“I think that you’ll find August’s unique perspective both practical and uplifting.”    - Stephen Lahey

August Turak was recently interviewed by Stephen Lahey on the SmallBusinessTalent.com® podcast on business/personal transformation. The SmallBusinessTalent.com podcast provides you with fresh sales and marketing ideas from real-world experts — people with years of hands-on experience building healthy businesses with strong sales and marketing results.

The free SmallBusinessTalent.com podcast is hosted by Stephen Lahey and is published once a week. Lahey provides you with practical advice and useful sales and marketing content. All podcast episodes are well-edited — condensed to stay focused, but long enough to deliver actionable information. It’s all about helping you grow your business in a more profitable and fulfilling way.

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Book Description: In addition to his work as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, and consultant, for the last sixteen years August Turak worked alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey, watching firsthand as they undertook new enterprises and sustained an incredibly successful business practice.

Service and selflessness are at the heart of this 1,500-year-old monastic tradition’s remarkable business success, an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining the lessons he’s learned from thirty years of business experience with intimate portraits of the monks at work, Turak shows how Trappist principles have been successfully applied in a variety of business settings. He demonstrates how the monks and such agnostics as Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their fanatical commitment to the highest principles but because of them. Turak also points to other “transformational organizations” that share critical components of the abbey’s philosophy conducive to success.

I was channel surfing one day when I found myself watching an obviously brain injured young woman being attended to by three nurses. She was in a semi-comatose, twilight condition and the nurses were trying to wake her up.  Propping her limp body into a sitting position, they began poking, prodding, and speaking to her sharply while she, with eyes rolling wildly in fear and confusion, angrily flailed at them trying to get them to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep.

Ignoring her resistance, a nurse eventually forced a tooth brush into her hand. With great effort, her patient finally managed to get the tooth brush somewhere in the vicinity of her mouth. One of the nurses remarked that this was a “good sign” while another branded it a “huge step forward.”

Gradually the camera began panning back, revealing a young woman on a stool with her back to the camera, watching this scene on a monitor along with me. A disembodied male voice from behind the camera said, “Does it upset you to see yourself like that?”  Slowly her head swiveled.  “Oh, no,” she said her face breaking into a radiant smile, “I love watching myself like that!  It makes me so grateful for who I am today and for all the people who never gave up on me.”

I was very moved by seeing such a lovely young woman completely recovered and the intense gratitude that accompanied her recovery.  But there was more to it than that.  I realized that, metaphorically, her story was mine as well. Like her, I had lived in a semi-comatose, dream-like condition while a series of patient and compassionate teachers pushed, prodded, and occasionally shouted at me in an attempt to get me to “wake up.”

And like her angry reaction to her devoted nurses, often all my teachers got from me in return for their effort was angry, self-justifying, fearful resistance. The resistance of a man who apparently just wanted to be left alone so he could sleep his life away in complacent “peace” and ersatz “happiness.” Then, as this radiant young woman’s smile faded to black and the credits started to roll, I too was overcome with gratitude for all the people who never gave up on me.

*     *     *

Whether it is in business, leadership, or our personal lives, the most important things we must learn cannot be “taught” to us. Instead they must “come to us,” sometimes in a flash of realization, and this experience is often described as a feeling of “waking up.” Most of the world’s religious traditions include the notion of “enlightenment;” a term that tries to capture the experience of exchanging the darkness of deep sleep for the light of profound awareness. Socrates spent his life trying to wake people up, and his sleep deprived fellow Athenians eventually put him to death so they could go back to sleep. Socrates repeatedly argued that the values and character traits that every successful life relies on cannot be “taught.” Instead they can only be “discovered” or “realized,” and he described his own role as that of a midwife rather than a teacher: an analogy that neatly captures both the “awakening” that a baby experiences at birth as well as the sharp crack on the behind that the midwife must lovingly administer to get the job done.

Louis R. Mobley, my mentor and the director of the IBM Executive School, firmly agreed with Socrates. Mobley utterly abandoned books and lectures in favor of games and simulations designed to wake his students up to their limitations and limitless potential. Mobley was not looking for intellectual “answers.”  He wanted epiphanies, eureka moments, and revelations: The kind of experiences that produce a change of heart rather than merely a change of mind. Again like Socrates, Mobley believed that leadership cannot be “taught.” But it can be midwifed by facilitating what he described as a “revolution in consciousness.”

