FLOW Vision News: APRIL 2007

Dear Friends in FLOW,

In order to create a world of flow for all, a world of optimal experience for all, we need to support the external conditions that foster flow, as well as cultivate the appropriate internal conditions.  Freedom, based on the rule of law and well-defined property rights, including protection for the commons, is the primary external circumstance required for flow.  Given such freedom, in the realm of education and human potential development, we will see an increasing number of entrepreneurial educators, in the broadest sense of the term, supporting people to cultivate the internal conditions leading others to a life of passionate engagement in meaningful purpose.

The singer-songwriter Sharon Bousquet, in a song titled “Myself for a Living,” sings:

It’s not “I want the big house”, it’s not “I need a new car”,
It’s more that I’ve been poured into a small clay jar.
It’s more a push inside, it’s like the voice of God telling me
to make the best of what I’m given, be myself for a living.

As we enter The Age of Abundance (the title of a wonderful new book by Brink Lindsey), more and more of us will feel a push inside to “be myself for a living.”

Cynics will say that such a sentiment is self-indulgent and that most people will have to continue to earn a living by the sweat of their brow, in pain and discomfort.  Certainly those who are able to make a living as singers or songwriters will remain a very small percentage of the population.  But it does not follow that most people must be doomed to dreary, meaningless lives in cubicles.  The number of ways in which we can each “be ourselves for a living” is limited only by our imaginations.

Consider:   Last November I got in a cab with beads, stuffed animals, and various chatchkies.  The cab driver almost immediately asked if I smoked cigars (I don’t.)  It turns out that for some eight years she has been the vocal talent on the leading national cigar radio show; she provides sophisticated, sexy British banter on the air and with callers as they are waiting to go on the air.  And then this very cheerful, dumpy, fat Jewish cab driver, in her delightfully tacky cab, started cooing racy sweet nothings to me in a seductively throaty British accent, stopping occasionally to giggle at the sexiness of her own performance.  She had certainly caught my attention.

I gradually drew her out as we drove from Clearwater Beach to the Tampa airport.  She had always loved to play with her voice, and had been known in high school for her impersonations.  At some point that social reputation led to her gig on the cigar show.  But the cigar show voice role was only the beginning of her story.

It turns out that, upon graduating from high school not knowing what she wanted to do, she went to a tech school to learn how to be a professional photographer.  She then got a job working for a commercial studio shooting weddings, family photos, and so forth.  After a few years she went out on her own and opened her own studio, where she promptly began giving her customers their negatives, a move which brought down upon her the resentment of all the other professional photographers who had traditionally kept the negatives from the customers.  As the other professional photographers attempted to blackball her for giving away negatives, she gradually she came to specialize in shooting overweight women, whom she loved to make beautiful, and they came to love her because she made them beautiful in her photographs.

In the midst of her successful career, her brother, with whom she was close, died of AIDS.  After his death, she wanted to spend time with people in grief.  So she closed her business and got a job working in a funeral home (she is certainly the first person I’ve met who deliberately sought out funeral home work).  She loved spending time helping people through the grieving process.  She worked for a national funeral home corporation that provided her with what she regarded as excellent training for helping people make decisions about their deceased loved ones.

While spending time with these people of all races, cultures, religions, and nationalities, going through the grieving process, she developed a fascination with the various beliefs about the afterlife.  She found that most people didn’t even know what their own tradition actually said about the afterlife.  And so she began researching diverse views on the afterlife, and discovered an extraordinarily rich literature on the subject.  She eventually left her funeral home job to open up a bookstore devoted to beliefs about the afterlife.  She spoke lovingly of this wonderful place at which people of diverse beliefs, often in a state of grief, would come and spend time shopping and talking, initially just coming in to explore their own beliefs but then browsing through the dazzling range of such beliefs.  After managing it herself for a few years, she hired a manager and now just went in a couple of times per week and drove a cab for extra cash.

She loved talking to people, and loved driving a cab as an opportunity to talk to all kinds of people.  She spoke resentfully of those cities that had passed laws requiring dividers between drivers and passengers, and said she would quit driving a cab if they passed such a law in Tampa.  She acknowledged that driving a cab was dangerous, especially for a woman, and had, indeed, been threatened with violence from some of her riders.  Several of her cab driver friends had, indeed, been attacked and hurt.  I expressed some concern at the risks she was taking, but she had clearly thought through her priorities and calmly insisted that she was doing what she loved, was managing her risk prudently, and wouldn’t want things any other way.

When she dropped me off at the airport I gave her a good tip and a big hug, and she was as happy as a person can be.  She had no card, and I’ve forgotten her name, but I will always remember her as an example of how to live life.  She was being herself for a living.

Each of us has a unique set of gifts to contribute to society.  The challenge is to find a way to offer our gifts in a way that satisfies our need to contribute while simultaneously satisfying the needs of others.  There are an infinite number of such matches; I believe we have only begun to scratch the surface of ways in which we can make each other’s lives better and enjoy doing so.

Some of us, such as the life artist/cab driver described above, are brilliant at discovering new and better ways to share our gifts with others.  Others of us see no options other than going to school or getting a job.  What if, instead of the seventeen years that most of us spent in school, taking academic courses, some portion of that time was spent in learning from entrepreneurs who helped us make the best of what we’re given so that we can be ourselves for a living?  At present American society spends about $200,000 educating each young person, and yet few are launched in life with a sense of personal vision and the skills needed to manifest that vision.

One of my favorite definitions of an entrepreneur is “Someone who stays awake at night thinking about ‘What sucks?’ and then creates a business to fix it.”  Why isn’t each of us delighted almost every moment of every day?  Why are there problems on earth?  How can each of us “be ourselves for a living” and thereby increasingly happy and well?  Might there be entrepreneurial educators, mentors, coaches, artists, and geniuses of life who could create more engaging and powerful learning experiences that could launch young people into positive lives for $200,000 per student?

More broadly, what would it take, in terms of legal structures, cultural norms, and personal ethos, to create a world in which everyone was constantly engaged in a life of delight, happiness, and well-being as we “be ourselves for a living” every minute of every day?

You might choose to believe that such a vision is impossible.

We believe such a vision is possible, and is in the process of being realized by many of us.  We encourage more people to work with us in creating the legal, cultural, and personal framework within which lives of wellness, meaning, and purpose increasingly become the norm, lives in which we work together to make the world a better place.

This month on our home page we feature Sharon Bousquet’s album Temple, which includes “Myself for a Living,” cited above, along with my article “A Tale of Two Idealists,” which provides a sketch of the life direction we are encouraging.  Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance provides the social and economic backdrop against which this vision is becoming a reality.

Towards peace, prosperity, happiness and well-being for all,

Michael Strong
CEO & Chief Visionary Officer
FLOW, Inc.

Please contact us at contact@flowidealism.org with ideas, insights, and inspiration. And remember that FLOW is a non-profit organization that promotes economic freedom and broadly distributed prosperity. You can support FLOW through your financial contributions among other means.