Carl Jung:

this is insane. i genuinely don't understand why ambitious people aren't shown this lecture before their careers start consuming their entire lives. clayton christensen spent his career studying why successful companies collapse. in his final class, he asked students to apply the theory to themselves: if you keep allocating your time the same way, what life are you actually building? he had already seen the answer in his own harvard mba class. everyone looked successful at the fifth reunion; by the 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, many were unhappy, divorced, and living far from their children. work shows you the score immediately. close a sale, ship a product, finish a presentation, earn a promotion, get paid. an hour with your child may produce nothing you can measure today; it may take 20 years to understand what that hour built. so the next free hour goes back to work, one rational decision at a time. this is how people build lives they never planned: through hundreds of right decisions that lead in the wrong direction, day after day. money, titles, and headcount are easy to count. christensen believed a life should be measured by the people who became better because you were there. he died in 2020. one question remains: if someone saw only where your time, energy, and attention went this year, what would they think actually mattered to you? the full 19-minute lecture is in the video below.

I thought spirituality meant neglecting my family. When I told my parents I wanted to be a monk in 2018, they feared I wouldn’t return from Thailand. The night before I left, they told me how much they’d miss me; how they were looking forward to spending time with me in their retirement. I arrived at my dharma teacher’s hut deeply conflicted.I ranted at him for 10 straight minutes about how my family felt my spiritual practice was pulling me away from them, how difficult it was going to be to take this into a 10-day silent retreat with me… Finally, my teacher interrupted me, “do I look withdrawn to you?!”He was sat on the floor, playing with his 3-year-old girl and her toys as if he were, himself, a toddler.I spent some time in the monastery and realized there was nothing magical about the place. Yet I’d put it on a pedestal because I wanted to escape the challenges of my human relationships. Painfully, I saw that everything I’d been trying to escape was in my own mind. )And I saw that actually, in my direct experience, what was in front of me when I faced my father was a man who loved me in a way I was never supposed to understand when I was young. A month after my return home, my teacher told me I finally got the memo.

The eternal balance of the spiritual entrepreneur: > Being linear enough to knock off key tasks to move projects forward towards a defined goal. > Being non-linear enough to surrender to the flow of your energy, explore the side paths, go off schedule, and and go down the strange rabbit holes. If you're too much in the linear, you lose touch with the Spirit. But if you're much in the non-linear, you lose touch with the Earth. Maybe eventually, if you are able to give up the world and material pursuits altogether, you can live in the non-linear, undefined state forever. But if you're building in the world (and have a team and customers relying on you), you also have to be able to play the game of task-orientation, concentration, discpline, and linear focus.