Soul Shelter

Readers who’ve subscribed to Soul Shelter for more than a few weeks know I’m a big fan of self-help books (there’s always hope!). So I’m shocked that it took me so long to stumble across The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz.

Though Schwartz’s subtitle might make you roll your eyes (“Acquire the Secrets of Success … Achieve Everything You’ve Always Wanted: Personal Property | Financial Security | Power and Influence | The Ideal Job | Satisfying Relationships | A Rewarding and Enjoyable Life”), his advice is down to earth-and in my view, priceless.

Instead of summarizing the whole thing, let me share some nuggets that hit me where I live. Maybe you’ll find them useful, too.

Think Positively Toward Yourself
Many of us were taught to be humble, to downplay our own abilities and accomplishments. Yes, modesty is a virtue, but constant self-deprecation—conscious or not—is a losing strategy in life. Schwartz believed that “the key to winning what you want lies in thinking positively toward yourself.” This passage reminds me of As a Man Thinketh, one of the granddads of the self-help movement:

The only real basis other people have for judging your abilities is your actions. And your actions are controlled by your thoughts. You are what you think you are … Thinking does make it so.

See What Can Be, Not Just What Is
Schwartz reminds us that visualization adds value to everything. Thinking big means training yourself to see not just what is, but what can be. Here are a couple of tidbits that deserve the big quotation marks:

A big thinker always visualizes what can be done in the future. He isn’t stuck with the present … Visualize yourself not as you are, but as you can be.

Broadcast Good News
Bitter thoughts are worthless. “No one ever won a friend,” Schwartz wrote, “no one ever made money, no one ever accomplished anything by broadcasting bad news.” ‘Nuff said. The following passage brings to mind a summer stay in Tokyo two years back amid 90% humidity and 100 degree heat:

Have you ever noticed how seldom children complain about the weather? They take hot weather in stride until the negative news corps educates them to be conscious of unpleasant temperatures. Make it a habit always to speak favorably about the weather regardless of what the weather actually is. Complaining about the weather makes you more miserable and it spreads misery to others.

Though written nearly half a century ago, The Magic of Thinking Big still feels contemporary, more so than some of the books discussed earlier this year in Here’s to Success Finding ‘How to Succeed’ Books.

So if you haven’t done so already, start thinking big by checking out a copy from the library, or purchasing one online from Powell’s or Amazon.

You may also enjoy:

“What’s the Big Idea?”

“The Heroic Journey”

“You’ve Got to Jump“

Back in March, Tim wrote about eight terrific titles that have made a big impact on him, and have helped to shape Soul Shelter’s twin themes of fortune and fulfillment.

Readers were invited to email us with comments on the books that have proven most important in their own lives, for a chance to win a signed copy of The Prosperous Peasant.

Our prize winner is Soul Shelter reader Nadine Warner, who sent us the following eloquent recommendations of four unconventional and intriguing titles.

Says Nadine:

“This list may be colored by the fact that I read stories to children. But I think that who we are is influenced by our early years, especially the books that we read and that are read to us. I’m an avid reader — always have been — but when I think about the books that have truly shaped my outlook on life, I find myself going back to these books. Maybe it’s because I remember them within the bliss of my childhood. Or maybe it’s because the messages are just simple and timeless.

Hope for the Flowers, by Trina Paulus: The quest for transformation, to “know thyself,” to think independently, to conserve … it’s all in there. In the author’s own words, “a tale-partly about life, partly about revolution and lots about hope for adults and others (including caterpillars who can read).”

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle: A book about other worlds, the importance of family, the balance of good and evil, how to go beyond appearances. Time and again I come back to this scene (and I read the book over 30 years ago!). The Beatles were right: Love is all you need.

An excerpt:

With the last vestige of consciousness she [Meg] jerked her mind and body. Hate was nothing that IT didn’t have. IT knew all about hate.”You are lying about that, and you were lying about Mrs. Whatsit!” she screamed.”Mrs. Whatsit hates you,” Charles Wallace said.

And that was where IT made ITs fatal mistake for as Meg said, automatically, “Mrs. Whatsit loves me; that’s what she told me, that she loves me,” suddenly she knew.

She knew!

Love.

That was what she had that IT did not have.

She had Mrs. Whatsit’s love, and her father’s, and her mother’s, and the real Charles Wallace’s love, and the twins’, and Aunt Beast’s.

