Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Buddhism

Why Serendipity Shouldn't Matter

Why Serendipity Shouldn’t Matter

“Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated.” – Wikipedia

I’ll be contrarian to my good friend Chris Brogan in saying that serendipity shouldn’t matter to you. Here’s what I mean. There’s an interesting expression in ninjutsu: banpen fugyo. Literally, change, never surprised. Toshitsugu Takamatsu, the previous headmaster of the Togakure Ryu ninjutsu school, is quoted as saying there’s no such thing as surprise for the ninja.

Stephen K. Hayes, my teacher’s teacher, often says that luck is merely energy that is unchanneled.

If you’re really good – really good – at life, if you’re working towards mastery of all that life has to offer and all the potential you have in life, then surprise and serendipity should be the gravy. They should be the bonuses at best. Why?

At the Web 2.0 Open, one of the exercises I asked people to do (adapted from Stephen K. Hayes’ phenomenal Evocation workshop) is to pick out something in your life that seemed like a lottery ticket sort of experience. Pick out something that was just wow! and good fortune came your way, and tell that story to a friend. During the event, I asked people to talk to the person next to them about their experiences, telling this story of a magical moment in their life when something fortunate happened. I told my story of co-founding PodCamp with Chris Brogan and suddenly finding myself on a jet to Sweden to put on PodCamp Europe at Jeff Pulver’s behest.

Serendipity, right? Good luck, right?

The second half of this particular exercise was to take the exact same story but retell it in a fashion where no luck was involved, where you made it happen and the natural course of events was that your efforts and focus created the outcome of success. I asked people to exaggerate if they needed to, but make the story work. Again, my story was of how hard Chris and I worked to create PodCamp and make it the success it was, and naturally events occurred which led to us being asked to create PodCamp Europe.

Here’s the funny thing: with a significant majority of the room, very little or no exaggeration was needed. Very little. Most people were able to find enough factual evidence in their lottery ticket moment of all the things they had done, all the choices they had made, that led to their good fortune. More than a few spirits perked up as they realized just how much of a hand they had in their “luck”.

This is the power that you have, the power that you give away, the power that you forfeit when you chase serendipity, when you hope for good things to happen just because instead of taking the reins for yourself.

Take charge of your life. Take charge of your destiny. Yes, leave room for hope and serendipity, leave room for good things to happen as bonuses to what you’re already doing, but do not live another day in your already too short life counting on hope when you have the capacity, the capability to take the wheel of the ship for yourself, to make good things happen, and to set the stage for the results you want.

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November 25, 2009
Heroism as the antidote to evil

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” – Edmund Burke

Go read this story on CNN about a two and a half hour rape of a 15 year old at a San Francisco high school function as nearly two dozen people stood around did nothing, or worse, joined in. No one called 911. No one got help. Very reminiscent of the Kitty Genovese case and the bystander effect.

How do you stop something like this?

How do you counteract something like this?

How do you prevent something like this from ever happening in the first place?

Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford Prison Experiment, has an elegant solution. The problem is the diffusion of responsibility. When a group of people are involved, no one person feels responsible. Only someone who steps forward, someone willing to take risks of social and physical violence, someone willing to bear the burden of breaking a conforming mindset can stop this.

In short, a hero.

Watch this TED talk featuring this discussion:

Dr. Zimbardo’s idea of hero courses is a good one, but probably won’t come to a school, church, or workplace near you any time soon. So how do you get started on this today? His idea of heroic imagination has deep, deep roots, stretching back over thousands of years, across multiple continents. At Stephen K. Hayes’ Evocation seminar, one of the exercises done by participants was a detailed exploration of what our inner superhero looks like, sounds like, and acts like. While it’s impossible to recreate even a fraction of that seminar in the bits and bytes of a blog post, I’ll leave you with a question you can ponder, one that will get you that first step down the path towards finding your own superhero.

Instead of thinking about superhero powers, think about superhero actions.