It has now been almost 60 years since Mobley began “blowing minds” at the IBM Executive School, and we spend billions to watch cinematic teachers like Yoda in Star Wars and Morpheus in the Matrix use similar shock and awe techniques with their students. Yet despite these powerful examples, we still cling to our books, lecterns, and Power Points in the vain hope that leadership’s most important lessons can be “learned” intellectually.

The reason why we refuse to take these examples to heart is rather simple. Waking up cannot be accomplished without the aid of a certain amount of trauma. Physically, it is impossible to wake up another human being from their slumbers without producing, at least momentarily, a startled state of confusion, fear, and sometimes, anger. Every sleeper experiences a mild traumatic shock before attaining consciousness; this is true no matter how gently they are awakened and even if they awaken on their own.

Similarly, it is impossible for even the most loving coach to get people outside the box of their dream-like condition without inducing a certain amount of trauma as an unintended byproduct. Deep down I think we all know this, and it is our aversion to trauma that often leads us to prefer living a Rip Van Winkle existence to running the risks of being jolted wide awake.

But in our fear we don’t realize that living life in a semi-somnolent state is fraught with an even bigger risk. The risk of missing out on an ineffable opportunity. The opportunity to someday smile into that magical lens that records your life and respond to life’s hidden producer, “Oh, no, I love seeing myself like that! It makes me so grateful for who I am today and for all the people who never gave up on me.”

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

In engineering “friction” can be defined as any waste of energy that has been harnessed to produce work. Entrepreneurs grow wealthy by reducing the economic friction between buyers and sellers. In business there is a form of friction that all too often kills plans, wastes energy, and ruins friendships: people fighting with each other.

I’ve investigated my fair share of work place squabbles. I almost never found two-legged villains at the heart of the problem. Instead I discovered hard-working, well intentioned people that had unintentionally allowed a disembodied demon into their midst: Ambiguity.

In one instance a sales department and shipping department were at each other’s throats. Both sides were convinced that they were the victims of a combination of incompetence and evil intentions on the part of the other. After scraping away the rancor, I discovered that the sales department was upset because product was not being shipped “on time.” Shipping was fed up with getting a flood of orders late in the day that they could not possibly ship without working into the night. The real problem was that both sides were operating from entirely different assumptions about what “on time” meant. I quickly brokered an agreement: any order received by shipping before 2:00 PM would ship the same day. Later orders would ship the next. I wrote the new policy down and distributed it. When the ambiguity disappeared so did the problem and the rancor.

I have often argued that a trait that distinguishes great leaders is an ability to creatively use the tension produced by ambiguity. Great leaders don’t live in a black or white world. Instead they love shades of grey. However, this trait is most effective when applied to strategic decisions. It is ambiguity surrounding execution that so often leads to disaster. Business execution is like an intricate, multi-faceted relay race. Ambiguity about who is passing the baton to whom by when almost certainly means that the precious baton will hit the floor and the postmortem recriminations will begin. In business, “crisp execution” is the Holy Grail, and crisp execution relies on eliminating ambiguity.

Again and again I’ve brought warring parties together and patiently heard them out. Then I would politely make a request: “Where’s the paper trail?” In almost every case there was none. All I had to work with were verbal communications based solely on memory, open to an almost infinite variety of contradictory interpretations. This internal friction was usually not the result of either incompetence or bad intentions. It was the result of people operating from entirely different assumptions about their respective responsibilities.

I have developed a tactic to eliminate the problems caused by ambiguity before they can arise. While my memory is still fresh, I summarize in writing everything that was agreed upon in a meeting or phone call and send it to all the participants. I make sure to invite everyone to either “sign off” or get back to me if my summary is either incorrect or incomplete. I also copy everyone not at the meeting that may be affected by our decisions in order to avoid “blindsiding” them further down the road.