And she had her love for them.

But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?

If she could give love to IT, perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love. But she, in all her weakness and foolishness, and baseness and nothingness, was incapable of loving IT. Perhaps it was too much to ask of her, but she could not do it.

But she could love Charles Wallace…

…Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. I love you, Charles. Oh, Charles Wallace, I love you.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was unaware of them.

Now she was even able to look at him, at this animated thing that was not her own Charles Wallace at all. She was able to look and love.

Flatland, by Edwin Abbott: Sure, it’s a book that works on multiple levels (no pun intended!), but before I encountered this book about a two-dimensional square’s first contact with a three-dimensional object, I hadn’t given much thought to what geometry and physics could teach me about the nature of reality (this was grade school, after all!). Yet now, every time I hit a dilemma, I come back to this book to find out if, maybe, there’s something that I am not seeing, that I am not yet capable of seeing because I haven’t opened my mind to the possibility.

Earth Child, by Sharon Webb: The first book of an admittedly obscure Young Adult science fiction trilogy in which humans achieve immortality at the price of creativity. The process only works on children, so they are given a choice-live forever (my interpretation: become a god), or pursue the arts (my interpretation: channel God/The Divine/etc). As a creative type, I always come back to the idea of the arts being a calling, and recognize the sacrifices that we choose to make in the service of our craft.”

Many thanks to Nadine on her wonderful entry! Her copy of The Prosperous Peasant is on its way.

While reviewing thousands of psychology studies performed over the past six decades, Martin Seligman discovered a disturbing pattern: the overwhelming majority dealt with mental illness. Only a tiny portion addressed the issue of greatest concern to most people: How to be happy.

Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, was thunderstruck by the implications of his discovery. During World War II, Seligman realized, psychologists had focused on helping traumatized soldiers regain their lives. In the process they became preoccupied with studying, classifying, and treating mental illnesses. Inquiries into happiness and well-being were crowded out of the research ring. For the past 60 years psychology had been devoted almost exclusively to rehabilitation, remaining largely unconcerned with understanding how people become happier and more satisfied.

Seligman has since spearheaded a “positive psychology” movement dedicated to scientifically defining, identifying, classifying, and engendering behavior causally linked to happiness and well-being.

In short, he and others have undertaken rigorous research into Soul Shelter territory: Fortune and fulfillment. What did they learn?

Most important, work satisfaction is crucial. Seligman discovered that people become happier when they can use their “signature strengths”—another word for skills or core competencies—in an enterprise linked to a greater good. That jibes with Marcus Buckingham’s work (and my personal theory that business ventures are scalable and successful to the extent that they address significant social problems).

A growing number of scholars agree. Psychologists and couples therapist Aline Zoldbrod says recent research demonstrates that materialism is bad for one’s emotional well-being. Psychology professor Tim Kasser, the author of one such study, was quoted in an International Herald Tribune article:

Consumer culture is continually bombarding us with the message that materialism will make us happy. What this research shows is that that’s not true.

Such findings trace back to the Easterlin paradox, first proposed in 1974 by the economist Richard Easterlin. Easterlin conducted a global study showing that wealth does not improve national happiness levels once basic needs are fulfilled. Since then the Easterlin paradox has become one touchstone of the positive psychology movement as it relates to happiness.

Recently, though, the Easterlin paradox has been challenged. An article entitled “Maybe Money Can Buy Happiness” quoted two economists who found measurement problems with the data underlying the Easterlin paradox. “The central message,” one said, “is that income does matter.” Other economists agree.

Easterlin himself admits that people in richer countries are more satisfied, but cautions that correlation does not equal causality. In other words, wealth doesn’t necessarily cause satisfaction.

What are we non-economist, non-psychologist types to make of all this?

Well, it seems the experts agree on at least one thing: increased wealth clearly increases happiness for people living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet unbridled materialism is a recipe for dissatisfaction. The problem seems to be our ability to effectively predict what will make us happy. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert put it this way in (yet) another IHT article:

If it were the case that money made us totally miserable, we’d figure out we were wrong … it’s wrong in a more nuanced way. We think money will bring lots of happiness for a long time, and actually it brings a little happiness for a short time.

P.S. Today (5/2/2008), after completing the rewrite of this post, I discovered that Justin Wolfers, the author of Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox, wrote an extensive, six-part series on happiness. I really need to start reading more posts than I write …

This essay first appeared in a different form in the October 2004 issue of Japan Entrepreneur Report.

