I’ve been doing a whole series of Unique Genius Superhero Interviews (including some new ones coming in the next several weeks of people like Yanik Silver, George Kao, Clay Collins & Amy Applebaum), but now it was my turn to be interviewed, this time by Ali Berlin.

Ali Berlin (a life coach in San Francisco with a Saturday morning radio show) interviewed me recently about topics like:

• Why I started PebbleStorm
• Where the inspiration came from
• How and why I broke away from the corporate world
• the inspiration for Unique Genius,
• tips and advice on finding your own Unique Genius (even if you have a full-time job and family and have little free time and energy)

The interview is a great first introduction to my own story and what PebbleStorm and Unique Genius is all about…including some practical tips

Listen To Or Download The Audio Interview

Or Download The Interview

Ali Berlin’s Original Post

On AliBerlin.com: “Make Money Through Enjoyment with Aaron Ross”

Have More Questions For Me?

Leave a comment and I’ll answer them!

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I can feel confused. I can be overwhelmed.  I get anxious.  I feel all the same stuff you do. The fear comes up…but I don’t let it stop me from moving forward, even if ‘forward’ is a babystep.

Babysteps, no matter how small, are one of my main “get unstuck” practices. I LOVE babysteps!

Here’s a two minute video of me sharing about what I did when I was feeling totally overwhelmed last week:

What I Created

In the video I share the next step that gave me a real sense of relief.  Below is the landing page I drafted in Powerpoint.

If you haven’t done one before, or anything like it, it might look like a lot of work.  It wasn’t – I’d already written much of this content up in different places, or in my Unique Genius webinars and invitations.  For me, the challenge was removing content to leave behind the least, best stuff (click on it to enlarge it):

Related Posts

• Using Rocks & Babysteps To Overcome The Fear
• Fear is Natural – Just Get Started

Do you worry about being transparent with clients and friends? It’s much easier to be this way and BE YOURSELF…rather than putting on a mask of perfection.

What Do You Do When You Feel Like This?

Please leave a comment, I and others would love to hear from you and get your advice!

One my essential entrepreneurial practices is a morning Personal Success Routine (“PSR”), that is my foundation for the day.  If you don’t have one or you never consciously designed it – you need one.  If you have one, I’d love to hear about yours in the comments.  I’ve found that when I don’t follow some kind of morning Personal Success Routine that includes some or all of various meditation, writing, exercise or happiness activities, I feel less healthy, less happy and less productive – both in the ways I have fun and in work.

Why I had to figure this out

When I left salesforce.com in late 2006, “my plan was to have no plan” -  I was “committed to being uncommitted”!  I wanted to have a bunch of different work and life adventures, for at least six months, before settling into a long-term direction. In work terms, that meant doing consulting projects for awhile rather than trying to start my own company right away.  I’ve seen that when I or others jump from one job/career to another, it’s impossible to get the mental space and clarity that helps you actually consciously know “is this really the right path/step for me, or am I doing it just because it’s the next rung on the ladder or it’s convenient?”   (Not unlike relationships.)

Whenever I was in a 9-to-5 job, it automatically forced me to create a morning routine – wakeup at 7a, eat oatmeal, shower, get dressed in a collared shirt, get coffee, read the paper, take the bus to work…etc.  (As I’m writing this, I’m noticing how much my morning consumptions changed – no coffee, oatmeal or newspapers.  I’m a little allergic/sensitive to coffee and oats, and I don’t read news anymore – online or offline.)

No daily structure can be as bad as too much structure

After I left the 9-to-5 world, I had to figure out a whole new morning routine for myself. I mean sure, it’s fun waking up to nothing for awhile…but it gets old.  When you have no morning or daily structure, it can be as irritating as having too much structure.  And even though I’d been an entrepreneur before, it was different because I was the CEO of a company…and thus had another 9-to-5 job.

• Side note for everyone who thinks being a CEO is automatically fun, enlivening and easy – it’s not. It can be the loneliest, most stressed role in a company, if you aren’t conscious in your design of your company or role.  It’s why I’m also doing CEOFlow: “Turn Your Employees Into Mini-CEOs”.

