Role play or soul play?

In 1998, Jim Carrey played the lead role in the film Man on the Moon.
A biopic about the late cult comedian Andy Kaufman.
And for the entire shoot, Carrey stayed in his Kaufman character.
Both on and off the set.
For four months, he was totally lost in that role.
Channeling Andy and his idiosyncratic personas.
At times it proved exasperating for the people around him.
But Carrey insisted that he wasn’t in control of his performance.
He was just along for Andy’s ride.
According to Carrey, after playing Kaufman it took him a bit of time to get back to being just Jim.
And after watching the fascinating documentary Jim & Andy, I can understand why.
But I think he should have phrased it this way:
“It took me a while to get back into playing the role of Jim.”
Because there’s no such thing as “just Jim.”
Carrey, like all of us, is always playing a role.
An interdependent one.
At work, in public, with family and friends.
And that’s not a problem.
The problem is that, like Jim playing Andy, most of us have no idea that we’re doing it.
We’re out of control, channeling our self-concerned identities.
Unconsciously along for the exasperating ride.
Unlike Halloween, when we intentionally put on makeup, costumes and masks.
And enjoy the ephemeral joy and absurdity of the experience with others.
We’ve isolated ourselves in our mental stories.
Radically disconnected.
Embodying society’s serious roles and the misguided struggle for safety and significance.
And so we have lost our true sense of self and our visceral connection to life.
Instead of intentionally inventing and taking on roles.
Knowing that the performances are made up and temporary.
And that the idea of the various roles is to improve our performances while enjoying the show.
Our authentic selves have become overshadowed and weakened.
By anxiously morphing our behavior to accommodate the perceived expectations of those around us.
In order to be the person we think we’re supposed to be.
To get what we believe will eventually make us feel secure and happy.
We suppress our souls to influence our current circumstances and manifest our delusional futures.
Of course, we eventually feel the hollowness of this instrumental and superficial reality.
And then silently ache to release our authentic selves.
But being authentic requires that you know who you are and what you want.
And that you understand what reality is and how life really works. 
Because the key is not to embody your roles.
But rather to embody your essential nature.
Your desire to uniquely dance with the dynamic energy of the world.
To be curious and creative, and to step, consciously, in and out of your complicated and nuanced human roles.
Fully aware and with acceptance and love.
The poet Rumi wrote:

“Take someone who doesn’t keep score, who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: he’s free.”

Indeed!
That person is free to soul play.

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The dynamic dance.

According to the genius poet John Keats,
“Nothing ever becomes real till experienced—
even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it.”
And the same holds true for models and theories.
You may think you know what you’re talking about.
But unless you’ve experienced it, it’s simply a belief.
An echo of others’ thinking.
This became clear to me on a recent trip to L.A.
I strolled off the plane, believing I knew how the marketplace works.
So much so, that I’ve written several books about it.
But during my trip, the marketplace became… real.
What was hidden from my logical mind, was revealed in the felt and flowing world of experience.
All of the component parts coalesced.
Artificial distinctions—like innovation, branding, sales and marketing—ceased to exist.
Let me try to describe it.
First and foremost is the IDEA.
Ideas are what impel desires.
Nothing happens without an idea.
But ideas are transient and impotent without CONNECTIONS.
Connections activate ideas.
And so you have to put your idea in someone’s path.
Where it can come to life through an infusion of ENERGY.
Energy that’s transmitted between human beings.
At the right time and with the right transference of meaning.
Feelings aroused by aesthetics, identities, and desires.
Which is the tangible manifestation of the idea.
And that manifestation is what turns the connection (and idea) into something greater.
But only if you’re willing to keep it energized.
By practicing IMPROV.
By letting go of control and encouraging the dynamic dance of desires.
Which flows directly back into… the idea.
And around and around it goes.
Where it stops, nobody knows.
The marketplace is a living system.
A constantly evolving creation that connects and energizes.
If you want to be a vital part of it.
You must be an enthusiastic participant.
In the wild, improvisational dance.

Only the creative survive.