We often hear that success is largely a factor of how many friends we make. However, success also depends on how few enemies we make. Clear, written communication has proven remarkably successful at keeping my enemies to a minimum. This discipline also forces me during meetings to focus on negotiating clear, unambiguous, mutually agreed upon action items. This in turn moves the meeting, project or sale along much more quickly.

The vast majority of internal squabbles are leadership problems rather than people problems. It is management’s job to make sure that the process by which people enter into agreements is formalized without becoming burdensome. When disputes arise from miscommunication and misunderstanding, it is management’s fault for not having the policies, procedures, and processes in place that prevent such conflicts in the first place.

In our own company, we made it clear that we had zero interest in refereeing “I said, she said” disputes. It was our policy that substantive meetings should always produce an internal “contract;” and that these contracts should be clearly written, mutually agreed upon, and meticulously kept. Staying on top of this process took discipline, but in the long run it paid off handsomely in increased productivity, team work, and perhaps most importantly, morale. Once our people discovered that without the proper documentation their pleas for “justice” would fall on deaf ears, they quickly adapted and disputes were practically non-existent.

The first step to removing crippling ambiguity is overcoming our distaste for writing and learning how to write clearly and unambiguously. A commitment to follow up “soon” is ambiguous. A promise to follow up at 3:00 PM on November 16^th is not.

The second step is overcoming the misconception that creating a paper trail is a waste of valuable time. My typical summary takes three minutes to write. These communications not only make things run far more smoothly, but have saved me countless hours in ex post facto conflict resolution.

Step three is overcoming our tendency for using ambiguity as tool for staying off the hook. Ambiguity in business is often connected to our fear of accountability. We resist making clear commitments because someone may hold us accountable if something goes wrong. Much of human interaction, consciously or unconsciously, is an attempt to hold others accountable while avoiding accountability ourselves. We crave wiggle room and plausible deniability. As a result, we often default to ambiguous commitments like “I’ll try” rather than “I’ll do.” Only by courageously embracing accountability in our business and personal lives can the friction of ambiguity be successfully overcome. If you want accountability from others, you must offer it first yourself.

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

Dear Dean,

Got to thinking about our conversation yesterday about branding and pigeonholes. You said it’s human nature to want to pigeonhole people and to be successful we have to figure out my pigeonhole even if — as you put it so well — “it’s a bloody big pigeonhole.” Generally I agree with you and, believe me, I am not trying to be difficult. I’d love to be pigeonholed. I spent my professional career building companies by identifying their pigeonholes in the market and made a lot of money doing it.

My problem is that what is new and refreshing about me is that people sense I am trying to teach a whole new way of thinking. I am trying to teach a whole different “mode,” a whole new paradigm: a paradigm revealed ever so slightly in all the fuss about getting outside the box. Scientists are only just beginning to understand what the Zen Masters were saying millennia ago. What the Zen Masters mastered and applied to spirituality is what scientists and psychologists call lateral thinking, frame breaking thinking, getting outside the box, divergent thinking, controlled chaos, and creative destruction. What all these terms are trying to get at is the essentially paradoxical nature of the universe. Problem is, while most people have run up against these ideas they are far from internalizing them. Folks think they know what outside the box thinking is but 99.9% of human thinking is still woefully inside the box.

We are on the threshold of a whole new way of thinking that is being forced onto the Western mind by the paradoxes of physics and astronomy. But right now, to the extent it has filtered into the ambient atmosphere it is through a glass darkly. More felt than understood.

Let me explain. The Matrix and Truman’s World in The Truman Show movie are made out of illusory pigeonholes. Similarly, we spend our lives creating these elaborate “belief systems” made up of all our own illusory boxes and pigeonholes. We are frightened creatures who know we are mortal and all around us is a universe that we can’t understand and doesn’t seem to care a lot about us. It is only natural that we want to “nail things down” by creating “a place for everything with everything in its place.”

“Who am I?” we ask. “I’m an American, a husband, a brother, a salesman etc. etc.” We take comfort in these labels and millions like them because they give us the illusory notion that “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.” We nail things down further by BELIEVING that if we just stick to the program we will be happy and die in peace. We desperately want to believe that life is fair, just, and that all will be well and all will be well.

