Ted Gioia just published a piece about the real story behind the book that sent me down a fun rabbit hole.

I knew the broad strokes of Robert Pirsig’s life. He was a Korean War veteran who studied philosophy at Banaras Hindu University in India, worked as a technical writer at Honeywell, and experienced a severe mental breakdown that led to psychiatric hospitalization and electroshock therapy - administered without his consent, a procedure that’s now illegal. He wrote the entire book between 2 AM and 6 AM in a small apartment above a Minneapolis shoe store while holding down his day job.

Then 121 publishers rejected it.

The editor who finally said yes - J.D. Landis - did so because “the book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for.” He gave Pirsig a $3,000 advance and warned him not to expect much. The book went on to sell five million copies. George Steiner compared Pirsig to Dostoevsky. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights. The Smithsonian acquired the motorcycle.

One editor, after 121 rejections, said yes because the book forced him to confront what he actually cared about. That’s Pirsig’s thesis made real. Quality isn’t something you can define first and recognize second. You recognize it, and then, maybe, you can start to articulate why. Landis felt it before he could explain it. Every investor I know has had that experience. Every founder building something genuinely good has had the inverse - the thing they made was real, but the institutions couldn’t see it yet.

The concept at the center of the book is Quality - capitalized, because Pirsig treated it as something fundamental. Quality isn’t a subjective judgment or a metric you track on a dashboard. It’s something you recognize before you can define it - something that connects science, art, and spirituality in a way that most Western philosophy refuses to allow. Pirsig eventually connected it to the Greek areti - excellence, or virtue - but the power of the book is that he arrives at this through the act of motorcycle maintenance, not through academic argument.

I called it “a brilliant essay on quality” and I stand by that description seventeen years later. It was the first philosophy book I actually felt like I grokked (no, I am not going to let a company own that word, nor am I going to let a company own the word meta.)

Every entrepreneur I’ve worked with over the past 30 years has faced what Pirsig calls gumption traps. He defines them precisely:

“Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all.”

I’ve used that quote in Techstars CEO roundtables when founders are drowning in conflicting advice during week four of the program and have lost the ability to make any decision at all.

The antidote is also in the book. During a mountain road passage, Pirsig describes the narrator’s anxiety about hairpin turns at altitude - imagining a stone dropping thousands of feet. Then they ride the road.

“It’s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.”

I was listening to this on an audiobook during a pre-dawn training run in 2010, heading up Highway 36 toward Lyons in pitch blackness with 40 mph wind gusts, and I physically felt the smile break out on my face. The life lesson of that line is so powerful.

I’ve written before about wanting to see someone write the equivalent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for entrepreneurship - a philosophical treatise that will stand the test of time rather than another how-to book with a framework and a subtitle. Jerry Colonna and I have talked about the need for this over the years. It doesn’t exist, or at least I haven’t found it yet.

Today, during morning coffee, as we were talking, Amy mentioned that she had already heard “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas, which is in heavy rotation on our Amy’s Faves playlist.

Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Amy had asked me how I was feeling about the launch of Give First: The Power of Mentorship. I said, “Fine,” which wasn’t a particularly compelling or enthusiastic answer.

We ended up discussing ‘Acts of Ego’, which I acknowledged was a big part of the book. By definition, the book is an act of ego, and while it’s not a memoir, there are a lot of “Brad stories” that I use as examples to support the points I’m trying to make. I’ve received both positive and negative feedback on this, and while the positive feedback feels good, I haven’t yet figured out what to do with the negative feedback.

At some point, I blurted out ‘Axe the Ego’ as an effort to neutralize how I was feeling. We both chuckled and continued to talk about ego. And then Amy mentioned Dust in the Wind.

… Now don’t hang on
Nothin’ lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away
And all your money won’t another minute buy

I must have listened to this song a thousand times when I was a young teenager. The words are imprinted on my brain.

(All we are is dust in the wind)
Dust in the wind
(Everything is dust in the wind)
Everything is dust in the wind

I have two friends who went to Israel last week to visit friends and family. Both are safe right now, but having an unexpected adventure as two countries on the other side of the world fire missiles at each other while the rest of the world talks about … all kinds of things.

The river behind our house doesn’t care. The trees don’t care. The rocks, which have been here long before us and will remain here long after us, don’t care.

We are all just dust in the wind.

Let’s start with existentialism.

For a long time, I’ve believed that you create your meaning during your existence on this planet. You get one life, and when it’s over, it’s over. I’ve never embraced the idea of a legacy, as I care more about what I do while I’m alive than what people say about me after I’m dead. And, I’ve always been deeply intrinsically motivated by learning, so the extrinsic rewards of life, while nice, aren’t a core motivation for me.

When I’m depressed or angry, I get nihilistic. My inside voice says, “Nothing fucking matters.” This particular inside voice rarely escapes the deep, dark edges of my brain and, when it exits an orifice known as my mouth, it’s usually said under my breath. I do find the Nihilists in the Big Lebowski particularly amusing, even though Donny and Walter confuse them with Nazis.

A few months ago, I started saying that I was an existential nihilist. Several people told me there was no such thing. Amy disliked this a lot as she aggressively pushes back on my nihilistic tendencies, mostly because she knows that I’m feeling depressed or angry when they pop out.

I decided Google would know, so a search on existential nihilism and a little link following lead me to absurdism.

Absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless, yet humans attempt to find meaning in this meaningless world, which the irrational universe doesn’t care about.

