Here in the Pacific Northwest the tree-leaves that haven’t yet fallen are burning bright with reds and yellows. Over the last several weeks twilight has come on noticeably earlier, and with our clocks now turned back an hour, we find ourselves in full tilt toward the year’s shortest days and longest nights.

As deep autumn alters the structure of my weeks ahead, time is much on my mind. So I thought I’d offer a few simple if occasionally offbeat ideas for “stretching” time — not, mind you, in the quantitative sense of maximizing productivity, but in the qualitative sense of remembering and appreciating how rich and deep with life every fleeting hour can be if one seeks one’s fulfillment in each.

1. Log-Off, Disconnect, Unplug

In his book The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts makes an important point about the nature of time:

‘Duration’ is deep time, time experienced without the awareness of time passing. Until quite recently, people on the planet lived mainly in terms of duration time. Time not artificially broken, but shaped around natural rhythmic cycles, time bound to the integrated functioning of the senses, the perceptions. We have destroyed that duration… We have fractured the flow of time…into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price.

Given the way our ultra-connected, online existences splinter time into frantic parcels, one’s first and most reliable method of stretching time these days is to switch off one’s devices in favor of analog reality, to become electronically inaccessible, to deliberately remove oneself from the pixellated up-to-the-minute what’s-new-what’s-now? hubbub, and step back into the true Now of the natural world.

In other words, whenever possible choose solitary introspection over information acquisition, or face-to-face interaction over hyper-connectivity.

And once offline, consider each of the following.

2. Travel, or Just Go Someplace New to You

We’ve all experienced a certain strange sensation while walking up a path and back in a place we’d never been before: Always, on that first outbound walk the path seems much longer than it does on the return.

A similar thing happens, on a larger scale, when one travels — especially when one travels abroad. While plunged amid a different culture, and perhaps surrounded by an alien language, each week can seem a month, each month a year, and each year a lifetime in its own right.

In traveling, or just going someplace new, one puts oneself into the realm of the unexpected, where one’s senses and imagination are stimulated to a degree that simply doesn’t occur in everyday life. This has a profound time-stretching effect. In the thick of business as usual, on the other hand, one’s response to the world is largely habitual, and through the lens of habit time seems only to grow more scarce.

Try it. Go away and think nothing of a homecoming. Go as one likes to go by the sea in the night, farther and farther out under the many silent stars. Try it. –Rainer Maria Rilke

3. Undertake a New Project Whose End Is Nowhere in Sight

Write a novel (no outlines allowed). Research your genealogy. Bond with a child. Volunteer at your community center or library or local tree-planting organization.

This point relates to my previous one, for the activities I just mentioned call for a new, often imaginative disposition. Each is an undertaking bound to break up routines of thought and behavior, and thus to take one out of one’s own customary sense of time.

4. Read Books About Other People’s Lives (Fiction and Non)

A wise and inspiring teacher (who happens to be my wife) puts it this way for her students:

We read to live a thousand lives with the one we’re given.

What could I possibly amend?

5. People-Watch

This is one of my favorite activities. I park myself at a busy spot (in my car or on a bench) and simply observe the various characters strolling or hurrying past, getting coffee, exercising their dogs, chasing after toddlers, waiting for the bus, etc.

The time-stretching benefits of people-watching are much like reading. Again, it’s all about exploring one’s own imaginative capacities.

I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms. I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die. — Hermann Hesse*

6. Meditate

This one’s probably obvious. But many people are unsure about what meditation really is. Think of it, if you like, as sitting and doing nothing — but remember that it’s got to be unadulterated inactivity accompanied by presence of mind, which is a very different state from the vacant passivity arrived at while, say, watching TV. Meditation, as I recommend it, means centering one’s focus upon one’s own pulse and breath, thinking about nothing else in particular. It means removing oneself from all stimuli save the flow of time.

It is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. – Charles Lamb

My previous two suggestions, reading and people-watching, could be understood as more active forms of meditation — but how often these days does one consciously free oneself to do nothing at all, to exist for a while fully separate (and still awake) from all pressing matters and all noise? To do so is to return to a core, and to bask in what Birkerts calls “deep time.”

