The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living

by Randy Komisar

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

While the market momentum seemed inexhaustible, I wondered if beyond greed there was enough passion to fortify the startup crews when the seas got rough—and they always do.

Business is tough. Tenacity and endurance are key to business success. But tenacity is seldom sustained simply by the drive for riches. Endurance most often wanes in the face of persistent obstacles if money is the overwhelming objective.

In order to find satisfaction in our work, therefore, we should train our attention on those things that we can influence and that matter to us personally.

The Monk encourages us to consider how we spend our time, not our money. Marrying our values and passions to the energy we invest in work, it suggests, increases the significance of each moment. Consider your budget of time in terms of how much you are willing to allocate to acquiring things versus how much you are willing to devote to people, relationships, family, health, personal growth, and the other essential components of a

high-quality life. Rather than working to the exclusion of everything else in order to flood our bank accounts in the hope that we can eventually buy back what we have missed along the way, we need to live life fully now with a sense of its fragility. If money ultimately cannot buy much of life'...

The Monk encourages us to make work pay, not just in cash, but in experience, satisfaction, and joy. These sources of contentment provide their own reward...

Don't be mistaken. Following your passion is not the same as following your bliss. While passion is a font of expressive, creative energy, it won't necessarily deliver pleasure and contentment at every moment. Success, even on your own terms, entails sacrifice and periods of very hard work. Following your passion will not necessarily make you rich, but then again it won't hurt your chances either, since most people are far more successful working at things they love. You have to engage passion realistically, with an eye toward what is achievable given your circumstances.

I am reminded that finding meaning and fulfillment in one's work should not be an elitist notion.

A few readers were disappointed that The Monk never attempts to address specifically how to create a successful business. I don't have a prescription for financial success, nor do I think one exists. In truth, The Monk is not primarily a business book; that is, it is not about buying low and selling high, but rather about creating a life while making a living. It is about the need to fashion a meaningful existence that engages you in the time and place in which you find yourself. It is about the purpose of work and the integration of what one does with what one believes. The Monk is not about how, but about why.

country that measures its prosperity by Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. Things are different there. The volume is turned down; the clock slowed. The pace of life is gentle. Fancy things are few and far between, but those precious qualities of life that seem to vanish in a Western society intent on measuring everything are not forgotten in Bhutan.

After a long moment, I asked softly, “Your holiness, with your great age, experience, and wisdom you have encountered many things. You have certainly answered many questions. What question still perplexes you? When you sit in meditation, what question do you still ask yourself?”

He continued to stare into me as his nephew said simply, “The lama says he still doesn't understand why people are not kinder to each other.”

Another monk, another riddle. And, as with The Monk and the Riddle, the answer lies not in dollars and cents, but in who we are and what we believe.

IT'S FEBRUARY 1999, and I'm motorcycling across the most arid expanse of Burma, now officially Myanmar. The boundless landscape is relieved only by one ribbon of life: the rich river basin of the Aye Yarwaddy that drains the Himalayas and wears a groove through the middle of this starkly beautiful country. My destination is Bagan, an ancient city studded with more than 5,000 temples and stupas over thirty square kilometers. The group I have been traveling with—American bicyclists

“Imagine I have an egg” —Mr. Wizdom cups an imaginary egg in his hand—“and I want to drop this egg three feet without breaking it. How do I do that?”

If they don't believe in the face of doubt, they'll never make it.

The other reason is simpler still. On one or two occasions in my own history I've been helped by people who should have given me the boot for my naïve and disruptive zealotry. I have been sympathetic

to the plight of true believers ever since.

VCs, I explained, want to know three basic

things: Is it a big market? Can your product or service win over and defend a large share of that market? Can your team do the job?

VCs like to target markets with big potential, especially tiny markets growing quickly into big markets, like the Internet. If it's a small market, the chance for a portfolio-levitating, reputation-making home run isn't there. A VC's portfolio return is an average of all its investments, so he'd rather have a huge winner and some no-ops than a bunch of minor successes. If you're off-target slightly in a big market, you ...

“So,” I asked, “how big is the market for all thi...

I thumbed through the material. It was a fairly polished presentation: market description, customer need, product strategy, competitive positioning, launch schedule, sales projections, expense forecasts, IRR and other rates of return, investment required, discounted cash flow. All the numbers you'd want. Year one. Year two. Year three. Everything worked out with an inevitable logic. Lenny had outlined in some detail

Street as easily as on Sand Hill Road. With frenetic energy and a natural penchant for risk taking, these armies of prospectors are smart, hardworking,

Step one: Do what you have to do. Then, eventually— Step two: Do what you want to do. We hear variations on this theme

At key points in my life, I've found it helpful to ask myself a simple question about what I was doing at that moment: What would it take for you to be willing to spend the rest of your life on Funerals.com?

