Prologue

THE THREE BRICKLAYERS

There is a story of three bricklayers working side by side that is sometimes told to illustrate the power of purpose and vision.

Someone comes along and asks the first bricklayer, “What are you doing?” The first bricklayer replies, “I’m laying bricks, one by one. Applying mortar and placing each brick.”

The second bricklayer is asked, “What are you doing?” He answers, “I’m making a living. By doing this job, I’m able to provide for my family.”

The third bricklayer, when asked, “What are you doing?” responds, “I’m building a cathedral. I’m helping people to connect with God.”

I’ve always liked this story. On one level, it’s a beautiful, simple illustration about perspective. It demonstrates the power we each have to choose how to interpret the events of our lives, how we can create our own unique meaning. The three bricklayers are performing the same task while understanding what they are accomplishing in completely different terms.

Looking at this story a bit more carefully, however, I wonder: if I were overseeing this project, I might be a little alarmed by the second and third answers. After all, I’ve hired people to lay bricks, and I might not be pleased if, while doing this task, they are distracted by thoughts of their family. I might be even more concerned if they are dreaming about some higher purpose. As a supervisor, I want my bricklayers paying attention to the details of laying bricks. Is the mortar mix the perfect proportion of sand, stone, and water? Is each person diligently looking at the blueprints and placing each brick in exactly the right place? Is each person and the team working cooperatively and yet fast enough to meet the schedule? In other words, at any one time, there are lots of tasks we could be focused on, but are we focused on the right ones? How do we know which are the right ones?

At the same time, as the supervisor, I understand that my employees are human beings, not machines. Humans have needs, emotions, aspirations. I recognize that for people to be most effective — to be able to work with skill, creativity, and conscientiousness — they need to be compensated fairly and adequately, in ways that meet their personal and family needs. And in order to be inspired to be truly excellent bricklayers, they need to be included in the work’s larger vision and purpose. They must be encouraged to see the noble aspect of the work they are performing — in this case, the sacred act of building a cathedral, a spiritual gathering place for the benefit of our community. Though it feels somewhat daunting, part of my job is to help them connect the simple act of laying bricks with the divine. Embracing all these perspectives or attitudes helps us achieve the great results we seek. Ultimately, I don’t want each bricklayer focused on only one aspect of their job; I want them to be adept enough to focus on, and succeed at, all three aspects simultaneously.

We are all like these three bricklayers, who together represent our individual self. The message of the story is that we each hold these differing, even contradictory perspectives within us all the time, and our continual, paradoxical task is to discover, in each moment, how to embrace, penetrate, and reconcile them effectively, cooperatively, even joyfully.

Step back and look at your daily life. Each day is filled with small tasks and activities, stuff to get done, bricks to lay. In and around these tasks, we eat, sleep, exercise, pay bills, go shopping, get the kids to and from school, and express our love. We maintain our home and family life. And during all this, we aspire and dream and connect with others. We are always aware, in some part of ourselves, of our aspiration toward our life’s greater goals. We are often assessing whether our work and activity is meaningful, if it has a larger purpose and benefits others. Like the three bricklayers, we are balancing multiple states of awareness even as we attend to the details of the specific job at hand, trying to do good work, take care of our family life, and find connection and fulfillment.

I enjoy using parables, and the bricklayer story arose recently during a meeting with one of my executive coaching clients, Roger, who is the CEO of an insurance company. Roger was describing how he was feeling increasingly tired and stressed from the day-to-day activities of his business — negotiating contracts, managing employees, and developing new business. At times he spoke about his work with great enthusiasm. He understood that from a larger perspective he was in the business of helping people create more security for themselves and their families. But as a source of greater meaning and inspiration, this wasn’t enough. His enthusiasm was flagging, and with it his effectiveness in his job. We discussed the three bricklayers story and the contradictions and tensions of integrating our daily work with vision, purpose, and our sense of community and well-being.

