“The ones who made it,” he said softly, “are the ones who weren’t in it for the money. The fortune-seekers couldn’t sustain their passion through the hard times—and there were hard times.”

A transplanted Brit who launched a Web production company in Hong Kong in 1995, Hamilton was one of a handful of Internet entrepreneurs in the island colony who enjoyed a multimillion dollar payday after his firm was acquired by a company that later went public on NASDAQ.

Hamilton’s not alone. In interview after interview throughout Japan, Asia, and North America, successful entrepreneurs told me the same thing, in different words and in different languages: “It’s not about the money.”

What, then, is entrepreneurship about?

Exploiting a market opportunity? Fame? Fortune? Proving yourself?

First, a tip as to what entrepreneurship’s not about: Entrepreneurship is not about you. It’s not about you getting rich, you proving something to the world, you struggling to overcome the odds.

Rather, it’s about you helping other people achieve their goals.

This is obvious when you think about it. Business is all about satisfying customers, right? Well, to satisfy customers, you need to help them save money, solve annoying problems, experience more satisfaction or pleasure, or earn a better living.

Put simply, in order to succeed as an entrepreneur, you must help other people.

Entrepreneurship, therefore, is about helping other people achieve their goals. It’s not about you (I’ll try to minimize repetition of that phrase in these final lines).

Successful entrepreneurs focus on others. Take Derek Sivers, for example. As the leader of a successful touring band, he needed a way to make his CDs available to fans everywhere, all the time—not just at concerts.

But Derek and his group were unattached to a major label, and big sellers like CDNow and Amazon required bands to have in-place agreements with large distributors. What was a hard-working, independent musician to do?

Derek decided to set up his own modest online sales channel, and soon friends from other bands were asking for help selling their music. Within a couple of years, the store, renamed CD Baby, was distributing the work of more than 90,000 artists. To date, it’s paid out more than $80 million to the more than 200,000 independent artists it now represents. Derek focused on helping others.

Successful entrepreneurs undertake ventures that benefit many people. My personal theory is that ventures are successful to the degree that they generate social benefits. I’m no fan of Microsoft’s products or business practices, but who can deny that the company enabled personal computing for a billion citizens? (Too bad Apple missed its chance to make that contribution—we’d probably all be a mellower bunch.)

So success as an entrepreneur is not about you. Ooh—I feel another Clark’s Rule coming on—I think I’ll call this one Clark’s “About” Rule for Entrepreneurs (CARE): It’s Not About You.

Now the question is, what do you CARE about?

This essay first appeared as a guest post at Get Rich Slowly in a slightly different form.

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“For Entrepreneurs Starting with Nothing, Here’s the Ultimate Strategy”

“How to Create Wealth, How to Keep Wealth”

“How to Go Solo Without a “Big Idea”

A cursory glance at Wallace’s writing appears to show a hyper-intellectual mind which probably regards faith as quaint and outmoded and any talk of the soul as either New-Agey or flattened by platitudes. Actually, Wallace used his prodigious powers of scrutiny in a mammoth attempt to peel away cliché, ingrained thought, or tried-and-true philosophies, all in the hope of achieving — truly achieving (and not merely taking it second-hand) — a real apprehension of Meaning. In other words, things like faith and the soul were important to him, as they are to any good writer. He believed we needn’t all be stuck inside our own heads.

These traits are evident in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. It’s a strange speech to give at a college graduation (although maybe not for Wallace). It meanders through the banalities of road rage at rush hour and shopping cart warfare at the local supermarket. But toward the conclusion something almost transcendent happens. Wallace provides powerful counsel regarding the importance of what we choose to “worship” in contemporary society, and the dangers of allowing intellectual habit to replace real thoughtfulness.

For today’s post I want to share the following remarkable excerpt from that speech. I believe readers will find it as moving as I do.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death…

(Read Wallace’s commencement address in its entirety here.)

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“Life Without Principle (or Interest)”

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“The Happiness Issue“

Silhouetted against the blue-black sky, the horse-mounted samurai with the horned helmet towered over me like a demon as I knelt in the dirt before him. I could not see his face but there was no mistaking the authority in his growling tone, nor the hint of mockery in his question.

I tried to speak and managed only a faint croak. My mouth had gone dry, as parched as a man dying of thirst. But I had to respond. My fate—and though I didn’t know it then, the fate of all of Japan—rested on my answer.

