I have been blogging less recently. One reason is that I have been working on talks such as the one I gave recently at Techonomy in Detroit and the one I am preparing now for TEDxNY. The other reason though is that I have been reading a lot about buddhism, hinduism, neuroscience and physics. I don’t yet have a lot to say about my new insights as I am still learning and digesting but I wanted to share what motivated my interest.
Unbeknownst to me it started with a blog post I wrote a while back about free will or more precisely my take on the lack thereof. At the time I received an email from a friend warning me about the dangers of this kind of determinism and the need to leave room for some kind of spirituality. I didn’t quite know what to make of it at the time but unlike the many emails that come and go every day that one stuck with me.
In the meantime I kept thinking and writing more about the transition to the information age it occurred to me that there was a problem. Much of what I believe we need to do to be successful in the future runs counter the current perception that humans fundamentally always want more – that we are first and foremost deeply selfish. With that view we would always be consigned to feelings of scarcity even in a world of digital and potential physical abundance. So that led me to think about how we might change as humans. And that started to bring me back to my free will blog post. If we don’t have free will then how could we choose to change? That seems like a deep flaw for my beliefs in the potential of the information age, especially knowing the terrible results of past attempts at large scale forced change such as the Cultural Revolution in China.
I also came to realize that this question of personal change is highly relevant to my job as a VC every day. Many companies struggle in one way or another because of issues in the leadership team. And those issues almost always require the leaders to start doing something differently, which is to say, they need to change. With startups most of the time the answer winds up being to just replace one or more members of the management team. To a large degree that is informed by the conventional wisdom that people past a certain age don’t change. Of course even that common approach becomes quite problematic when it is the founder or founders who need to change in order for the company to succeed.
There was yet a third strand and that one was even more immediate. I had also realized that I needed and wanted to change personally. This had come up in different contexts but I most came to understand it in relation to our children. I wanted to become a calmer and more patient parent than I had been. The real prompt here was a specific fight I had with our youngest which wound up leading me to spend time with Dr. Shefali Tsabary and read her important book “The Conscious Parent” (see also this blog post).
There is still a lot that I am digesting as I have since been reading widely ranging from sacred texts such as the Baghavad Gita to popular ones such as The Power of Now to multiverse physics including Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe and David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality. It has been great fun to read these and I am planning to write some short reviews. More importantly it has started to influence my thinking so that I now see openings for a theory of free will and the possibility of personal change.
Even more importantly though I have started and am continuing to actually change. I have become calmer and more patient (you will have to take my word for it I suppose). This personal experience has made me more optimistic about the possibility of social and organizational change. It also has let me be more equanimous at a time when there is a lot happening in the world at large, on the internet and in tech startups that one could freak out about. I also feel deeply grateful for the family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and even complete strangers who have all played a role in this change (knowingly or unknowingly).