I was surprised to see tears in Roger’s eyes as he entered more deeply into the ways these issues impacted his life. We began to address how he might transform the stress he felt into more equanimity and enthusiasm, how he might improve his ability to focus and develop the quality of his attention. At the end of his workday he wanted to be less distracted and tense and more present and alive for his family. At the same time, he wanted to better understand how to shift the culture of his organization from one that was often cynical to one that encouraged trust, collaboration, and innovation. He wondered how he and the people he worked with could develop more responsiveness and compassion while simultaneously improving the effectiveness and profitability of the business.

This is the same challenge and opportunity many of us face every day: How can we be present and alive for each moment of our lives in ways that allow us to actually feel alive in every moment? I believe it is only by embracing our life’s contradictions that we understand how to work with them and find clarity, balance, and meaning within the context of our particular circumstances. On the surface, this counterintuitive approach itself seems contradictory. But in my life and in my work, I have found that embracing life’s paradoxes is a powerful skill; it is a path to increasing effectiveness, awakening joy, and discovering our true purpose, in this and each new moment. Our minds are the most engaged and vibrant when we honor complexity, learn stillness in turmoil, face doubt with confidence, and seek to know ourselves so that we might better serve others.

There is no laminated foldout map for becoming more balanced and alive. There is no single established path, though conventional wisdom often promises that such a path exists. Indeed, one of our biggest obstacles is the doubt and anxiety we feel about whether we are on the right path, about whether we are acting effectively, helpfully, and appropriately. However, there are reliable, effective methods for creating the path we need, one fitted to ourselves, and that is what this book offers. It’s a program for finding our way whenever we feel lost, and in part it uses contradictions and paradoxes like signposts that can help point us in a clearer direction. Humans are inescapable storytellers, and we can hold many stories at the same time. The elasticity of the human mind not only is capable of this but seems to welcome the chance. This book seeks to help you name and embrace your life’s contradictory truths, its authentic paradoxes, as essential to creating an inspired, effective life.

To do this, I use and have developed a number of surprisingly simple tools and practices, which are designed to be easy to remember and integrate into your daily life. Simplicity is good, because navigating our relationships, our work life, and our place in the larger world can be difficult, confusing, and complex. That is why I find stories and parables like that of the three bricklayers so useful. In their paradoxical ways, they wake us up to what is obvious and true, and they can help us recognize what we don’t otherwise see.

Over many years, working with my clients and in my own life, I’ve distilled these paradoxes into five core truths. Each represents an important understanding, a vital competency, and a way of living in the world that leads to greater freedom, satisfaction, and effectiveness. They are

1.   Know yourself, forget yourself

2.   Be confident, question everything

3.   Fight for change, accept what is

4.   Embrace emotion, embody equanimity

5.   Benefit others, benefit yourself

Each of these five truths is a paradox — a paradox that can be embraced and practiced. Together these five truths can be worked with as a program or a path.

Another way to work with these paradoxical truths is to identify the results of practicing each truth, and to recognize that each truth builds upon the preceding truth:

•     By working with “know yourself, forget yourself,” you develop your attention.

•     By working with “be confident, question everything,” you broaden your outlook.

•     By working with “fight for change, accept what is,” you foster more skillful action.

•     By working with “embrace emotion, embody equanimity,” you increase your resilience.

•     By working with “benefit others, benefit yourself,” you gain effectiveness.

The program or path of working with each of these paradoxical truths leads, progressively, to developing your attention, outlook, action, resilience, and effectiveness:

This book is organized in two parts. In part 1, I explain the book’s central concepts and methods. Chapter 1 discusses what I mean by “paradox” and how embracing it leads to greater clarity and insight. I also introduce myself and explain how I grew into a paradoxical combination of Zen teacher, CEO, and leadership consultant. Chapter 2 explains what I mean by “effectiveness,” and it describes the book’s practical approach and how to use the book to create your own path. Chapter 3 discusses the Zen Buddhist concepts that underlie much of the material, and it explains how to read and work with the teaching stories that I use throughout.