But knowing what we require to be willing to do something lifelong provides invaluable self-knowledge. It's not, as I've learned from my own experience, that the deferred life is just a bad bet. Its very structure—first, step one, do what you must; then, step two, do what you want—implies that what we must do is necessarily different from what we want to do.

the second step, the life we defer, cannot exist, does not deserve to exist, without first doing something unsatisfying. We'll get to the good stuff later. In the first step we earn, financially and psychologically, the second step. Don't misunderstand my skepticism. Sacrifice and compromise are integral parts of any life, even a life well lived. But why not do hard work because it is meaningful, not simply to get it over with in order to move on to the next thing?

Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can't tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express

your passion. But it isn't just the desire to achieve some goal or payoff, and it's not about quotas or bonuses or cashing out. It's not about jumping through someone else's hoops. That's drive.

As I tell the M.B.A. classes I sometimes address, it's the romance, not the finance that makes business worth pursuing.

How is this going to affect that individual, or this group of people? What are they going to say? To feel? Will they know why you made that decision or will they think you did it arbitrarily? When we talked about product support, it wasn't evaluated as an expense line. It was a service—for people. The focus was always on the value you could deliver to your customers, employees, partners, and shareholders—and what they and others thought about it and about you. You might not hear it in the first session. You might not hear it in the second session. But, unless you were deaf, by the end of the first few months, you heard the theme loud and clear. Bill had an underlying faith

that if we focused on the people issues, worked hard, and did a great job, the business would take care of itself. That was Campbell.

I started to pay attention. I made a break with my old legal habits. I began to apply Campbell's thinking to doing deals. My job was to find intersections of interest between the negotiating parties—not differences, but commonalities—and to build them into a solid relationship and transaction.

BUSINESS, I told Lenny and Allison, is about nothing if not people.

Finally, your many business partners and associates. Sever the chain of values between leadership and the people translating strategy into products and services for your customers, and you will destroy your foundation for long-term success. The culture you create and principles you express are the only connection you will have with each other and your many constituencies. It may not be Allison's utopia, but it was a far cry from Lenny's soulless machine. As I talked, Lenny had been

But the best learned through trial and error that investing in a passionate group of smart people, with a big idea for a big market, provided the greatest odds for success.

Frank, I understand completely and agree. Still, a second discussion with Lenny— along with Allison—makes me suspect that Lenny may be his own worst enemy. What if their business were about building communities for families and friends coping

with the deaths of loved ones? A content site and directory of local services? What if it gave families a place to gather from wherever they were, anywhere in the world, where they could share their grief and help each other make arrangements and decisions? This could include family Web pages and chat. What if the revenues came not only from the commerce they're talking about now, but also from the advertising of support services, providing qualified leads to people who can help, and delivering premium on-line services to interested parties? I don't know what those are yet, but if the site got up and

running, the users would tell us. This business could work in partnership with local providers of related services and funeral directors, and lock them all i...

I liked being the leader better than being the guy who made the trains run on time. I found that the art wasn't in getting the numbers to foot, or figuring out a clever way to move something down the assembly line. It was in getting somebody else to do that and to do it better than I could ever do; in encouraging people to exceed their own expectations; in inspiring people to be great; and in getting them to do it all together, in harmony. That was the high art.

Lenny would need to step up and make a similar transformation. He would have to take on the mantle of leader and rally people to his vision to enlist their support. He could not hope to get by simply trying to make the train run; he would have to set its course and motivate others to join him for the ride. It

would be easy to dismiss him as no Jack Welch, but if he could become the Retriever and assemble Funerals.com from the muck, he would be the right CEO for phase one. The time to worry about operati...

For me, the moral of the story of Steve Perlman and WebTV is the need to emphasize visionary leadership over management acumen in the formative stage of a startup. If you turn a visionary startup into an operating company too early, you throw out its birthright. It will never be as big, as grand, or as influential as it might otherwise be.

For some of us, Silicon Valley's forgiving attitude toward failure rests on a more profound realization: Change is certain, and in a world of constant change we actually control very little. When there are important factors outside your control, the risk of failure always looms, no matter how smart or industrious you are. We delude ourselves if we believe that much of life and its key events fall under our control.

If you're brilliant, 15 to 20 percent of the risk is removed. If you work twenty-four hours a day, another 15 to 20 percent of the risk is removed. The remaining 60 to 70 percent of business risk will be completely out of your control.

If you're excellent at what you do and the stars are in alignment, you will win. Of course, you may run out of time first, but, if you're excellent every day, you will have furthered your chances of beating the house as much as they ever can be. That should be your primary measure of success — excellence — not simply the spoils that come with good fortune. You don't want to entrust your satisfaction and sense of fulfillment to circumstances outside your control. Instead, base them on the quality of what you do and who you are, not the success of your business per se. Unless you understand what is truly outside your control, you are likely to make serious mistakes, misallocate resources, and waste time.

Personal risks include the risk of working with people you don't respect; the risk of working for a company whose values are inconsistent with your own; the risk of compromising what's important; the risk of doing something you don't care about; and the risk of doing something that fails to express—or even contradicts — who you are. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

In theory, the risk of business failure can be reduced to a number, the probability of failure multiplied by the cost of failure. Sure, this turns out to be a subjective analysis, but in the process your own attitudes toward financial risk and reward are revealed.