I suspect that this kind of sitting meditation is today, more than ever, confused with — and avoided as — boredom. But really, boredom, at least as we often mean the term, is the opposite of meditation, for unlike meditation, boredom itself does nothing to renew and enliven the soul’s rich sense of time and time’s elasticity. (This fine article in The Boston Globe, however, makes a good case for reassessing boredom’s benefits).

Here’s a final word for today on the subject of boredom, time, and time-stretching, written some eighty years ago by the great German novelist Thomas Mann:

What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony — uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When every day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. …We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time — and thereby renew our sense of life itself. **

*Hesse translation by James Wright

**Mann translation by John E. Woods

(This is a renascent post from Soul Shelter’s Year-One archives)

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“Let Us Begin”

“When Time Stopped”

“The Heroic Journey”

“On Slowness”

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“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“The Art of Looking Deeply”

“Time to Give In, Time to Give Up”

“A Hymn to the Library“

Then we boarded, then we were in the air, and I watched as two rows in front of me one of the young girls started braiding her long, flaxen hair.

Somehow the expert weaving mesmerized me, and suddenly time stopped. There was a pleasant buzzing drone, and I felt like animals must feel, just sensing, no thinking, no disembodied “mind” driving the body like a car. Everything seemed one.

I was in the moment, and didn’t have to read, or write, or watch a movie, or do something or be productive or think about tasks ahead or past behind. I was content to watch the girl’s fingers braiding and not anticipate the next moment, which never comes anyway, because this is the moment: Now, the Now that is, the Now that will be, the Now that was. It’s all one Now, and always was, and I knew this again entirely, as I hadn’t for some very long time.

Then the braiding of the flaxen hair was finished, and I started to think about the extraordinary experience of time stopping and scrambled to write this down. But thinking was my mistake; it made the moment disappear. I scribbled down some of the words you see here, then looked back at the braided hair, and tried to recover the feeling, but it was gone, and wouldn’t be willed back.

So I finished the eight-hour flight, with some movies and some reading and some sleeping, but without another Now moment.

And today, some months later, I fondly remember that Now, and how now cannot be willed into Now.

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Last week I presented some ideas concerning restriction as a creative catalyst, and touched upon the writings of John Dewey (1859-1952), one of the finest intellects this country ever produced.

Dewey was the rare sort of soul whose scope of achievement seems wholly the product of genius born into an earlier and more salutary age. He was a preeminent university educator for most of his adult life, a major philosophical influence on American pedagogy, an accomplished psychologist, an authoritative social commentator and Humanist spokesman, and a highly effective political activist. It’s enough to boggle the mind of contemporary admirers.

Somehow, Dewey also managed to compose some of the most adroit and eloquent writing in the “side area” of aesthetics, and it’s here that he had much to say about the paradoxical benefits, in creative terms, of a somewhat blocked creative expression. Last week I wrote:

It’s hard work we do whenever we seek to raise an idea from the dark recesses of germination into the light of day. No matter the freedoms or constraints of our circumstances, such work is always hard—it was never really meant to be easy.

John Dewey would concur. In fact, I was basically paraphrasing the man.

And today I’d like to share some selected excerpts from Dewey’s great work Art As Experience (1934).

Instead of “restriction,” Dewey’s keyword is “resistance.”

“Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—whether through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed.

Dewey refers to biology and the adaptive processes of living creatures in order to argue the usefulness of resistance. It’s a good frame of reference, and gets one thinking positively about resistance as imperative to personal and creative growth and evolution.

However, because I’m excerpting selectively here, I should make clear that Dewey’s analogy is not meant to point out the ruthlessness required for survival of the fittest, nor the merits of Social Darwinism — nothing of the kind. Rather, in truer Dewey manner, the subject here is the mysterious, unexpected ways our creativity is enhanced or reduced in the face of certain inevitable forces (the day job, the dishes, distractions), and thus the ways our ideas succeed or fail to come to full fruition. In the following passages we could substitute “creativity” for “life” and cut to the analogy’s chase.

If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life [creativity] grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives….

If life [creativity] continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life [creativity]. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation) actually takes place. …Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, because of, tension.

Granted, too much resistance can prove harmful, but medium-size tension can be a good thing. If the resistance we face is not completely obstructive, and we’re allowed to make steady, incremental progress toward our creative ideal, we may ultimately find ourselves arrived at what Dewey calls “a more extensive balance … a more significant life.”

