Greed

In Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he points out there are four main factors that make up the incredibly successful:

Right birthdate, right social class, 10,000 hours of practice, and right culture.

His book seeks to explain why some people are so spectacularly successful. And he concludes success is little more than a roll of the dice. The lucky few, born smart enough, and at the right time to the right parents, inevitably become greatly successful.

The book conveniently leaves out any inner dialog the incredibly successful may have. By looking at the raw statistics about where a person was born, and his family, he supposes he can tell whether a person will be successful or not.

He is wrong.

People do not become wealthy, do not practice for 10,000 hours because of their social environments. People practice and stick with it because they have two things aligned within in their minds:

Desire and Justification
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Why do good people insist on being victims?

There is no inherent goodness in living a tragic life. The world doesn’t care you decided good people can’t become successful.

It merely asks, who will be in charge, who will lead humanity into the future?

Why should it be the ones with the least morality? Why not us?

There is a disease going around that says, the more you suffer the more of a hero you are. Suffering for a cause, suffering for an idea, that’s what makes a human whole.

Stop.

Suffering does not make us better. Suffering merely gets us caught up with ourselves. We become so self-involved we forget everything else going on in the world.
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Ishmael the sheep herder was stuck again with the cows. It had been like this all his life, he dreamed of sheep all night. By day, he worked in the fields with cows. It was just his luck, dealing with inferior cows for his entire life.

Everybody in his country thought sheep were dumb. But he knew better. Sheep had style, sheep had class, and he was a classy guy.

In school, he had once written a paper, called, “The Cow and the Intellect”, where he proceeded to prove mathematically, cattle to be an inferior species, with an inferior meat, milk, and leather. He spent months on that paper, and that paper was even published in some pamphlet somewhere.
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A friend of mine was recently contacted by a major American auto manufacturer for some possible consulting work. Everything went well, their team was more than qualified. A deal was close to made, and then the question came:

“So, how big is your team?”

“Seven people.”

Dramatic pause. Silent room.

“I don’t think we have any problems that small.”
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Time is short, time is fleeting, time is burning, time is running out.

Do we squander it or do we burn through it like it burns through us? Does it pass while we whisper our small needs to it, or do we grab it and yell; demand a life of fire we know life is capable of being? Do we let our spirits be broken and become machines, or do we throw rationality and order to the wind and become something greater than a professional? Quit hiding behind indifference and feel the world’s edge.
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Last night I dreamed of a man who was building an island. He had taken sand and dirt, filled it in his truck, and was building a new, free land for people to come and live on. He had his life saved long ago, in some sort of drunk driving accident, and this was his way of redemption. I saw and walked his land, it was in Florida, and it was right next to huge houses. I decided to live there. I decided his island was going to be my new home. It made me happy.

I sit here and write, and mostly think. I sit and think what I should be doing with all these resources in the land of so much, and I come up short. There’s cars and plastics and phones and instant images, but no substance. We can instantly transmit and receive a million little ideas, but never experience. Never depth or meaning. Instead we get tiny fragments of a feeling.
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Let’s sit together, and I’ll take off the top of this white box we’re in. I’ll replace the roof with the stars and pour you a coffee with my mind.

And as we sit down and get comfortable, there’s a knock on the side door. It’s my childhood, she wants to show us something.

Our perfect universe of coffee and pudding implodes and we’re whisked away to the roof of my old elementary school. We’re both eleven and the cops will tell our parents if we get caught up here.

I should let you know now; I brought you here because I had something important to tell you. But seeing my old house from here, and hanging out with you, I’ve forgotten all about it. Let’s check on my sixth grade girlfriend. She lives a couple blocks from here.
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There is no global recession. There is no coming catastrophe, and there is no need to worry about the future. Markets are adjusting themselves and becoming more efficient. We don’t need all these people working to create what the market currently puts out.

And so, a great number of jobs are being lost that are no longer needed maintain the same output.

Is this something to be afraid of, something to worry about? Is the world going to end, are millions of people going to end up on the streets?

The answer is no, at least not because of lack. We grow food more efficiently now than ever before. There are too many houses and not enough people to fill them. There is no lack anywhere, except for the ones we arbitrarily create for ourselves.

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Once upon a time, there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.

But then, one day, the prince ran away from the palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strangle and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.

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Perhaps what keeps keeps you from finding peace is the many words. For redemption and virture, samsara and Nirvana are also mere words, Govinda. There is no thing that is Nirvana; there is only the word “Nirvana”.

I barely distinguish between thoughts and words. Here on this ferry, for example, there was a man, my teacher; for years he simply believed in the river and noting else. He noticed that the river’s voice spoke to him; he learned from its voice, it raised him and taught him. The river seemed like a god to him. For many years he did not know that every wind, every cloud, every bird, every bug is just as godly and knows and can teach just as much as the venerated river. But when this saint went into the forest, he knew everything, knew more than you and I, without teachers, without books, only because he believed in the river.

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