There are a lot of words on the Absurdism Wikipedia page so I decided to use AI to count them. I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro and it failed but suggested I try Web Page Word Counter which told me there are 11,342 words on the page. I then asked Gemini to try again and this time it said there were between 4,500 and 5,500 words on the page. I then went into another instance of Gemini 2.5 and asked the same question. This time it said there were 10,256 words on the page. I tried Claude and it told me that it hit the maximum length for the conversation. I asked ClosedAI and it told me it couldn’t do this. I changed the ClosedAI model to deep research and it got started. I asked Perplexity and it said it couldn’t give me an exact number, but could estimate it at 3,000–3,500 words. I looked at the Wikipedia Page Information and it said the page had 78,436 bytes. I highlighted the article, copied the text, pasted it into Google Docs, and did a Word Count, which was 8778 words. ClosedAI Deep Research is still going and is up to 21 sources.

Dave Jilk turned the Gogol quote around deliciously: “The apparent absurdity of life is a distraction from our becoming who we are”. I think that’s a good summary of what I’m getting at.

ClosedAI Deep Research took 9 minutes and used 25 sources. It came up with 8,227 words.

Now that’s absurd.

Dave and I cover this right off the bat in the book, so I thought I’d toss up an excerpt that addresses the question with part of my own origin story with Dave. It follows.

Nietzsche? For entrepreneurs?

It was the end of January 1988, about nine months since we had embarked on turning Brad’s solo consulting shop, Feld Technologies, into a real business. We were fraternity brothers and close friends and opened our first office directly across the street from our fraternity chapter house in Cambridge. We planned to use smart yet inexpensive software developers to build business application software. We employed half a dozen programmers, most of whom were undergraduates from our fraternity working part-time. We didn’t have any financing except for Brad’s credit card and the $10 with which we had purchased our common stock.

Dave walked into Brad’s office after calculating preliminary financial results for January. Up to this point, we had mostly broken even, but the news was grim: we had lost $10,000 in one month. We had not seen it coming, and it took some effort for us to untangle what had gone wrong. Dave had been spending most of his time managing the part-time developers, who were primarily working on future products, instead of billing hours to clients. Brad had been selling computer equipment, which had low gross profit margins, instead of billing hours to clients. Much of our revenue for the month had come from one highly productive though erratic undergraduate developer, Mike, who was working on a billable client project.

Before we had a chance to figure out what to do, Mike quit, citing a need to focus on his studies. Now we had no choice: we fired everyone, shut down our month-to-month office, sold all the office furnishings, and moved the business to our apartments in downtown Boston. It was gut-wrenching. Brad wondered whether we had failed just as we got started. Dave worried about paying rent. We had long discussions about the future of the business, including whether or not to continue.

But we did have billable projects. We no longer had to spend our time managing people and had figured out where our bread was buttered. Results were good enough in February to calm our nerves and even better in March. Just as important, we had learned some crucial lessons and settled on a very different idea about how we would move forward with the business. The experience of hitting bottom and the lessons we learned became deeply ingrained in our brains and our company culture as we more methodically and progressively built the firm.

Fast-forward thirty years, when we were in the midst of writing this book, and Dave was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He encountered a passage that said the highest mountains rise from the sea, and that fact is “inscribed…on the walls of their summits.” Because of our experience at Feld Technologies—and many times since—we knew immediately that this had to be a chapter in the book. We imagined the solace and instruction it might have offered us to have seen (and understood) this quote, to have read a short essay like the one in our chapter Hitting Bottom, where the starkness and promise of the situation are presented in black and white, or to have heard Walter Knapp’s story of the crash and rebirth of Sovrn, a genuinely disruptive company.

That is how we wrote most of the chapters and how this project began. In reading Nietzsche, we noticed ideas that reminded us of situations, questions, and concerns that frequently arose in our entrepreneurial and venture investment experience. Nietzsche had a way with words, and we found that some ideas were nicely encapsulated and phrased. We started playing with expanding upon his pithy aphorisms and gathering stories from entrepreneurs, and it clicked.

Feld Technologies never became a disruptive company, despite our ambitions. It plateaued at around $2 million in revenue before we sold it in 1993. Because we had built a solid foundation for a certain kind of success, we never again hit a deep low point, and consequently never again had the painful opportunity to rethink our premises. This point, too, is covered in Hitting Bottom and illustrates why we did not just skip Nietzsche, write some essays, and assemble some entrepreneur stories. Nietzsche—sitting or walking alone, in pain, almost blind—thought deeply and managed to share these thoughts with the world. We tried to follow his lead, thinking hard and pondering additional angles and situations to which the quote might apply. We want you to do the same, as you keep in mind that Nietzsche’s works have been highly influential throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

In business and entrepreneurship literature, inspiration is sometimes more helpful than instruction. Though there is plenty of how-to information in this book, we aim to give you food for thought from a different perspective. We address issues of leadership, motivation, morals, creativity, culture, strategy, conflict, and knowledge. We push you to think about what you and your enterprise are made of. We expect you to question and ponder these ideas, not just put them into action. If we are successful, you will sometimes get angry and at other times feel pride. At times you will wonder what you really know, and at other times you will charge forward. We hope that the combination of Nietzsche’s colorful language, our elaborations, and some stories from entrepreneurs will offer you intellectual, emotional, and entrepreneurial inspiration.

Nietzsche was not a fan of commercial activity or businesspeople. He saw the former as crass and the latter as lacking nobility. However, we suspect that if Nietzsche were alive today, he would view entrepreneurs differently. He adored intensity and fervor, deeply valued those who create things, and wrote at length about “free spirits” who do not feel bound to tradition or cultural norms. Nietzsche viewed his mission as the “revaluation of all values,” and he intended to disrupt the entire moral tradition of Europe in the late 19th century.