Raising my head just enough to brave a glance at the demonic figure, I saw him staring at me, like a hawk poised to seize a mouse in its talons.

When I managed to speak, my voice was clear and steady, and I drew courage with each syllable.

“That’s correct, Lord Nobunaga,” I said. “I do.”

It was a time of carnage and darkness: the Age of Wars, when the land was torn by bloodshed and the only law was the law of the sword. A peasant wandered the countryside alone, seeking his fortune, without a coin in his pocket. He longed to become a successful samurai—a career all but impossible for an uneducated peasant unskilled in the martial arts. To be sure, nothing in the demeanor of this five-foot tall, one-hundred-ten-pound boy could possibly have foretold the astounding destiny awaiting him.

His name was Hideyoshi, and on that fateful spring evening in the year 1553, the brash young warlord Nobunaga hired him as a sandal-bearer. Driven by a relentless desire to transcend his peasant roots, Hideyoshi went on to become Nobunaga’s loyal protégé and right-hand man. Ultimately he became the supreme ruler of all Japan—the first peasant ever to rise to the absolute height of power—and unified a nation torn apart by more than a hundred years of civil strife.

Hideyoshi’s true story has inspired countless novels, plays, movies—even video games—for more than four centuries. Born the weakling son of a poor farmer at a time when martial prowess or entry to the priesthood were the only ways for an ambitious commoner to escape a life of backbreaking farm toil, he rose from poverty to rule a mighty nation and command hundreds of thousands of samurai warriors. For generations of men, Hideyoshi became the ultimate underdog hero: a symbol of the possibility of reinventing oneself as a man and rising, Horatio Alger fashion, from rags to riches.

Hideyoshi was driven by a burning desire to rise in the world, and rise he did—beyond his wildest dreams. Sheer hard work, dedication to service, and force of will enabled him to become the first-ever peasant to achieve supreme civil and military power as Taiko, or Imperial Regent—the Emperor’s proxy. Along the way, he pacified dozens of warring clans, built roads, bridges, and Japan’s greatest castles, instituted currency reform, and laid the foundation for a federation of states that would later become Japan’s social democracy—and Asia’s mightiest economic power.

But absolute power, as they say, corrupts absolutely. In the evening of his days, Hideyoshi stained his legacy by ordering an ill-advised invasion of China via Korea (so illogical was this move that many scholars believe mental illness sparked Hideyoshi’s astounding hubris). The debacle turned into a disastrous seven year war costing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. To this day, Hideyoshi is reviled by many in Korea as history’s greatest villain. Today the lessons of his life could not be more timely.

In The Swordless Samurai, my second book, Hideyoshi reveals secrets of organizational leadership and success in an imaginative exposition of the peasant-turned-samurai’s personal philosophy, based on true historical incidences and what is known of his enigmatic personality. The work is now available in paperback from St. Martin’s Press.

This essay, excerpted from parts of The Swordless Samurai, first appeared as a guest post at the Art of Manliness.

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“My Search for the Bushido in George W. Bush”

“The Heroic Journey”

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A while back at my blog, I asked my readers for their definitions of simplicity. Many included the importance of having less, but enjoying more. When it comes to actually giving stuff up, though, it can be easier said than done. In that spirit, here are five ways you can make it easy to enjoy a life with less stuff.

1. Use what you do have.

Go through your music collection and make a playlist of forgotten favorites. (I love doing this!) Pull a favorite book off the shelf and give it another read. Pull a passed-down antique out of the closet and give it a place of honor. Using and enjoying what you do have gives you a feeling of abundance that’s incredibly uplifting.

2. Keep a list of free and fun things to do.

You could take a photography walk, teach the dog a new trick, snuggle with a loved one, incite a family wrestling match, write bad rhyming poetry, take a nap, or dance to the radio. The more items you can dream up, the more fun you have at your fingertips.

3. Start seeing empty spaces as packed with freedom.

Celebrate every empty shelf, bare wall, and exposed square foot of flooring as the ultimate victory. If freedom equals happiness (or at least a big component of it), then not having something just brings you closer to your personal nirvana.

4. Engage all five senses.

Don’t just put on your shirt in the morning. Take a second to feel the weave, to take in the color, to smell the freshness (it is clean, isn’t it?). Okay, you don’t have to taste it, but you’re starting to get the idea. Same with your food. Don’t just eat it; savor the smells and sights of a delicious meal. By packing the mundane with meaning, we create a luxurious lifestyle out of nothing at all.