If you had all the superhero powers you wanted and needed, what would you as a hero stand for, and what in all of the world would you first fight against?

That single question will tell you not the kind of superhero that exists in your daydreams, but the one that exists inside of you right now.

What do you stand for?
What do you stand against?

Think about that as you ponder the San Francisco rape, the Kitty Genovese bystander effect, and Dr. Zimbardo’s lecture. That will be the first step towards awakening your superhero and the superheroes of all those around you.

Do it soon. Do it now. Right now, more than ever, our world needs as many heroes as it can get – including you.

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October 28, 2009
How to avoid missing the best days of your life, part 1

Ever get the sense that life is moving too fast?
Ever get the sense that the best days of your life might be gone before you know it?

You’re probably right. After all, we’re so bloody busy these days that we’ll walk right by genius and not even notice (go read the story and come back here. I’ll wait). We’ll pass by stunning natural beauty and not even blink an eye. Julien obliquely pointed this out the other week, but didn’t talk about how you can fix it, how you can fix yourself (which is irony given the retreat he did at a Zen temple).

Here’s how you fix it. It’s simple, but not easy.

Remind yourself.

You were perhaps expecting something more? Think about that word, just that word for a second. Remind. Re + mind. As in to put back into your mind. This is how you avoid missing your entire life. This is how you avoid seeing everything go by and waking up at the age of 40/50/60/70/80/the day before you die, wondering what happened and why you feel so damn empty inside.

Remind yourself.

Okay, how? Here’s how. This part is easy if you can remember to do it.

At selected intervals throughout the day, sit up straight, take a deep breath, and promise yourself that no matter what you’re about to experience, you’ll find something to enjoy in it. About to sit down to eat? Take that deep breath and promise that you’ll enjoy at least the first bite (slowly!), even if you’re in a hurry to eat the rest of your meal. About to go outside? Take a deep breath and promise to find and look at for at least a moment one beautiful thing. Easy to do these days with fall foliage. About to come home from work? Take a deep breath and promise to enjoy at least the first moment when you walk in the door, knowing you’re home – even if everything afterwards isn’t as perfect as you’d like.

Here’s the hard part: remind yourself. Remember to do this. I like to set an alarm on my calendar (which promptly buzzes and rings every device around me). Set up a schedule on your Google calendar or PDA or Outlook or whatever it takes to prompt you a few times a day to do this. You can do it before meals, or every hour on the hour, whatever your technology supports. Remember, this isn’t a big deal or investment of time, literally and figuratively just a minute to catch your breath from the rat race and appreciate something – anything – that you can.

Your mind gets used to habits very quickly. Why not make a habit of finding something beautiful in your life all the time? This is how you start – by reminding yourself to do so frequently.

In the next blog post, we’ll talk a bit more about other ways to really improve your ability to get more out of your life. Stick around.

Credit: ideas from this blog post are derived from exercises by Stephen K. Hayes.

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October 25, 2009
Lychees, Ohio, and Evocation

While a bunch of folks were at Blogworld in Vegas this past weekend, I and a few other intrepid seekers got on a plane at Logan Airport in Boston to head to… Dayton, Ohio! Instead of the Strip, we headed to the Dayton Quest Center for a seminar with Stephen K. Hayes called Evocation.

It’s nearly impossible for me to describe exactly what Evocation was or what happened in a general sense because Evocation was an intensely personal exploration of understanding our self-imposed limits and how to shatter the barriers of what’s holding us back from achieving true success in the world. Evocation was a completely different seminar for each person who attended because every person in the room faced different, unique challenges in their lives. The areas of exploration and growth that I needed to explore, the questions I needed answers to were very different than the ones of the person sitting next to me.

Evocation was exactly as it sounds – a seminar that evoked reactions, thoughts, and insights about our problems with our own minds, memories, emotions, and experiences acting as both student and teacher, both problem and solution. It was an esoteric seminar in the most powerful sense of the word esoteric – all the good stuff was all direct experience rather than textbook learning, which is another reason why it’s so hard to describe.

