Chapter One FORM

PART ONE: Understandings

The best things in life aren’t things.

-John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza

I’ll never forget watching Yo Yo Ma perform Bach’s six cello suites in San Antonio, Texas, in April 2019. My wife Glenda and I were in the second row next to our friend Francisco Cigarroa. In front of us was a family with two girls, one of whom wore a sparkly dress.

Yo Yo Ma walked out on stage with a huge smile on his face to thunderous applause. He looked all around with what appeared to be supreme joy. He gazed up at the balcony, scanned the crowd, looked at Francisco, Glenda, and me. His eye caught the girl in the sparkly dress and his smile somehow broadened. He made a gesture as though shielding his eyes from the bright sparkles, and then winked at her. Then he sat down, breathed deeply, the space became completely still, and he began to play with the effortless freedom and sublime richness of true genius.

That night Yo Yo Ma played many notes. They were the correct notes at the correct times. He played loud and soft with passages fast and slow. If you think back to your own music lessons, these elements of notes, rhythms, and dynamics, were most likely the focus of your studies. If you were in band or orchestra, these things were measured in contests. But all that stuff, the Form of Yo Yo Ma’s performance, was merely the container for the magic we all experienced. The magic was in his joy, his generosity, his genuine love for the music and the people there to hear him.

It’s that magic, by the way, that draws all of us to music in the first place. That hard-to-explain language of fleeting beauty, personal expression, a sonic blanket to wrap around our emotions. It is Essence.

We’ll dive into Essence next chapter. First, let’s consider the key elements of Form.

Form is what we own, measure, and see, including things like money, property, and physical appearance.  In music it’s the notes and rhythms. Form is also thought that has become rigid and defined in order to win arguments or in service of ideology. This includes campaign slogans, yard signs, and social media posts.

Because Form is easy to point at, share, and judge, it takes up most of the space in our conversations. Many times, Form takes up all the space—not because we choose to see the world that way, but because Form is visible, and Essence is invisible. We simply react to what we see and miss what we don’t.

Form makes up the visible path most of us walk in our daily lives, but it is only half of Truth.

Owning

We spend much of our lives in pursuit of ownership of money and property. Some people work for years in jobs they don’t enjoy just so they can make money.

Wars are fought over land and resources. The policies people argue about usually involve money, property, or regulation of business.

While it can be hard to get motivated to meaningfully address a problem across town, let alone across the world, do something that will impact our personal bank accounts or property, and we will march down to city hall, or pay someone to do it for us.

Measuring

Property is easy to measure. Money is nothing if not measurement. We place value on people in terms of work output and experience. Our entire financial services industry is based on measurements of bundled and divided shares of corporations to a point of abstraction, funneled into second-by-second graphic representations that make it seem real.

We love to measure progress. FitBits and smart phone apps tell us how many steps we’ve taken or how many miles we’ve ridden, how fast. With that information we can see how we did today versus yesterday, and we can tell our friends about it in concrete terms.

Exams supposedly tell us how smart or prepared a child is, what they’re good at, what classes they should take next, what colleges they should go to, and how much financial aid they should get. Standardized tests help us with all of that but are also used to determine which teachers or schools are failing, and which deserve a blue ribbon.

Nowadays we even measure thoughts and experiences through social media. The entire premise of social media is the sharing of thought-widgets that can be measured by our friends with likes, shares, and comments.

Seeing

I imagine most reasonable people understand that we’re harming our environment at an alarming rate. Most of us have seen some combination of images or information about global warming, sea levels rising, coral reef destruction, and impossibly large landfills.

But if it’s not in your back yard, if you don’t see it daily, or if the problem won’t have disastrous results until after you’re gone, it’s difficult to maintain care day-to-day. That’s why so many Americans struggle with future-oriented disciplines like healthy mental and physical habits, or saving money, and spend almost no energy at all thinking about our nation’s trillions of dollars in debt.

Something we do see a lot is ourselves. We see our faces in the mirror every day. We look at our hair, our skin, our muscles, our waistlines, our clothes, our wrinkles. We care about these things a lot, and even spend hefty sums on pills, oils, gadgets, and surgeries to increase our vitality. Nowadays many of us care as much or more about our online appearance, monitoring our number of friends and subscribers, and each day’s haul of measured affirmations.

Winning

Perhaps the murkiest category of Form is winning. I don’t mean the stuff we win, like a prize at the fair, because that would be property.

I’m talking about how we turn thought into winnable argument. Winning is a kind of measurement: I was right, you were wrong. One point for me.

How do we do it?