Pushing through resistance, our ideas get toned up, driven to evolve into something better, more creative, and more robust, somewhat in the way a body grows immune to disease by low-level exposure. The ideas’ final execution may altogether outshine our original concepts. What’s more, we may find that the whole process of germination, resistance, and achievement has taken us to new personal and creative heights.

Strange as it seems, a creative undertaking — whatever it is, so long as it is serious — will likely profit from influences reasonably adverse to its expression (the day-job, etc.). In fact, Dewey sees resistance, and the surmounting of it by the creative soul, as aspects of a simple natural rhythm — the yin and yang, or perhaps winter and summer, of existence — and indispensable to a fulfilling life experience. Too much won too easily rarely satisfies, as many a morality tale has told us.

The rhythm of loss of integration with environment and recovery of union not only persists in man but becomes conscious with him; its conditions are material out of which he forms purposes. … Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. …

Contrast of lack and fullness, of struggle and achievement, of adjustment after consummated irregularity, form the drama in which action, feeling, and meaning are one. The outcome is balance and counterbalance. These are not static nor mechanical. They express power that is intense because measured through overcoming resistance. …

…A world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envisage with pleasure Nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected upon the background of our present world of stress and conflict. Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of a living creature is capable of esthetic quality. The live being recurrently loses and re-establishes equilibrium with his surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. …

And yet, of course, having pushed through all obstacles and ushered a creative work into existence, we learn anew that the natural rhythm of germination and resistance must continue. We see that engaging this process (“not shunning moments of resistance and tension”), and growing in our most meaningful work over time, is the stuff of a fulfilling life.

The time of consummation is also one of beginning anew. Any attempt to perpetuate beyond its term the enjoyment attending the time of fulfillment and harmony constitutes withdrawal from the world. Hence it marks the lowering and loss of vitality. But, through the phases of perturbation and conflict, there abides the deep-seated memory of an underlying harmony, the sense of which haunts life like the sense of being founded on a rock. …

And now monsieur Dewey gets downright poetic:

An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. …Nor without resistance from surroundings would the self become aware of itself; it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates opposition and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilized, eventuates in elation.

There is no art without the composure that corresponds to design and composition in the object. But there is also none without resistance, tension, and excitement; otherwise the calm induced is not one of fulfillment.

Artists and creatives: give thanks for the eloquent insight of John Dewey. Fear not resistance. Harness it if you can. And keep working.

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“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan”

“Knuckling Down to the Hard Work of Writing”

“Are You An Amateur? Why Not?”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

That’s because when the sculpture’s head is fastened on, viewers see before them a contrite, bowing figure of Mao Zedong, seeking the viewer’s forgiveness for atrocities committed against millions during the Cultural Revolution.

Headless, the sculpture remains innocuous and safe from official sanction. Assembled, it breaks the taboo of criticizing China’s leaders.

“We wanted to portray him as a human being, a regular person confessing for the wrongs he’s committed,” said Zhen, quoted in a recent article in the International Herald Tribune.

The Gao Brothers focus on what Oscar Wilde called “the proper aim of art” — “the telling of beautiful, untrue things.”

The Gao’s sculpture is, in short, a beautiful lie. Mao never confessed to wrongdoing, and of course never can. Yet while impossible, such a confession is a beautiful thought.

The IHT article about The Gao Brothers prompted me to consider that most art — fiction, theater, film, paintings, music, dance, sculpture — consists of beautiful, untrue things.

Beautiful, soul-affirming untruths.

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“Stacking Stones, Letting Them Fall“

“Restriction breeds invention!”

While fielding audience questions at a public reading a few weeks back, the deeply gifted fiction writer Ethan Canin remarked thusly on the usefulness of limitations—and even roadblocks—for any fiction writer. This, of course, is an idea all creative souls can seize upon.

Canin, author of the now classic 1988 short story collection Emperor of the Air (his auspicious debut at age 28), was talking about restriction in terms both of the nitty-gritty components of a short story and the overall circumstances of a writer’s life.

A teacher at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, Canin said he’s fond of prompting his students to write a short story that will “make the reader cry over a pair of socks”—a supreme example of creative restriction. He’s always surprised and delighted by the results.