Here’s an example of esoteric. Let’s take something that a lot of people haven’t eaten: a lychee nut. If you’ve had lychees, all I have to do is say the word and it evokes the taste, scent, and experience of eating one. If you’ve never had a lychee, no amount of verbiage in this post will ever come close to granting you the whole, authentic experience of biting into one. The only way you can truly understand a lychee nut is to have the direct experience. I can tell you perhaps a local store near you that sells them, or another name under which it might be sold, but in the end, the experience of biting into one and the wonderful taste it imparts (if it’s fresh and ripe) is something you can only experience.

In fact, the more I might try to blog about a lychee, the less likely you might be to try it. I might stumble upon an explanation of a lychee that’s good enough for the casually curious, and once you’ve got that explanation, you’ll pass it by. Your mind will say, well, we have a general idea of what it’s probably like (even though you have no idea whatsoever), so it’s not worth running out to the store to get one.

So rather than write about Evocation any more or how life changing an experience it was for me – heck, I came away with an entirely new sense of identity and self, a better, more powerful version of the me that got on a plane in Boston last week – I’ll only suggest that the next time Stephen K. Hayes offers a seminar like Evocation in the future, screw Blogworld (or whatever else is happening then) and go to Dayton to train with him. The experience will be unlike anything else you’ve ever done, and the tools you’ll get to make your life better, make your business more successful, and make you happier as a human being will be worth it.

You will emerge with an astonishingly clear vision of who you are supposed to be in this life, the true, authentic, heroic self that is inside of you right now, silently screaming to be free.

I’ll close for now by extending my sincerest thanks to my teachers, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, and Stephen K. Hayes, for an incredible Evocation experience that was infinitely more valuable than anything I might have won in Vegas, and a hearty “see you next time!” to my fellow Evocation participants.

There will be much more to come in the days ahead as the lessons of Evocation settle into my mind and begin to produce the results I want to create. I hope you’ll stick around as we explore together what’s possible.

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October 19, 2009
No, I'm not headed to Vegas and Blogworld

Just to clarify some confusion, I’m not headed to Vegas or Blogworld this week, though many of my friends are, and I wish them safe travels and good luck if they decide to hit the tables. I’m instead headed to Dayton, Ohio later this week for a transformative conference/seminar called Evocation, hosted by my teacher’s teacher, Stephen K. Hayes. Here’s the agenda – as far as I know, there’s still space if you’d like to attend and can get to Dayton, Ohio.

“Evocation” – Recalling Your True Face, Finding Your True Path

As a result of all we have encountered and experienced from the beginning of life, we each carry deep in our core a vision and voice of who we identify ourselves as being. For most of us this is usually a positive thing, but even in the most hardy, old scars and scoldings can block us from attaining our fullest potentials in life.

Japanese culture’s Bu Do “warrior paths”, and especially the martial way of To-Shin Do, provide a vehicle for exploring how to remove the obstacles to fullest power living. The path of the warrior takes us out into life to confront fear and weakness in a direct and purposeful way, and each step on the path has the potential for waking us up to all we were meant to be in life. By coming face to face with the root “ghosts” of where old personal hold-backs began, and learning how to let go of the limitations that have slowly crept in to define us, we can find our original face, return to authenticity, and re-pledge ourselves to our truest personal path.

This weekend seminar with Stephen K. Hayes will present you with a collection of significant exercises and practice models for evoking your truest inner greatness and redirecting yourself as a tatsujin master of life.

Featured exercises include:

1. “One Deep Breath” – How to get grounded and free of distraction in your body, your intellect, your feelings
2. “Accountability – Reclaiming abdicated responsibility”
3. “Appearances are not reality”
4. “Mistakes are opportunities to grow and develop your power”
5. “Coming from emptiness of practiced limitations” – Discover where personal reality and public reality meet and overlap
6. “Generating a circle of protection”
7. “Power of allies in overcoming binding obstacles”
8. “Your new vision, your new voice”
9. “Vows for future greatness”

Tuition is $249. Register by phone at 937 436-9990 or email [email protected].

For my money, I know I’ll get more out of Evocation than I will BlogWorld, but I wish the best to everyone headed out that way. See you on the other side!

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October 13, 2009
A bottle of awesome

I had a conversation recently with a friend after she’d gone for a long drive along the lakeshore with her favorite music cranked to 11, and she expressed the rather fervent wish that she could somehow bottle the way she felt, but couldn’t.

The thing is, you very much can do so, you very much can create the mental and emotional states you want to experience. Your body and mind are designed to do exactly that, because at our most primitive levels, we’ve evolved to remember strong memories and feelings as a key to survival.

Look at your own history of strongly anchored memories, from basic things like the taste of an apple to incredibly complex things like the first person you kissed. You have tons of memories, good and bad, that you’ll never be able to get rid of. You have tons more memories waiting to be triggered at the drop of a hat – the right song in a public venue or the right scent of perfume, and you’re instantly somewhere and somewhen else. Ask any couple that’s been together for a while if they have a song that they strongly associate with, and you’ll get an enthusiastic yes far more often than not.

What emotional states do you want to invoke? Confidence? Serenity? Awesome?

The trick to refreshing and triggering the emotional states you want to experience is to know what your triggers are for memories you do have, and set new triggers when you want to anchor down a state for later recall. For memories you already have, few are more powerful than music, which is where the post about using your iPod for mental protection came from. Go read it and try it if you haven’t. Go dig up the powerful, positive states you want to recall out of your past. If high school or college was a positive experience for you, go dig out those yearbooks that are inevitably collecting dust on a bookshelf and take a quick jog down memory lane to extract the memory triggers that still have strength and impact.

If you know in advance that you’ll be encountering an experience that you’ll want to remember, like my friend’s lakeshore drive, then decide in advance how you’ll anchor that experience for later recall. Perhaps you’ve got some special hand gesture that has significance to you – many devout folks who pray with clasped hands find that just the act of physically doing so refreshes their mental and emotional state. Maybe it’s a special outfit you wear or a special routine that you create, a special habit that you can invoke – whatever works best for you.

There’s ample precedent for all of this. If you look at some of the images from Buddhism and from ninjutsu in which various hand postures are shown, you’ll see that they are less about portraying practices to the uninitiated and more about prompting practitioners who’ve gone through training to refresh their memories and experiences. Having a picture or statue in your home of Fudo Myo-o, Jesus Christ, the Dalai Lama, St. Mary, etc. isn’t so much a thing to pray to or worship as it is a daily, constant reminder of a mental and emotional state you’re seeking to invoke in yourself. (though of course many people do use them as foci for worship as well)

You don’t need to use religious materials, either, especially if they don’t connect with you. Plenty of people have powerful state changes when they pop in their favorite movie. Plenty of people have powerful emotions when they fire up Team Fortress 2 or Sim City or World of Warcraft. Plenty of people have associations that are just as strong around Yoda, Tirion Fordring, Superman, Indiana Jones, Batman, the Terminator, and Rocky Balboa. Use the tools and content that speak the most to you of the emotional and mental states you want to generate.

For “bottling” the feelings and states you want to recall, the trick is to be consistent. If you go for lakeshore drives as your way of refreshing yourself, then set a routine, a hand posture, a habit, whatever, so that similar experiences and emotional states are anchored with the same habit. If you love watching Rocky jog up the steps of the art museum, set those physical habit reminders for that feeling. Whatever creates the way you want to be, set your reminders, your anchors. Then, later on, when you need to invoke that same mental and emotional memory, the habits and physical gestures brings back what you’ve stored.

Give it a try and see how “mind-setting” works for you!