5. Make a list of the things you get in return when give things up.

My list includes freedom, peacefulness, and room to think. Keep the list at the bottom of sock drawer and reference as needed. It’s a powerful reminder of exactly why I’m not filling my drawers with endless new things.

You might also enjoy:

“Simplify, Simplify”

“On Moderation”

“What We Really Need to be Happy“

Several months ago I wrote about something I hadn’t done in nearly 20 years: Apply for a job. In that post, I promised an update on what happened. Here’s what I’d planned to write:

“I was offered the job, and I accepted it …

Now, you may well wonder why a successful company seller and teacher of entrepreneurship would, in the midst of writing a three-month thread exhorting others to go solo or become more entrepreneurial in their work lives, would suddenly become a university employee.

Let me explain.

First, this job is all about my lifework over the past 24 years. Never has a job seem to so well-suited to my interests and skills.

Second, I wanted to reengage in a community. For the past five years I’ve been writing, teaching, investing, and working on a new publishing-related venture. But aside from the periodic bursts of interaction each new class brings, these activities involve working either alone or with one, or occasionally two, other people. I like working solo, but I’m no hermit. I miss the community of the workplace. I love the work-at home-or coffee-shop work style, but I’m also feeling the need to be part of a larger community—and to have a place with my name on the door, where I can go to be part of something bigger, and where I can help others.

Third, my work is computer- and data-intensive, and can be done just about anywhere quiet where one can think, write, research, or compute. That’s fine, but it means I work a lot from home, library, and coffee shops, and tend to exercise the same skills over and over. I want to go to a place that requires new and different behaviors, where colleagues are available for face-to-face chats—and where my name’s on the door (or at least a mailbox).

Fourth, it’s a half-time job, so it leaves room for doctoral studies and my venture, which fortunately is something I can work on rather than in. Teachers should be practitioners, and I want to keep practicing. But the experience of applying, interviewing for, and accepting this job has renewed my appreciation for salaried employment.

Which is a good thing, because let’s face it: Most people are better off working as salaried employees rather than entrepreneurs.

A company is a community, and we all need community. Being a solo or small businessperson can be lonely and socially isolating (I think the most satisfied entrepreneurs are those who succeed in building companies big enough to become true work communities). Telecommuting or otherwise working alone sounds like a dream to those stuck in cubicles, but there’s a dark side, too (see reader Sarah’s Five Ways to turn Telecommuting into a Nightmare for a hilarious but provocative take on the work-at-home lifestyle).

Financially, too, it’s tough to beat a steady income for building wealth. While entrepreneurship can lead to outsized rewards, slow and steady saving and investing is the most reliable path to prosperity for most workers. Ignore financial news and sock away as much salary as you can.

A salaried job provides emotional stability along with financial security. The truth is that most people are happier and better off being employees. A workplace provides community, a belonging-place, camaraderie. At worst, it’s a place to commiserate with coworkers; at best, a place where lifelong friendships grow …”

But! as I wrote back in Paragraph One, all this is what I had planned to write. Here’s what actually happened.

I didn’t get the job.

Though I became one of three finalists, another candidate received and accepted the offer.

I was disappointed. I’d been confident of success, and had good reason to be so. Nevertheless, I had to face a bitter lesson life teaches over and over again: There’s always someone smarter, stronger, and more qualified.

So I’ll remain self-employed, and trod steadily toward my goal of becoming a half-time, salaried university professor. And in the meantime, I’ll continue to sing the praises of both entrepreneurship and salaried employment.

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I’ve heard lots of different writers tossing around a particular little quote. I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been variously attributed to Joan Didion, W.H. Auden, and Saul Bellow. Here it is:

I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.

Writers cherish this epigram because it gets to the mysterious heart of the creative process. Often we sit down to our work at a loss for ideas. We find, at such moments, that we must relinquish control, step back, and welcome the surprise of whatever comes through.

Whether you’re a painter, songwriter, or creative thinker of any kind, your process of creation will be the same in one important respect: it will require surrender.

Surrender to what? Oh, to the uncontrollably slow, fabulous percolations of imagination, memory, mind, soul — or, in strictly psychological terms, surrender to the untraceable workings of the unconscious.

Because I’m chest-deep in labor on a new book now, I muse upon these matters daily. The unconscious is a rascal, but I’d be lost if I didn’t surrender and let it do it’s rascally thing.