But deep down we know that these silly belief structures don’t really represent the way the universe works. This is the splinter in our minds. Surprises keep hitting us. People die, friends betray, politicians lie, companies lay people off, and spouses cheat. As more and more of these truths rain down we become ever more frantic. We keep nailing things down and — especially as we reach middle age — the nails keep popping out. We thought we would live forever but the mirror says differently. We react to the horror by trying to nail things down and pigeonhole them even more. We insist on iron clad contracts and pre–nups and pay our doctor through the nose, but still the nails keep popping out. The earth is moving under our feet threatening to open up and swallow us — just as it does, eventually, in the grave.

So we turn to spirituality as a last hope. What do we want from spirituality? We want yet another pigeonhole, another way to “nail it all down,” to “make sense of it all,” to stop the world from moving under our feet, to give us security. And we want to do this all on the cheap by using “belief” once again. It never occurs to us that our need to believe, our desire to pigeonhole, our desire to nail it all down is causing all the problems in the first place.

Yes, it is natural for people to want to pigeonhole. But spirituality is not natural. It is both unnatural and supernatural. It is not natural, but as I say in my essay Brother John, it can become like reading, writing, or riding a bicycle: second nature. We have to get beyond what is natural if we want the answer to Zen’s riddle of life and death.

However, there are exceptions to every rule, and Jim Collins passed on a number of highly practical tips that I feel no qualms about passing on to you.

Collins’ first tip is never work on more than ten things. One day I was feeling so overwhelmed by my job that I asked Collins for help. Taking me to lunch, he gave me this formula that I have religiously used ever since.

1. Create a list of every goal or task.
2. Prioritize this list down to the ten most important. (Collins added with a grin, “It won’t hurt if the first two or three have something to do with money.”)
3. Submit your priorities to your boss and get his sign off.
4. Once you have your top ten put the rest of the list into a drawer and forget about it.
5. Add new goals to your list as they come up, but never work on them unless they are important enough to supplant one of your top ten.
6. When a goal is accomplished, go back to your list and move the most important to your top ten.
7. But no matter what never work on more than ten things at a time.

Let fires burn is Collins’ second tip. Lack of focus is the single biggest reason for failure. Confronted by multiple fires we tend to spread ourselves so thin that we never succeed in putting any of them completely out. Successful people triage their precious time by concentrating on critical tasks while stoically ignoring the rest. In short, you must learn to say “no” to be successful.

This leadership advice stood me in good stead when a few years later I became the first head of marketing for a family run cable television operator. I spent my first two days on the job fielding phone calls from dozens of system managers in desperate need of marketing help. Yet rather than try to help them all a little, I focused entirely on one cable system where I could quickly produce meaningful results. Using this experience as a template, I then quickly rolled it out to the other systems.

The third tip is interview constantly. No matter how busy he was, Collins interviewed at least three people every Friday morning. Never wait until you need someone to start looking. Collins always had a file drawer full of candidates when one of his people suddenly resigned. According to Collins, recruiting only under pressure creates a bias toward “screening them in rather than screening them out:” a sure fire recipe for hiring the wrong person.

The next tip is move quickly. One day he said, “Remember Augie, when you take a new job, hire somebody, fire somebody, rearrange the furniture, but whatever you do, do it fast.”

Never fritter away your “honeymoon period” in a new job. First impressions are critical: waiting too long to make things happen can permanently undermine the trust you need to be effective. Estimate how long your boss has allowed for you to “find your legs” in your new position. Then cut it in half. Never meet expectations; blow them away.

Tip number five is don’t burn bridges. Sooner or later we all find ourselves unhappy in a job. When this happens make a realistic appraisal: How likely is it that you can change the circumstances that are making you unhappy? If the likelihood is low or nonexistent, then immediately find a new job. Unfortunately, we often insist on fighting a hopeless rear guard action until we garner a reputation for being the quintessential “disgruntled employee.” As Collins put it, “Always go out with a party and a referral rather than a collective sigh of relief.”