So now in my PebbleStormy (yes, that’s a word) world of “work on what I want, when I want, with whom I want, from where I want…” I’ve been experimenting for a long time on how to start my days off on the right foot.  Trust me, either lying in bed or doing nothing in the morning gets old fast – well, if I do it more than 1-2 days per week…

My routine that helps me feel healthier, happier and more focused and productive each day

1. Get enough sleep.  I’m actually working on getting more sleep. I’m only getting about 6 hours per night (last night I got 5).  I want 7 – 7.5 hours per night, which is perfect for me.  The whole “sleep when I’m dead” mentality is bullshizz.  What good is not sleeping if you don’t enjoy your days as much?  I feel like crap when I don’t get enough sleep after a few days, and am much less clear and productive.   Right now I set my alarm for 7am.
2. Drink water. 1-2 cups. I get dehydrated at night. It’s the best thing to have before anything else in the morning.
3. Get moving, I do either some jumping jacks, push ups and/or sit ups. This is both for the exercise and to wake up and get my blood moving.
4. Meditation. I do 10-30 minutes almost every morning.  It would be nice if I was more regular about meditating for 5 minutes before bed, too.  I did a blog post about my practice: A lifetime happiness and focus enhancer: Vipassana meditation. If you’ve never meditated before, you can start with 1-2 minutes: Meditation 101: How To Start.
   
5. The Artist Way “Morning Pages”. The essence of this: just write three pages of anything, even gibberish, every morning, and it will help you unlock your creativity.  I really like these as a way to do a brain chatter dump, and get some advice from myself. Sometimes I just do half a page, sometimes the full three pages.
   
6. 1-2 happiness/centering exercises. These days I’ll do some exercises from either the Hoffman Institute retreat I did or from the Abraham-Hicks book “Ask And It Is Given” (I love their Focus Wheel Process).  I HIGHLY recommend that book for both the content and all the great tools in the back!
7. A “3 goals” process. I ask myself the question, “if I can only get 3-5 things done today, what should they be?”  What are my top priorities?
8. Exercise: 4-5 days a week I do either running (20-45 min down to the Santa Monica beach) or yoga in the morning (I love Rudy at 9am at Power Yoga in Santa Monica).  If I run, I do it early – after I drink water, but before all the other stuff (before meditation, etc).  When I do yoga, it comes after my writing/meditation.
9. Skin brushing: I had a couple of trusted experts tell me about this, and now I do it most days before showering.  There are plenty of articles about skin brushing and why it’s good for you, but I’ll tell you the main reason I like it – it stimulates my skin and nerves and body like I’m getting a caffeine charge.  Very cool.
10. Good food: Almost every morning, I have a green smoothie (picture on Facebook).  I have a Vita-Mix blender, and dump in spinach (a lot!), an apple, berries, and all kinds of superfoods and goodies like ginger, lemon, mesquite, rice protein, flaxseed, hempseed, maca, goji berries and spirulina.  You can google “green smoothie” online for all kinds of suggestions.  I became religious about this after taking an amazing ‘uncooking’ class from June Louks in Malibu, who wrote a great book called  “Rawumptious Recipes: A Family’s Adventure to Healthy, Happy, Harmonious Living”.  I’m not a raw foodie, but can appreciate all the information and recipes.

I’m always experimenting with these steps, adding, subtracting, playing.  The order of steps often changes depending on the day and whether I’m running, doing yoga, am time-limited, etc.  I’m not too anal about it.

This might seem like a lot – and it is.  I set aside a couple of hours for all of this, not including the exercise.  That’s how important it is to me. I didn’t start here, I evolved this over the past three years, building on it step-by-step, then starting from scratch and trying other things. My travel still plays havoc with my PSR!

Take babysteps rather than jumping in too fast

You don’t need a lot of steps in the morning, or some complex routine.  Start with something simple, such as a green smoothie.  Or 1-2 minutes of meditation.  Create a plan to have a more exensive PSR over time, including good food, exercise, meditation, happiness awareness/practice and goal-setting.  If you try to do too much too quickly, you’ll be more likely to fall off track at some point and get discouraged.  Start with one thing at a time – take babysteps, and keep at them.   Keep it simple and add one new practice per month.  If you fall off track, just get back on when you can.

[Updated] Being kind to myself

I woke up Monday morning feeling run-down (it started Sunday night), and I needed a rest day. So my PSR for Monday was staying in bed sleeping and/or reading a fiction book until 11am    Being successful includes being kind/easy to myself in addition to pushing myself.  Too much of one or the other unbalances me.

How I Design My Week For Success

A follow up post about designing my week:

http://pebblestorm.com/2010/03/12/how-i-design-my-week-for-success/

“Productive Flourishing” Charley Gilkey’s PSR

If you really want to take this thinking to the next level, check out Charlie Gilkey:
How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive

What’s your PSR?   Please share in the comments!