I love this passage from Annie Dillard’s darkly whimsical volume, The Writing Life:

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. These truths comfort the anguished. …Most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace. Octavio Paz cites the example of ‘Saint-Rol Roux, who used to hang the inscription, The Poet is Working, from his door while he slept.’

For all of us it’s true: we do much of our work while lying asleep — or while standing in the shower, or sitting behind the wheel en route to our day-jobs. Always, little cogs keep silently turning. Some rich mineral water seeps up through the strata to surface as a glimmering idea.

Ernest Hemingway famously described his working method as a revving-up of his subconscious. As soon as heard the engine’s purr he stopped working and let it run on its own. So, paradoxically, when he left his desk his real work got started.

I always worked until I had something done, and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. …I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.

One must go to the desk, of course, and regularly; nothing will happen if one doesn’t. A regimen is important because it primes the pump. But just as important is surrendering one’s conscious efforts, letting the spout at the back of the mind burble free.

These words of Andre Dubus, one of the twentieth century’s greatest short story writers, remind me that not thinking about one’s work, like Hemingway, is a discipline as indispensable as going to the desk in the first place.

I gestate: for months, often for years. An idea comes to me from wherever they come, and I write it in a notebook. Sometimes I forget it’s there. I don’t think about it. By think I mean plan. I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it; it is hard work, because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether or not I can write it; but I must not know, or I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.

“Art is long,” wrote Henry James. “If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.”

Indeed, one must be patient. One must surrender to the slow fruition of thought, image, ideas. Rilke called this “being inactive with confidence.”

And if we reflect, we see that this practice applies to many aspects of life. Essentially, it’s the practice of faith. Surrender, stillness, and trust: all are religious disciplines. T.S. Eliot talks about this religious quality of creativity, and even equates one’s creative actions with one’s destiny:

Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster. …The concept of destiny leaves us with a mystery, but it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

Stalled as it may seem at times, our work has a meaning and an order. If we care about what we do, if it is real to us, and if we approach it with discipline and surrender, it will germinate night and day — and cannot fail to blossom and surprise us.

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“Unleashing Ideas: A Fourfold Approach”

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I’m glad, because I personally witnessed Mark’s effectiveness on the job at the same Dilbert-sized company for two years. During our time together, he flourished while I struggled (the experience taught me, among other things, that competence is a function of fit between the person and an organization, not something inborn and unchangeable—but that’s another post for another time).

Since then, Mark’s worked all over the world: Japan, Singapore, Egypt, London, Holland, the U.K., and Italy. Mark’s no armchair guru; he’s successfully accomplished hundreds of difficult projects, while effectively managing and mentoring difficult people—both superstars and underperformers.

But what really knocks me out is his unshakable good cheer and humor. I’ve never met anyone who maintains such consistently high spirits amid situations that would crush the life from ordinary employees.

Now Mark has a couple of books out. The first one, called Time to Get Started, carried an intriguing paragraph entitled “Power of a Committed Decision.” Here’s my synopsis:

There is nothing more powerful in the world than a committed decision. Many people think they are making decisions, but unless there is a powerful commitment behind those decisions, they are not decisions, but preferences. Add the commitment to ensure your decisions are real decisions—not preferences.

“I always understood the power of a committed decision,” says Mark, “mostly because I’ve seen so many uncommitted decisions in corporate life! But three years ago, the true power of a committed decision became visible to me with my personal ‘committed decision’ to create a unique daily thought for my Web site.

“Now, creating a unique thought for each day would definitely take commitment, and I also knew I would need the motivation to start and the discipline to keep it up. What I needed were the two ingredients of a committed decision: 1) a “Why” to generate motivation, and 2) a ‘No Alternative’ to create the discipline to follow through.

“The ‘Why?’ was built by viewing the sum of my daily thoughts (over many years) as my legacy—something I can leave behind when I leave this world. This made the “Why” a powerful reason to act. Second, I needed the discipline to make sure I would do it on a daily basis and not miss a single day. This is where “No Alternative” became important. I began to make the daily thoughts more visible by sending an e-mail of the past week’s material to people who found it interesting to read. This way, I had “No Alternative” but to keep it up—or disappoint readers.”

So, if like me, you sometimes find yourself wondering why your decisions, well … don’t actually decide anything, give Mark’s advice a try. And make this year’s decisions stick.