We define a thought-position in our minds, or in writing, or in speech, typically oversimplifying the issue. Or, more commonly, we hitch our wagon to a thought-position someone else has defined. Then we present it to others as a concept that is correct while claiming opposing ideas to be incorrect.

It is a line in the sand, a sign in the yard, or a sticker on the bumper.

On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress said, Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. This is an example of an over-simplified thought stated with intention to win. This argument would form the basis of the inexorable public campaign that would lead to the United States’ disastrous invasion of Iraq in March 2003—a military engagement roundly criticized in the years since by most Americans on both sides of the aisle.

But you don’t have to be the most powerful person in the world, or in politics at all, to regularly use your thoughts for the purpose of winning. Think of any family argument, or any social media dispute. Most that I’ve witnessed involve one party’s claim that they are right, and the others are wrong.

Ideology

I remember my middle school debates with Christian friends who wanted to know if I believed in God. I grew up in a teeny town in Upstate New York and the options were Catholic, Episcopalian, and Jehovah’s Witness. But the conversations were generally the same: Do you believe in God? You don’t?!? Then how did the world get created? Aren’t you worried you’re going to Hell?

Each passionate friend of mine was approaching me from a place of care, having been convinced of simple truths they had learned from brightly illustrated books in Sunday school. As someone who grew up outside of such a tradition, I was always particularly sensitive to the fact that each individual was totally convinced that their way was actually the right way, and that the other ways were wrong. Keep in mind there are over four thousand recognized religions in the world.

No matter who you talk to—with the exception only of extreme fundamentalists—you can almost always find some aspect of religious dogma about which to equivocate. The Old Testament gives easy examples: Do we all really think the entire human race descended from two individuals in a garden with an apple and a snake? Do we really think all the animals in the world—all of them—have parentage in the pairs Noah put on that boat after forty days and nights of rain? Do we literally believe the world—the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas, the dinosaurs—was created in seven days?

I think most believers and non-believers alike will roll their eyes and tell me that none of this is the point. And I heartily agree! Because religion is really about spirituality, and spirituality is an element of Essence, not Form.

But sometimes fundamentalism is very much the point in religious discourse. There are knock-down, drag-out fights and schisms around the interpretation of specific phrases, especially with regard to evolving thought around race and gender. People die in disagreements about these very things. And many thousands of people have died for centuries over fundamentalist disagreements between differing religions.

But religion is certainly not the only area that can fall prey to this kind of dogmatic fanaticism. Politics, social justice, environmentalism, animal rights (I mention as a lifelong vegetarian), are all commonly cast into armor made of immutable argument. Any area in which one person wishes to change the thoughts and actions of another person—or wishes to anchor his or her personal identity firmly into a bedrock of defined, comforting clarity—is ripe for ideological rigidity.

Onward

It’s not that we don’t care about Essence. After all, our interest in every single thing mentioned above from ownership, to measurement, seeing, winning, and ideology, is driven by our Essence. It’s simply that we don’t understand it very well. As we’ll soon learn, Essence is impossible to see or own, it’s difficult to measure, and you can’t win with it. So, while we are always impacted by it, only a small percentage of us cultivate our awareness of Essence.

Reflection on Form

Before we move on to a discussion of Essence, I’d like you to try a brief reflection.

For all the reflections in this book, I recommend you do the following preparation:

Breathe regularly with your eyes closed for a few moments.

Connect with any part of your body. It could be the soles of your feet, your right hamstring, or the pad of your left thumb. What is the sensation of that spot in your body? If you’re feeling distracted or hurried, this might take a little while, or you may come to a place of connection right away.

Ask yourself the following question. There are no wrong answers, only discovery.

Imagine yourself five years from now having succeeded in your endeavors. Picture it in your mind. What do you see? What does a successful ‘you’ look like?

Designate a notebook to be your Form & Essence Journal. Write or draw what you’ve seen on the first page.

Chapter Two ESSENCE

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;

what is essential is invisible to the eye.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Tim and Karrie League founded Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in 1997. It’s been called the coolest movie theater in the world by Wired.com, the best theater in America by Entertainment Weekly, and the best theater ever by Time Magazine.

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is one of Austin, Texas’ most important cultural institutions, known around the globe for its fierce love of the art of filmmaking.

Tim’s family got their first VCR when he was eleven. He told me, I was a quiet kid with a small group of friends, and all of a sudden through video stores we found a gateway to curate our own adventure. We were in this crazy discovery time where most weekends we’d have the others over, and our moms would let us stay up late watching three or four movies in a row. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I was definitely falling in love with movies.

