely.  The intro call for this program occurred yesterday, and it blew my mind.  I will post the audio to this call when I get permission, but let me summarize some of the key ideas here, and their impact on me.

The relationship between happiness and success, and effective tools to achieve these two goals,  has been the dominant inquiry of my life.  It has always seemed to me that a person could be one or the other – entirely dedicated to work and achievement at the cost of one’s personal life and relationships, or else living a life dedicated to pleasure, connection and authenticity, but at the cost of success and/or financial stability.  I have had very happy times in my life, and quite successful times in my life, but they rarely coincided.  In one way or the other, I have been obsessed with this theme my whole life, which I see as being connected to the “right-relationship” of masculine and feminine forces within oneself [Shirley Luthman, Waking Down in Mutuality], and in the outside world as “sexual polarity” [Lafayette Morehouse, David Deida].  For the last 6 years I have been engaged in a deep exploration of  these teachings, all of which have a lot to say about happiness, and perhaps even about “awakening” – surely, “awakening” needs to include some deep acceptance of self and unconditional enjoyment of life, and so the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of awakening need be very closely related.  But I have not yet found a philosophy or developmental school in which there is a practical analysis and action plan for simultaneously achieving these two goals, happiness and success. 

Mike Jay’s fundamental idea – and this of course is just the tip of the iceberg – is that happiness comes from being oneself, whereas success comes from meeting the success criteria of one’s chosen profession, that will vary (an athlete has different success criteria from an executive).  And the problem is this: that success comes from predictably (repeatedly) doing the work that will cause one to meet the success criteria for one’s profession;  however, unless one has enjoyment (happiness) in these activities, it’s virtually impossible to do anything with any kind of consistency.  The majority of people struggle their whole lives trying to improve their character or motivation in order to do the things that they know are necessary for their success, and they fail miserably, simply because human nature and our individuality (skills, likes and dislikes) cannot be easily changed, if at all.  Mike Jay talks about a trillion dollar industry built around training people to do this (change their motivation), which, of course, doesn’t work.  The real solution is to:

1. Understand oneself sufficiently to know one’s limitations, and not even attempt the things that one is not suited for.  It’s much better to not even begin than to spend one’s lifetime in a battle with oneself, in which the speed and efficacy of one’s entire system gets degraded.  This of course is no different than the prime Socratic directive to “know yourself”, brought into the 21st century and expanded to account for all the layers of complexity that must be handled within our modern lives.  (I am reminded here of something I heard the Dalai Lama say: “If you are not going to meditate, don’t even pretend to be a spiritual person.  You will have so much more freedom”). 
2. The way to meet the success criteria for which one is not suited, is to partner with someone else.  This however is not an easy thing because in addition to “knowing oneself” it requires the ability to ask for what one needs, and distinguish in the answer whether it’s a good fit.   According to Mike Jay, introverts have a particular difficulty with this, both because going outside themselves is difficult, and because they don’t know how to ask the question (present clearly and enrollingly) and distinguish the answer.  But it’s hard for everyone – this of course is the fine art of leadership, or management.  

So there you have it – in a nutshell – the cause of the overwhelm that I have been experiencing lately.  I am an introvert which compounds the problem.

It’s difficult for me to fully convey the importance of this insight for me – along with the fact that I seem to have found at least the beginnings of an answer to the problem that has been tormenting me my entire life.  I have studied Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen (other major integral philosophers / developmentalists), and I am becoming increasingly connected to the “integral evolutionary” community which I see now as my “spiritual home” – but I haven’t yet found anything actionable in these teachings – anything that helps to either alleviate human suffering, inject more love in the world, or put money in my pocket and in the pockets of my clients / business associates.  Even before Mike Jay, I had already started to partner with people more in my business, and will also be getting into social media in a big way in the coming months, but it’s really wonderful to be a part of a coaching and inquiry group around these important issues.  It feels wonderful not to be alone any more, and I am ecstatic. 