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“Daunting Task? Learn to Whip It”

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Partly it was natural shyness that paralyzed me. Yet in school theater productions I strutted the stage without fear, happily performing to packed auditoriums. What accounted for my contradictory nature? Simple. While acting in a play, I could rely upon a script. I didn’t have to venture my own thoughts or guesses. Speaking in class, however, I risked saying something silly or giving the wrong answer. In class, I was vulnerable to mistakes — and mistakes are a shameful thing. Or so we’re led to believe.

Ours is a success-or-failure culture. We covet seemingly flawless wins, and avoid at all costs missteps, goofs, or even well-intentioned blunders. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed back in 1841:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.

Success — early, gracefully, and infallibly achieved — is the main idea; God help us if we cannot leap clear over all errors to attain it. We learn these attitudes early: Answer right and go to the front of the class. Ace the test and advance to the top of the grade-sheet. Make no mistakes and excel. But err and you will fail to advance — or fail, period.

Absurd, of course. Human beings cannot learn without making mistakes. We ought to know this, even in youth. The old cliché, Nothing ventured nothing gained, dances in our brains from an early age — yes, but being a cliché it fails to penetrate. And so throughout our lives we must teach and re-teach ourselves that mistakes are natural and even useful – not shameful.

Personally, the realities of adulthood re-teach me this lesson often — as does my writing process, which necessitates engaging mistakes and building successes upon them.

In the wonderful book The Conversations, legendary film editor Walter Murch puts it beautifully:

Truly great lessons can be learned from work that fails, but failure is stamped on the product and there’s a tendency to think everything you did was wrong, and you vow not to go there again. You have to resist this impulse, just as you have to resist the syrupy entanglements of success. These are, almost, religious issues. What the world thinks is success, what it rewards, has sometimes very little to do with the essential content of the work and how it relates to the author and his own development.

Like Emerson, Murch speaks here to our success-or-failure culture, but with different nuance. We tend not to credit the value — indeed the necessity — of the mistake, the attempt, the unprofitable or impractical venture, and consequently we often do not understand the real nature of success when we see it.

In his wonderful book Blue Highways William Least-Heat Moon notes:

The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds: Bell was working on an apparatus to aid the deaf when he invented the telephone; Edison was tinkering with the telephone when he invented the phonograph. If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.

Thomas Edison faced many a doomed venture, including a scheme to build houses of poured concrete all over America. I recently heard it said, however, that his outlook was always: I never fail, I just find out a thousand ways that something doesn’t work.

My poet Rilke puts it more boldly: “The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.”

I can’t help feeling Rilke is right. Meditating upon the subject long enough, I begin to see that worthy mistakes — and not easy successes — are in fact what life is all about. What a freeing thought!

The writer Paul Zweig wrote, “Making our wish, we make ourselves. We exist in the time between the wish and its fulfillment.” For today’s post I paraphrase Zweig thusly:

Making our attempt, we make ourselves. We exist in the time between the attempt and the attainment.

So throw off timidity, young person at school, and raise your hand! It’s your mistakes that will lead you to the front of the class. Onward through worthy errors. Fail, grow, live, and keep on venturing.

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“Measures of Success”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Redefining Rejection“

I was vacationing on Orcas Island, part of the San Juan Island group between Canada and Washington State. There I pursued manly activities such as fishing, chopping wood, boating, hiking, swimming, and lighting woodstove fires. The copy of Wired magazine I brought lay unread in my shoulder bag, which remained unopened (what was I thinking?). Amid the Orcas Island landscapes and the Puget Sound seascapes—Dall porpoises, harbor seals, soaring trees, boats, dogs, fish, dogfish, banana slugs, iron fireplaces, axes, and deer skeletons—Wired magazine seemed an effete, puerile invader, deserving of banishment from my analog island.

Instead, I went to the Orcas Island public library and got a copy of Wuthering Heights. Good, timeless human angst and agony, still powerful after 200 years. In the final two days I finished off Jay Mcinerney’s Ransom, a solid read with particular appeal to Japan buffs like me. And as the August days waned, I came closer than I care to admit to buying a boat and spending the next six months cruising the San Juans with fishing tackle and a sleeping bag.

Back in Portland, I reluctantly switched on the PC, took one look at my desk, and immediately saw two acute problems. Here’s a picture: Can you see what’s wrong?

