Something’s a brewin’ here in Austin, TX!

This evening I spoke to a revolutionary (and fellow zaadzster) with a vision for how human beings can solve the world’s problems in the next 50 years and create a world that really works for everyone… through entrepreneurship!

Right now it seems that most people who are passionate about issues like the environment, global warming, social justice, extreme poverty, etc. blame capitalism and entrepreneurship.

And most people who are passionate about business, free markets and entrepreneurship consider the aforementioned causes and people who champion them to be adversaries.

These two sides have been taking positions and battling each other in order to further their idea of a better world and a just society. What the man I spoke with tonight sees is how all of us as human beings can use our creative minds and entrepreneurial spirit to “flow” together and create a better world, a world that works for all of us. In fact, he partnered with Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey to create an organization called FLOW, to promote this vision and facilitate a movement where people passionately take up the cause of creating a world that works for all of us throught creativity and entrepreneurship.

This is a movement whose time has come.

More and more I see young people awakening to a vision of living a visionary life, a life without limits guided by their own vision, a vision that calls them into heroic action to create a better world. I see the idea of a visionary life becoming a meme. I see it becoming what’s next and what’s cool.

Zaadz is furthering this vision, this idea, this meme, this movement by creating a community where conscious, entrepreneurial people can come together.

I am seeing more and more incredible parallels and synergies for Vision Force, FLOW, Zaadz and other organizations as we bring this new world to life, and on my drive home the thought again occured to me of how we can help bring this world to life right now by making such conversations available to the masses right now. The kinds of conversations I am privy to, given what I do for a living, would be incredibly valuable for every independent thinker, dreamer, idealist and entrepreneur who still believes we can create a better world. Ha! Not just a better world… that’s just it… I want to show you just what leading visionaries SEE for our future. It’s far beyond a “better world.”

Put on your seatbelt and start with Michael Strong’s FLOW vision.

Yesterday we tested a new model for our workshops, one in which a partiipant only need give up an afternoon, invest a very small amount of cash and drive to a home in their local area. We titled it, Visionary Mind: Living at the Level of Vision.

We had a great conversation and the workshop “worked,” yet the greatest outcome was the vision for how we can upgrade it in the future. What we want to create is a simple format for a short afternoon or evening discussion that can easily be organized and lead by anyone with a moderate level of training in the iStand technology (the VisionForce work). The idea is to create a formula that can be duplicated around the world by people passionate about VisionForce and the difference it can make in peoples lives and for humanity itself.

We’ve scheduled the next workshop after having made the following adjustments/upgrades:

1) It will be an hour shorter (4 hours instead of 5)

2) We will leave more time to integrate the global vision, to build personal vision and to introduce opportunities for each of us to step up our game in “being the change,” and “changing the world.”

3) We will focus more on the Inner Conflict Diagram and use it to integrate more of the concepts, so participants leave with an even firmer grasp and clearer view of how everything relates.

4) We are going to make it even more of an interactive discussion than it already is.

If you can make it to Austin for the afternoon of Sunday, January 14th, we’d love to have you. Details are here.

Entreprenuers dancing naked around the camp fire? Maybe…

Yesterday when I received an Evite from a local group called Bootstrap Austin inviting me to an evening discussion titled Entrepreneur As Hero, I didn’t think twice. That morning I’d had a revelation of sorts, when I’d seen a new vision for working with entrepreneurs in a new way (more on that later). And with all the seemingly magical synchronicity happening in my life recently, it was a no-brainer.

Just weeks ago, I’d sat down for a bubble tea with a friend who offices next to me, Kevin Koym, and he’d expressed his mission in life in terms of inspiring the maximum number of people possible to take up entrepreneurship. He sees entrepreneurs as revolutionaries who step outside of “what is” to create “what can be,” and his current entrepreneurial enterprise provides a methodology and internet-based tool for entrepreneurs to collaborate at higher levels. It was Kevin who’d turned me onto Bootstrap Austin and the fire dancers.

So recently, as I’ve received the standard emails from people who are of the mind that business, entrepreneurship, capitalism and money are somehow bad… somehow to blame for the ills of the world, the drum of the entrepreneurial warrior within has been beating more loudly. I see entrepreneurs as today’s heroes, the ones who are standing for a better world and risking everything to bring it into existence. They are the warriors and creators of today.

So, I showed up early last night with local Vision Force Boot Camp grad and ally, Audrey Parker, at the home of one of the local bootstrap members and was welcomed by a man whose face I did not recognize, but whose name I did. He introduced himself as Michael Strong, and I knew he was somehow involved with Flow, another Austin-based entrepreneurial network. Turns out he’s the CEO, and come to find out he is a pioneer in education and independent learning and has founded innovative Socratic, Montessori, and Paideia schools and programs around the U.S. He has a passion for freeing young minds “from the matrix.” Talk about synchronicity…
He introduced me to Bijoy Goswami, founder of Bootstrap Austin and the Bootstrap Network, who was already engaged in the topic of conversation of the evening, entrepreneur as hero, and relating it to the recommended reading, Joseph Campbell’s book, Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Soon, other Bootstrappers showed up and as I met each of them I continued to feel as if I was coming home to reunite with family. These were conscious entrepreneurs and visionary thinkers. Where have I been all my time in Austin. How is it I’d not met these people sooner?