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Yes, this is me around 4 years old. If I could only go back in time and give myself some advice that I’d actually listen to and obey…

I think you’ll know what I mean when I say I used to rush around in work so much that I never had a chance to pause, breathe and reflect on what was working and not working in, um, work.

How often do we stop and reflect?  (Or even just stop?)  Not enough!  Yet it was taking a pause (in the form of a trip to Asia waaaaaay back in mid-2007), that helped create the mental space for the vision of PebbleStorm.

The phrase that comes to mind is “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”  Anything with the word “doom”, I want to avoid!

On October 28, we had a PebbleStorm webinar on “Lessons Learned” since PebbleStorm’s launch back in March.  Specifically, I’ve been thinking about “what advice would I give myself back then?”, what 3-5 pieces of advice would I share to help me be more successful with greater ease, clarity and fun?  I’ve been asking what advice the other PebbleStormers would give their prior selves too… so that we can all benefit from it.

What We Shared:

• I’ll share my own Top 5 Lessons Learned from doing this program over the past six months. What advice would I give my past self?
• Some other PebbleStormers will be sharing as well – what would advice would they give their past selves?
• The two most popular pieces of advice that people shared will surprise you!
• What works?  What have people accomplished?
• Funny enough, all these lessons learned are ones YOU can still learn from, that yourself of six months in the future would tell you now!

To Watch The Recording Or View The Slides, Register Here:

Once you register, you will receive an email with the links.  If you don’t get an email in your inbox right away, try it again – you might have misspelled your email.

The Programs & Roadmap

A) Feed Your Freedom “FYF”
I’ve found it’s almost impossible for people to access their Unique Genius if they are stressed because of either a lack of time/mental space or money.  This program is designeded for professionals who want a mix of regular income ($5k-$10k/mo) and freedom (work just 1-3 days/week):
www.PebbleStorm.com/feed-your-freedom

B) Unique Genius
For anyone wondering what they want to do next, or what their life purpose is:
www.PebbleStorm.com/uniquegenius

C) CEOFlow Freedom: “Turn your employees into mini-CEOs”
This is for business owners/CEOs with employees, who are feeling overwhelmed and that her business has trapped you…more details on CEOFlow Freedom.

CEOFlow Sales: “Create predictable revenue (CPR)”
“CPR” here underlies all the other programs, because it’s hard to enjoy making money if 1) you aren’t making it, or 2) it isn’t predictable.  This program for now is focused on sales coaching/consulting for companies who want to ramp up sales or make sales more predictable.  The concepts will be a part of Feed Your Freedom as well, but in that case it’s about creating predictable income
www.PebbleStorm.com/cpr

CEOFlow Adventure
(Coming)…once you have money and freedom, why not some adventure and more fun?  This gets your juices flowing and will stimulate ideas and your culture to keep your sales and inspiration going!

Unique Genius – Helping Yourself Through Others

Not coincidentally, all of this is the same path I’ve personally been on and will be on (did you know your Unique Genius is about solving your own problems, past/present/future, for others?). Yes, that’s my own roadmap above – I’m right at the beginning of the green area!

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(By the way, the picture is from a PebbleStorm Treasure Map Hike on Sunday in LA…hence the eyepatch!).

Below is an excerpt from an email I sent to the PebbleStorm group going through the “Come Play With Us” program.  I’m posting it for two reasons: to practice non-perfectionism (is that a word?), and to declare that I’m on a kick to let go of perfectionism, which is an  Enjoyment Enemy. Besides creating unneeded pressure, it just gets in the way of progress.  Ever heard the term “perfection is procrastination”?

“Perfectionism spells paralysis.”
— Winston Churchill

I, we, can’t be enjoying ourselves fully if we’re worrying about things being ‘perfect’.  How often does being perfect get in your way, either in life or work?

I’ve let go of a lot of perfectionism over the past couple of years (my father might say I never had it, after so many years of seeing messy rooms ).  I didn’t even see it until recently, when I started helping people overcome their own perfectionism, both the progress that I’d made and how much farther I have to go.

When you’re in your own room for a long time, you get used to the dirt. Also, when your room is really dirty, a little more dirt doesn’t show up.  You see things in a new light when you visit a neighbor’s room. And when you leave your neighbor’s room, you carry a new perspective with you back to your room.  Seeing others’ perfectionism has made me more aware of my own, and how it gets in the way of enjoyment. It’s a new smudge to be aware of and let go of.  My room’s getting cleaner, so smaller smudges become much more obvious.  Of course, the room never(?) gets perfectly clean… there’s always another smudge to clean…

Hey, there’s a perfectionism lesson even here, in that we, to be happy, have to be accepting of having smudges, even as we work to clean them up!  ‘Cuz they’ll never completely go away.