The final tip from Collins is don’t procrastinate firing someone. No one likes to terminate another human being and Collins was no exception. However, he believed that we usually know when a person is “just not working out” much sooner than we are willing to admit. Prolonging the agony is not fair to the non-performing individual or the team. Collins’ rule of thumb is intervene twice: If two attempts at coaching fail to produce results then let the person go. According to Collins, while termination may elicit anger initially, in the long run it usually produces relief and a happier human being working somewhere else.

In my own career, the most difficult of Collins’ tips to master was the last. Again and again I resisted letting people go long after my gut and the metrics told me that the situation was hopeless. Collins was right: My misguided compassion only prolonged the agony, hurt morale, and made the inevitable break-up much more damaging and traumatic…

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

The Duke University Self Knowledge Symposium proudly presented August Turak who gave his renowned lecture, Five Years with a Zen Master on September 26th in Duke University’s Bryan Center. The crowd was on the edge of their seats as Turak took them on a wild, wonderful ride sharing his experiences in his search for the meaning of life as a young man. Turak delivered an inspiring message of struggles and hope and shared what he discovered including the importance of giving back to the community. In the spirit of service and selflessness and giving back to our community, we offer you; our viewers, the opportunity to watch for yourself in our latest video.

But apparently all is not lost, according to Stiglitz if we just make Brazil our model by improving education and nutrition and eliminating “corporate welfare” the American Dream may yet rise phoenix-like from the ashes.

While I share the concerns of Stiglitz and other apocalyptic prophets over poverty and income inequality, I find the causes he cites and the medicine he prescribes far less compelling. Our educational system is in fact abominable; better nutrition is always a good thing; and “too big to fail” corporate welfare is inexcusable. But there is a far more serious underlying cause to income inequality that almost no one, including Dr. Stiglitz, wants to talk about. This elephant in the parlor is apparently too big to be acknowledged let alone ushered back to the zoo.

The Wall Street Journal recently cited testimony that Ron Haskins of the left-leaning Brookings Institution gave before the Senate Finance Committee. Haskins emphasizes “the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success.” He cites “three elementary rules” that based on census data can “virtually assure” that young people and their families will not only “escape poverty,” but have a “72% chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 a year in 2010).”

Rule 1: Complete at least a high school education.

Rule 2: Work full time.

Rule 3: Be married but wait until at least age 21 before getting married and having children.

Haskins goes on to say that the prospects for people who violate all three rules are almost exactly the reverse: their chances of being poor soars to 77% and their chance of making the middle class craters to just 4%.

“Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase economic opportunity in America.”

Haskins willingness to step out onto such thin, politically incorrect ice is incredibly refreshing, but there are two additional points I would add. First a fourth rule: Don’t abuse alcohol and drugs. Second, the most critical of Haskins’ rules is get married, stay married, and give your children the incredible leg up that only a home that includes a father can provide.

As if in answer to Haskins’ prayers, one week later the Journal ran an article, Asians Top Immigration Class, based on a Pew Research Center study: The Rise of Asian Americans. According to the study’s editor, “Asians exceed Americans on educational credentials and socioeconomic markers of success despite being predominately first generation immigrants.” Half of Asians get a college degree compared with 30% of Americans and their median household income is $66,000 versus $49,000 for Americans.

Apparently Asian immigrants have yet to get the memo from Stiglitz that the American Dream is dead, but what is most striking are the reasons that Pew cites for their remarkable success. “As a group, Asians place more value than Americans overall on marriage, parenting, and careers.”

Asians, according to Pew, are “more likely than the overall U.S population to be married, or live in a multigenerational household, and their children are more likely to be raised in a two-parent home.” As for blaming the victim, “Irrespective of their country of origin, Asians overall believe that American parents are too soft on their children.”

The editor concludes, “They [Asians] are the highly skilled workforce of the 21^st century, but they also bring traditional values (my italics).

Asian immigrants are living breathing evidence that the American Dream is not only alive and well, but is not living in Brazil as Dr. Stiglitz would have us believe. However like oil from Saudi Arabia, according to Pew we are now importing the much maligned “family values” that make the American Dream possible from China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

Dr. Stiglitz’s wrong-headed diagnosis is doubly dangerous because it fuels class envy while reinforcing the cult of victimhood that has proven so damaging to African-Americans in particular. What is moribund is not the American Dream, but the traditional values that Asian-Americans embrace. The same values that made the American Dream possible in the first place for my own immigrant grandparents and millions like them.

