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

This is an edited talk I had with Kathryn, my business partner a few weeks ago, as we were just launching the name “Inspired Success”, and it reflects on why we like those two words together. I really enjoyed looking back at our reflections on what creativity really is, what we’re really about, and the vulnerability it takes to put something out into the world that’s meaningful for others, and still maintain your own integrity, about being that person you want to be, and having all those things come together. This is the exciting space that we’re working in, and supporting other people to work in. So I’m excited to share this talk with you.

So, we could discuss the name inspired success. I’ve gotten a lot of positive responses. And I can obsess, trying to find the perfect phrase. So that’s not always helpful, but that’s why I asked other people instead, and see what their response was.

I’m juxtaposing, I realized that’s my whole thing. I juxtapose things, like: spirituality and money; impact and fulfillment; all those things. It’s an ongoing inquiry. Like: “I don’t know what deep prosperity is. I don’t know what inspired success is” —  in other words, we have a lot of ideas about it, but that’s the whole point, is that it’s an inward, an ever-spiraling inquiry. There’s no one right answer.

“Success” on its own puts you in a one-track mind, and inspired success forces you to spiral around those two ideas. Like: what does it mean, if I take my inspiration and infuse my success with that? Or my success is informed with my inspiration?

Kathryn Gorges: What I like about it is it takes a word that’s a business word that means I’ve accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. It’s very business-oriented; it’s very down to earth. It’s, you know, understandable. And then another word that’s not a business word at all. It’s a life word, “inspiration”, “inspired”, anything having to do with that. People don’t usually put it into the business world. They put it into the life realm, right? And, you know, rather than saying a “lifestyle business”, or a small business, or you know, something like a “passion-based” business, inspired success means that you’re inspired, and you want to achieve something. You’re inspired to achieve something. I mean, you said, it’s a juxtaposition and it is; but it shouldn’t be, right? And a lot of times, it really isn’t. So it does some work for us in terms of saying these are married concepts, inspiration, and success. They are married.

Chris Burbridge: Right. When I think about the people that instantly loved it, are people that are creatives, who are in the process of doing that.

Oh, you know, I just realized that the word “inspired” comes from “in-spiration”, which is the breathing of life into something, right? Isn’t that what it means? Yeah. Inspiration.

Kathryn Gorges: Yeah. My dictionary definition is saying it’s referring to the Latin, but it’s also saying it’s in Middle English, “divine guidance”.

Chris Burbridge: Or I’m breathing in air. So I think that’s perfect, because that’s the feeling I get is the idea of success, it’s like breathing life into the idea of success. That’s really perfect, because we are interested in the traditional business stuff and we do like that stuff, and it’s really cool. But then part of our context is like: why is it so cold and sterile and devoid of human personality sometimes? So we’re interested in breathing in heart. Yeah, and we do.

“And I think that the great majority of the problems in the world have some roots in the stuckness that people feel. And then trying to get out of the stuckness through things that are sublimating them, rather than satisfying them. And that’s why I’m always on and on about trying to find what true wealth means for you. Instead of the proxy of the hundred millionaire fantasy life, that proxies that experience instead of centering it in our creative impulse, of what we want to give too, and be, on this planet.”

I was just doing some inner work that I do with a friend on the phone. And it was really good because I was feeling all these places where I was feeling stuck. And I was feeling kind of.. stiff, or unmoving. Or even where I didn’t know I had feelings, that were stuck underneath. And it was sort of a convenient lack of emotionality. It was sort of pleasant to have this mildly frozen state; but it wasn’t moving!

So then I did this work. There’s a lot of different ways to do that work, but the way I do it, I love. And I was really feeling a lot. And when I was feeling a lot, I could feel the energy moving. I could feel it like an ice flow, where the sun beats down and gradually melts the ice and then all the chunks start to move, and then the whole ice flow starts moving down the river. And the creative energy moves when you have that.

And I realized that I don’t have to know exactly where that creative energy is going to take me. I don’t have to have a plan yet. As soon as I let that creative energy flow, it’s going to flow somewhere. And I will wake up into a space where I know where I want it to go, as well.

And, at the end of the work, there’s an exercise where you look at how the world reflects you and you reflect the world. And there’s a phrase that I said: ” The big problem with the world right now is that the energy is not moving.”