You’ve probably seen the images.
Hundreds of climbers queued in line.
Pushing and shoving.
Stepping over dead bodies.
To reach the summit of Mount Everest.
And take selfies.
What!?
How did scaling the world’s highest mountain turn from a daring adventure?
One that landed a handful of mountaineers in history books.
Into recreational tourism for the Instagram crowd?
Simple.
An unrestrained dance of desires.
Adventure-seeking climbers.
Dollar-seeking Nepalese.
And every entrepreneurial facilitator in between.
29,029 feet of free market capitalism.
And a perfect metaphor.
For what every entrepreneur and enterprise is going to face.
Because as soon as you create something of value.
Innovators and imitators will show up in short order.
And crowd the mountain.
It has happened in just about every category.
From consumer products and professional services.
To retail and information technology.
Even creative endeavors.
Like books, paintings, music and movies.
And so, now what?
In the late 80s, one of Intel’s founders wrote, “Only the Paranoid Survive.”
A best-selling management book on how to bridge the narrow line.
Between catastrophe and opportunity.
In his book, Andrew Grove wrote:
“Businesses fail either because they leave their customers,
or because their customers leave them!”
Pretty simple, huh?
Grove defined a two-step approach to making strategic decisions.
And preventing that loss.
Step one is to identify what he called strategic inflection points, or SlPs.
An order-of-magnitude change in a company's “environment.”
Competitors, suppliers, customers, potential competitors, providers of substitutes, complementors.
A change to any of these parameters is a change to the environment.
Which, in turn, are opportunities.
To go way up!
Or… to go way down.
We are living in an age of SIPs.
If you can’t see it, you are asleep.
Going through the motions.
Hoping and praying that you will, somehow… survive.
Grove’s second step is to make a decision.
To consider that your business could be done a different way.
And then to be brave enough to do it!
Jeff Bezos, the poster child for innovation in the 21st century, said:
“One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”
Do you see?
There’s no need to be paranoid today.
Because change isn’t a possibility to fear.
It’s a reality to embrace.
One in which…
Only the creative survive.

The paradox of planning.

I was searching through file boxes the other day.
Hoping to find and shred irrelevant documents.
And I hit the jackpot!
They were filled with various plans.
Business, new product, financial, strategic.
Facts, figures and statistics.
Exhaustive detail and rock-solid projections.
Whose time had come and gone.
But here’s the interesting thing.
I never used any of them anyway.
My future never emerged from what I read or imagined.
Nor from what others told me.
It came from what I passionately felt.
And discovered.
By jumping, sensing and responding.
Dynamic learning.
Like the pioneering Wright brothers.
Bicycle repair shop owners.
Who drew plans and built prototypes.
And flew the world's first successful airplane.
Planning is paradoxical.
It’s useful when it gets you excited.
Investing and moving into the unknown.
But it can also destroy possibility.
By miring you in alternative viewpoints.
By keeping you playing around in your head.
And to make matters worse.
Others will play with your head, too.
They’ll sense your confusion and apprehension.
And your desire for guidance, certainty and hope.
And they’ll add to your inertia.
With even more information.
Or they’ll pitch you with promises.
Ones that make you feel good about yourself.
Big ones that no one can logically make.
Or small ones that keep you comfortable.
And small.
Warren Buffett once said:
“You’re looking for three things, generally, in a person.
Intelligence, energy, and integrity.”
There’s plenty of intelligence in planning.
But no energy or integrity.
Those come from stepping into the unknown.
From daring greatly and following the lead of another aviation pioneer.
An English major and lawyer.
Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher.
Who once remarked:
“We have a strategic plan.
It’s called doing things.”

P.S. So why is it that college dropouts, disenchanted employees, bike shop owners, and English majors are the ones who change the world? Are they the best prepared?

Put trust in ideas.

Years ago, I was head of procurement at one of G.E.’s business units.
If the computer “instructed” me to purchase something, I’d triple source it.
And then negotiate the absolute best pricing and delivery.
It was adversarial and tactical.
I was simply reacting to my circumstances.
I knew it.
And our suppliers felt it. 
Kind of like Walmart’s suppliers feel it today.
As well as scores of media salespeople and agency reps.
But here’s the key insight.
Every once in a while a design engineer would walk into my office.
And he’d demand that I source a unique component.
One that would give us a strategic edge in the marketplace.
And when that happened, my leverage with suppliers disappeared.
Despite my posturing and arm twisting, they had the edge.
And they knew it.
So with smiles on their faces, they “worked with me.”
I wasn’t very happy during those circumstances.
But our engineers were happy.
Our customers were delighted.
Our marketplace status and margins improved.
And those suppliers’ salespeople were tickled green.
Despite my feelings, it was a win-win-win-win.
The same is true in every domain.
Who ever has the best ideas wins.
Sure, in many cases it’s a short-lived win.
But it’s a win nonetheless.  
And the kind of win that every person in it for the long term is after.
Emerson wrote, “It is a lesson which all history teaches the wise.
To put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.”
Circumstances appear to drive the bulk of today’s decisions.
In business, politics, and everyday life.
Everyone is consumed with their feelings.
And present state of affairs.
Status, position, identity and personality.
Don’t let that myopic view consume you.
Stop looking at yourself.
And instead, look at your environment.
Believe in your abilities.
Have faith in your ideas.
And then make those ideas everyone’s reality.