Some years ago I read an interview with Canin in which he advocated a regimen likewise dependent upon restriction. He claimed he deliberately restricted himself to one half-hour per day of writing time. (A measly half-hour?!) The amount of productivity generated by so minuscule an allowance, he said, was astonishing.

This calls to mind some comments by another fine contemporary author, Annie Proulx, from a 2003 reading in San Francisco. Proulx restricts herself creatively by deliberately avoiding all regimens. Much like Canin, rather than bemoaning the scarcity of time, she embraces it and lets it augment her energies. But unlike Canin, Proulx works scattershot. She’s done this so long she knows no other way:

I don’t have a regular writing regimen. I write whenever I can get the time—and usually it’s a matter of shoehorning some work in somewhere or it doesn’t happen. I’ll write if I wake up at 2:00 a.m., and I often do. … I’ve never kept a set writing schedule. That sounds really bad to me.

Naturally, Proulx is an extreme example. Not everybody can be so dedicated as to relinquish structure entirely. But she makes a helpful point, underlining the main one here.

As Canin’s notion goes, imposed limitation—in ideas or images, as well as in actual time to create—can galvanize the imagination in ways that, paradoxically, the writer given unlimited creative freedom may seldom experience. (Canin’s own widely read story, “Accountant,” itself revolves around a peculiarly moving pair of socks.)

This notion is not new, of course. The timeworn adage “Resistance sparks the flame” suggests something similar. But such ideas have fallen out of fashion in a present contemporary moment geared toward job obsession, live-work lifestyles, and all-or-nothing dispositions in most endeavors.

The great lot of us, I’ll venture to say, have always got an idea or two simmering on the back burner—but tend to despair of ever realizing them. Our creative sweat and tears, we feel, are sucked dry in making a living. Our time is gobbled up “on the clock” at work. We embody the modern dichotomy of creative energy at odds with practical demands, and we get … well, depressed. Working for the buck, we feel we’ve been coerced into betrayal of our own more creative impulses. Our guilt induces inertia.

But how liberating to think that “distractions,” “creative roadblocks,” and the scarcity of time may prove in many ways beneficial to imaginative production—and not strictly detrimental as many a creative soul tends to believe.

Writing about art back in 1932, the great American thinker John Dewey suggested this very thing. Where Canin’s key term is “restriction,” Dewey prefers “resistance,” but his gist is much the same:

Resistance accumulates energy … The resistance offered to immediate expression of emotion is precisely that which compels it to assume rhythmic form.

In other words, it is resistance to its production that makes good art good. (The rarity of unadulterated inspiration notwithstanding.) Dewey goes on to invoke Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s term, “salutary antagonism,” a beautiful term we might usefully substitute for the more negative “creative roadblock.”

And here I’m reminded of a delightful snippet from Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety:

He said he understood that I was into a second novel. How did that go? I told him: Slow and hard. Good, he said. Hard writing makes easy reading.

How inspiring, helpful, and certainly reassuring are these outmoded perspectives for anybody frustrated by an abundance of back burner ideas and lack of front burner “space” to implement them. And I daresay that’s most of us.

It’s hard work we do whenever we seek to raise an idea from the dark recesses of germination into the light of day. No matter the freedoms or constraints of our circumstances, such work is always hard—it was never really meant to be easy.

So maybe our cramped schedules and day-to-day errands are not the enemies to creativity we suppose, but in fact allies in disguise (“salutary antagonisms” perhaps). Maybe our back burner simmers away all the while, reducing the sauce to gourmet richness. The key, of course, is to keep one’s eyes on that pot. Why not spend the little time we’re spared stirring the sauce, rather than stewing in frustration? It just may surprise us what a few turns of the whisk can yield.

In coming weeks, I’ll further explore this subject of Restriction as it pertains to creative life, beginning next week with more John Dewey.

Till then, simmer and stir.

You may also enjoy:

“Working Without Working”

“Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas”

“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“Secrets of Creative Longevity”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan”

“Knuckling Down to the Hard Work of Writing”

“Are You An Amateur? Why Not?”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

The scene was the Bend Venture Conference and the focus was verbal pitches (written business plans had already been vetted by the conference organizers). Representatives from a dozen companies mounted the stage in turn to deliver short overviews of their ventures. Eight were in a “Wild Card” competition wherein speakers delivered their pitches within a strictly-enforced two-minute time frame.