Before I move on, here are a couple of ways I manage my perfectionism…throwing rocks, as I described in “Using rocks & babysteps to dodge the fear“, and “bursting” as I wrote about in the “Big Aaron Update…Bursting…”

[UPDATED] When perfectionism can be useful

Like anything in life, perfectionism can be helpful or hurtful, depending on your relationship with it.  When it prevents you from getting started or from finishing things, it’s an enemy!  When it can help you complete a project in a way that delivers an amazing experience, it can actually be a friend.  The key is noticing how it affects you, so that you can avoid getting trapped by it and instead can use it to help you with your goals.

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Hi everyone!

1) Teams Update
[yadda yadda yadda...]

2) Some great enhancement ideas from my 8p call tonight  (Thank you Jim Belden, Onna and Erin Halling!!):
i. A 1 day game” babystep. Erin Halling had a great idea to make it simpler to practice the “Play” concepts!  The example she used was to create a game out of moving, in which she’d win by finishing moving by a certain time, and an example rule would be having to stop to jump around and be silly every 2 hours   More to come… Reminder  – have fun with thinking of games, there is no reason to be ‘perfect’ here. Perfect is NOT fun – messy is fun!

ii. A Serendipity Board that lists the games and players, as they’re created. Thank you Onna!!!  Here’s an example from a local open house event we held last year:
http://pebblestorm.com/2008/09/08/a-serendipity-board/

iii. A “Design Your Game” template, that will be created as I work with the first few people in creating some games.  Thank you Onna!!!

iv. A “Meet Your PebbleStormers” call on the Wednesday between webinars, to give a chance for people who want to meet and connect with more people to do so (anyone have suggestions for icebreakers?).  Thank you Erin!!

3) Lastly  – I’m asking for help (and will continue to)
Whew!  By the way – I can see that there’s no way I’ll be able to create all this, and the other ideas that will come up, by myself (I can’t do it all myself – mental note).  Anyone interested in helping me with any particular pebble(s), in addition to Erin and Onna?   Or ones you might think of but I don’t have here?  You know it’d be fun to do together!!

My own perfectionism & ego
I have a hard time asking for help, which is related to both own perfectionism and ego (I don’t like looking bad as much as the next person).  I’m going to keep letting this go, and will appreciate your support in doing it!   Perfectionism is one of the worst enemies of PebbleStorm and enjoyment, and one I’m going to be paying attention to in myself, so that I can help others avoid it too.

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Here are some stats about the launch webinar (thank you again Yanik Silver!)…

…..Registrants for the March 17 PebbleStorm webinar: 1300
…..Number of people who joined live on it: 350
…..Players in the PebbleStorm “Come Play With Me” game: 15 (sold out)
…..Amount of money spent on marketing: $0
…..Receiving messages like these: “Thanks for making the world more of the place I want to live”,  “Discovering you and your work through Yanik has been a real turning point for me and I will forever be grateful to both of you“, and “It was fabulous and I’m buzzing with all the possibilities“: PRICELESS

So why should you care?  Because my mission is to help you do exactly this! I’m practicing my own principles, then distilling them for you so that you can join me.

Priceless Gratification

What does ‘make money through enjoyment’ mean?  It means you can create a business that makes you money, and has a big, positive impact on people’s lives and the world (in fact, the better/bigger the impact, the better the buiness will do).

Personally, here’s an example of priceless gratification from Sarah Levinson, who wrote “You know what happened after listening to this webinar?

1. I was able to sleep better
2. I began to feel much happier about my life in general, and about my original goals for work and my purpose in life.
3. The next day at work I applied the principle of enjoyment. IT WORKED!” [Aaron: I'll post her example in a separate post on applying enjoyment]

And I make money from this, too?  Yay!! 

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Webinar replay with audio

(Sound quality improves at minute 20)

For a long time, when people asked “how do I get started with you and PebbleStorm?”, I didn’t have an answer!  As part of the launch, I created a page that summarizes how people can do something with PebbleStorm:

www.PebbleStorm.com/Get-Started

[UPDATE 6/28/09 By the way, the best link to find out how to get started with PebbleStorm is now www.PebbleStorm.com/UniqueGenius]

Interested in online self-study courses? I had requests from people who can’t join now, but would at least like to sign up for the game but as a self-study version, in which you can go through the game and courses on your own.  I’m not sure when I’ll create it, but it will be in months, not weeks or years.  If you’d like to be a beta player to help me test it before public release, write me at aaron at pebblestorm dot com.