Ryan Holiday’s newest book, Stillness Is The Key, came out at the beginning of October. I ended up with two copies and thought I’d read it over the weekend after they showed up at my house. The weekend slipped by and I didn’t pick it up until mid-day on Thanksgiving.

It was pouring rain in San Diego all day so it was a perfect laying on the couch reading afternoon. I just finished and, once again, Ryan delivered with this book.

Ryan divided the book into three sections: Mind, Spirit, and Body. He has a thorough exploration, broken up into about a dozen chapters, for each category. As is his style, there are many detailed and powerful examples.

He leads with Seneca, a friend of all Stoics and a frequent visitor in Ryan’s writing. He tells a short story around apatheia, or upekkha, or aslama, or hishtavut, or samatvam, or euthymia, or hesychia, or ataraxia, or aequanimitas – a word that finally comes closer to translation into English.

That word is stillness. In the intro to the book, Ryan says,

“To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude—exterior and interior—on command.

Buddhism. Stoicism. Epicureanism. Christianity. Hinduism. It’s all but impossible to find a philosophical school or religion that does not venerate this inner peace—this stillness—as the highest good and as the key to elite performance and a happy life.

And when basically all of the widom of the ancient world agrees on something, only a fool would decline to listen.“

I thought the chapters in each section were extremely well-titled and are listed below. Like reading a poem, slow yourself down and, instead of skimming the next three paragraphs, read them aloud.

Mind: The domain of the mind, Become present, Limit your inputs, Empty the mind, Slow down think deeply, Start journaling, Cultivate silence, Seek wisdom, Find confidence avoid ego, Let go.

Spirit: The domain of the soul, Choose virtue, Heal the inner child, Beware desire, Enough, Bathe in beauty, Accept a higher power, Enter relationships, Conquer your anger, All is one.

Body: The domain of the body, Say no, Take a walk, Build a routine, Get rid of your stuff, Seek solitude, Be a human being, Go to sleep, Find a hobby, Beware escapism, Act bravely.

If even one chapter in each section strikes a chord with you, I encourage you to grab a copy of Stillness Is The Key.

Ryan – thanks for adding another phenomenal book to my bookshelf.

I got sucked into a rabbit hole of trying to understand the discussion, debate, and the subsequent aggressive (vitrolic?) arguments. Neither was what I was trying to say, nor did I feel like becoming part of that particular discussion. So, I chickened out and wrote the post The Moment You Realize You Aren’t Comfortable With What You Wrote instead.

Now that I’ve sat on this post for a few weeks, I’m now fine putting it up. If you are part of the “facts care or don’t care about your feelings” discussion, that’s cool, but that’s not what this is about. So, please read it with the meaning  I was trying to convey.

I love the phrase “facts have no feelings.” And, it’s important to distinguish that phase from a different quote which I don’t like and is in a completely different dimension of discussion, which is “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Queue all the comments about living in a post-fact reality and alternative facts. Or about how facts are simply a fictional narrative that humans create about the universe. Or how facts don’t matter since whoever has the loudest megaphone can overwhelm any facts. Or, how facts actually matter in the long-run, even if they are ignored in the short-term.

Earlier this year I read Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre. It had some good stuff in it, but several of my friends who read it were turned off by McIntyre’s biases (which he acknowledges directly in the book), asserting that the biases undermined what he was saying.

Around the same time, I read James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty which I enjoyed regardless of what you think of Comey. After I wrote a blog post about it, I ended up getting a range of emails. Some were positive but others were similar to the ones I got about McIntyre’s book (although more aggressive) basically saying Comey was full of shit and not telling the truth.

One of my favorite lines in the context of business is Your Truth vs. The Truth. I use the original iPhone release as the example and two Steve Ballmer videos – one from 2007 and one from 2014 – to make the point. My punch line in the post is:

“When I say “your truth” I’m not referring to opinions. I’m referring to your deeply held beliefs. Your truth is the set of ideas that forms the basis of your view of the world. It requires a huge act of will and introspection for you to change your truth.”

That leads me to “facts have no feelings” and the distinction between “truth” and “facts” in the context of business. While the two are regularly conflated, they are really different. The “alternative facts” nonsense in politics makes this point clearly. If “alternative truth” had been said instead of the famously used phrase “alternative facts”, it would have made a lot more sense. Sure, some people would have still ridiculed it, but it would have been a logical construct because there can be a difference between what one person thinks is true and what another thinks is true.

Here’s a provocative example. I think bitcoin has no fundamental value. However, there are many people who believe bitcoin has fundamental value. And, regardless of whether or not it has fundamental value, it is a fact that when I wrote this sentence you can buy bitcoin for $3,403.48 (of course, it is also likely that when you read this, the price will be different.) So, people ascribe value to bitcoin, whether or not it has fundamental value.

My truth would be that bitcoin has no fundamental value, but is a highly speculative object that people like to trade. And, I build a set of truths around that. Other people have a different truth about bitcoin. Regardless, the fact is that a bitcoin can be bought and sold. And, for the avoidance of doubt, even though I think bitcoin has no fundamental value, I own some bitcoins (a fact …) Finally, while someone could extrapolate the notion that I don’t think cryptocurrencies have fundamental value, that would be incorrect, since bitcoin is simply one cryptocurrency.

Here’s something to chew on: “Should facts get in the way of truth?” Or, “Should truth get in the way of facts?”

Your truth (or my truth) and deeply held beliefs are complicated things that can change. But, facts have no feelings.