You may also enjoy:

“What We Really Need to be Happy”

“The State of American Happiness”

“A Moment of Fulfillment“

(This post is an installment of CommonSensical, a periodic feature here at Soul Shelter in which we offer timeless words from thinkers and artists new and old on the subject of pursuing fulfillment and protecting one’s soul.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance,” first published in 1841, is one of the most inspiring texts I’ve ever encountered. It reads like a gospel for anybody who’s looking to dedicate him or herself to the pursuit of a personally fulfilling life. And because in Emerson’s day such a pursuit often demanded a brave parting of ways with convention, a casting off of societal mores (and still does in our own day, to a lesser degree), “Self Reliance” has a lot to say about courage, inspiration, and the lessons we ought to take from the triumphs and accomplishments of the famous lives that went before us.

I return to “Self Reliance” often, and it never fails to reverberate anew. Here are some of its highlights (and these are highlights only, a mere sampling from the great 30,000 word text).

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. … A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility… Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. …

See another recent Soul Shelter post presenting a similar idea — albeit much less gloriously: the value of keeping a notebook so our “spontaneous impressions” don’t flutter away.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. … A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Here Emerson states the Big Idea of Soul Shelter, which we phrase this way on our “About” page: “All too often a job is just a job, uninspiring or worse. Why is this so? Can things be otherwise? If not, then what changes might we make in order to devote ourselves to work that feels more meaningful?”

What’s Emerson’s solution?

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. … [But] society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. … It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. … Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. … I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. … What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. … It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. … But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. …

Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. …

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. …

The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. … But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. …

In Emerson’s view, inspiration is active, not passive. The inspired individual, rather than being the lucky recipient of frequent dispatches direct from some angelic muse, is more likely somebody who participates in the power of accomplishments preceding him or her. In other words, the truly inspired person does not wait in a room for an angel to visit, but goes out and collects and samples the fruits of others’ inspiration, closely examining just why this or that inspired work succeeds, and applying the lessons of its success to his or her own talents.

So the self-reliant individual learns to stand before an enduring creation—or ponder the achievements of another—without being cowed or worshipful, and to engage another’s success and synthesize it with his own unique potential.

To be self-reliant in this way, Emerson insists, is to “live in the present … above time,” in a place where ideas of consequence and beauty are abundant, and self-trust is as natural as the existence of a rose.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. …

If we live truly, we shall see truly. … The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul. …

I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. … It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. …

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. … We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

The prophetic power of Emerson’s admonishment here always gets me. Who can read such a thing and not feel the irresistible impulse to stand up at last and take arms against his sea of troubles, to set out on the Heroic Journey toward happiness, creative fulfillment, and a balanced and befitting life?

Immediately Emerson goes on to address the problematic American pragmatism that tends to make us timid once an adventuresome undertaking fails to go as we’d hoped. From what I know of American measures of success, these observations hold all too true today.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ’studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. …

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. …

Now, I don’t mean to be too timid and “quote a sage” instead of self-reliantly trusting myself, but that last line is one I ought to plaster to the wall above my desk. Such a simple and powerful truth is too easily forgotten.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. … Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. … Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again. …

He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head. …

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

So there’s “Self Reliance” in severe abridgement. Find the whole masterful text online, or better yet, buy a volume of Emerson for lifelong reference.

You might also enjoy:

“Time For Everything”

“Simplify, simplify!”

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)“

(This essay first appeared in a different form in the August 2003 edition of Japan Entrepreneur Report)

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits. Robert Louis Stevenson

Jack Ma knows a thing or two about failure. After flunking two university entrance exams, he was accepted by his “city’s worst university.” Following graduation, he was earning $15 a month teaching English in mainland China.

But just a few short years later, he was running Alibaba.com, China’s most successful business-to-business e-commerce portal, and guest lecturing at the Harvard Business School (many of the professors there were baffled by his views). Now Alibaba.com is a listed firm valued at U.S. $26 billion. Here’s Jack’s take on failure:

The lessons learned from success stories only apply under certain conditions. But examples of failure teach us all something … I call Alibaba.com ‘1,001 mistakes’ …

What Jack says hits home with me, because I’m a rather accomplished gaffer myself, with an impressive record of small business busts. I’ve stumbled through a series of entrepreneurial ventures over the years: forming bands and making records, writing and producing publications, assembling retail products, and so forth. Most of these efforts were washouts in terms of businesses. Some were naïve, a couple embarrassingly so. But as the years passed and my experience grew, the efforts became less naïve and more practical (the pros say it takes four bad investments to make a real venture capitalist—maybe entrepreneurs need four flops, too).