And that was the thing I wanted to talk about for a minute. Because I think it’s very, very important. This project that we’re doing is about business, but for me, it’s about so much more than that. It’s about finding pathways, for people to feel free in their lives, to make things that really matter to them. And the way that that liberates our creativity to do things that are more meaningful, and exciting and powerful. And I think that the great majority of the problems in the world have some roots in the stuckness that people feel. And then trying to get out of the stuckness through things that are sublimating them, rather than satisfying them. And that’s why I’m always on and on about trying to find what true wealth means for you, instead of the proxy of the hundred millionaire fantasy life, that proxies that experience instead of centering it in our creative impulse, of what we want to give to, and be, on this planet.

So what I said was the big problem in the world right now is that the energy is not moving fast enough. So I think that’s really a lot of what’s going on. It’s that a lot of us have a great deal of stuck energy, in the form of emotional stuckness, that gets lodged in places in us. And causes us to lash out. And act out of impulsiveness; or acquisitiveness; in unnecessary ways. And this all might sound so terribly mystical. But I find it eminently practical and pragmatic.

When I feel the feelings that are in me, I connect with the creative current that’s alive in me. That. I suppose it is me. And that creative current gives me an internal aliveliness, that is here. Regardless of whether I have a penny in my bank account, or a billion dollars in my bank account or -$5 million in my

So this is part of a conversation I had with Kathryn, about a week ago. And at first, I was super critical of all the ways in which it was really — well, not that perfect. That audio is not so great (although I did what I could to make it better). But then, when I listened back to it, I realized it was the kind of thing _I_ would really want to hear, as a creator. And therefore, I realized it might just be the kind of thing you would want to hear, as a creator.

At the beginning it jumps around a bit. Kathryn begins by talking about the Spotlight Your Brilliance workshops she’s been doing on her own brand, and bringing them into our company. And at one point she mentions one of our possible clients, and I edited her name out, to sort of, protect that person’s privacy.

But, we are really getting to something here, is what I keep feeling — and I feel that it’s very exciting. I share some of my own insights about the ego, and how the ego part of us, really doesn’t want to be seen as too special, or ready, or anything. Because we can feel just as vulnerable to be seen then, as anything else, and that can be scary too. So, this was a bit of a revelation to me.

I hope you enjoy it.

Kathryn Gorges: Okay. What I’m working on. Let me give you a debrief on what I did for my spotlight classes. The reason I’m telling you this is because I’m creating a version of this for businesses. So it’s not for solo preneurs. It’s like, how do you… how do you figure out what’s awesome? What your genius, the business’, genius is, cause there’s this slightly different process. So I started to lay out it’s different format, but it’s still is experiential. And I’m thinking this is the kind of thing I could go back and invite, what’s her name?

I could invite other people to anybody that’s got a business, that’s a passion business, where they are offering products and services and it’s just… and people aren’t buying just them. They’re buying them to do something.

Chris Burbridge: I think is almost the perfect person for this, like she’s the prototypical perfect person, because she really has the passion. She loves to think about it. She doesn’t know how to think about it very well though. And she’s hired these designers in the past, that have made some pretty pictures, but haven’t really helped her. And so still the problem persists, which is that she needs to internalize it. So it’s two major problems, right? One is, the branding company probably doesn’t really have a clue to begin with. And the other problem is even if the branding company had it, it wouldn’t necessarily matter, if she didn’t have a clue herself. I think it’s so great because… of course this is a hard problem, and of course it’s the kind of problem we want to solve, is that we want people to actually feel more of their own relevance. It’s interesting that was the first that just came to me, was their own relevance. Their specific relevance. And it’s not to say that overnight she’s going to become this person that’s completely confident, but if we can help her to start seeing that and coming from that place.

And then part of what’s cool about what we do, being both inner and outer, is that on the inner we can help people start to get that glimmer of who they really are , but then because we’re professionals, we can also help them represent that. In other words, when you first start out trying to find your voice, it’s like a little bit shaky and still maybe people aren’t going to exact

I came up with a triangle model this morning, that could help us think about the relation between pay, meaning, and flourishing. And provide a contrast between broken-apart living, and as-a-whole living.

I got out of university in 1990, graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz at this exact moment when we started to learn the effect that climate change that our outputs were having on the earth and struck by this realization for the first time as a lot of us probably were that we could actually upset the very balance of the planet itself, which was… hard to live with. Meanwhile, I saw a world that was suffering in a lot of ways and people doing things they didn’t want to do in order to survive. And this bothered me.