The problems with my desk are subtle but serious, and I’m going to fix them ASAP. Here they are:

1. Role confusion
This is a honkin’ big desk, measuring 80 inches long by 36 inches deep. For a computer station, it’s far bigger than it needs to be. That’s because it’s designed for analog work—for spreading out papers and books, for thinking and writing by hand. Yet it’s dominated by computer crap that makes such “spreading out” impractical. It needs to return to its true mission in life as an analog work desk.

2. Telephone presence
What’s that about? The presence of a telephone assumes constant sitting at this computer station/desk throughout the day. This a dreadful violation of several of Clark’s Rules (though great if you want to be a constantly swamped office worker).

Apprehending these problems, I immediately got on the phone with Harris Work Systems to arrange the purchase of a new, separate computer workstation, substantially smaller than my main desk (BTW, this will be a motorized workstation—when it arrives I’ll show a picture and explain the ergonomic advantages). My honkin’ big desk, sans computer, will return to its proper purpose, in a new and honored location in my office.

So thanks, Orcas Island, for the analog injection—and for the hint on better coping with an all-too wired world.

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“How to Be Late for Dinner”

“Fixing a Broken Work Model”

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The odds were against John Keats from the beginning. Orphaned as a small child, he grew up in poverty, had a scattershot education, nurtured an ill-fated love for a woman he couldn’t win, was savaged by critics in his native England, and died unknown to the world at age twenty-five.

But Keats left behind a slim body of poetry that includes some of the most beautiful lyrical works in the English language. His poetic mastery is often cited as being second only to Shakespeare.

Keats’s correspondence is full of riches as well. In May 1819, eighteen months before fatally succumbing to tuberculosis, the twenty-four-year-old poet sent his brother an astonishing letter outlining his philosophy about the human soul. I first read this letter more than a decade ago and have revisited it a few times a year ever since. Keats’s life-affirming perspective always touches me.

The letter seems a natural thing to share on a blog about the soul, for Keats is talking here about the big themes that all of us, by virtue of being alive, must explore: the meaning of life and death; of joy and sorrow; the conflict between fate and freewill; and the nature of identity. In short, he’s talking about the quest of existence itself.

Call the world, if you please, “The Vale of Soul-Making.” Then you find out the use of the world… I say “Soul-Making” — Soul as distinguished from Intelligence. There may be Intelligence, or sparks of the divinity, in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire Identities, till each one is personally itself.

…How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks…to have Identity given to them, so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it is a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion, or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation.

Now Keats takes up a vivid analogy to explore how a unique soul comes to be formed in a world where one is often at the mercy of uncontrollable circumstance.

It’s particularly moving to reflect that the young man writing these words has led a very difficult life, has long been haunted by the conviction that he will die young — and yet, rather than say “no” to life, has opened himself to the troubles and wonders of the heart, and seeks to create art of lasting beauty.

… I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the Horn Book used in that school. [Note: a Horn Book was a child’s primer, often covered with a sheet of transparent horn]. And I will call the child able to read the Soul made from that School and its Horn Book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the heart a Horn Book, it is the mind’s Bible, it is the mind’s experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its Identity. As various as the lives of men are, so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls [i.e. each possessing identity] of the sparks of his own essence.

This appears to me a faint sketch of a system which does not affront our reason and humanity. I am convinced that many difficulties which Christians labor under would vanish before it.

Keats is saying here what Rilke, another favorite poet of mine, put another way in 1904: “Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”

And noticing that Keats describes a Soul as Intelligence that has acquired an Identity of its own, I think of certain inspiring people I’ve been privileged to know in my life — and of inspiring artists whose works never cease to amaze me. These people, and these artists, have a kind of indescribable soulfulness that sets them apart. Unique, wise, humble, and generous, they enrich my life beyond measure. Keats would suggest that these people have such life-enhancing soulfulness to share because they have experienced the world openheartedly.

Now the poet sums up:

Man was formed by circumstances, and what are circumstances but touchstones of his heart? And what are touchstones but provings of his heart? And what are provings of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? And what is his altered nature but his Soul? And what was his Soul before it came into the world and had these provings and alterations and perfectionings? An Intelligence, without Identity. And how is this Identity to be made? Through the medium of the heart. And how is the heart to become this medium but in a world of circumstances?

Fate is fickle, life unpredictable, but one is here now, and there’s lots of living to be done.

You might also enjoy:

“The Heroic Journey”

“Time for Everything”

“Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan“