ROUGH TRANSCRIPT

So I’m very reluctantly making a recording now while I’m bicycling, because I think I might want to make a, a second podcast, which is more of a diary of my own process. Uh, More personal, more rough, pretty much an unedited and treated a snapshot of my own process. Going through building the business that we want to build.

Apologies for the obnoxious beeping in the background.

Truck.

It’s kind of a depressing, sad and lonely. Um, pre-Christmas Sunday sort of thinking all about the different things I wish I could do or should do and cool ideas and songs to create. Learn and things. And then I was like, Chris, you can’t stay on this. It was like depression zone. And I know depression zone quite well.

Uh, perhaps more like mild depression, I guess, but certainly know it. And the biggest cure for me is usually. Well, what’s your goal. So I pulled myself out and got on the bike, another good cure and said, I’m going to do some work on the community and start inviting people to our pre beta. And I guess there’s a couple things I wanted to point out here.

One is. I am absolutely having to live 100% the life of the type of person I envisioned being in our community.

Uh, so, um, there’s a million things I want to do. And now the goal, bringing myself back to the goal again and again and again and again, and yeah, there’s revisiting the goal. There is asking yourself whether there’s a shorter path, there’s looking at the big picture. Um, but then there’s just doing it and that’s what I’m on.

And it’s interesting how much of life is just: now, put another brick onto the building because you could do that today. And it’s the building you decided to build. So let’s put some more bricks on it while we have a chance today and we have a little bit of sunshine and so that’s what I’m going to do.

And there’s so much less time than you think there is, but you can put another brick on the building today and then there will be a, another brick. So we’ll see whether I add this diary entry to the main podcast as a kind of different animal or make a new podcast. I don’t know, but here we are.

This week’s episode was actually a conversation between me and Kathryn back in October of last year, 2020, when we were still Essential 3; but I think there’s a lot of beautiful things in here — about re-nourishing the local, and how important that is. So, it speaks to a lot of things we really believe in, encouraging the things that make small business and local business really special.

And of course, that doesn’t have to mean a struggling business. It can mean prosperous, and sustainable, and thriving, and full of satisfaction in many ways at once — which is really our goal, to support creative business people to do in the world.

Chris grew up in Berkeley, with lots of local shops and unique spaces.

Kathryn remembers living in a small town where she could walk to the little shops when she was a kid. Walk to the library, the five and dime. See the people, and feel like she was part of something. But when she moved to suburbia, it felt very sterile. It was wonderful to know people in the town, in the shops, and have some sort of relationship with them. You felt a sense of community. A sense of exchange. Each little business contributed to the feeling of having fun things to do, good things to do, useful things to do. All the little relationships were woven up into that.

When the Wall-Mart comes in, it’s heartbreaking the way it could take away so much of that, suck it out. How did our culture become so profit-centric, to the exclusion of everything else? And so immediate results-centric?

Yancey Strikler published a great book last year, This Could Be Our Future. This is where I learned how Milton Friedman had contributed to an acceleration of this bottom-line-only thinking, in the 1970’s and 80’s. The idea—the religion, you might almost say—was that anything that improved the bottom line was good for the business; and therefore good for the economy; and ipso facto, good for the world. At this time, big companies were doing away with pensions, long-term relationships with employees, with towns, and becoming more abstracted entities, more divorced from human ties, and more wholly driven by an abstract logic of shareholder profit.

Is there a relationship between the impoverishment of the spirit, that comes out of a religion of maximizing profit at all costs, and the spiritually impoverished people who go along with it? I think about junk food: it has high caloric content, but low nutritional density. So you just keep wanting more, and aren’t sure why it does not nourish you. (Is it possible that there is a relationship between the obesity epidemic in the United States, and the anomie created by the suburban sprawl-ification, the big box-ification of America? I think there is.) As Eric Hoffer said, you can never get enough, of what you don’t need.

We have created a top tier who has an enormous amount; a middle tier who have some, but are feeling more and more tenuous. And then you have a lower tier that is growing. When you are struggling, it’s hard to think about stopping at the artisanal cheese shop, or buying the fancy bread for six bucks, when there’s one on sale for two. Yet, while the lower tier are more “at the mercy” of these structures—are they really bringing optimal satisfaction to those at the top? Why do people who are at the top financially, seem so often to hunger for more and more? How much do they need to spend before they consider that they have “arrived”? Are they sublimating some needs with money? (For more on this, see our previous conversation.)

A thing I often wonder is: how much of our destruction of the world is brought about, simply

Hey there. So this recording was done with me in Kathryn back in November of last year (2020). We were still calling ourselves Essential 3 Consulting; we hadn’t gone into being Inspired Success yet. But listening back to it, there were a lot of things I enjoyed about it. We talk about what I called the “guru industrial complex”, which is a way of talking… if you’re not familiar, the way online teachers tend to pump you up, and pump you up, and pump you up, but not always give you what they could. And we cover some other ground. Some really cool ideas about how to make internet marketing, or any marketing more connected, better and how to be more authentic. A theme that came out of it, listening back to it was learning to trust yourself. And it occurred to me: a thing that’s core to what I’m trying to help creators do, is learn to trust ourselves more. And when we learn to trust ourselves, I think we also come off as more authentic, more reachable. All of this episode is about how to be more connected and more genuine; and through that, be more truly and genuinely successful.

A quick note about the term “guru”. I do not wish to align the online teachers, who are working hard, for the great part, to teach and help people. But I want to outline problems I see in the system. So, I use it in a general sense—one who positions him or herself as a teacher with knowledge, in such a way that it seems to exude an aura of tremendous knowledge.

I begin by telling the story of my friend’s husband—although I don’t do this in the video, let’s call him Jake (not his real name).

Jake is a very kind and thoughtful human who has been in an industry which is well-paying, but left him no space for his creative self, and he did not feel that he was fully aligned with doing good in the world. He came into contact with an online teacher (which I had worked with, by chance, some years ago).

The basic message of the teacher is: you can find your tribe and inspire them, teach them, show them something wonderful, and create a meaningful, lucrative business doing so. She shows testimonial after testimonial, sharing their successes from her method. It’s very inspiring, and basically she says, you can do what I am doing.

And indeed, this process had worked extremely well for her. She’d been making next to nothing in another writing capacity, and taken the workshop of a local “guru” couple, who’d taught her how to do this, and as I say, it was working! She had grown into low six figures, to mid six-figures, and then beyond, in just a few years. So the multiplication power of this kind of thing is real for some, and obviously it was providing some forms of value.

Bottom line, Jake got very inspired. And by going up level by level in her programs, he got into an “inner circle” program, where he paid $20,000 for a year. Of course, the promise is that you will finally realize your true potential. Once and for all, you will create a lucrative business where you can serve people who care about your work; be seen; and then you can quit your soul-destroying humdrum work.

Jake had no background in entrepreneurship, Internet marketing, or online anything. He was a “virgin”, if you will, and was totally inspired.

So, Jake kept finding that the inner circle coaching program, that he’d paid so much for, wasn’t working for him. I’m not sure why, but it wasn’t what he’d expected. Were things painted with too rosy a brush? Did too many visions of sugar plums dance in his head? Perhaps it could be said that this was his problem; perhaps nothing was specifically promised, other than what was delivered. And yet…

And yet, I feel we work with something precious, when we work with someone’s