Do what feels wrong.

Years ago I was gifted an awesome challenge.
Reverse the mounting losses of a high tech division of GE.
And do it in 18 months (and… with no authority).
The problem was straightforward.
And so was the solution (at least on paper).
And so began my first, real learning about human motivation and cognition.
For as the poet genius John Keats wrote, “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”
And did that experience ever become real for me!
(And ultimately, it was a real breakthrough for that organization).
There’s a popular belief that human beings are rational creatures.
That we make decisions by carefully weighing objective facts.
It’s simply not true.
Instead, we’re driven by our immediate perceptions and feelings.
Especially ones regarding our personal fears and desires.
So even though my solution was logically correct.
I was in for one hell of a struggle.
Because it felt wrong… to everyone.
Like backing up a boat trailer.
Or informing elite engineers that their trivial rubber O-rings failed.
And caused the death of seven astronauts.
And to make matters worse.
My solution was an assumption about a future outcome.
And no one can guarantee anything about the future.
Not even the simple act of backing up a boat trailer.
I know that truth from experience as well.
So what?
So here’s the essential question.
Can you transcend what feels wrong… to you?
Can you be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason?”
Can you hold your beliefs lightly, as working assumptions, and try to prove yourself wrong?
And not through intellectualization.
But through experimentation.
Like a scientist.
Because that’s the key to success today.
While everyone else is busy following their feelings.
True innovators and leaders rebel against theirs.
They do what instinctively feels… wrong.
While most people do what’s easy, because it feels good.
They do what’s hard, because they know that others won’t.
While others analyze opportunities to death.
They jump off cliffs and build their wings on the way down.
And that’s what sets them apart.
And lands them in unknown territory.
What’s sometimes referred to as a “blue ocean.”
At the beginning of this piece, I called my past challenge a gift.
And that’s because I experienced a profusion of negative feelings.
Fear, anger, doubt, rejection.
Stimuli that forced me to pause.
And carefully choose my response.
And those are the same feelings I’m experiencing right now.
As I introduce my newly discovered philosophy to the world.
And so I try really hard to remember.
In my response to those feelings.
Lies my growth.
And my freedom.

Stay alive or be alive?

I recently watched a documentary on the struggling retailer, Sears.
And something simple, yet profound hit me.
Stay with me as I attempt to unpack it.
For the past five years, I’ve been working on a philosophy of life.
Along with various ways to get it across to people.
A movie screenplay, two books, and, most recently, an online learning program.
The online course is called “How to Be Alive!”
It highlights a distinction between staying alive.
Staying certain, calculating and comfortable in life.
And being alive.
Being curious, compassionate and creative.
It’s designed to help people who feel stuck.
People who spend much of their time anxious and worried.
People who feel like they’re not being themselves.
People who often wonder, "Is this really all there is?"
Now, there are those who don’t need the program.
People who find comfort in the predictability of routine.
And fulfillment in money, status and things.
They simply want to measure and compare.
Optimize the status quo, and… stay alive.
I know many who subscribe to that way of living.
In fact, it’s the overwhelming majority.
And that’s fine.
But while watching the program about Sears, I realized something.
In business… in the marketplace of products, services, entertainment and ideas.
It’s not fine.
Because in that environment.
The only way to stay alive IS to be alive.
To be curious and compassionate.
To be daring and creative.
To dance with the tension of uncertainty.
Why?
Because you’re serving people who are relentlessly searching.
For unique and more meaningful solutions and experiences.
Do you see?
Sears is trying like hell to stay alive.
And because of that defensive strategy.
Sears is going to die.
It’s a paradox.
The prince of paradox, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

“If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.
If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again;
that is, you must be always having a revolution.
...if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”

Not “continuous improvement.”
To succeed in the marketplace, you must be always having a revolution.
You must feel people’s present desires and problems (not your desires and problems).
And then be moved to do something about it.
Without certainty.
You must feel the tension of the unknown.
And then make the investment and see where it takes you.
It’s what innovators like Bezos and Musk are doing.
And what Sears and Ford and other “stay alive” organizations are not doing.
They’re not embracing their uniqueness.
They’re not living from a place of possibility.
They’re living from their fearful past.
So if you want to stay alive in 2019, then BE alive.
Spread your unique wings and fly.
And in order to fly, you need something solid to take off from.
And nothing is more solid than your inner spirit.
And the desire to improve people’s lives.