*  *  *

I’ve argued repeatedly that great leaders face facts no matter how distasteful those facts may be. Communism for example is at heart neither an economic nor a political model. Instead it is a theory of human nature that tried -unsuccessfully and at the point of a bayonet- to prove that people are essentially cooperative and that competition and private property were unnatural aberrations foisted on people by a corrupt social system.

But what is far worse than being wrong is that Communism’s apparatchiks kept at it for 70 years despite overwhelming evidence that there was something fundamentally wrong with their underlying assumption about people. Advocates were so emotionally invested that they clung to the notion that Marxist theory was right and merely the implementation wrong.

All the Communist cadres needed was “more time” and a few more gulags to bring their worker’s paradise to fruition. To this day there are otherwise rational people who argue that “authentic” Communism was “never tried,” and that Marx will yet be proven right about the nature of the human animal.

America is in an analogous situation. Despite compelling evidence like the achievements of Asian immigrants, we refuse to accept the basic truth about family and parenting that our ancestors spent countless generations working out through trial and error. The so-called “social experiments” and “alternative lifestyles” that we’ve indulged in over the last sixty years under the banner of “diversity” and “tolerance” simply do not work for the overwhelming majority of Americans. For all too many, alternative lifestyles are just a one way ticket to underachievement and a cycle of poverty.

The inconvenient truth is that America’s most urgent problems are not economic, political, or even educational: They are social and cultural. The fundamental causes of income inequality are illegitimacy, divorce, single parent households, promiscuity, and a cultural miasma that treats fathers as ancillary and largely superfluous sperm donors.

Getting the proverbial cat back into the bag is a daunting task, but we will never begin unless we first recognize the real source of income inequality and poverty in America. Instead, like Communist apparatchiks, we will remain in denial and follow Dr. Stiglitz and his legions of acolytes down the politically safe and correct path of treating symptoms with remedies that only make the patient worse.

Instead of burying his head in the sands of Brazil it is high time Dr. Stiglitz looked to the rising sun of Asia’s immigrants for answers.

Follow me on Twitter @augustturak, Facebook http://facebook.com/aturak, or check out my Forbes blog http://blogs.forbes.com/augustturak/ for more tips and strategies for becoming a great leader – and to discover how service and selflessness is the secret to success in business and in life.

I enjoyed your Forbes article, A Wake-Up Call For Leadership, and I wonder whether it’s really the case that we have to experience trauma to be awakened?

The following is a recent experience I’d like to share:

Moulin d’Alger

My wife and I have a home in the Languedoc region of southern France. They have forest fires there and with the drying of summers, there is a move to enforce the law in relation to brush clearance as that reduces the risk to life and property. Thus we found ourselves with an unexpected and monumental task, clearing brush from steep hillsides around our house. The rough land was at about the steepest angle one could move around on without using all four limbs. Cutting the scrub was tough and clearing it away by rolling large bundles down the slope was even tougher. After two weeks of part time work I was fit but exhausted.

The day before we were due to leave we decided to rest. However I was tempted by the need to finish some steps, to bring down a small tree for a log I could split. The tree fell awkwardly and I asked my wife to hold a rope so I could attach it to branches in order that I could cut them without losing them over the edge and into the river. The first went well but the second was harder and I recall reaching out as far as I could to attach the rope. I decided to take support from the tree but it moved. I went head first over the edge and fell five meters (over 16 feet) onto rocks and tree stumps. I have no memory of the fall, nor of the following events. The local fire service carried me off to hospital where I was found to have broken ribs and a sprained neck. There is no doubt I am very fortunate to be alive and whole.

This incident amazes me. I could be dead or crippled. I realize that I was tired and my judgment was impaired. However, there was a surreal aspect to the event. I recall distinctly the moment before the fall – the texture of the rope in my hands and the details of the leaves I was negotiating. Then, as the fall began, I simply let go of this world – no panic, no attempt to arrest myself. I recall that to pull the rope might jeopardize my wife so I declined that option and surrendered myself to the abyss.

