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.   Transcript 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.” Transcript 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.   Transcript 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.   Transcript 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.   Transcript 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

Thoughts on perfectionistic grandiosity, and the infection of super guru success people, vs. a grounded vision of progress. I have two metaphors: climbing a mountain path, and planting 3 different seeds.   Transcript I wanted to share some realizations. I had this past week about perfectionistic grandiosity, I listened to the smart, passive income podcast the other day. And pat Flynn had this woman on named Dorie Clark who wrote a book called The Long Game. And it was a really nice antidote to the customary. Rah, you can have it all instantly. Thing that can pervade the world of internet sort of business training and things like that. And she had a lot of interesting thoughts about how to get a perspective on what it’s going to take. And it kind of shifted my perspective in a way where I realized I was still. A little bit inside this perfectionistic grandiosity that said, oh, if you’re not having this giant mega super result instantaneously than maybe there’s something wrong with what you’re doing. And now I think with the work I’m doing with Catherine. I, I feel beyond that in some ways and anchored into a thing that’s deeper and more meaningful and rich, and I feel dedicated to it, but I could still see these vestiges of perfectionistic grandiosity. And I came up with a couple of interesting metaphors and the first one is a mountain metaphor. For years. I think what I was doing was I really, really, really wanted to climb this mountain, you know, and it, it entrepreneurial mountain, but you know, a mountain of creating something valuable and wonderful and great. And I’m still climbing. Right. But what I saw metaphorically was that I would be down in the village at the foothills of this, this mountain hanging out. Drinking a beer thinking about, maybe I should really climb that mountain. And then finally I’d summon up the courage and the Gusto and kind of explore the foothills there and I’d see a pathway. Wow. There’s a pathway at the mountain. I think that might go all the way up to the top. I think it does. I want to climb this mountain and get all outfitted ready, excited, and start trudging up the map. Full of VIM and vigor and enthusiasm. And I’d be trudging up this metaphorical mountain, trying a few things, reaching out, doing some free workshops, webinars, videos here and there, talking to people, tweaking out my website a little bit. So I get, get up a little bit, little bit of a ways up the smell. Half a mile. I don’t know, a mile who knows of this big, big mountain. And I would have some real wins, you know, like I would get consulting clients or I would get coaching clients, or I would get clients for my web business that were great. That were where I wanted to morph it more into a whole consulting package. And wow. It’s starting to happen. You know, and then all of a sudden I’d hit a Boulder. It hit something. I don’t even know what, but I think part of it was the feeling that, oh yeah, I got a Quincy client or two or, yeah, I guess I had a little win, but you know, it’s not big enough. It’s not grand enough. You know, it’s not grandiose enough. I don’t know. It may be, it’s not what I thought it was going to be. I’m not exactly sure what the discouragement was. I’m really not, but then I would kind of wander back down the mountain, get distracted land back in the village again, you know, and sip some beers for a while and think about going into the mountain again, maybe after a while, wander up into the foothills and find another trail. And then get all excited and go up that trail. Go with that trail. Go up. That trail, hit a Boulder, have a few little starting successes. I shouldn’t even say little because

