Chop Wood, Carry Water

Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. -Wu Li

This is a difficult post in that I'm trying to articulate counterintuitive knowing I've not been able to put into words even in a journal. And I am sitting at a coffee shop with free WiFi in sprawling southern California shutting out the Flashdance soundtrack blaring in the background. And in less than a half hour, I'll be heading back to a spiritual course I've been in this entire week.

Last October I hung my consulting shingle up. If you read between the lines on my September 13th post you may hear the pangs of loss. Triggered by yet another project ending prematurely. Yet another startup was either struggling or closing shop. That post was about the impermanent nature of all the projects I've ever been involved with. Aggh, where was the legacy? And what was lasting?

So that's it -- I'm doing MY own thing now, I thought. I resurrected a start-up idea I've been kicking around for a while, which I facetiously called the Super Secret Startup. It had the heavy trappings of "great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes." It was a fairly overwhelming gargantuan project.

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. - Linus Torvalds, from post "Just Barely Enough Design"

My intention for the whole endeavor was to give innovative and entrepreneurial folks the autonomy to live out their passions with a sane enough schedule so they had the time to contemplate and spend time on the important things in their life. In other words, allow the truly important to be urgent, as Stephen Covey would put it.

Personally I have had the gift of a few years off (it wasn't entirely intentional at first) and I wanted to share that gift with others.

Tremendous things can be accomplished by those who follow their bliss-- but the prerequisite for that is first FINDING it. Joseph Campbell believed that every adult should take 3-5 years to loaf and wander. He wandered out to California, lived in a cabin, and read books. Thoreau likewise retreated to a cabin. Many embark on grand journeys of discovery. The point is that you must leave the comfort of routine... the conditioning of society and parents... and strike out on your own: take a few years to just ask questions: "What is my purpose?". "What is the nature of life and existence?". "What brings me bliss?"... "What is my particular genius?".... "What do I want my legacy to be?".

"Who & what, exactly, am 'I'?"

These are vital questions... deep questions. Shouldn't we take a few years of our lives to engage them? Shouldn't we attempt to find our own answers for them... - from Hobopoet's post "Do Nothing Man of Tao"

I realize that time alone is not the issue. It comes down to willingness. We intentionally choose to flee from the stillness that would lead us straight to these questions - and the answers.

I thought I was living a life that placed the important in the urgent category before the tsunami. Of course I wasn't.

Since my return from Thailand I now know that the Super Secret Start-up was a vastly indirect slow boat to China approach to where my motivations actually lie and what's truly important to me. (I don't think I had the conviction to go the direct route.) And it was just grand enough to ensure it would never get off the ground.

So my new plans are not plans. They're experiments. In an experiment the customer can evolve (or nix) the product and service much easier than a full-fledged completely "launched" product. And it's easier to shelve experiments and try new ones. I've been taken with this Fast Company quote from Tom Peter's Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times:

Increasingly, successful businesses will be ephemeral. They will be built to yield something of value, and once that value has been exhausted, they will vanish.

That ephemeral, impermanent quality can be hard to swallow if you're clinging tenaciously to the "what" of your product, service - or a company itself - being the tangible evidence of worth, of legacy. But what I'm doing has become nothing to me compared to the how. Thus, how I'm being is more important than what I'm doing. And maybe it's the how that echoes in our memory long after the what has turned to dust.

Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. -Wu Li

Comments

[Mike Warot]

I liked your "steal this idea" entry... here's an idea to add to that collection, if you're hardware inclined: http://bitgrid.blogspot.com

Boiled down, the idea is to build very simple (4 bit) computer cells that take 4 inputs (one bit from each neighbor), and run 4 programs (each a single 16 bit number) resulting in an output for each neighbor.
--Mike--

[Niti]

You said, "Thus, how I'm being is more important than what I'm doing"

I would take it one step further, once you discover who you are in the moment of stillness, it encapsulates who you are, your system of values, if you will, and thus whatever you do will reflect those values.

[Lisa Haneberg]

Evelyn: I can sure relate to your post. I have plunged deep into big projects with high hopes and, later, disappointments. I have begun to realize the wisdom of experiments, but had never crystalized it in the way you have here. And I agree that the "how" is central to our unique value proposition as solopreneurs.

Thanks!