As we’ll learn in chapter twenty-five, Leadership, Tim’s love of movies would come to permeate his business culture and fuel the Alamo’s industry-defying innovations.

Essence is invisible and impossible to objectively measure. Tim League’s infectious love for movies—his famously uncompromising passion for the art—is an example of Essence.

Essence is taken less seriously than Form. For example, a girl missing school because of a fever, is easily verified and supported by her parent. A girl suffering from emotional stress, however, will have a difficult time communicating the problem, and may not even understand it herself to the extent she’ll act upon it.

Here's another example.

People frequently lie to get out of doing things they don’t want to do. Not wanting to do something is a feeling rooted in something complex like fatigue, disinterest, or dislike. These feelings and their causes are all Essence. But none of that is what we typically say. Instead, we say things like, I’m sorry, I have other plans. Because being physically obligated elsewhere is Form, easy to understand, and apparently unchangeable. Having a preference based in Essence is harder to explain and may not be as readily accepted.

Essence encompasses emotion, meta-characteristics, meaning, mental health, and spirit. Let’s consider each.

Emotion

Humans are emotional beings. Think about the reason you do just about anything. Think about your why in any given moment. Think about those moments you don’t do things you know you should. What’s your why then?

Emotion has a lot to do with our motivation. If we feel lousy it has a huge impact on what we do and how we do it. Same thing if we feel great. If we feel lousy and still manage to produce, it’s because we pull on our discipline, or willpower, or habit strength.

But what are all those things? Those are meta-characteristics built within us from years of internal development. They are invisible yet they are at the core of everything that makes us successful, productive, and happy people.

Meta-Characteristics

With kids we often celebrate success in terms of grades, awards, and accomplishments. With adults we often talk about jobs, family, or service.

But what’s underneath the A on that math test? What sustains academic performance? Are there traits that lead someone to long-term success at home, at work, and in their community?

I’m going to suggest that meta-characteristics—the kinds of personal traits built over the course of years from positive family, mentor, and social relationships, alongside myriad challenges met, failed, and overcome—are the foundation that give people the inner strength and resources they need to find success time and again.

Angela Lee Duckworth is an author, psychology professor at University of Pennsylvania, and founder of a nonprofit called Character Lab. In her famous May 9, 2013 TED Talk, she described her interest in studying motivation as a key factor in success. This grew out of her experience teaching seventh grade math in New York City. She studied cadets in the military, rookie teachers in schools, employees in private companies, and even contestants in the National Spelling Bee.

In all those different contexts, Duckworth explained, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn’t social intelligence, and it wasn’t good looks, or physical health, and it wasn’t I.Q. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in and day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years.

Talk to anyone you trust about the most influential person in their life. Ask them why that person had such a positive effect. They may describe a parent, teacher, or spiritual mentor. I guarantee you, though, that if you ask them why that person had such a positive influence on them, they will begin describing meta-characteristics.

Meta-Characteristics

Identity Confidence, Motivation, Belonging, Responsibility, Optimism, Passion, Self-Esteem

Creativity Observation, Dreaming, Innovation, Imagination, Envisioning, Curiosity

Resilience Persistence, Perseverance, Willpower, Doggedness, Acceptance of Criticism

Resourcefulness Collaboration, Flexibility, Ingenuity, Innovation

Habit Consistency, Organization, Quality, Care, Review

Empathy Kindness, Consideration, Sharing, Sacrificing, Openness

Ethics Integrity, Honesty, Authenticity, Fairness

Meaning

Meaning is between the words, off the page, in the mind of the beholder. Objects, actions, communications, and historical or cultural implications are all interpreted within us as meaning. This is complicated, so we’ll spend some time here.

In the introduction to this book, I described the significance of an object: my great-grandfather’s pocket watch. A wedding photo, an ancestor’s homemade chair, an award for public service, or anything you just happen to like the look of, are all examples of objects with meaning.

Actions are filled with meaning. Sending a thoughtful card, the way the barista places our latte on the counter, how we close the door after our spouse reminds us to take out the garbage, all these actions carry meaning.

Communication has meaning. I might write you a perfunctory email asking for a report by a deadline, and you might interpret it as helpfully direct, or as offensively dehumanizing. And I might have meant it one way or the other, or, more likely, I didn’t think about its meaning at all, because we are rarely aware of Essence.

Meaning involves interpretation through one’s own filter. You will read my email differently than anyone else. Further complicating things is our interpersonal history or power dynamic. If, in the course of our work together, we’re frequently exchanging emails of this nature, then the degree to which we’ve developed comfort, trust and rapport—or not—will also play a role in your interpretation of my meaning.