Her example was photography. Artifact Uprising came out of her original experience with photography, the dramatic shift to digital photography on iPhones and picture storage on Dropbox and Instagram, and the massive overwhelming feeling of having zillions of digital photos. In Jenna’s case, it’s caused a slow down of her photo taking (digital paralysis) because she’s overwhelmed with the massive numbers of photos she now has, doesn’t really have the energy to deal with them, and resists taking more because they’ll just end up along with the other zillions in Dropbox.

I totally identified with this. Amy and I have a huge number of digital artifacts at this point – with our enormous photo library being just one of them. The feeling of paralysis in dealing with them is substantial. After a brief tussle the other day over “hey – just share the photo stream with me of the stuff you are going to take today” followed by a struggle to figure out how to do it the way we wanted to do it and still have the photos end up in the same place, tension ensued and digital paralysis once again set it. I sent myself an email task to “spend an hour with the fucking photos on Dropbox” this weekend which I’ll probably end up avoiding dealing with due to digital paralysis.

Yesterday, my friend Dov Seidman wrote a great article in Fast Company titled Why There’s More To Taking A Break Than Just Sitting There. It’s worth a long, slow read in the context of reacting to being overwhelmed digitally as well as in the general intense pace of life today.

As I sat and thumbed through some of the beautiful photo books that Artifact Uprising creates, I could feel my brain slowing down and being less jangly as I settled into observing and interacting with something not-digital. Try it this weekend, and ponder it while you are taking a break. Pause, and explore why you are pausing, how it feels, and what you are doing about it. And see if it impacts your digital paralysis when you end the pause and go back to the computer.

I spent the afternoon at the Silicon Flatirons conference SciFi and Entrepreneurship – Is Resistance Futile? I thought it was phenomenal and remarkably thought provoking. I came back to my office to find Dane and Eugene playing TitanFall on my 75″ screen. In a few minutes I’m heading out to dinner with my parents, Amy, and John Underkoffler of Oblong who was in town for the conference. The juxtaposition of another intense week rolling into the weekend and a day off the grid intrigues me.

The first panel was a fireside chat between me and William Hertling. William is one of my favorite sci-fi writers who I think has mastered the art of near term science fiction. If you haven’t read any of his three books, I encourage you to head over to William’s website or Amazon and grab them now.

At the end of our fireside chat, we were asked a question. I heard the question as about mortality so I went on a long space jam about how I’ve been struggling with my own mortality for the past 18 months since having a near fatal bike accident (one inch and it would have been lights out.) Up to that point I felt like I had come to terms with my own mortality. I would often say that I believed that when the lights go out, they go out, and it’s all over. And I’m ok with it.

But last fall I realized I wasn’t. And during my depression at the beginning of 2013 I thought often about mortality, how I thought about it, whether I was bullshitting myself for the previous 25 years about being ok with it, and what really mattered about being alive, and being human.

I then handed things over to William. He  proceeded to answer the question that had been asked, which was about morality, not mortality.

Oops.

When he finished and I’d realized what had just happened, I emitted a gigantic belly laugh. And then for the next couple of hours I kept applying the lens of “what really matters” to the discussion about science fiction, entrepreneurship, and the human race.

From the meditation I’ve been doing, I’m definitely exploring “listening to my thoughts” rather than obsessing over them. I’m recognizing that the narrative I’m creating in my brain is just my narrative and doesn’t necessarily have any real meaning, or importance, at all. 150 years from now, I don’t believe any of it will matter. And then, suddenly, the great John Galt quote “It’s not that I don’t suffer, but that I know the unimportance of suffering” comes to mind.

Sometime during the fireside chat, the statement popped out that “I believe the human species dramatically overvalues its importance to the universe.” I think this is going to be a radical point of conflict with the evolution of machines over the next 50 years. At this stage, it’s a part of what gives our lives meaning. There are so many complicated things that happen on a daily basis that create stress, conflict, controversy, and emotional responses. All of them theoretically generate meaning, but when I “listen to my thoughts” I recognize the unimportance of them.

And then I start searching for what really matters. Both to me, and about being human.

See you Sunday.

I stopped doing a few things last year. I stopped traveling for business. I stopped working on Saturdays.

I discovered great relief, and happiness, from stopping doing these things.

As I start 2014, I’ve decided to continue to stop doing things that are neutral to negative utility to me, in an effort to spend more time on the things I want to do, and do them more deeply.

Some of the things I’m stopping are ones that down deep I know are unsatisfying to me. Interacting with government at any level – federal, state, or local – has been a huge negative emotional drain. I’ve put a lot of energy into two issues over the past seven years – startup visa/immigration reform and patent reform. There has been almost zero change in either of these and the experience has been deeply unsatisfying. I’ve been incredibly distressed and agitated by the NSA / Snowden revelations. The idea of municipalization in Boulder, and my interactions around it, bums me out. I’ve realized that it’s not a game I like at all and that whenever I spend time on it, I’m a less happy person. So I’m not going to engage in 2014 and see how that feels.

For the past 25 years, my week days have started at 5am. I started experimenting with that a few months ago and, even though I’ve had some stretches where I’ve gotten up at 5am, I realized the thing I didn’t like was the oppressive crush of scheduled stuff that started at 9am and didn’t end until 6pm. I’ve lived an adult life of “manager mode” with only a few stretches of true “maker mode” and I desperately need – and want – more maker mode. So I’m stopping doing anything scheduled before 11am. I’ll get up whenever I want and my mornings, until 11am MT, will be unscheduled for me to do whatever I want with them.