Much love,

Marc

Last weekend Rebekah and I spent a day with sensuality educators Monica Day and Sam Gedal, exploring desire, connection, attachment, fear (you know – all the things that matter) and, yes… orgasm.  The experience was unexpectedly profound for me, and has caused a ripple through my life which is both subtle and undeniable.  One of the fundamental premises of the work is that of orgasm as a metaphor for life.  This conversation, as the Quakers put it, “spoke to my condition”: how can I stay in the flow of life, immersed in both sensation and powerful ideas, riding the waves and the crests of pleasure, of connection and disconnection,  fear and excitement, expression and receptivity, playing with the energies of attraction and revulsion; and still function in the world, run a business and manage my sometimes chaotic energies and the conflicting needs and demands on my time and attention.

Here is how Monica describes the results of this inquiry for her, on her blog:

At some point, you fully own and take responsibility — for everything. The practice, your life, your desires, your orgasm. Your part in your relationships, your choices, your suffering. There is no more blaming, there is no more victim status. There is just you. Your physical, emotional and spiritual being. And of course, your orgasm — which exists on all of these levels. And how all of these parts of you collide with the world around you. And what you do with every moment of that collision.

My biggest surprise: Freedom is not what I expected. It’s much, much better. Much more subtle. Nothing changes in some ways. And then, everything does.

The fundamental shift I had was to understand that in my borderline-compulsive need to live full-out, I was losing the most important thing:  Me.  I have been getting a lot done, I have been highly functioning in most areas of life, but I wasn’t enjoying myself. So it was game-over from the beginning, I never had a chance and this was the reason I was behaving in self-destructive ways around caffeine, for example.   It was a sweet insight because when I honored my need and desire to "drink life from a fire-hose" as it were, I forgave myself for my excesses as I saw them as coming fundamentally from an inspired place.  Since getting that, I have dropped my negative internal dialogue around this, which has actually freed me to take better care of myself — previously, shame and blame had me stuck, which are very ineffective agents of change. Failure to take care of myself is actually a very selfish act because in addition to me not enjoying life, everyone in my sphere of influence is affected negatively.  I have, essentially, been pretending that I don’t have a body.

Funnily, when one of my friends first heard me talk about the idea of life as orgasm, he said right away: that fits very well for you, Marc! 

Another interesting feedback came from another friend and course participant, who told me that in my rushing in all directions at once, I came across as out-of-integrity and not believable (not “walking my talk”).  To which I could only agree.  There is a difference between “getting a lot done” and being effective.  Being effective is getting a lot done while staying connected to others and to oneself.

This brings up another question: this current stage of life I am in now, which is the passionate, possibly even manic pursuit of experiences and connection, exploring the world and my possible fit, seems to me more typical and appropriate to someone in their 20s, or early 30s. Well I turned 50 in March, and I have started thinking of the nature of my legacy and of my gift. I told Sam that I had no interest in being a sexual or sensual educator, since I feel that I have no particular gift in any of these areas: sexuality, sensuality or education (well, I am a pretty good WordPress educator, but that hardly counts ;)). Sam challenged me to write a letter to my list, declaring that I was opening an orgasmic education practice and would start teaching. I am not willing to go that far yet, however I can certainly declare that I am opening an orgasmic inquiry group! A life-orgasm inquiry group, to be precise (you are a part of it ;). 

"[William James] believed, with many another religious thinker, that the sinner is closer to God than the conventionally good man, because life is given us as a passion; it is, as Keats said, a vale of soul-making.  What is characteristic of life is the thing that antedates and denies convention. Convention trims, distorts, and suppresses, for good reasons that we all acknowledge.  But social discipline also weakens and disables, leaving  no merit for the virtuous man who is such only because his spirit is too weak to be tempted.  This is no doubt why saints and apostles more often consort with thieves and prostitutes than with bankers and aldermen”

– Jacques Barzum, from the preface to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience

Throw away
Your begging bowls at God’s door

For I have heard the Beloved
Prefers sweet threatening shouts,

Something on the order of:

Hey, Beloved,
My heart is a raging volcano
of love for you!

You better start kissing me –
Or else!"