Overdoing enjoyment

You know when you’re so busy that you lose track of time and days?  And not in a good way, but in a mentally overloaded way?  Because that’s how my head’s been the past several days/week, because my main businesses and projects (PebbleStorm, CEOFlow, DataSalad, ColdCalling2.com and Nitro.la) are all gelling right now, in great ways, and need real attention. Which, because there’s a traffic jam of goodness, is becoming a pain in my azz.

For example, Yanik Silver’s hosting my first PebbleStorm webinar (“Here’s an Uncommon Way to Discover Your ‘Unique Genius’ – Combining What You Love with Real Satisfaction and Financial Independence”) in two weeks, on March 17 (register here).  I’m also holding CEOFlow events in both Southern and Northern California, organizing a Nitro.la event, and will also be updating the content on ColdCalling2.com, among other things…

March is going to be a month of overload, a big ol’ bite of the apple.

Extremes of any kind aren’t sustainable

The thing is, I love all these businesses and the people I’m doing them with!  Yet things go wrong when we go to extremes, even with enjoyment, and get outside of our sustainable pace.  I feel like a glutton at the dessert bar, stuffed from eating too much, but unable to stop…

So of course rather than meditate, play Wii, go for a walk or a motorcycle ride, I decide to do a blog post about all this and add some gas to the fire!  Yep I’m laughing at myself.  Ah, what I won’t do for my readers

Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it

The first inspirations for PebbleStorm came to me back in July/August 2007, when I was at the VC firm Alloy Ventures in Palo Alto, CA (I will do a dedicated blog post on the ‘origins of PebbleStorm’ sometime).   After doing about three months of research into the b2b lead generation space, I had 10-12 ideas for projects or businesses that I wanted to do.  They all seemed so interesting to me that I didn’t want to have to pick just one.  I mean, if you had 10 children, could you choose just one you wanted to keep, and then leave the rest behind?

I got my bunch of businesses

Trust me, I am not complaining.  This is a great problem to have, and I love all this stuff – again, so much so that sometimes I can’t stop, even when I should.  One of my habits, which I’ve gotten MUCH better at since starting PebbleStorm, is overdoing things and going to extremes.  Sort of like when I ran myself into a hyponatremia coma in a triathlon in 2001.

Of course, that pattern is also what led to me creating PebbleStorm (“I want to work on what I want, when I want, with whom I want, from where I want”), which is a seriously extreme way of thinking about work, in its own way!

80% patience, 20% bursts

As much as I counsel patience, babysteps, taking things slowly and more patience, it does make sense to regularly turn on the juice and burst for a few hours (fun!), days (ok) or weeks (yuck).  Patience gives you the clarity of exactly what you need or want to get done; bursting gets it done very quickly.  You gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em, and how to balance the two modes.  I burst for 1-4 hours at a time, and preferably with one of my business partners.  I’ll break longer bursts into 1-hour chunks with their own goals.

What I mean by “burst”

When I use the term burst, I don’t mean just working on random stuff for a few hours. I mean sitting down with a very specific goal (launch a website, draft a webinar, publish a blog post, draft and send an event invitation…), for a defined time period (1 hour, 2 hours…), shutting out distractions, and getting it DONE. For example, I might budget an hour to publish a blog post, or two to revise a Sales Success Kit document – and the time limit keeps me focused on getting it done.  

This is really the first time since starting PebbleStorm that I have a good reason to burst for a few weeks/a month.  I’m not sure if this will lead to changes in my ongoing routines or not, but I’ll pay attention to it.

The burst that created a profitable business in four hours: ColdCalling2.com

Here’s an example of how I burst: a couple of weeks ago, Onna Young (CEO of ColdCalling2.com) and I created a profitable product and business/website in about four hours, after doing some basic preparation and goal-setting.  We had fun with it, and made it into a game: “How can we create a site and sellable product in just four hours?”  In that time, we created the ebook, Success Kit and website www.ColdCalling2.com.

(Well, technically we lost, since it took us 4 hours and 15 minutes.  But don’t tell anyone.)

It wasn’t magic, just the application of PebbleStorm’s principles and PebbleStorm’s 5 Stages.  I’ll discuss it some more in the March 17 PebbleStorm webinar.