Get lost!

It’s my sincere wish for you.
I hope you get lost.
I hope you escape the confines of your rationalizing mind.
Your memories, impressions and reactions to the known.
And you rediscover the magic of uncertainty.
Because uncertainty is the genesis of originality.
The known is your cage.
The known is a mental box that tells General Motors that people don’t desire cars any longer.
It’s an intellectual prison that keeps politicians posturing, instead of improving people’s lives.
It’s a hypnotic trance that assures us that what we think is the way things are.
Open a door to a different side of life.
Then feel the fear and walk through it.
Life is a creative banquet.
But most people are starving to death.
Because they don’t want to walk through the door of uncertainty.
And lose control of the known.
Everything they’re grasping onto.
Wealth, status, reputation, comfort.
Nachman of Breslov, also known as Rabbi Nachman, once said:
"Never ask directions from someone who knows the way, you risk not getting lost."
And if you don't get lost, you don't discover.
So let go and get lost.
You just may find yourself.

Note: If you need help getting lost, check this out.

Let's mutate!

Have you heard the news?
Being a slacker may ensure your survival.
Researchers have found that metabolic rates are reliable predictors of extinction.
The lower the energy uptake.
The more likely the species you belong to will survive.
So there you have it!
Survival of the sluggish.
Stay on the couch.
And you leaders?
You may unintentionally be driving your organization to extinction.
So let go and relax (I'm actually being quite sincere).
Now, the researchers did point out that metabolic rate isn't the be-all, end-all of extinction.
It's simply another tool in the toolbox.
Plus, their discovery may just be... "a mollusk phenomenon."
I know... it sounds like something from the Onion.
So here's what I think.
I think the phrase "survival of the fittest" confuses just about everyone.
Darwin's breakthrough idea has nothing to do with the popular idea of "fitness."
You know, strength or athletic ability.
"I'll get bigger and stronger than you, and then kick your ass!"
Evolutionary fitness has to do with spreading genes.
And how do genes spread through the evolutionary process?
Mutation!
Random changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits.
Changes that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment.
To help it survive and to have more offspring.
Marketplace evolution works the same way.
It's about mutation.
Random changes.
And the messy business models that emerge.
Ones that are better designed for the "immediate, local environment."
So perhaps we should change the corporate rallying cry.
From... let's innovate!
Which implies a systematic and methodical process.
You know... "Let's get this straight."
To... let's mutate!
Expertly described by Sir Richard Branson:
"Screw it, let's do it!"
Yes most mutations are neutral, or even harmful.
But in a rapidly changing environment, it's the name of the game.
Because, try as you may, you can't control evolution.
The marketplace selects the beneficial mutations.
Amazon, Netflix, Instagram, Samsung.
And the species that are not well adapted to the environment go extinct.
Barnes & Noble, Blockbuster, Kodak, Sony-Ericsson.
Now, if you're not mutating or evolving, don't despair.
There's nothing inherently wrong with you.
You're just living in an environment which is now... very different.
From the one you evolved to "kick ass" in.

The heart-head equation.

In the late 90s, I was introduced to the single most important aspect of successful influence.
The lesson was passionately expressed by an aging salesman in the film “Jerry Maguire.”
“If this is empty, this doesn’t matter.”
He made his point while emphatically pointing first to his heart, and then to his head.
I was quite moved by that flashback scene.
And I was sure I knew exactly what he meant. 
But I didn’t. 
At the time, I owned and led a company that developed and sold medical devices.
My charge was to get busy healthcare providers to recommend our products to their suffering patients.
Since I was dealing with “caring” people, I naturally chose to appeal to their hearts.
I invested heavily in emotional communication that tapped into their innate desire to help others.
And it failed miserably.
But I learned something important about the heart-head equation.
An insight that helped inform my future success. 
Heart is not about emotional messaging. 
Heart is about empathy. 
It’s surprisingly easy to confuse the two.
It took me awhile, but I was eventually able to feel our audience’s deepest desires.
And visualize their motivating picture.
And once I did, the response was emotion.
But not joy or laughter.
Rather it was the feeling of being uniquely understood.
There’s nothing more difficult in business, or in life, than empathy. 
To look at our lives through other people’s lives. 
And nothing more important when creating belief.