Audience members voted to select the Wild Card a winner, so personality, delivery, and presentation order weighed as heavily as venture feasibility and the entrepreneur’s track record. This year’s Wild Card winner was ADASA, a maker of specialized RFID tag encoders for a technology category that has been poised to become the Next Big Thing for ten years running.

Competing for the grand prize of a $120,000 equity investment were four other companies previously reviewed by the conference organizers and selected as outstanding potential vehicle for investment. Each was grilled post-pitch by a panel of five venture capitalists (VCs), who, along with the conference organizers, voted to determine the winner.

Contestants included Moonshadow Mobile (whose founder assured me the previous evening that I had missed the third great technology revolution), Precision Plant Systems, which offers technology tools for crop management, Second Porch, which enables users to rent, trade, or share their second homes, and Site 9, a hosted collaboration tool provider now generating $40,000 in monthly revenue (and which hardly seemed to need funding).

The presentations and feedback sessions were entertaining, especially the good-natured pushback up by the VC judges concerning founder assertions. The scene recalled Oscar Wilde’s characterization of lying as “the telling of beautiful untrue things,” for each entrepreneur’s assumption could only be proven true or false in practice. Therefore contestants could only believe in and vigorously assert their beautiful visions, while the VCs could only assess stated assumptions in light of hard, previous experience with similar ventures. It was disheartening to recognize, for example, that Precision Plant Systems — whose crop management solutions are so economically elegant and socially powerful — faces a stupendously difficult, expensive, manpower-intensive task in selling to cost-sensitive small-scale farmers, who can take years to evaluate purchases affecting their land.

But in the end, Precision Plant Systems took first prize, and that somehow seemed fitting. Returning home, we all felt like winners, hopeful that Precision Plant Systems and its CropIQ system will, indeed, evolve into a beautiful truth.

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In my school days I was the painfully reticent kid in the back of the class who paid attention, behaved himself, and made the honor roll every quarter, but would never ever raise his hand or volunteer to speak in front of the other kids. When called upon I would either turn catatonic or talk with a doubt-ridden quiver.

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 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 guide you to the front of the class. Onward through worthy errors. Fail, grow, and keep on venturing.

(This post has re-emerged from Soul Shelter’s year-one archives.)

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“What the Seeker Ultimately Discovers“

They say doctoral theses are meant to be written, not read.

The depressing truth of that statement dawned on me while slogging through the writing of my dissertation on business models.

Nevertheless!

I believe business models are important to everyone, personally and professionally, and vow that my thesis on will be readable, if not widely read, and will be useful to businesspeople, if not to academics.

Here’s my definition of business model:

The strategic and economic logic by which an enterprise profitably acquires and keeps customers.

This is important professionally because it encapsulates how the organizations for which we work provide value to both customers and to society. It’s important personally because it helps us conceive of ourselves — in a useful way — as one-person enterprises providing value to various “clients” and to society.

The specific focus of my doctoral research is “international business model portability.” In plain language, the research question is: Why do some business models transfer well to overseas markets?

For example, why has Japanese educational services provider Kumon been successful in every major market on the planet, when few Japanese service firms succeed overseas?

How does one go about answering such a question?

Well, universities prefer robust, scientific approaches to such investigations. But unlike hard science research in a laboratory where individual variables can be isolated, controlled, modified, and measured in carefully planned experiments, the business world deals with a squishy, chaotic, complex, difficult-to-define, changing-as-we-speak entity (”the enterprise”) operating in a chaotic, complex, difficult-to-define-and-impossible-to-control environment (”the natural world”).

Launching an enterprise like Kumon involves a messy, unquantifiable mix of psychology, finance, sociology, politics, anthropology, economics, law, and real estate. And all that’s aside from actually executing the core “job” — whatever a business does on behalf of customers.

The “job” itself — the essence of a given business model — might involve engineering, construction, physical therapy, chemistry, botany, art, computer science, sports, or any of a hundred other different disciplines.