After at least four clinkers, when I was finally able to identify my core skills and align my entrepreneurial efforts with them, the next venture evolved into something that was eventually valued highly by a third party.

So I say it’s time failure got some respect. One of my favorite self-help books, all about failure, is The University of Hard Knocks (also freely available at the Gutenberg Project). Ralph Parlette, the author, was a popular lecturer with a humorous, self-deprecating style who extolled the wisdom learned through “hard knocks” experiences of flopping. It’s hilarious reading underpinned by hard-hitting truths.

Here’s the takeaway: Keep trying. The most common precursor of success is a string of failures, each teaching an unforgettable lesson. But experience accrues to those who try, and failures eventually teach us how to succeed. Here’s how Shakespeare put it:

Our doubts are traitors

And make us lose the good we oft might win

By fearing to attempt

You may also enjoy:

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“You Don’t Need to Be an Insider”

“What’s the Big Idea?“

A few months back, I sat beside an old friend at a formal dinner. Call her Penny. Penny and I hadn’t seen each other for about three years, but we’d kept in touch through periodic e-mails. Penny happens to be one of the most industrious, inexhaustibly creative people I know, besides which, she’s always impressed me as having a virtuosic ability to stay connected to her innumerable friends, and to connect these people to each other — effecting introductions that often result in dynamic partnerships.

She’s a nexus, as I told her once (which only made her blush). She’s what might be called a natural expert in networking.

So imagine my surprise when, while chatting over our dinner, that very term arose and Penny sat back in her chair, shook her head, and said matter-of-factly, “You know, I really hate that word.”

“Networking?” I said.

“Yeah. It just gives me the creeps.”

I decided I’d avoid mentioning that it was a sort of keyword that popped into mind every time I thought of her. I gave a moment of silent consideration instead.

Finally I said, “You mean, it sounds too mercenary for your tastes.”

“Yeah! Exactly! I just happen to like people. I find them fascinating. I like to listen to their stories and learn about them.”

Penny’s artlessness is priceless. And I suddenly understood — after thirteen years of observing this woman’s social mastery, her lively, life-loving way of constantly undertaking new, exciting projects and forging relationships with highly creative, one-of-a-kind individuals — how it was that she managed to be so productive, so inventive, so ceaselessly inspired and inspiring.

Instead of channeling her personal and professional energies into schemes to “capitalize” on certain associations, Penny just opens herself, all the time, to the personalities around her. She primes the pump of whomever she’s seated beside at a party. Not because she’s looking for anything in particular, but because she’s unfailingly inquisitive, and always ready to entertain a diverse viewpoint or to query somebody and learn from their unique perspective.

Penny’s what I would call a People-Reader. She listens. Her interest is genuine and personal.

When it comes to books, some individuals are deep readers, plunging into the classics, annotating the margins of every printed page they lay eyes upon, constantly drawing connections between ideas digested from various sources. And some people read only skimmingly, sticking to headlines, or hurrying through great literature, or scanning ephemeral cyber-text.

In a similar way, certain people learn to cultivate deep “reading” habits in their social interactions, while others are content to “skim.”

Talk to Penny at a party and you’ll find yourself in a real conversation. Never will you feel that she’s taking measure of your “usefulness.” There’s always an authentic give-and-take with Penny, a sense of good old-fashioned human interaction — discourse of a kind that seems rare these days. That’s what Penny thrives on; that’s what she’s in it for; she’s never been in it for anything else. (I can only imagine how she’d cringe at the term “social capital,” though surely many who employ it do so innocently.)

Penny knows that the value of our life and our work can only be real if our relationships are real. True connections and meaningful accomplishments begin from a shared humanity.

A People-Reader like Penny never plots and calculates how to make this acquaintanceship or that third-degree connection or that person’s inimitable talent “add up” to profit for herself or advancement toward her own harbored ambition. That’s the stock in trade of People-Skimmers, a whole different breed, the true social mercenaries.