I’ve been deeply conflicted with alcohol in 2013. I grew up in a house with no alcohol – neither of my parents drank. I drank plenty in college, but limited myself to just booze – no drugs (my parents scared my brother and I straight at an early age.) Over the years, I’ve gone through dry phases – up to five years – where I didn’t drink. In other time periods, including around the Internet bubble and 2013, I found myself drinking more than I felt was ok as I used it to dull the edges of the stress and anxiety. In addition to the negative physical effects, I spent a lot of mental and emotional energy thinking about “am I drinking too much.” I’ve always struggled with abstaining vs. moderating, so 2014 will be a year of abstaining from alcohol.

Many of you out there provided great support, friendship, and advice in 2013. I treasure all of it, even when it’s hard to hear, something I disagree with, or when I am simply not in a head space to act on it. As 2014 begins, I look forward to another year that is an interesting one on this journey called life. And by doing less of the stuff I don’t want to do, I hope to have more time to go deep on the things I want to do.

Happy new year!

While a plethora of entrepreneurship books have come out recently, including the ones I’ve written in the Startup Revolution series, there hasn’t yet been the equivalent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for entrepreneurship.

Matt Blumberg’s new book –Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business – has elements of it and is awesome. It should be out next month and every entrepreneurial CEO should buy a copy of it right now as it’ll be an incredibly important book to read for any CEO at any experience level.

Riz Virk’s post on TechCrunch yesterday – The Zen of Entrepreneurship – also caught my eye. He’s got a book out called Zen Entrepreneurship: Walking the Path of the Career Warrior. He’s sending me a copy but I went ahead and grabbed it on Amazon to read this weekend.

I know Riz from the 1990’s in Boston – I was an advisor to his first company Brainstorm Technologies. It was long ago enough at this point that I don’t know if I was helpful or not, but I had warm feelings toward Riz and smiled when I saw his name pop up again after not seeing it for a while.

Jerry Colonna and I have talked on and off about really digging into this topic and trying to write a philosophical treatise on entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial way that will stand the test of time. I’m not ready to take this on as I’ve got enough on my plate, but I know it’s out there somewhere. In the mean time, I’m psyched to see more CEOs writing real books about entrepreneurship, rather than yet another ego testament to themselves.

Matt and Riz – thanks for putting the effort into this!

On July 18th, Ben wrote a post titled Something I Think I Could Fail At: 10 Day Silent Meditation Program , promptly went to Northern California Vipassana Meditation Center, and went off the grid for ten days. He resurfaced today. His post about his experience is awesome – go read it now.

Amy has done several ten day silent meditation retreats with Goenka. The first time she did it was the longest we had ever not communicated – an entire ten days of zero contact with each other. When she got home, she proceeded to spend five hours telling me everything that had happened over the preceding ten days. I like to tease her about it, but it was fantastic to just sit and listen to her replay her experience.

Ben’s first paragraph sets the tone for the entire post.

It was during the 8-9 PM meditation session on the 8th Day — by then I was 80 hours into the 10 day, 100 hour meditation course — when I experienced something remarkable. I was partially kneeling and partially sitting on a small bench in the meditation hall with about 45 other meditators, doing breathing techniques (anapana) and scanning my body for sensations (vipassana). Shortly after starting the session, my mind became as sharp as I’ve ever felt it in my life. I was in complete control of a lucid, concentrated mind.

I let you read it and I challenge you not to be inspired by it. Not by the amazing accomplishments of Ben during the ten days, or the magical breakthroughs he had, or the powerful new insights, but merely in the experience of how he worked diligently, worked intelligently, worked patiently and persistently at something he thought he could fail at, but he succeeded.

Powerful stuff Ben. Thanks for sharing and inspiring.

At dinner last night, I got into a long conversation about what makes for a fulfilling life. My answer was:

Spend as much time as possible with PEOPLE you love in a PLACE you want to be on a THING you are passionate about.

I believe it’s that simple. What do you think?

Indulge me while I think out loud. I’m trying to decide if I like the phrase “poke people in the eye with the truth” or not. Help me by reacting to the following rant – good, bad, bullshit – and feel free to poke me in the eye with truth if you’ve got some, just give me a hug at the end.

Last week, at the Startup America Regional meeting, I got into a conversation about the role of state and local government in the development of startup communities. I went on my typical rant about how entrepreneurs have to be the leaders and government is a feeder to the startup community. I talked about a few things government can do that have a positive impact and a number of things government does that hurts startup communities. More specifically, I talked about specific types of people in government and their roles, including the people with an “economic development director” title (or something like that – who I’ve come to learn are called “ecodevos” which makes me think of Devo and the B-52s and then my brain goes somewhere completely else other than startup communities and government.)

One of the people I was talking to said “that’s all well and good, but I’m not comfortable telling my fill-in-the-blank-with-a-government-title person this stuff. I’m concerned they won’t respond positively to this. I strongly agree with you on what your saying, however. How should I approach this.”

I responded that “sometimes you just have to poke people in the eye with truth.” Be blunt. Be direct. Be firm. Don’t be an asshole – just say it like you see it. And if they think that makes you an asshole, that’s their loss. And when you are done, give them a hug so they know you care and are trying to be constructive.

I carried that line around with me for a week. I observed myself (which is deliciously meta) poking people in the eye with truth and then giving them a hug. My animal spirit, according to Amy when she’s in an earthy crunchy woowoo moment, is a giant polar bear. I like to think of this as the warm, cuddly, lovable version of a bear – the one that won’t crush you when it hugs you. Somehow these two thoughts merged together in my head and continue to circle around.

I’m at Venture Capital in the Rockies today. This is our annual Colorado VC / entrepreneur thingy. Last night I had dinner with a bunch of entrepreneurs who didn’t have dinner plans. It was last minute and a lot of fun. At the end of the dinner we got into a great conversation about the state of the local VC community and I was characteristically blunt about what I thought had happened, was going on now, and would go on in the future. While I have no idea if I’m right about the future, I made the strong assertion that it doesn’t actually really matter that much given the incredible underlying startup community and incredible entrepreneurial talent in the region.