In other words, designing and implementing a business model has more to do with intangible, qualitative uncertainties than it does with tangible, predictable certainties. Call it soul over science.

Kumon provides a good example. This Osaka-based provider of after-school K-12 math and language learning services has achieved extraordinary worldwide success, establishing operations in Africa, South America, North America, Asia, Europe, India, and Australia. It’s a stunning example of true international business model portability: the Kumon model has proven viable everywhere.

Why has Kumon proved so successful worldwide — in culturally, administratively, geographically, and economically distant markets — when Japanese service sector firms generally perform poorly overseas?

The answer, I believe, is simple. Kumon’s Value Proposition — its job — is to help every child reach his or her full potential. That’s something parents everywhere want for their children, and Kumon delivers.

In highfalutin academic jargon: The hypothesis that emerges from my grounded theory approach suggests that international portability depends on the universality of the Value Proposition.

In regular English: Global success appears attainable to the extent that the model touches what is deeply, universally human. One might say that an enterprise’s soul is embodied in its business model.

You may be thinking, Jeez, Clark, did it take you two years to figure that out?

Yes, it did.

So in upcoming posts I’ll share more on business models, their relationship to entrepreneurship, and how business model thinking can jumpstart personal careers.

In the meantime, take a look at my latest book, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game-Changers, and Challengers. It explores just about everything you might want to know about business models. A 72-page sampler (approximately 5M PDF) is available now for review.

You may also enjoy:

“The Soul of an Entrepreneur, the DNA of a Business“

“What Am I Doing With My Life?“

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer“

“The Hazards of a Career, The Rewards of a Vocation“

Bright Star, the new film from director Jane Campion now in theaters, dramatizes the early nineteenth-century poet John Keats’s love for a woman he ultimately could not win.

The odds were against Keats from the beginning. Orphaned as a small child, he grew up in poverty, had a scattershot education, 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.

(This post has been disinterred from Soul Shelter’s year-one archives and updated.)

You might also enjoy:

“On Pilgrimage: The Ghosts Who Are My Teachers”

“The Heroic Journey”

“Time for Everything”

“Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan”

“An Unforgettable Lesson in What It Means to Be Human”

“The Rainbow Vanishes“

In college I had a drama instructor named Sheila Weber, who was a remarkable teacher and an extraordinary person.

On the first day of her three-part, one-year drama course, she said she was going to reveal the essence of acting, and that we were not going to understand it.

She also told us that, if we stuck with the class, around the fourth month or so we would begin to understand what she was about to tell us. And if we stayed the entire year, we would fully grasp the essence of acting. Here’s what she said:

The essence of acting is playing the human element.

Sure enough, we were baffled.

And sure enough, three or four months later, we started to understand what Sheila had been talking about that first day of class.

We learned, for example, that to play an old person you don’t focus on perfecting a limp or shaky hands or jowl stuttering. Instead, you concentrate on understanding and experiencing love of family, memories, nostalgia, regret, hopes and fears for the future — things common to all people, not just old people.

We learned that when playing a king (as I did for a scene from “Ondine”) you don’t focus on “kingliness” or a “royal” demeanor (whatever that is). Instead, you concentrate on finding and expressing in the king a core human element common to everyone. In this particular scene, the king wanted to make friends with Ondine. The scene, in essence, was about a person trying to make a friend. Even kings get lonely, I discovered.

And we came to understand that the doctor didn’t perform the abortion because of prurient interest in his patient, he did it because he wanted to help her. And we saw that Biff lit the cigarette, not because he was tough or cool, but because he couldn’t handle acknowledging his father’s failing life.

So, slowly, we learned to discern the human element in a scene, which was the hardest thing of all, at least for me. Once you did that, and understood your character’s goal, you knew what to do, what to “play.”

Then it became a matter of “reliving the scene.” In short, an actor relives, or re-experiences, in real time, the sequence of events in a scene. The mark of a professional, Sheila said, is the ability to repeat this on command.

I don’t know if any of my classmates went on to do much in the dramatic arts. I sure didn’t.

But I was surely touched by a great teacher, who taught an unforgettable lesson in what it means to be human.

You may also enjoy:

“In Defense of Solitude (Part One)“

“The Rainbow Vanishes“

“Are You an Amateur? Why Not?“