People-Skimmers are unpleasant folks. We’ve all run into them at one time or another. They’re the ones who prowl parties, cv’s pinned to their lapels and ears stopped against irrelevant pleasantries. They hasten through introductions and practice a form of small talk that’s like speed dating for the obsessively professional. Their radars are primed for prestige; human kindness and friendships are merely incidental byproducts of ambition — welcome, but of secondary importance. Not so for the likes of Penny. For her, Courtesy, Kindness, and the Art of Listening are everything.

I believe there’s an awful lot to learn from people like Penny. And I hope I’ve gotten better at really reading individuals as she does. I hope mere headlines don’t distract me too much.

And I believe, though Penny’s too pure to explicitly affirm this, that the deeply human traits necessary for good People-Reading are as fundamental to real success as they are to enduring friendship — and you just might get both in the bargain.

What could be better?

The nonfiction publishing world is ruled by the Big Idea: the concise, single-sentence statement of a book’s theme—and why it’s important. Once in book form, the Big Idea must grab bookstore browsers, convert them to buyers, then satisfy them as readers.

But all this starts farther up the food chain. Authors hoping to sell manuscripts to publishers must have crystalline statements of their Big Ideas (and increasingly, either celebrity status or a “platform” through which they can reach a substantial audience).

I’m pitching a book to a new publisher, so lately I’ve been struggling to articulate my Big Idea. That’s forcing me to dig down to the work’s true underpinnings. But along the way it raised a peripheral, far more fundamental issue: What’s the Big Idea of my life?

That question stopped me cold.

Somehow I’ve never articulated the Big Idea of my own life. To tell the truth, it took me longer than most to figure out that one creates rather than finds meaning in one’s life. We can hardly expect to wake up one day and intellectually fix upon a purpose for living. Purpose evolves over time and by doing, not merely thinking.

Yet it seems to me we could all use a Big Idea for our lives. It needn’t be world-changing. But neither should it be small.

The best thing that’s happened for me since starting Soul Shelter is that community members have been inspiring me with the Big Ideas of their own lives.

In Michigan, for instance, Spiritual River blogger Patrick has dedicated himself to helping addicts recover. At age 32, he’s created more meaning in his life than most 50-plus Deferred Life Plan multimillionaires.

Chris, a world citizen in action, has dedicated himself to advocating nonconformity. J.D., who recently quit his job to write full time, is resolved to inspiring others to eliminate debt and achieve prosperity. And Mark, my blogging partner, is committed to pursuing truth and beauty through literature. His latest post, The Heroic Journey is, at heart, about pursuing your own Big Idea.

Patrick, Chris, J. D., and Mark share a common value: making a lot of money is not part of their Big Idea. “Making a lot of money” is a boring, uninspired notion. In fact, it’s a Little Idea (you can take it from me; I’m no armchair philosopher on this particular topic). Money helps, but it falls short in inspiring behavior that transcends short-term self-interest. Remember the difference between pull and drive? Our Big Ideas should pull us.

So what’s my Big Idea? I’ve been moving toward it for years, and it’s high time I declared it:

Through teaching and writing, to help others start their own ventures—particularly ones that span national borders.

There, I feel better already. Wish me luck with my Big Idea. In coming months I’ll share steps I’m taking to live it.

You may also enjoy:

“Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan”

“Time for Everything”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“The Heroic Journey“

In a powerful lecture entitled “Mythic Literature,” recorded in the 1960s, the noted scholar of world mythologies, Joseph Campbell, said:

Every now and then, you will face the great mysteries that mankind has been facing. The mystery of death, when it eats into you. The mystery of the magnitude of the cosmos and your own place in it and all. And the imagery that will be coming up then will be imagery that will be matched in the mythologies of the world…

Abraham Maslow [a psychologist and a spokesman of the “positive psychology” movement]…published a little paper in which he discussed the values for which people lived. He named five:

1. Survival
2. Security
3. Prestige
4. Personal Relationships
5. Self-Development

And I remember when I read that, I thought those are exactly the values that go completely to pieces when one is seized with a mythological zeal. If there is something you are really living for, you will forget security, you will forget even survival, you will forget your prestige, you will even forget your friends, and as for self-development, that’s gone. When Jesus said ‘He who loses his life shall find it’ he was talking about this.