I really enjoyed this conversation with Anita Edge. We talk about online guru stuff, what kind of teaching really works for people, and how we can all make a form of online teaching and offline teaching that’s more deeply helpful and penetrative to people’s actual lives and results. And what really works there. When she started talking, she was telling me about a woman named Green Smoothie Girl who started out just teaching kind of “formula” stuff, and now is teaching a much more holistic program, helping people at the _being_ level. And so the recording that follows didn’t capture that aspect of it, just to let you know, that’s where we got started and it takes off from there. And so enjoy.   Transcript Anita Edge: You might have a formula for marketing, but that’s not…. Your life is more than marketing. And what she’s gone into is sort of like how to build a life that supports what it is want to do. And if you think about the like passion economy or whatever. Yeah. A lot of that it’s like the two have to go together. You can’t have do a successful. The business career that’s separate from you and your life. Really they have to dovetail. They don’t have to be two sides of the same coin, but they have to mesh .  Chris Burbridge: Speaking. Yeah. So speaking of dovetailing, I think that whole idea dovetails with a concept that I think about a lot, which is there are some things that are much easier to teach than other things. And I always think of that. Sufi, humorous story, Nasrudin’s story, where Nasrudin is looking around under a street lamp at night for his keys. He’s frequently looking for his keys. And then the guy says, where did you lose them all over there in the dark? Why aren’t you looking there? Because it’s lighter over here. And I just think so a lot of times in life, that’s how it is. So if it’s easy to pack package up a video course and turn everything into five step things, it can be pretty tempting to ignore that’s not really necessarily what people need or that, that was the easy part or that appeals to the part of us that wants life to be easily wrapped up in five step things. And it’s easy for that quote unquote guru to necessarily perhaps believe that it can be wrapped up in five steps because that will benefit them. Just like the drug companies, right? You could have very well-meaning people in the drug companies and it’s easy to malign people, but certain systems, maybe capitalism or, money system prejudices people towards certain approaches, right? Whether it be selling pharmaceuticals rather than natural herbs or selling easy five step formulas, rather than saying, Hey, you know, a lot of the reason I was so successful, like I’m teaching you this five step course about how to be a influencer, but a lot of the reason I became this person is because I don’t know, I have a natural confidence but I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to teach you to have that natural confidence, or because I went through a lot of suffering and shyness, and there was this big moment that happened in my no I’m missing. I’m making stories up. I’m just giving example. You mentioned a character, but somebody, oh, I went through this trauma in my early twenties and that caused me to stop being shy. And that’s why I’m able to do this, or over simplifying. But it’s always, and a lot of times those simple step formulas, the last thing they want to tell you. But you have to love this, because you&r

My friend Helen Shi is a brilliant woman from China with many interests. We used to sit down at the dining room table, and I’d put my iPhone between us, and just record. The quality was not great — but it was surprisingly okay. I got to discuss my economic philosophy.   Transcript   Moving from Mass-Scale Economic Vision to Local-Scale Chris Burbridge: When you leave the mass indoctrination, the mass indoctrination is massive scale. Right? Massive indoctrination is I have to be a billionaire. Or a hundred millionaire otherwise I am not happy or successful. And there’s many aspect of it, but that’s one aspect of it is like your personal dream of how much money they’re going to make before they feel successful or before the company feels successful . But this is such a problem. This creates mass scale, of course the internet is capable of creating that more than any other thing in history. And this is the thing that venture capitalists want. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think they’re very, I think it’s very destructive though. Then you create almost monopolies, like Amazon, Apple, et cetera. But it’s interesting that it’s actually very interesting that the same platform, the Internet that’s capable more than anything else in history of collecting power in one place, is also the platform that is more capable than any other thing in history of creating tiny little niche, specific businesses or communities that would be impossible in the past. And it’s possible of creating many, many, many, many, many, many, multi hundred thousand dollar a year businesses for individuals, that create several jobs, satisfying lifestyle, increasing community diversity, you know, and this is what I’ve been interested in for several years. And one person talked about it, like the difference between solar power and nuclear. Okay. Right. Solar power, you can have, everybody can have their own local, whatever they want, and nuclear power. It’s, you know, a lot of state control, massive scale, massive investment. No human individual could do it.  And it’s all controlled centrally. Yeah. So it’s the same thing that I’m always thinking about. Like instead of inventing a business model that you control centrally, you invent business models that are open sourced ideas that you distribute all over the world that people can adapt anywhere. Right. So, it’s interesting to think that the same platform that makes it more possible to collect power in one place, is also the same platform that lets you have this diversification power.  Helen Shi: Isn’t there are one. Oh yeah. Like at least multiple, a lot of companies are like that. Chris Burbridge: Are like what? Well yes, there’s a lot of companies like both examples. But I guess my point here was that when you leave the idea that success equals domination either economically or emotionally or any other way, socially you’re liberated into an incredible new world of possibilities.  Helen Shi: I was just reading about the old money, new money thing. I know things that’s the way old money thinks, and like you see all this animation, they have a big boss and they become very big, big, big, big, huge. Then they were defeated. It’s kind of become huge is a pre- indicator of be defeated. (Laughs) Chris Burbridge: Okay. So, fo