Photo credit: Mark Blevis

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August 24, 2009
The case for not instant

Kate Carruthers tweeted:

@cspenn time is all about perception anyway – we’re going nuts & getting cranky at microwaves because they are too slow, it’s madness

There’s a particular state of mind that you can cultivate that can open a lot of doors and relax your mind, but our continued focus on instant – better, faster, richer, stronger, right NOW – prevents us from ever touching it. It’s a concept that evolved out of our warrior and spiritual traditions that’s been adopted by practitioners of every discipline.

In Zen Buddhism, it’s a state called zanshin, or ever present mindfulness. Athletes call it being in the zone. Whatever you call it, it’s the state when you’re doing something where the boundary between you – the person doing – and the thing you’re doing fades away.

You’ve had this experience many times in your life, whether you know it or not. You’ve experienced it watching a particularly compelling movie, when you the viewer and the movie are one – you cry with the characters on screen, and your mind for that movie is in the movie. You’ve experienced it as a tradesman, when the activity – sawing wood, hammering nails, catching fish, and you are one, and everything you do feels effortless, free from stress, and pleasant, even if it’s physically difficult labor. You’ve experienced it as an athlete when all your concerns fade away and the swim, run, or ski slope and you are indistinguishable and you feel like the wind itself.

One of the great esoteric secrets of Zen – meaning it’s in plain sight but you can’t see it until you’ve had the experience – is that this zanshin state of mind is available all the time, every day, every moment. Everything you do has the potential to deliver you into that state of mind. For most of us, myself included, it takes some time to get into that state. We’re not super engrossed in the movie at the opening credits. We’re not soaring along the race track as soon as we lace up our shoes. It takes a little time to find that state and get into it, but when we do it feels terrific.

This is where we make the case for not instant. For the hordes of us that are not Zen masters, we need the time it takes to boil potatoes or knead dough or take photos or tend garden to get into that state. If we reduce everything in life to a few pushes of buttons, we lose those opportunities to practice mindfulness, to practice what it means to be in the moment. Instant, super fast, super convenient has its place, to be sure, but so does the long way, because we all need that time to get into our frame of mind where we can shut out everything else and let ourselves be free.

The second part of this is that any activity that’s sufficiently repetitive gives you the opportunity to develop this state of mind. Going for a walk, baking bread, lifting weights, cooking soup, playing with your kids, watching movies – so long as you have ample time to find your mind.

The final secret in all of this is that not instant stuff gives you a chance to recharge after a particularly draining experience. As a professional public speaker, I find that I expend a lot of mental and emotional energy when I speak, which is good for the people who enjoy hearing what I have to say. In the day or so after doing a particularly energetic presentation, I take the time to do more of the not instant activities to help my body and mind rest, reset, and recharge. If you’ve got something in your life that periodically draws intense bursts of energy from you, doing some not instant stuff will help you recalibrate and get back on track.

Here’s to things taking their due time.

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July 29, 2009
The year of the ox ahead

Hat tip to Stephen K. Hayes’ Densho and the Tsubaki Jinja shrine for this stirring description of what 2009 may hold for us all:

HEISEI 21/TSUCHINOTO/USHI DOSHI/KYUSHI KASEI meaning the 21st year of the Heisei reign of current Emperor, 6th of the Ji-Kan 10 Celestial Stems Inner Aspect of Earth, Year of the Ox and a Nine Purple Fire Ki Year.

Year of the Ox, Signifies leadership, strength, power and stability. As for Kyushi Kasei it is the 9th number of the cycle of 9. It is situated in the south position which is at the top or head of the 9-star compass so it implies mental development and intelligence. 9 is the highest number compared to 1. Its color is purple which implies high rank. It is common sense that happiness visits the family who treasures life, ancestors and Kami. It is the sun above your head at noon and implies vigorous ki, especially mental ki. In terms of fortune it is the time to make a plan, to sow, to fertilize and to prepare for the future.