And it’s that jump, from the thing that animals live for, to the thing that only a human being can live for, that is the jump [into the Heroic Journey]…

Over the past ten years or so, I’ve done a good share of reading into world religions and mythologies. These age-old story patterns and images have taught me much about the art of writing (my first novel used a mythic structure of sorts). Naturally, as any inquiry into mythology will do, mine led me to Campbell, and his powerful ideas have had a lasting impact on my life.

For the last twenty-odd years, Campbell been criticized as a guru of the New Age movement. In fact, he was nothing of the kind, however misappropriated some of his ideas have been. Quite to the contrary, he was an eminent scholar — and certainly one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth-century.

Campbell came to public attention in the mid-1980s, thanks to the wildly popular six-part PBS series, The Power of Myth, in which he was interviewed by Bill Moyers. But Campbell’s career as a mythographer had its truer, more auspicious beginning a full three decades earlier, with the 1949 publication of the groundbreaking book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

In its pages, he presented a comparative study of mythological stories and belief systems from all over the world, and demonstrated the universality of many symbols (or archetypes) mankind has used for ages. He called this the “grammar of symbols,” and argued that every world culture produces a “mono-myth” in which the journey of a hero figure is marked by certain clearly distinguishable stages, such as: The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Crossing of the First Threshold, The Belly of the Whale, The Road of Trials, Atonement with the Father, Refusal of the Return, Crossing of the Return Threshold.

The Heroic Journey, found in so many different myths, reveals a psychological reality common to all human beings, and Campbell showed how modern psychology can shed light on the symbology of these diverse myths.

Each of us is born, confronts life’s mysteries, enjoys its graces, suffers its blows, and must eventually face death. That experience, being universal, is a “mythic” experience. We all share it, and we all look to stories, images, and belief systems to better understand it. That’s what Campbell’s work explored. In his preface to that 1949 book, he wrote:

There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed. My hope is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to … unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the sense of human mutual understanding. As we are told in the Vedas: ‘Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.’

And being a passionate humanist, and believing that his scholarly studies could be deeply relevant to the wider culture beyond academia, Campbell did not shy away from speaking in very personal terms about the “Heroic Journey” as it applied to everyone, even in modern life.

“The final secret of myth,” he said, “[is] to teach you how to penetrate the labyrinth of life in such a way that its spiritual values come through.”

In Campbell’s view, recognizing the mythic forces at work in one’s life could deeply enrich that life. He was at his most outspoken about this in The Power of Myth. And it was there, while talking about the Heroic Journey, that he used a phrase that has almost single-handedly popularized him among New Agers: “Follow Your Bliss.”

Frankly, I cringe whenever this phrase gets invoked in a twinkling, wind-chimey, neo-mystical manner, because all too often it’s being appropriated to justify self-indulgence or shallowness (in fact, it’s used in just this way by a character in the recent film, The Namesake, adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel).

I believe Campbell’s maxim is most meaningful — and useful — when placed firmly in the context of the man’s serious thought, and his lifelong work. “Following your bliss,” as Campbell means it, requires more than doing what feels good at any given moment. Being a matter of “mythological zeal,” it might require a confrontation with a dragon or two, a painful sacrifice or an embarkation into loneliness — in short: a parting with one or a few of Maslow’s Five Values. Here’s where bliss comes up in the conversation with Bill Moyers:

-Moyers: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?

-Campbell: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

-Moyers: Is it my work or my life?

-Campbell: If the work that you’re doing is the work that you choose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, ‘Oh no! I couldn’t do that!’ that’s the dragon locking you in. ‘No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,’ or ‘No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.’

-Moyers: In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

-Campbell: But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and to become alive yourself. … There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.

Being a writer of stories, I identify strongly with Campbell’s vision of a universal human narrative, a Heroic Journey through life’s frightful and glorious moments alike, a constant adventure that demands we remain on the path which will best allow us each to confront our fears and fulfill our potential.

The idea that following one’s bliss, finding one’s own heroic path, requires sacrifice and the abandonment of “security” or “prestige” or “self-development” rings very true with me. The journey may be hard, the road may be narrow, the destination obscured. But I hope I’ll be brave enough, always, to make the most worthy sacrifices, to go toward the dragon if that’s what’s most necesary, to seek spiritual adventure over stagnant convention. I want to recognize true and enduring fulfillment.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world. — Joseph Campbell

Once upon a time, a young Apple Computer attorney named Randy Komisar negotiated a deal that might have turned the personal computing industry upside down—and changed the world.