Somewhat frivolously, I would describe this as the ‘hand of God swept me away” – and follow with “and his other hand caught me”. Instead of being dead, as well I might be, I came round to find myself battered but intact. This is not mere luck, as it would seem, but indeed some ‘divine intervention’… something for me to ponder, to respond to… a further awakening perhaps? A lesson in living? I am duly grateful.

These incidents pointed to my need to become more conscious, to awaken. It seems to me that I can choose to ignore them or I can choose to recognize them as reminders and respond as best I can”.

Warm regards

John

Dear John,

Thanks for your thoughtful and inspirational reply. I loved your story very much and I think it answers your question: You experienced a traumatic event and it woke you up to a deeper understanding of life and self and God. However I would quickly add that when I use the term “traumatic” I do not mean that waking up requires anything as severe as plunging over a cliff. As I noted in A Wake-Up Call For Leadership, we experience a “slight trauma” every time we wake up from physical sleep. However if we pay close attention we will find that whether it is spiritual awakening or just some lesser occurrence the typical “wake up call” is initially experienced as a “shock” of some sort – even if it is nothing more than that infernal alarm clock sitting by our bed. Doctors even “shock the immune system” with a vaccination in order to “wake” it up to fighting disease. Psychotherapy no matter how benevolently administered always leads to some sort of “crisis” that is experienced “traumatically” for the patient in order to effect progress and healing. All of this leads to an important spiritual point: All too often we look for spiritual teachers and directors who “soothe” us when what we should be looking for are those that can wake us up with the least amount of trauma. Thanks again for your comment and wonderful story. August Turak

Dear August,

Is it that trauma is required for awakening or that awakening is accompanied by trauma? Does it matter?

I agree with contrasting teachers who soothe with those who might (lovingly) shock – the latter are likely to be more effective. I have known both as, no doubt, you have. Obviously there is a lot of self-calming that goes on as we, the masses, anaesthetize ourselves to the madness of this physical world.

Why would it not? But do we want to go like lemmings to our doom?

Those who seek more will forego such comforting. Right now I am suffering somewhat but have no doubt that I have been given a valuable experience and a great opportunity.

At least I am now addressing my writing with a sense of urgency! At the time of this accident I happened to be reading Fritjof Capra, Gregory Bateson and, oddly enough, Paulo Coelho. I suspect a conspiracy!

The rest remains to be revealed.

Good wishes,

John

Dear John,

Whether trauma causes awakening or merely accompanies it, I would say is immaterial. Typically it is the TRUTH that wakes us up, and it is our reaction to the truth that we experience as traumatic. I remember a spiritual teacher saying that his problems arose from his bad habit of telling people the truth and that this “tended to engender rage.” I remember my teacher’s teacher referring in a letter to his interactions with his own teacher. He said that working with his teacher often left him “murderous.” But then of course he went on to lavish high praise on this very same teacher. Thanks so much for your notes, and I am not surprised that you have the spiritual maturity to see in your suffering the opportunity that it may very well contain. Authentic spirituality is not a process of addition. It is a process of disillusionment. August

-Willard in Apocalypse Now

My Zen teacher wasn’t the mild mannered, taciturn, picture of inscrutable wisdom of myth and legend. He was a highly humorous, iconoclastic, often irascible, full-fledged West Virginia hillbilly with more fire in his Buddha-like belly than most people could stomach. He also wasn’t averse to bitching; and what he bitched about most was all the people who asked for his advice and then never bothered to take it.

One day, in a fit of youthful exuberance, I swore I would do whatever he instructed no questions asked. For a few tense moments he just looked at me silently scanning my soul. Then cocking an eyebrow he slowly said, “You’ll do anything?”

“Yes,” I said, though not as emphatically as I’d intended.

“Anything?” He quietly repeated.

I barely mustered a feeble nod.

“Good,” he said as he walked away, “go learn how to think for yourself.”

*     *     *

Like any good Zen puzzle or “koan,” this two minute dialogue inspired forty years of back breaking work. I also love its “mousetrap” nature: the salient feature of every koan. If I’d asked how to learn to think for myself he would just have said, “I’d love to tell you, but then you wouldn’t be thinking for yourself.”