Then part 2 presents the five core truths. These are five essential areas where we primarily seek and most need effectiveness. Knowing, in any particular situation, what an appropriate response should be almost always involves embracing the knotty riddles and contradictions in one or more of these five arenas. In all cases, by seeing the ways we are out of balance in these areas, we can learn what we need to do to recover our balance and become more effective. Throughout, I use real-world stories from my clients’ lives and my own life to show how this works.

In Buddhism, the path to awakening is often called “the middle way.” It is the path we tread between the extremes and opposing forces of life. However, I’ve found that this terminology can be misleading. It suggests something akin to “moderation in all things,” as if we might resolve these contradictions into a single perfect, correct action that strikes a middle ground. But that is not how we experience life, nor is it a recipe for fulfillment and success. For instance, there are times when we must act with bold assurance, and times when we must patiently refrain from acting or even voicing our opinion at all. In either case, half measures will not do. Instead, we have to train ourselves to be able to act in whatever way is most skillful at any one time, choosing from among all possibilities. We must hold the contradictions and paradoxes within us, balancing them in a continual dance that enriches, enlivens, and often unexpectedly relaxes our lives in the process.

As the book’s title suggests, the imperative to know yourself and forget yourself represents perhaps the central paradox that we must face. All the other paradoxes relate to it in some way. In addition, throughout history, many other schools of thought have espoused this conundrum, that we are to deeply know ourselves while at the same time managing to be selfless. “Know thyself” was, famously, the inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Ralph Waldo Emerson preached that knowing yourself was essential for finding God within, although Christianity has often said the opposite, that forgetting yourself is the path to God. Eihei Dogen, the founder of Zen Buddhism in thirteenth-century Japan, said, “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.” Yet however one frames this apparent riddle, the goal has always been to understand and deeply experience the profound mystery of consciousness, of our place within the sacred, while simultaneously finding fulfillment, effectiveness, and compassion in daily life.

The stakes for doing this are high, and the benefits of success are pragmatic and urgently needed. Our world is messy and difficult. The list of human-made problems is daunting: climate change, war, violence, severe economic injustice, underemployment. Writer, businessman, and environmental visionary Paul Hawken once said that “humans are the only species on the planet with an unemployment problem. Brilliant!” On this score, the Buddhists got it right — underlying all these seemingly unsolvable problems are the same basic human tendencies: greed, hate, and delusion. Isn’t this the level in which the real problems of our world exist? Imagine if we focused here. Imagine if we used this as our inspiration: to heal ourselves, and in this way also, in a real and direct manner, heal the world.

This is my highest and truest hope for the work that I do and for this book. I often end my workshops and retreats by saying that my real hope is to create a conspiracy. The word conspiracy literally means “breathing together”: con means “with”; spire is “to breathe.” Together, we can change the world, beginning with ourselves. We do this by combining and integrating these attention and mindfulness practices, the skills of influence, leadership, and real power, along with ethical, responsible, and compassionate actions. When we are successful, we can bring skillful action, compassion, and wisdom into our daily lives and activities. We can change the world through our own sense of presence, our ability to show up, to be ourselves, to speak the truth.

When my daughter was seven years old I used to read to her every night before she went to sleep. One night as we were completing our nightly routine, she turned to me and said, “Daddy, when we die, do you think we are given all the answers about life — like when you play a board game and you are done, and you look at the back for the solutions?”

The truth is I don’t remember exactly what I said. I hope I said something like “I don’t think we need to wait until we are dying to find the answers. I think that real wisdom, real compassion, and real love are right here, right now, in every moment.”

When we pay attention, right in the midst of the difficulties and strains, the pleasures and pains of our lives, it’s the unexpected, the puzzles, the paradoxes that catch us, open us, change us. We can appreciate and learn from these puzzles, and little by little, or all at once, solutions appear. We have the ability to transform and shape the context of our lives and become skillful, excellent bricklayers: doing our work well, taking good care of ourselves and our families, and taking care of others and the world.

Breathing, together.