Komisar struck an agreement with Apollo Computer to license the Macintosh operating system. The move was the very embodiment of “Computing for the Rest of Us,” Apple’s Big Idea, the grand and good mission that inspired Apple employees and fans alike. Later Komisar would write:

Along with many others inside Apple, I was a strong proponent of licensing the Macintosh operating system in order to preempt Microsoft in setting the standard for user-friendly computing. After all, it was Apple’s birthright, its overriding mission. It would mean cannibalizing our own model, sacrificing margins for volume and market share, but it seemed better than circling the wagons and defending an ever-declining piece of the PC business.

But at the last minute, John Sculley, the brilliant Pepsi-Cola executive who at Steve Job’s behest famously gave up “selling sugar water” to lead Apple, scuttled the deal. Sculley undercut the company’s greater mission in order to preserve Apple’s high-margin end-to-end hardware/software business model.

Apple’s share of the worldwide personal computer market subsequently plummeted, and today it stands at just under three percent (3%). Would Sculley have made the same decision if he could have known that, years later, the reality of Apple’s vision would be Computing for Three Percent of Us?

No one knows, of course, what might have happened had Apple stuck to its ideals and licensed its operating system. But in The Monk and the Riddle, the best-seller detailing the episode, Komisar illuminates the point by distinguishing between passion and drive. Passion and drive are not the same at all, he writes:

Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do.

Passion pulled Apple Computer toward its mission of making computing available to everyman, but drive forced management to choose predictable profitability and lower risk. Here’s my takeaway: Drive arises from will, passion from the soul.

The distinction is useful. Komisar goes on to make the key point of his book, a rejection of what he calls the “Deferred Life Plan.”

The Deferred Life Plan consists of two steps:

1. Do what you have to do
2. Do what you want to do

To achieve the “promise of full coverage under the plan,” writes Komisar, you should divide life into two distinct parts. In Part One you do whatever it takes to become financially secure. In Part Two, you retire and do exactly what you want (it may hardly be necessary to note that the Deferred Life Plan is fueled by drive rather than passion).

The problem, of course, is that those who achieve financial security through drive rather than passion often discover the hollowness of victory. To use a self-help cliché, the success ladder they struggled so hard to climb was leaning against the wrong building.

I experienced this for myself when I sold my company in 2000. I’d started my firm in 1994 based on a passion: exploiting the Internet’s ability to convert high variable communications costs into low fixed costs on behalf of Japanese consumers, who’d long suffered from expensive metered-rate telecommunications services. The Internet also promised a curiously powerful mix of intimacy and anonymity, something perfectly matching the Japanese communication style.

That passion sustained me through the tough early years. Later, as our services were sought by higher and higher profile customers, the exigencies of business—and my drive to succeed—steadily overtook passion. Soon my business became one of helping online retailers sell more, more, more into Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. By the time we sold out, I, too, had “sold out” my Big Idea—my original vision—while fatigue and world-weary “success” blurred my recognition of that very truth. Maybe that’s why Komisar’s story struck me with such force.

Received Western wisdom continues to enthusiastically endorse the Deferred Life Plan, as it has for more than 200 years (earlier this month Mark wrote about Charles Lamb’s surprisingly mixed feelings upon his “deliverance” from a life of office drudgery in the early nineteenth century).

Opting out of the Deferred Life Plan is no easy task. It’s a struggle demanding discipline, not just of the will, but of the soul.

You may also enjoy:

“Time for Everything”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“

In my writing life, I’ve had to learn not only how to harness ideas and produce something from them when they start to flow, but how to keep them flowing in the first place. Here are four simple tips that might be useful to anyone hoping to summon up fresh concepts or find new approaches to a project.

1. Keep a Notebook

Henry James famously urged the novice writer to “Try to become one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” He was speaking to the importance of not missing the little glimmers that move fleetingly through the mind—those brief, seemingly inconsequential images or concepts which just might prove to be an odd piece of some larger idea. If you let these little bits of thought come and go, if you shrug and idly say, ‘Huh,’ and allow them to fade away unrecorded, how can you ever know whether or not these pieces might have been patched together into a whole? You must capture them when they come. Don’t trust them to stick around very long on their own. Keep a notebook in your pocket (and a pen). Think of the notebook as a butterfly net. If a strange-colored thought catches your eye, swipe!