While on the surface there’s plenty of political correctness about this conversation, and lots of “we need more VC money”, which I’m sure will be echoing in the hallways at VCIR today, I realized that I was once again simply asserting my belief that this didn’t really matter. At dinner, I wasn’t poking any VCs in the eye with the truth since there weren’t any there, but if they had been, I’m sure that’s how they would have felt I was behaving. It probably wouldn’t have been comfortable, but if they’d been willing to respond and challenge my assertions, it would have been a robust conversation.

I’ve got plenty of other examples of this from the last week, but you get the gist of this. Is “poke people in the eye with truth” a good phrase, or just nonsense?

I had to read that sentence twice. I simply didn’t believe it. Fortunately this one will go to the Supreme Court. The punch line from Justice Breyer is right on the money: “If you win this case, there is nothing to prevent the police or government from monitoring 24 hours a day every citizen of the United States.”

GPS tracking. Hey – did you know that you can already track me through my cell phone without my permission? How about a little tag sewn into all clothing that uniquely identifies me. Or maybe something injected under my skin. Giving the government the right to do it without probable cause or any process, or suggesting that someone doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy,  just feels evil to me.

The depth of the ethics of these issues are going to be significant over the next decade. It will be trivial for any of us to be tracked all the time without our knowledge. Don’t want a device – how about image recognition view the web of surveillance cameras everywhere.

I don’t have any answer for this, but I have a lot of questions and ideas. And I’m glad that I live in the US where presumably my civil liberties, privacy, and freedom of speech are sacred. I know there are plenty of people in the US that don’t agree with this, or believe that the government should have more control around this to “keep out or find the bad guys.”

Philosophically this is a hard and complex discussion and has been since the creation of the United States of America. The difference, right now, is that technology is about to take another step function leap that no one is ready for, or is thinking about, or even understands, that will create an entirely new set of dynamics in our society. Our government, especially leaders in Congress, the White House, and the Judicial System need to get much smarter – fast – about how this works. SOPA / PIPA is an example of terrible legislation that runs the risk of massively impacting innovation and individual freedom of speech. But it’s just a start – there is a lot more coming.

Denying that there is going to be a dramatic shift in how humans and computers interact is insane. Trying to hold on to incumbent business models and stifle innovation through legislation is dumb. Trying to create complex laws to contain and manage the evolution of technology, especially when it transfers power from innovators to non-innovators, or from the rights of private citizens to the government, is a mistake and will fail long term. Trying to repress free speech of any sort is wrong and won’t be sustainable.

I live in a world where you can’t anticipate or control change. It’s coming – and fast. Let’s embrace it and use it for good, not resist is and try to surpress it in the name of “protecting ourself from bad actors.” I pledge to do my best to always be thoughtful about it and be a force for good in the world. But please, don’t deny the inevitable – embrace it, and build off of it. It’s what makes America amazing and extremely durable long term.

I enjoyed this book. As I was reading it, I kept coming up with alternate titles like Everything is Bullshit, The Macro is Irrelevant, Humans Don’t Reason Well, Common Sense Fucks Us Up, Predictions are Useless, and Attributing Things To Abstract Collections of Stuff Like Crowds, Markets, Companies, etc. is Stupid.

Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University and a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research. For those of you who think social science is garbage, he’s also a real scientist with a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics. Basically, he’s a smart, well educated dude who has strong reasoning skills and is an excellent writer.

This book reinforced several deeply held beliefs that I have:

• The macro doesn’t matter in the long run.
• Predictions are irrelevant.
• Most people don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it.
• Anything can be explained in hindsight, and the explanation is often wrong.
• The media introduces massive bias into most phenomenon so ignore the media if you really want to understand something.
• Trying things, measuring everything, and iterating aggressively is the best way to figure out what works.

There are probably others. Watts beautifully takes apart a bunch of stories that are viewed as either “common sense”, “conventional wisdom”, or “counter-intuitive truths.” It’s a beautiful thing to read him dissect the popularity of the Mona Lisa and Shakespeare in the same book that he explains why some of the nonsensical assertions of Malcolm Gladwell that are repeated as gospel (including the hilariously stupid Paul Revere / William Dawes analysis), followed by an explanation of the faulty reasoning around the spread of SARS.

The second half of the book is where the good stuff is. Part 1 is “Common Sense” and sets the stage by explaining how as humans we regularly misinterpret what’s going on for a variety of reasons, including our belief about what common sense is and how it works. Part 2 is “Uncommon Sense” and for those of you searching for tools on how to deal with the world more effectively, there is plenty of chocolately goodness here.

I have no idea how much of Watts analysis is actually correct, but his assertions about what blinds us, causes us to make crummy decisions, and results in us believing things we can’t possibly understand sang to me.

I met James for the first time at Defrag this year. Eric Norlin invited him. A few of my friends told me I had to see his talk. It was awesome. Now – a bunch of the Defrag talks were superb but James was early in the first day and he set the tone. I can’t remember whether he was before or after Tim Bray but they were back to back and all I remember after they were both done was exhaling a deep breath and saying to myself “fuck – that was great!”

James’ book was in my Defrag swag bag (legendary – one of the best anywhere) and I finally emptied it out the other day. I’m reading a book a day over the next two weeks and this was my book today.