History, culture, implications, and future impacts—like national debt, or global warming—are all processed within each of us as meaning.

What does it mean to a small-town resident when a big box retailer with pharmacy and grocery builds in town? For one person it means civilization has arrived: more convenient access to goods with lower prices. For another it might mean a job. The land developers involved will make a profit, while the independent pharmacist’s business will be slowly squeezed out. These things represent Form and are measurable.

For anyone who cares about the unique culture of the town’s offerings, they will mourn that their town now looks a lot like all the other towns. For anyone looking into the future, they’ll realize that from now on, some percentage of every single dollar ever spent at that big box store will leave the community never to return. These meanings are Essence, harder to define, and almost never win arguments at City Hall.

The Snowbowl is a ski resort 12,300 feet in elevation on Humphrey Peak. Humphrey Peak is the tallest of the San Francisco Peaks that tower majestically above Flagstaff, Arizona. The Snowbowl was established in 1937 and operated with a similar footprint until the 1970’s when thoughts of expansion took hold. It’s a tourism and revenue generator for the city of Flagstaff, and lots of people enjoy skiing there.

I lived briefly in Flagstaff, and I remember struggles with snowfall. No snow meant no skiing, and no skiing meant no money. Arizona is a famously dry place, and while the mountain climate is different from the desert climate, enough snow for a robust skiing season was always a big concern.

So, in 2005 the smart people at the Snowbowl proposed a new approach to generating fake snow. Fake snow requires massive amounts of water, and clean water is very expensive and in short supply. But grey water, or sewage effluent, on the other hand, could be piped in and sprayed into the atmosphere to generate copious amounts of snow. Guests would just need to be sure to use it only for skiing!

Humphrey Peak, however, is sacred to thirteen different Native American tribes, and of critical, central importance to the religious beliefs of the Navajo and Hopi peoples in particular. The Navajo view Humphrey Peak as a living, sentient being to whom they pray. The Hopis believe that sacred spirits called Kachinas come to the mountain for half of every year, and act as spiritual bridges to their god. Both collect healing plants and herbs from the mountainside.

Imagine the uproar in the Judeo-Christian world if a business interest suggested piping 1.5 million gallons of reclaimed sewage effluent a day to be sprayed over Jerusalem to increase secular tourism, after decades of expanding the footprint of its resort in the holy land.

There have been many legal battles over these issues since the 1970’s, almost all of which the Navajo and Hopi peoples have lost—including the battle over sewage effluent. But I bring up this example here only to illustrate that meaning in Essence is invisible, and rarely considered in business. To view only the Form of a mountain, or forest, or lake as a physical resource to be exploited for measurable gain, without seeking to understand its meaning in Essence, however, is to be aware of only half of Truth.

Mental Health

Mental disorders account for a significant portion of the global disease burden, wrote Sandro Galea, M.D., the Robert A. Knox professor and Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. He titled his March 25th, 2019, Psychology Today article Mental Health Should Matter as Much as Physical Health.

Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses, Galea continued, affecting an estimated 300 million people around the world. Depression is so widespread that the World Health Organization has projected that, by 2030, it will be the leading cause of the global disease burden.

There are so many tragic cases of celebrities who ruin or even end their own lives. I’ve defined Form as that which you can own, measure, see, argue, or believe in a fanatical manner. Individuals like Robin Williams, Michael Jackson, Anthony Bourdain, Amy Winehouse, and Kate Spade were rich in terms of most, if not all, aspects of Form. Since so many of us spend so much of our education and working lives trying to achieve even a small part of the success those individuals realized in Form, we are often baffled at how they could possibly be depressed, let alone depressed enough to end their own lives.

How does it get to that point?

How is it possible that in one of the world’s richest nations the rate of suicide could rise in the past twenty years from 10.5 per 100,000 to 14.2 (1999-2018, National Institute of Mental Health)? Nearly 50,000 people a year commit suicide in the United States, making it a leading cause of death in the nation. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in 2018, More than half of people who died by suicide did not have a known mental health condition. That means the majority of those individuals, though mentally ill to the point of taking their own lives, were undiagnosed and untreated.

The answer is that we don’t talk about mental health. We don’t like to, we don’t know how, and by and large, we don’t take it seriously until it’s too late.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has a program called StigmaFree, and explains that the stigma surrounding mental illness is shaming, and keeps people from getting help. Even though most people can be successfully treated, less than half of the adults in the U.S. who need services and treatment get the help they need…The average delay between the onset of symptoms and intervention is 8-10 years.