Emerson said it beautifully (and I’ll be posting more about this great mind soon):

Let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not.

2. Block Out Time in Your Calendar

I’ve long had an uncomfortable relationship with calendars. Something in me recoils from those neat little numbered boxes. I guess I’m loath to believe that the beauty and possibility of a day can be shrunken down to such strict geometry. But recently, while trying to balance various freelancing responsibilities amidst my main enterprise of drafting a new novel, it became clear that I’d have to get over my reservations and buy a weekly planner. There were just too many tasks and deadlines to bear in mind.

I did not compromise my convictions, mind you. I was still firmly resolved to see that the calendar served me. I would use this tool to help me manage my time, rather than let the tool dictate my every moment. So I sat down with the planner and reserved significant blocks of hours for novelizing. There: those hours were now spoken for. I’d dedicated them in ink. All other tasks must now defer to the primary importance of these working periods. If you’re hoping to generate ideas, you’ve got to make it clear to your own subconscious that you’re creating conditions to help the ideas to arrive.

The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro employs a useful working method whenever he comes to a critical stage in his writing. He lets it be known to friends and associates that he’s dedicated his time exclusively to the project at hand. He names the procedure A Crash. “I’m having A Crash,” he announces. He won’t be returning calls. He’ll be unavailable to discuss all matters save those relating to his work. And by simply giving his undertaking this formal designation, he finds that people are more inclined to understand and respect his aloofness. They forgive him their unreturned calls. “Oh, he’s having A Crash,” they say quietly, and smile.

3. Take a Walk

It’s not always useful to sit down at a desk and demand ideas of yourself. Creativity is an impish, testy thing. Sometimes, if mine suspects there’s too much weighing on its appearance, it refuses to show up. One of the best ways to get ideas flowing is to take a paradoxical approach: get your mind off the matter. Get outside of your house or office and outside of your head. But I’m not saying you ought to distract yourself with thoughts about other things. The idea is to try not to think at all. Take a walk. Breathe. Clear your mind by counting your steps or measuring your breath.

There’s a corollary to this point, which I’ve found extremely useful. It comes from Ernest Hemingway and has been cited fondly by many writers in interviews. It goes like this: In your non-working hours, make it a habit to train your thoughts away from the project at hand. Try to remember that this avoidance of thought is as much a discipline as the act of working steadily. Here’s how Hemingway put it in A Moveable Feast:

I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.

And Hemingway’s last remark brings me to my fourth tip…

4. Read, or: Get Inspired

I don’t quite believe inspiration to be an airy and fickle cosmic messenger, as is commonly supposed. The way I see it, inspiration is an ever-existent thing. It surrounds each one of us all the time, in the fruits of other’s creativity, the works of other artists old and new. Inspiration is a kind of worldwide creative circuitry that anyone can tap into.

(Of course, the most powerful inspiration—that which produces work of blazing, timeless significance—truly is an almost mythological force. A winged, two-headed lion, maybe. A creature of great wildness and ferocity, not to be trapped. But while this kind of world-altering inspiration just might be a bit supernatural, after all, and surely can’t be corralled and domesticated, even it can be harnessed for a while.)

The best method I know for accessing writerly inspiration is to open and lean over the pages of a good book. And I think every field or discipline must have a counterpart to this action. So read, view, or listen to good work by dynamic people in your field. Try to understand just why these people’s achievements stir you as they do. What creative seed do they water inside you? How might that seed be brought to flower, and in what way will the resulting creation differ from or add to the inspiring achievements that preceded it?

In other words, pay attention to your rising voltage as you read. Isn’t that your own unique current, just waiting to be spliced into the global circuit of inspiration?

Here’s how Joseph Campbell talked about reading (more on this fellow soon as well):

Read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time…When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don’t say, ‘Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did’—and don’t bother at all with the bestseller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. But when you go from one author to another, you may be able to tell us the date when each wrote such and such a poem—but he hasn’t said anything to you.

Try out each of these tips in turn. Or combine them for a powerful cumulative effect. And may you enjoy an embarrassing abundance of ideas!

You might also enjoy:

“The Lonely-Novelist’s Five-Point Productivity Plan”

“Daunting Task? Learn to Whip It”

“Understanding the World Through the Thomas Theorem“