From a reader in Costa Rica:
I just finished your book The Mother of All Minds. It is a very thought-provoking work, and has created quite a log jam in my brain. I don’t know if you have ever heard that you convinced someone to get out of a relatively profitable business, but that is exactly what is going to happen with me. I am one of two stewards to my parent’s fortune (and we could possibly use the word “hostage” as well as “steward”) and find myself at the helm of a ship that is comprised of a marginally profitable conglomeration of businesses on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.
The reason they are marginally profitable is because of me. Without me, they would be broke, and the employees would very likely be in less favorable circumstances than they are now. (I have this odd conglomeration of businesses because of a rescue gene; I acquire stuff to fix it up.) I am not, however, a good long-term manager. So because of me, they are also marginal earners. This might not have been the case in the States, because the individual work ethic there is closer to my own, but here—well, it’s different. Anyway, your book made me scrutinize what I am doing and made me realize that I am capable of more than what I am doing now. The problem is that my personal measure of “more” is actually “less” on the contemporary world scale, and frankly arguing the point has gotten very boring to me. I am not surrounded by a group of pre-Betas ready to cross the gap. I have a large group of 1.3s, a smattering of 1.4s, two 1.5s and me. I am a Beta [thinker] in ultra Alpha land.
(I lived for almost nine years in a tiny fishing village, and there were people whose Direct TV dishes threatened to overturn their houses. Many of them had never left the village or mixed with another group of people except as guides to tourists, and yet they were very comfortable passing judgment on…well, everything! Everything that they saw on TV anyway. I could go on for days. So many people never leave home, and with the insidiousness of television, some of them develop this odd ingenuous sophistication and feel capable of judging all nations, religions and races from the comfort of their living room chair. This is the wisdom being passed on to our future world leaders. Our children are learning mercy from YuGiOh and Donald Trump. Their world view can be measured in a double digit diameter. Sad. And dangerous.)
My dream was always to be an author, and a philosopher (as odd as that may sound). I never had the guts as a youngster to stick out the hee-haws that this causes. Through hard work, my parents have earned a lot of money. Enough, in fact, that I and my children are well provided for financially. If we are careful, we have more than enough. My block has always been making money. After a certain point, money has always seemed…superfluous. And I don’t mean that in a snotty, nose in the air way, either. I am certainly capable of making money. I can spend it like Paris Hilton, too. I have lived high on the hog thanks to my father, and thanks to my own very stiff work ethic. But I also have had the experience of winning a $50 raffle,that was exactly enough to pay my electric bill, which was good because the next day they were going to shut off my electricity because my nuclear family was so poor at the time.
Your book brought many things to the surface for me, not the least of which is a drive to push outward, learn, educate, and evolve. My goal is not to create a manifesto for living, like the Bible, but to promote an organic educational growth system that levers us ever upward to meet our new challenges. Someday racism on the basis of skin color will be eradicated, but there will ever be new isms that we need to deal with. I don’t think that the shape of our problems is going to change with our evolution, only the labels that they bear. I hope to have the opportunity to develop living apparatus to seek and disassemble these destructive patterns.
One cannot hope to fit the entire universe between their ears in this minimal blink-of-the-eye lifetime that we have, but there are some that have the responsibility before their world peers to try. I am in exactly that position. Thank you for taking the time to share your experience about being “out there”; it lets me know that while I am a loner, I am not alone.
What started as a thank you note turned into a missive. Thank you, Mr. Lynch, you are an inspiring writer and an impressive thinker.
Isn’t it remarkable that a bunch of words printed on a few dozen sheets of paper can cause such a powerful reaction in a few billion brain cells, all of which are transient and, singularly, each by itself, so insignificant as to be close to invisible? But, it goes without saying, you’ve made my day. And I am going to want to “keep tabs” on you, if you don’t mind being kept tabs on. I want to know how all this works out for you. (This isn’t, of course, the first letter of this kind that I’ve received over the years. A colleague of mine [Paul Kordis] and I wrote another book called Strategy of the Dolphin® a few years ago that seemed to have a similar impact on some folks eager for “the next level.”) Meanwhile, as we like to say around porpoiseful/purposeful waters, “Carpe dolphin!”
For more information on the two works cited above, go here:
The Mother of All Minds: Leaping Free of an Outdated Human Nature
Strategy of the Dolphin®: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World