On the personal front…meditation, exercise, a home in Santa Monica

Meditation: It’s been about three months since I attended a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat (“A lifetime happiness and focus enhancer: Vipassana meditation”).  I’ve been meditating about every 2 out of 3 days – sometimes for 5 minutes, sometimes for 30 minutes.  It’s a bit of mental calm.  I’m still playing with my practice, but I’m feeling like 30 minutes most mornings, and 10-15 at night, is where I’m heading to over the coming months.

Exercise: I’ve noticed how exercise affects my mood positively that day, even many hours after the workout.  If I don’t exercise, I’m not as centered (not that anyone else would notice). Normally even I wouldn’t notice, because I’m good-natured in general, but I’ve been paying attention to this. I’m really enjoying both Yoga and mat pilates.

I just moved to Santa Monica: I finally found a great place to rent in Santa Monica (video) as a home, after 2.5 years of bouncing around Northern and Southern California communities!  (I was doing the taster’s menu approach in order to figure out exactly where I wanted to land long-term.)

It’ll be fun organizing some PebbleStorm groups here in the coming months.  A core part of PebbleStorm includes connecting fellow PebbleStormers, and creating a network of trusted people that can work together very easily.  Santa Monica’s ground zero for the core group now.

I’ll continue to visit the SF Bay area about once a month, to see family, friends, clients and to host the CEOFlow sessions.

How much do I want to proof this before publishing?

Not much.  Time to hit “publish”, eat something and rest my brain…I have more bursting to do tomorrow!  Although I joked in the beginning about making the overload worse by blogging, sharing is fun, and one of my core enjoyments (as it is with many people).

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By the way, about PebbleStorm: CEOFlow… imagine you’ve already created your dream business and are making money through enjoyment. You’re about to be an accidental CEO with a whole new set of issues, employees and partners to deal with…fun fun fun ☺.  CEOs have special needs. The intention behind CEOFlow is to help you continue to evolve and grow your business, but without losing your enjoyment of it.

Here are the original (almost unchanged) notes from 2006 that I wrote to myself…

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Why can’t we take the work out of work?
A few people live their dream – why can’t more?  I don’t buy it when people assume intelligence or drive is what’s needed for success.  Why are so many people, including lots of very innovative, smart and ambitious people, trapped in the rat race?  Example: the NYT article on “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich”

Why can work be so unpleasant?  When it’s bad…
Yes, a great manager can be an amazing mentor and coach….but all too often manager-employee relationships often feel more like parent-child relationships, and put too much artificial power into people’s hands.  Why do so many workplaces not only tolerate, but promote controlling managers?

Working all the time in a corporate environment just feels so unproductive (not to confuse activity with productivity).  There’s so much work for so few results, in the scheme of someone’s life.  You’re trapped there in “face-time” (as opposed to space-time ☺)…waiting for other people to get back to you…producing lots of ‘stuff’ to look good just because your manager’s manager’s manager asked for it…”Um, about that TPS report…”  Back to the trusty 80/20 rule: 20% of the time people can be productive, 80% of the time they’re doing things that don’t really affect the company’s bottom line or their own happiness.

As a rule of thumb, the nature of a corporate hierarchy structurally creates conditions for fear, wasted time and politics.  With a limited number of slots available to people, everyone competes for them.  This is often made worse by CEOs who want to see competition between their people, thinking it will bring out their best, when really it just helps create an environment of fear and control.

The past strategy of economies of scale might have been beneficial, but what about the benefits of leverage and nimbleness? Can’t a company increase its profitability and impact, without losing its soul or flexibility?

Innovation requires speed, thought, freedom and a lack of constraints – not resources, size or economies of scale.

More Frustrations

I never felt like I could be completely productive whenever I wanted to be.  In a single job, you always end up waiting around for things to happen or people to get back to you, which is non-value-added time.  So people fill that time with busy work.

The classic hierarchy, while useful in organizing large groups of people, ends up creating unnatural “parent-child” relationships between managers and reports.  Just like Zimbardo’s “prison guard-and-prisoner” experiment at Stanford, in which the students playing as guards starting abusing prisoners, managers frequently abuse employees without even realizing it.  They’ve lost their context.  CEOs can be the worst offenders, being the most out of touch.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.  So how can you organize groups of people, without dangerously concentrating power?  In the short-term, power gets things done.  But over the long-term, it eats away at a culture.

In one job, you can only make incremental increases in productivity per year – it’s very rare that you can multiply your productivity or make big leaps.