It was perfect timing. On my 90 minute run today alone (no humans at all) in the mountains behind my house in Keystone, I kept thinking about SOPA. I’ve been incredibly agitated the last few days by SOPA after watching three hours of the House Judicial Committee hearing on Friday. SOPA is such an evil thing at so many levels and the people in the House that want it to happen appear to refuse to listen to facts or logic, and – when they talk about what they are confronted with – claim the facts and logic aren’t actually factual or logical. The noise in my brain about this kept drifting away as I thought to myself “how strange that there is snow only on the left side of the trail” or “I wonder if there will be any good movies next weekend since all the ones this weekend are shit” or “how awesome is it that there are no other humans out here” but then would be interrupted by angry thoughts about the chairman of the house judiciary committee who is the sponsor of this bill, the people on the house judiciary committee that are clearly “the henchman”, the absurd process that is unfolding – and then I’d start thinking about my breathing again and the fact that my heart rate was above 160 and that felt good.

James takes us through his chaotic mind, his successes and failures, his struggles and depressions, as he gets to the point where he very clearly tells us that only one thing really matters – one’s own happiness. He proceeds to describe a series of completely fucked up things that get in the way of it. He prescribes a very simple way to be happy, which includes a number of things I do and often suggest such as don’t watch TV, don’t read newspapers, exercise daily, get plenty of sleep, stretch your mind every day, ignore all the crappy people in the world, don’t worry about things you can’t impact, recognize that many parts of the macro (government, banks, education) are irrelevant to your well being, and don’t roll around in the mud with a pig.

But most of all he reminds us to just be honest all the time about everything. In my experience, this is the most liberating thing of all on the quest for happiness. Anyone who spends time with me knows I try to always do this regardless of the implications.

Be honest. Be happy. We all die eventually.

I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the first time in 1975 when I was about 10 years old. I’ve read it several times over the last 35 years, but probably hadn’t read it in over a decade. My first business partner, Dave Jilk (now the Standing Cloud founder / CEO), gave it to me as a birthday gift last week.

I just read it again and it was as powerful, inspiring, and enlightening as I remembered it. I’m often asked what books I’d recommend to an entrepreneur (especially an aspiring entrepreneur). There are two: Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Whenever we are in the upswing of an entrepreneurial cycle, like we are right now, I start seeing all kinds of weird stuff appear. Random people, who get notoriety for themselves, blow up. The media is aggressively negative presumably in the quest for getting readership. Entitlement behavior runs rampant. The quick buck artists appear. Money becomes a central topic of many conversations. Established companies and government suddenly wake up to the power of innovation and try to co-opt the energy. The word bubble becomes so popular that a bubble builds around using the word bubble.

The great entrepreneurs just keep building their companies. They focus relentlessly on their products, their customers, and their people. They create things that delight, take chances, make mistakes, and iterate as they, and their organizations, get better. They just keep at it and the very best ones shut out and ignore all the noise. And they learn, and learn, and learn.

Just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Young Jonathan realizes he is different and then outcast, but he discovers himself. He then discovers others like him, including his great mentors. He learns, experiments, tries new things, makes mistakes, and learns. And learns. And then he becomes the mentor and teaches other young seagulls to discover themselves. Throughout, he does what he loves the most – he flies, and practices, and learns.

If you are an entrepreneur, take one hour out of your day this week and read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And then spend another hour, alone, thinking about it. I assure you that it’ll be worth the time.

Recently, while pondering how Yoda would deal with Optimus Prime, I got a tweet from FAKEGRIMLOCK asking if I wanted a guest post from him. Without hesitation I said yes. Following in all its awesomeness (with illustrations), is another missive from my favorite Dinobot.

BE ON FIRE

WORLD FULL OF IDEA. ALL NEED IS BRAIN. MOST HUMANS HAVE BRAIN.

IDEA BY SELF IS COLD. JUST SIT THERE. DO NOTHING.

IF WANT DO SOMETHING, NEED FIRE.

NEED BE ON FIRE.

WHY BURNING MATTER

MAKE STARTUP HARD. IT HARD BECAUSE YOU WRONG. YOU FAIL.

FAIL COLD? GO HOME. QUIT.

YOU NOT QUIT. YOU BURN. FAIL IS FUEL. MORE FAIL, MORE BURN. BURN FAIL UNTIL ONLY WIN LEFT.

THAT WHY BURNING MATTER. NOTHING STOP PERSON ON FIRE. NOT SLEEP. NOT SICK. NOT BROKE. NOT BULLET. NOT END OF EARTH.

NOTHING.

FIRE MAKE SMOKE

ANGER IS SMOKE. FIRE DESTROY. DESTROY MAKE NEW THINGS GROW. COLD PEOPLE HATE FIRE. NO ONE WANT TO BE FERTILIZER. FIRE NOT CARE.

LOYALTY IS SMOKE. PEOPLE FOLLOW FIRE, GET HOT. NOTHING STOP PERSON ON FIRE. PERSON ON FIRE WRAPPED IN HOT CROWD? THAT FIRE CHANGE WORLD.

WIN IS SMOKE. PERSON ON FIRE NOT CARE ABOUT WIN. NOT CARE ABOUT MONEY, FAME. WIN HAPPEN WHEN BUSY DO THINGS THAT MATTER. THINGS ON FIRE.

WHERE IS FIRE? LOOK FOR ANGER. MIDDLE OF ANGER IS CHANGE. MIDDLE OF CHANGE IS HOT CROWD. MIDDLE OF HOT CROWD IS WIN. MIDDLE OF WIN IS FIRE.

HOW MAKE FIRE?

WORLD IS BROKEN. FIX IT.

RIGHT IDEA HARD. RIGHT IDEA HURT. RIGHT IDEA IS HOLE IN WORLD.