And then I was living in San Francisco with my girlfriend at the time and she was temping. So then I started to temp and then I started to work in these giant office towers. Like the phone book company. I worked in the phone. On some floor in some cubicle in the phone book company, and I would type memos. They had a thing called memos before email. It was kind of weird.

So anyway, I’d be typing these memos and then we were supposed to be there at eight, I think, and leave at five. Or five-thirty take the bus down there, take the bus home. And I was exhausted every night. Exhausted. How do people do this? I really don’t understand how people do this every day, 40 hours a week. Where are you supposed to put your art? Where are you supposed to put your heart? This seems horrible. And I still think it’s horrible. If that’s not what you love to do. It put me on a path that I’ve been on for over 30 years of now of trying to help design ways and help people to create work that they love work that’s meaningful and compensating and contributing all at the same time.

So, I got this model in my head this morning of a triangle. All systems take things in from the environment. They put things out or contribute things to the environment, and then they have the experience of living. So, the three pieces of the triangle are contribution, compensation, and enjoyment.

So we contribute to the world. And we’re compensated for that work. And in that whole process, we enjoy ourselves. That might sound a little simplistic, but that’s the ideal or that’s the model.

And at the time back in 1990, when I got out of college, I was wondering how in God’s name… if I take these 40 hour a week jobs, I won’t have any time to think my thoughts and understand what’s important and know what I really want to do. So I kept temping and that was a good solution for a while.

There were a few little pockets of places where you could talk about things like work sharing or working from home or part-time positions, things like that, but it was very rare. It was “weird”. And now all of that of course has exploded in a hundred different ways, which I think is really awesome. And I’m mostly just interested

In this short little walking thought, I explore the idea of “deep prosperity” that occurred to me the other day. I feel it encapsulates so much of what we are going for in our work. It opens up an inquiry about what prosperity really means, and pushes us to explore. And it feels more about an *experience* of living, not a momentary hurdle to be passed somehow.

So I came up with a term today that I really like, and the term is, deep prosperity. We’ve been throwing around some different ideas. Like I had one called inspired success, which I still like and sort of speaks to this idea of success in multi-levels and the multiple ways and combined with the spirit of inspiration.

But. I really like deep prosperity, even more for several reasons. First of all, success speaks to a moment in time. It speaks to this sort of “rah, rah” … Rocky at the top of the steps moment of something that we call “success”. But of course, life is really a process.

And. I like the term deep prosperity, because I’ve always felt like the term prosperity when set on its own is embedded with kind of Scrooge McDuck imagery of someone who’s so rich that they can swim in their own money pit and conquer the world. And I think that. The Elon Musks and Bill Gates of the world may have been a little bit too influenced by the Scrooge McDuck archetype. And I really want to get away from the Scrooge McDuck archetype. I don’t really think Scrooge McDuck was all that happy. Do you? He was kind of a weird guy.

But the phrase deep prosperity to me invokes this multilayered sensation, it causes you to inquire into what prosperity means for you. And it implies that, if there’s a depth to something, there must be many different strata almost when something is deep, it asks of you to inquire into it and things that have depth have lasting resonance.

And when I think about exploring and experiencing and being in deep prosperity, it invokes a richness of a lived experience that cannot be summed up simply by “yay, I made a lot of money!. I made it! I succeeded!”, which is such a hollow chimera. Such a hollow illusion, such a threadbare, ideal. The feeling of deep prosperity for me, calls forth this quality that I’m wanting to help us and encourage other people to live into, something that must be understood by living it and experiencing it over time. Something that can be imagined as embodying and encompassing the richness of life in all its dimensions. And this is so cool because I feel so much of my work of late has been to try to harmonize these important things in life. That is, financial abundance, sustenance wealth, wherewithal, practical ability with the rich qualities of living so that they can all be felt and experienced together as not separable from each other.

And, you know, I just keep feeling that when people are say they want an unlimited amount of money, I think there there’s an imbalance. There’s a sense that they are not planted in the soil of what it would feel like to be living a rich life and feel safe, comfortable and alive in the, in some ways just ordinary life that we’re all living. And part of why that’s so important is from a practical standpoint, I don’t see how everybody could make an enormous amount of money that doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. So then why go for that? If you want a society to be happy. But particularly why go for it if it’s not even going to make the people that achieve it happy, or if there’s a false equivalency between “I make a lot of money” and “I have satisfaction in my life”, a false coupling. So sometimes satisfaction could come through making money. Sometimes perhaps because of other things you had to do for the money or some other reason, the making of the mone