This has the makings of a very exciting, very promising year ahead.

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December 30, 2008
The soul of marketing

So here we are. The economy’s down, business everywhere is in trouble, prospects for the future look dim at best. What’s a marketer to do?

The thing to do is to take a moment and strip away everything in marketing that doesn’t matter. Put down for a moment ROI, analytics, metrics, conversation, social media, direct mail, campaigns, all the buzzwords that we insist upon. Put all that away because it clouds our vision.

The soul of marketing transcends all of this, all the technology, all the distractions. The soul of marketing can be boiled down into a simple three part creed. If you work for a great company, this is a formalization of what you already know.

I believe in myself.
I believe in my community and our ability to mutually succeed.
I believe in what I have to share.

I believe in myself. This is where you start. I believe in myself, I believe that I am larger, stronger, more powerful, more capable than any downturn, than any financial crisis or sagging economy, because I believe that I can make things happen in any environment, but especially in a challenging one. I believe that worry, doubt, and anxiety are largely mental limitations and I believe in my ability to go beyond my limitations.

I believe in my community and our ability to mutually succeed. I believe in my coworkers, that we share a common purpose to be successful, to do good, to help each other succeed. I believe that the more I share with my community inside and outside of my company, the more I receive in return unasked. I believe that giving is the greatest pathway to gain, and what I have, I have to share in order for everyone to prosper.

I believe in what I have to share. I believe in the company I work for and the products and services we have to offer. I believe that our goods and services legitimately improve the lives of the people who use them responsibly, and I believe that the company I work for stands behind our shared ideals. I believe that at the end of the day, our community, our customers, and our world is better for us having done business in it, and prosperity will be the natural by-product of the true value we create.

If you can wake up every day and affirm this creed truthfully to yourself, if you can look a coworker, colleague, or supervisor in the eye and feel these truths in action, then no amount of economic hardship will be able to slow you down.

If you wake up one day and you can’t affirm this creed, then you have to either change how your company does business or you have to change companies to one that does business in alignment with your ideals.

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December 9, 2008
The Wheel of Time Turns

The Wheel of Time Turns

Fall is coming around again, and as it does, the echoes of autumns past come with it. Nostalgia for times past are inevitable as the growing season ends and we buckle down for winter’s arrival; Halloween in older traditions is said to be the day when the veil between living and dead is the thinnest. This brings to mind an expression one of my teachers, Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center, talks about at the beginning of every autumn’s New England Warrior Camp.

If you look only at the calendar, time looks like a loop. It’s September again, it’s your birthday again, it’s this or that again. History repeats itself, and except for maybe feeling a little bit older when you blow out the candles, time doesn’t feel different.

If you look away from the calendar as a loop and see a day as a notch on a wheel, then you can look past the cyclical repetition that permeates our days (“Monday again?”) to a more broad perspective. Like the wheel of a wagon on a trail, the same day, week, month, or year mark comes around again and again, but we forget to look at the progress the wheel makes on the road behind and in front of it. We forget to take a moment to see how far we’ve come in one turn of the wheel, and to look ahead for what adventures await us on the path in front of us.

Take a moment right now to reflect on your journey so far. How far have you traveled and how much have you achieved in the last year? How much different is your life in one turning of the wheel?

Stephen K. Hayes has an especially powerful insight into the familiar Zen painting of a brushed circle. From a limited perspective, it’s just a circle, signifying completion and no end or beginning, but if you delve into it, you see that it’s a spiral being observed from the top down. The brush is illustrating your ascent up the spiral towards achievement, and though it may look like a circle, it’s so much more if you have the broadness of mind to see past the surface.

Life is all too easy to let slip away in meetings, appointments, and routines, only to wake up one day and realize the wagon wheel is at the end of its journey. Know now that though the wheel returns to the same notch every so often, it only travels on any given part of your life’s trail once. Be sure to enjoy the trip before it’s over.

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August 26, 2008

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