RIGHT IDEA MAKE BURN INSIDE TO FIX. CAN TAKE DAY OFF FROM IDEA? IT WRONG ONE.

FIND IDEA THAT BURN, GRAB WITH BOTH HANDS, NEVER LET GO.

THAT HOW MAKE FIRE.

YOU MUST BURN

EVERYONE THINK WAY TO STARTUP IS TALENT + IDEA + MONEY.

EVERYONE WRONG.

STARTUP NOT ABOUT MAKE THING, SELL THING. STARTUP ABOUT CHANGE WORLD.

WORLD IS COLD. YOU MUST LIGHT WORLD ON FIRE.

YOUR FIRE.

YOU. MUST. BURN.

In order to stay on the #NOEATFRIDAY list, I promised FAKEGRIMLOCK that this would be licensed under Creative Commons. Anyone can do anything they want with this, including FAKEGRIMLOCK (as long as no infinite loops are created.)

We covered a lot of stuff around entrepreneurship, creators, the magic of doing things, the importance of asking “why”, and my belief that we are in the midst of a massive societal behavior shift. One of the questions that a long time friend asked was something like “My daughter is in high school and worries about the path she needs to be on to make sure when she gets out of college that she gets a good job. If you were me, what would you tell her?”

I don’t have kids so I don’t really feel qualified to answer this from a parents perspective, but I answered it with a story of three key things my dad said to me between the ages of 10 and 17 that had a profound impact on what I’ve done and how I live my life.

Age 10: You can do anything you want: My dad is a doctor. He came home for dinner every night but would often go back to the hospital in the evening (and on weekend) to do rounds and visit patients. Until I was 10 I’d often go with him. I loved hanging out with him, would bring a book, and plop down at the nurses station and read while I waited for him to go about his business. At 10, I decided I had no interest in being a doctor. I didn’t like the way hospitals smelled, I didn’t like the noise and the chaos, and I lost interest in all the doctors I was meeting. I remember telling my dad that I didn’t want to be a doctor. I blurted it out – think of a very nervous 10 year old just spitting out “Dad – I don’t want to be a doctor.” I remember my dad looking me in the eye and saying very clearly, “Brad – that’s ok – you can do anything you want to do.”

Age 13: We didn’t want to discourage you so we were supportive: When I was 10 – 13 I was a serious tennis play. I played all the time and was on the Texas junior tennis circuit. I was pretty good – consistently getting to the quarterfinals in singles and occasionally the semifinals. When I turned 13 I bought a computer for my bar mitzvah. I also hit puberty and discovered girls. I lost interest in tennis. Recently I was talking to dad about this and wondered what he thought at the time. He said that he and my mom were supportive of my tennis, but were relieved when I decided to quit playing. They were sick of schlepping me around Highway 80 and other places in Texas to spend the whole weekend watching me play, scream and yell, throw my racket, and then mope when I eventually lost. He said “I didn’t want to discourage you, so we were supportive, but we were relieved when you went down a different path.”

Age 17: Give it a year: My first two months at MIT were awful. I was homesick – all my friends, including my girlfriend, had gone to UT Austin. I got a 20 on my first physics test and went in my room for an hour and cried. I was completely overwhelmed by Cambridge and Boston – the people, the dirt, and the hustle of the city. The fraternity I lived in was filthy. The early winter chill startled me. And I thought Dallas, where I grew up, was the greatest place on early. My parents came and visited me in mid-October for a weekend. We were walking around on a crisp fall day in Concord, MA when I told them I hated MIT and wanted to drop out and go to UT with all of my friends. We talked to for a while – with my parents mostly listening – and then my dad said “You’ve only been here two months. Give it a year. If you still hate it after a year, switch to UT. But give it enough time to really understand it.” I ended up staying at MIT, getting two degrees, dropping out of a PhD program (I finally got to achieve my desire to drop out), and – while many of my days at MIT were brutal, I ended up loving the experience and treasure the impact it has had on my life.

I’m really lucky to have parents who have been awesome and incredibly supportive of me. When I reflect on the things that shaped the path I’ve taken, it was often short little one liners like these at a critical moment. My dad was just magical with his timing and his message. I can only hope I can be as good as he is.

We’ve been investors in Dov’s company LRN for the past decade and over the last five years I’ve gotten to know Dov and his wife Maria pretty well. They are a dynamic entrepreneurial couple, as Maria is founder / CEO of a new company called Yapp. In addition to being hard at work creating their companies and raising a family, they both live incredibly principled lives. How they do this is embodied in Dov’s philosophy about HOW.

Ever since I’ve know Dov, he’s talked about the importance of HOW. Not what, not why, not how much – just simply HOW. We’ve had our share of long conversations about a variety of topics, but they all come back to the HOW of things.

Dov believes that HOW is everything. It’s not what you do that matters, but how you do it. LRN exists to help businesses understand and incorporate this concept, as the historical approach to business has been all about “how much”, and if you read, ponder, think carefully about, and internalize Dov’s writing and philosophy, you quickly realize that “how much” is irrelevant when lined up against HOW as a construct.

While this applies to business, it also applies to life. My favorite part of working with and talking to Dov is just letting our conversations go wherever they want. While we occasionally stay focused on business, we often drift into wide ranging discussions about our individual lives, HOW we address things, and HOW it all works, and HOW we think about it.

Sure, there is plenty of why and what and where and who in our conversations, and I continue to be a very strong believer in the use of the five whys (continually asking why to get to the root cause of things), but I’m also a deep believer in asking about and focusing on the HOW.

I have dinner with Dov on Monday night and am looking forward to it very much. In the mean time, I encourage you to get a copy of How, read it thoughtfully, and think hard about the HOW in everything you do.