It doesn’t get cold too often here in Austin, but this night was quite chilly and so there was a fire in the fireplace in the living room. That’s where we sat down in a circle and began what would be a 3 hour conversation about the heroic life journey called entrepreneurship. We talked about entrepreneurship as a path to enlightenment, and the almost unavoidable and continual expansion of consciousness that happens along that path, as one must continually face one’s self and evolve beyond one’s limitations.

Refrencing movies like The Matrix, Braveheart and Star Wars throughout the night, we talked about how today’s culture conditions us so much to be outwardly focussed and paranoid of failure, and about how we’re missing the kind of rituals that could help us as a culture mark our inner progress along our entrepreneurial paths in life. All evening I couldn’t help but notice how it felt as if we were warriors of the same tribe on a spiritual journey, and at some point I even brought up the idea… What if once a quarter, we went camping and celebrated our failures, struggles and triumphs around the campfire?

While that may or may not happen, what I do see emerging in the next decade are new cultural traditions and structures to support people in living entrepreneurial/visionary lives. I see that visionary thinking and an entrepreneurial approach to life is the way of the future, and I am so excited for what is to come.

I strongly encourage all entrepreneurs to get involved with communities like Flow and the Boostrap Network. We may live in a world where entrepreneurship as a lifestyle is increasingly growing in popularity (some surveys have shown 7-8 out of 10 highschool students want to be entrepreneurs), yet we still live in a world that blames successful entrepreneurs for society’s problems. How ironic that the very individuals who are, as Ayn Rand might say, lifting the world on their shoulders and taking humanity to new heights are often those blamed for our problems.

I use the term entrepreneur very loosely to mean individuals who are risking a lot to bring something new of value to humanity into existence. (Aren’t we all entrepreneurs in spirit? Don’t we all yearn to live a heroic life, creating value?)

Do entrepreneurs do what they do out of greed? Is there a limited amount of wealth that entrepreneurs and capitalists just greedily fight for at the expense of others? Or is wealth created? And who creates it?

Hear the “news?” John Kerry (who ate breakfast a few tables over from me at the Four Seasons in Austin Sunday morning) makes a joke intended to slam Bush, Republicans slam Kerry, Kerry slams back…

When will the day come? How long will it be before we have visionaries as leaders? In some respects each man may be a visionary, but when will we all stop thinking, speaking and acting like positionaries? All it does is cause more of the same from the other side. This back and forth bickering, battling for positions, wastes all of our time… and our tax money. Perhaps worst is it sets an example for all of us, an example that says acting this way is socially acceptable.

Is this normal behavior for adults? For leaders? Here’s my prediction… America’s next president will be much more a visionary, and much less a positionary. America is tired of the positionary-think, demonstrated by most politicians. It’s based on fear, blame, pride, manipulation and propaganda.

Barack Obama from what I have seen speaks more more like a visionary than a positionary. Could he be America’s next president? Anyone who can communicate as a visionary, rather than a positionary, has an advantage I think. What do you think?

Post your comments.

Go here to listen to this valuable interview with John Matterson: how the individual can harness the powers of the internet and of business to transform their lives and the world around them.

You imagine that your neighbor might be a fearless terrorist, secretly planning to destroy the world as you know it. He might be operating inside an independent terrorist cell that is virtually undetectable. He might have a plan to cause great destruction in the community you inhabit. He might have access to all the tools, ideas and resources that he needs to achieve his mission.

Now imagine this. Your neigbor might be a fearless visionary, secretly planning to create a world that really works for all of us–a world of peace and prosperity. He might be operating inside an independent visionary cell that is virtually undetectable. He might have a plan to create incredible values for your community. He might have access to all the tools, ideas and resources that he needs to achieve his mission.

Such a visionary cell has just emerged in war-torn Uganda. One fearless, young visionary has been not-so-secretly planning to create a future that really works for his countrymen and for humanity. He’s been operating autonomously, rapidly growing the number of people who are working with him, both locally in Uganda and globally through the internet. He has a plan, and he’s carrying it out. Now, VisionForce has chosen to give him access to all the tools, ideas and resources he needs to achieve his mission.

Check out our VisionForce Uganda project here.

Together, we’re busy figuring out a model that will be easily replicatable and sustainable. We intend to cultivate the spontaneous emergence of visionary cells around the globe–in China, India, Lebanon, Israel, Iran, Cuba, Africa, Brazil, Japan–everywhere there are youth who are willing to stand for humanity. Never before has the future been so solidly within the grasp of the youth!

What can you see is possible? Leave your comments, please!

When this young man in Uganda downloaded our 200Mb Vision Force 101 program a few months ago (that’s a photo of him doing the program), I didn’t think much of it. He’d been asking me to invest in a business idea he had, and I sent him this program instead. What has happened since has shifted my entire vision for how the VisionForce work can impact the world.

Over here at VisionForce.com, we’ve been working on how we can support Clovis in continuing to impact his country locally, by training and supporting other young visionaries. Here’s a sneak peek at the project page. It’s in development. Much more to come… soon! Soon!