8-10 years?

Can you imagine waiting 8-10 years before treating strep throat, a broken bone, or skin cancer? Of course not, because those things you can see and point at. Those things we take seriously. Those things have Form.

Mental Health is impossible to see, and difficult to measure. But it is a critical ingredient in life-success, and indeed, our very survival.

Spirit

Craig Hella Johnson is one of the most inspiring community leaders and captivating musicians I’ve ever known. When I am around Craig I feel like my mind slows, my vision sharpens, and my soul awakens.

Craig created the Grammy-winning, world-famous choral phenomenon known as Conspirare. When I asked Craig about Essence, here’s what he shared:

"Inspiration is everything. There’s a fiery force that gets lit inside of us when we are in alignment with our inspiration. Some might call it entrepreneurial energy, but it’s more than that. When I was first getting started, I felt that surge. Way before I knew what to do, I felt an imperative. It was a seed, an impulse, an inner leading.

"I trust that truth recognizes truth. At the core, underneath all the shenanigans of being human, beneath all of our deeply held beliefs and opinions and convictions, there is a truth that exists. But through over-conceptualization, Form, commerce, we spend most of the time living in betrayal of what is true.

"Each of us builds vast experience over our lifetime, but with a completely limited perspective. If we truly grow in life, we realize how much it takes to cultivate the wisdom that we seek. We must have our concepts dismantled, our concepts of ourselves dismantled, because they’re in the way of our connecting to truth, to the breath of life. 

"Truth is not an opinion. It’s not a perspective. It can’t be spoken of, and yet it knows itself. The present moment is alive with truth. It’s so trustworthy. But the second I succumb to fear, or over-mindedness, truth loses its life force.

"So privately, personally, I devote myself to being brave enough—even though it’s scary—to say I’m willing to know the truth. I say:

Universe, I say to you, yes. I want to know what’s true. I don’t want to have a set of beliefs that protect my concept of what I think life is, or what I think life is supposed to be. I really want to know.

John Henry McDonald is a trusted mentor. When I met him, he was one of the most prominent figures in the world of financial services in Austin, Texas. He was the best-dressed man in every room, was a well-known television personality, and was on the cusp of selling the successful company he had founded.

John Henry had also been homeless. He had been sent to fight in the Vietnam War as an alternative to prison, had been traumatized, and had spent years addicted to drugs and alcohol. Through an incomprehensible series of visions, actions, and kindnesses John Henry entered recovery, turned his life around, and found fabulous success. In retirement he would generously share his gifts as both a teacher and philanthropist.

John Henry loves to list five elements: Material, Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual. His assertion is that the vast majority of people prioritize their thoughts and actions in that order, from concern for money, to body, to mind, to heart, to spirit. His next assertion is that success in life comes from turning those priorities precisely upside down and placing spirit first.

I asked John Henry about the role spirit has played in his life.

"I once stated: Money isn't everything, but it is one thing. We may as well excel. By that I meant that excellence will be obtained in business when ethics are placed first, when the spirit is the focus of our lives, then we may find ways to attract rather than achieve financial success.

"I don’t have education. I don’t have a lot of abilities. But I have mystery. I have the ability to look inward and acknowledge that I really do not know. I haven’t got a clue. But I have learned that if I put spirit first, good things happen.

For example, early in my career I began to write things down that I believed might be true. I wrote things like, By focusing on making others wealthy I will become wealthy myself. And Joy sets in motion trains of circumstances that bring me good fortune over time. As I attracted employees, I developed a 12-point creed that stated my philosophy. I would sit with new hires and share what I had found. We all embraced this tagline: Only the truth will do—really."

"By encouraging introspection and meditation, a culture of balance was designed.

Most people don’t understand placing the spirit first. And I believe that’s because they have no choice. Very few people have the ability of introspection—the ability to look inside. The material is obvious and external, but if you don’t have the ability to look inside, then the material is all you have.

We’ll hear more from both Craig Hella Johnson and John Henry McDonald later in this book.

Reflection on Essence

Breathe, connect, ask:

Who is someone you’re grateful for in your life? Can you picture their face in your mind? What is their expression? Describe what makes them special.

Chapter Three EROSION

Beyond the beauty of external forms, there is more here:

something that cannot be named, something ineffable,

some deep, inner, holy essence.

-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

SaulPaul is a Grammy-nominated hip-hop artist, inspiring speaker, and entrepreneur. He calls himself a musician with a message. He’s given multiple TED Talks, consults and speaks for some of the best-known corporations in the world, and was named Austinite of the Year in 2017. Through the