Corporate structures inherently treat people as cogs in a machine, and this worsens as the organization gets bigger.  Especially once the org is past 150 people, and people can’t know everyone well, employees tend to become names on spreadsheets.

People attached too much of their own self-worth to their titles. While titles can be helpful in the short-term in identifying someone’s function in a company and place in the pecking order…over the long-term titles end up putting people in boxes. People get defined by their title, and every person is much more than their title!  It also creates a reward system in which people end up politicking just to get titles, when titles are used as part of the rewards system.

Most people are put into functional roles/groups that focus on a particular area: sales, marketing, development, etc.  Sometimes people are happy with this (for awhile).  Oftentimes, people end up being frustrated because they get blocked when they’re ready to make a move to another role or try something new to expand their experiences. Companies don’t like it when people move from one function to another – it’s ‘too risky’.  “You’ve been doing sales here for 5 years, what makes you think you can do product management or marketing?”

Biggest bottlenecks in business?  Why is work so unproductive?

Lack of trust creates long sales cycles, complicated contracts, dysfunctional corporate cultures, politics, hoops to jump through both inside a company and between companies.

Carrying costs: you rent space, hire a bunch of people and invest in all kinds of fixed costs…creating beast you have to feed.  Work and growth become and obligation, not a choice.  Now you gotta feed the beast!

“Selling” is incredibly inefficient compared to “attracting” through word-of-mouth. Also, selling is just a pain in the ass.  Most business owners don’t like to sell, and most salespeople aren’t very good at it (and don’t like it either).  It’s just a paycheck to them.

Contracts: most contracts, and the bulk of what’s in contracts, are crap.   Yes, you have to have them in this legally paranoid world, but is there a way to recreate a system in which you don’t need 80% of this stuff?

Lack of trust & integrity is what causes the bottlenecks, waste and frustration in business.   It’s why we need selling, HR, contracts…

Is there a way to bring trust and integrity back to business?

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Yep.  That’s my intention here, even if we might have to start from scratch in a bunch of areas. Shortly after I wrote these notes down (and processed a few other things), I came up with PebbleStorm and its mission.

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There were 120+ other people there, evenly split between men and women and ages from 20s-60s.  Dhamma.org, describes Vipassana as: “This non-sectarian technique aims for the total eradication of mental impurities and the resultant highest happiness of full liberation. Healing, not merely the curing of diseases, but the essential healing of human suffering, is its purpose.”

And a booklet from the retreat continues:

What Vipassana is not:

• It is not a rite or ritual based on blind faith.
• It is neither intellectual nor a philosophical entertainment.
• It is not a rest cure, a holiday, or an opportunity for socializing.
• It is not an escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life.
  

What Vipassana is:

• It is a technique that will eradicate suffering.
• It is a method of mental purification which allows one to face life’s tensions and problems in a calm, balanced way.
• It is an art of living that one can use to make positive contributions to society.
  

How I benefit from regular meditation

Even before this retreat, I’d been meditating for about a year (simple observation of my breathing, not Vipassana) because:

1. Meditation enhances my ability to focus. It creates mental ‘space’, helping me distinguish “activity” versus “productivity”. Ever feel like you’re so busy doing ‘stuff’, but when you look back, none of it felt like it mattered?   It doesn’t matter how hard you’re working to climb that mountain…if you’re climbing the wrong mountain.
2. It opens up my creativity – I’ve had some great ideas come through!
3. It enhances my happiness and contentment
   
4. It’s enjoyable – calming and relaxing, like a mental massage  
   

How I got started with meditation – slowly; babysteps!

I started about a year ago, after beginning to work with an Ayurvedic nutritionist (which is also when I stopped drinking coffee and alcohol). I started with just a few minutes at a time in the morning, and slowly built from there.  Even now I don’t meditate every day.  For the past six months, it’s been about 3-5x per week, for 10-30min, and slowly getting more consistent over time.  I am increasing that now after the retreat.

Attitude makes all the difference

I’ve found my attitude makes a huge difference.  When I started a year ago, meditation felt like more of a chore, as if my conscious was a mom saying “eat your peas, dear”.  OK ok…grumble, grumble.  However, once I got the hang of it and stopped resisting, I began to look forward to it as an enjoyable, relaxing mental space, like a mental spa break ☺ Do you look at going to the spa as a chore?  The kid grew up and realizes they not only like peas, but even looks forward to meals full of them!  (Please ignore this analogy if you don’t like peas as an adult.)