Great leaders think for themselves. While Steve Jobs is only the most obvious example, epitomized by Apple’s “Think Different” tag line, all great leaders know that their biggest obstacle is conventional thinking, fads, “group think,” and a herd mentality.

A few years ago “big box” retailers were all the rage as they smugly “rolled up” the universe at the expense of poor Mom and Pop. Now Circuit City and Blockbuster are bankrupt and the Internet has Best Buy gasping for breath. A few brave souls made billions in the recent financial meltdown by resisting the pull of the crowd. They dared to be wrong just long enough to be right despite ridicule and even ostracism at the hands of their peers and the “experts.”

But thinking for yourself is also not as simple as stubbornly rejecting every idea just because it wasn’t invented here. Besides, most of the nonconformists I’ve met were just conforming to some socially acceptable form of nonconformity. On Wall Street they say, “Never fight the tape!” which is just another way of saying that there are times when even the most principled person must clamber onto the train or get off the tracks.

The rewards are priceless, but a stiff price must be paid intellectually, psychologically, and morally for the privilege of thinking for yourself.

The Intellectual

Read everything you can, read critically, and remember that a book is never really read until you explain it to someone else. Surround yourself with people that continually challenge your ideas. Find a kick ass mentor who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Avoid chit-chat like the plague: Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Great minds talk about ideas, average minds about events, and small minds about other people.” The mindless just parrot their favorite lines from movies.

While the conventional wisdom of our culture considers arguing the height of bad taste, independent thinkers like Plato and Thomas Aquinas argued incessantly without getting personal. I’m so addicted to arguing that if I can’t find a foeman worthy of my steel, I just argue with myself- often without even realizing it.

Finally, the best way to learn is to teach. Teaching forces you to articulate your ideas in a clear, concise manner and naturally invites questions and criticism. There are thousands of venues starving for volunteer teachers, and you will get far more in return than you can possibly give.

The Psychological

But training the intellect is actually the easiest part of learning to think for yourself. The philosopher Nietzsche said that freedom of thought relies on a psychological step: “The hour of one’s own great self-contempt.” Independent thinkers like Socrates find their own ignorance and herd-like tendencies psychologically intolerable. For them, the real possibility that their most cherished beliefs might be merely the brain washing effect of their genes, upbringing, peer pressure, and societal influences is suffocatingly insufferable.

"Never get out of the boat" -Apocalypse Now

The cultural air we breathe is so infectious that two of the most brilliant people I know spent months picking out the “perfect” name for their first born only to find, much to their chagrin, that their efforts had merely produced the most commonly chosen name for that year. People like Jobs, Socrates, and Nietzsche don’t choose to get out of the boat. They are driven out of the boat by a psychological abhorrence for this kind of mental slavery.

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and without it our purely intellectual efforts degenerate into little more than the mental masturbation of the armchair general.

The Moral

But the heaviest price that free thinkers must pay is moral. Thinking for yourself has lifestyle implications that disrupt “normality.” These abnormal, even traumatic, disruptions are not the regrettable collateral damage of the process: They destroy complacency and provide the essential resistance that builds the muscles of independence.

A hermit has his cave, a monk his monastery, a writer his garret, an artist his studio, and a scientist his lab. A fund manager I know shuts himself up in a windowless office so that even something as innocuous as the weather will not inadvertently influence his mood and therefore his trading decisions. These are the lonely places where deep thinkers go to be free of the virulent and highly contagious influences of the madding crowd.

Taktshang Tiger's Nest Monastery

Being a great leader is actually much harder than being a monk, writer, artist, scientist or fund manager because a leader must maintain his lofty independence while simultaneously joined at the hip with customers, employees, vendors, stockholders and society in general. The ancient mystics called this trick “being in the world but not of the world,” and pulling it off can lead to feelings of alienation, isolation, and loneliness that are only exacerbated by being constantly surrounded by people. Uneasy lies the head that wears the leadership crown.

The lonely lot of leadership also means keeping secrets; often the very secrets that if revealed would produce the understanding on the part of others for our motives, actions, and decisions that all human beings so desperately crave.

When I was CEO of my own company one day my partner waltzed into my office and closed the door.