I heard about Vipassana from a friend about three years ago, and even though I wasn’t meditating at the time and had no idea what Vipassana was, I immediately had a feeling of “I want to do that!” (someday).

The retreat: 10 days of silence to calm the mind and enable the study

It’s called “Noble Silence” – no communication during retreat with other students or the outside world, either by voice, glance or gesture.  The purpose is to calm the mind, to enable one to really learn and apply the technique. You can see ask the teachers questions, and their is instruction, so it’s not totally silent.  I found the silence actually very easy, and it did make the practice easier to learn.

Walking into the retreat, and leaving behind iPhone, camera, etc., and knowing I wouldn’t have access to email or my phone for 10 days, my mind immediately calmed down…

How it went & what I got (including an unintended addiction)

We had a suprisingly busy schedule, beginning at 4am, of meditation, breakfast, meditation, lunch, meditation, evening tea break, meditation, and then evening discourses. I was asleep by 9:30p each night. During the long meal breaks, I’d nap or take walks on the walking paths.  The food was amazing!  I became addicted to Celestial Seasoning’s “Bengal Spice tea“, a form of chai without black tea or caffeine. Yum!!  Don’t worry, caffeine addicts – they had instant coffee there too.

Although some people had a really tough time in the first couple of days with the silence and hours of meditation, I found it was surprisingly easy; a piece of cake.  I had some tough days (Day 8 was a low one for me), but it was all worth it.  I was surprised that it was harder physically than mentally for me, because I wasn’t used to sitting like that for so long.  Many other experienced meditators brought their own cushions and backrests. For novices like me, the Center had a ton of cushions and benches there for people to try out and use. It took 3-4 days to figure out my ‘seating system’.

Here are some of the specific things I got from the retreat:

• A practice that will increase my happiness, calmness and awareness in all situations in my life
• Clarity/confirmation that what I’m doing with PebbleStorm is exactly what I should be doing with my life
• A GREAT image for PebbleStorm, using a tree to illustrate four levels of happiness, and how PebbleStorm helps people tap into the most enduring, meaningful forms of happiness.  It’s only sketched in pen now, I’ll have to play with it before I’m ready to post it here.  First a Sun, now a tree…I sense a trend here in using natural images in addition to my circles…
• A shift in my thinking of the balance of buddhism/happiness thinking and capitalism in PebbleStorm (a topic for another day).  I used to think it was 50/50, but really the mix is more like 80% buddhism/happiness and 20% capitalism. By the way – if you’re unfamiliar with buddhism, its core isn’t religious at all, though sects have added rites and rituals. It is simply a system to help people achieve lasting happiness (“enlightenment”).

Did I mention the 10-day retreat was free?  It’s 100% donation-supported.

And by the way, the course is free.  Yes, lodging and TASTY meals for 10 days.  They do ask for a donation at the end, “to pay for others”, but it’s by no means required and there is really no pressure at all.  The entire worldwide organization, in 120 countries, runs on a donation and volunteer basis.  This is how strongly people feel about how Vipassana has impacted their lives!

A worldwide non-profit driven by genuine, passionate commitment

Both the practice itself and the non-profit organization teaching it at more than 120 centers around the world are fascinating.  Run by volunteers (even teachers aren’t paid), it’s a worldwide, well-oiled machine. The retreat ran like The reason the organization works so well is because of people’s passion for the benefits they receive from Vipassana…and they want to help others receive the same benefits.

Now: integrating it to my (daily) life

They recommend, as a minimum, an hour of meditation in the morning, and an hour in the evening.  Rather than start out strongly and probably have some discouraging breakdowns in the practice, personally I know I’ll be more successful with a gradually building practice (this is me – what you need to be successful might be very different). It’ll take me some time to figure out my routine and to really make it a part of my daily life. For the next three months, I’m going to do it as much as possible, at least once a day, but realize that I have some experimentation to do.  Especially since I’ll be traveling and moving quite a bit between San Francisco, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires…and any kind of travel plays hell with my routine.

“I could never meditate, my mind is too busy/I have ADD…”

I’ve heard this from so many people.  If your mind is so agitated, isn’t that exactly why you should work to tame it, to put it to work for you rather than being at its mercy?  Jumping into a 10 day silent retreat might be too much at first, but there are plenty of ways to try it out in smaller steps.

A 3-minute practice and simple steps you can try

Please Leave A Comment!

Do you practice?  What works for you?  Leave any suggestions in the comments!  And I’ll share updates on my practice monthly as it builds.

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