The Journey of A Next Culture Entrepreneur
By 2015 I had barreled through five years of Law School in Paris and New York, and worked three months in an American Law Firm in Paris. Then… I left my budding Law career. I left the path that most of my friends were going to follow for the remainder of their professional lives.
At first I thought that entrepreneurship would be a home for me to bring about the changes I wanted to see in the world, but two challenges faced me. The first was education: All that I had been given from kindergarten through graduate school neither brought me closer to who I wanted to be, nor gave me the skills I needed for what I wanted to create. The second was the crippling nature of modern entrepreneurship: It failed to call forth the level of inventivity I needed to roll through challenge after challenge and create something big that doesn’t already exist.
Until a few weeks ago, I thought that E.C.C.O. (Earth Coincidence Control Office) had moved me to another world, taking me far away from both of these challenges, somehow for my own good. I write this article because now, five years later, I realize that I have arrived at exactly the place I was searching for in 2015. I am a Next Culture Entrepreneur.
Modern culture entrepreneurship — including social entrepreneurship — is rather solidly welded to the concept that it is possible — and necessary — to hold the central purpose of your project as ‘making a profit’. The distinguishing factor from project to project is limited to which product is sold, or which market niche is infiltrated. The motto of social entrepreneurship is ‘make a difference and make a dollar’.
When an economic construct has been founded on the principle of externalizing costs to society, to future generations, and to ‘underdeveloped’ nations, so as to ‘maximize profit’, how can an entrepreneur — despite all good intentions — avoid creating planetary and social devastation without reconsidering the gameworld’s founding construct? How can an entrepreneurial Team recontextualize its game-play when it limits itself to the same prison that has created the need for drastic change in the first place?
A second theme diminishing possibilities for modern culture entrepreneurs — especially in educational, social or environmental projects — is the intention of providing convenience, making things easier. The idea of rescuing people from discomforts as your valuable service includes the idea that it is possible for a person to be a victim. Entrepreneurial success begins by identifying individuals or classifications of people who are victims of their circumstances so that you can position yourself as their rescuer. A rescuer’s success depends on finding victims to rescue and persecutors to blame. How can a rescuer reconcile in themselves their intention to create change with their need to have victims? The game of victim-rescuer-persecutor has been named by Dr. Stephen Karpman in 1968 as the ‘Drama Triangle’. Possibility Management has renamed the Drama Triangle, Low Drama in order to introduce an entirely different purpose called High Drama. Projects that originate in rescuing victims or manipulating customers to ‘need’ your services have no access to creating anything other than Low Drama.
The intentions of ‘making profit’ or ‘rescuing victims’ are two very old Low Drama strategies that have been played for many centuries with very little to no effect on our capacity to create actual change.
I consider you to be one of my fellow Next Culture entrepreneurs, researching and experimenting to invent new frontiers at the edges of business-as-usual. Yes, we can flatten the hierarchy. Yes, we can allow ideas to emerge from the bottom up. But by now you may be feeling the same as I, that research and experimentation confined within the current economic paradigm, has not — and cannot — ultimately create any sort of breakthrough regenerative economy. The green paint is already cracking and peeling away.
You are a creative and caring genius, possibly hoping that your entrepreneurship will make a difference. But the old paradigm defends itself religiously. ‘Reality’ is grinding away at your entrepreneurial spirit.
Or you are the sensitive and inventive misfit with many amazing ideas and resistance to joining the pack of Wall Street wolves has not yet found the soil in which your ideas can blossom and bear fruit.
To you I say this: there is a sideways door to the poor choice between doing something that changes nothing, and doing nothing thereby making things worse. That sideways door is not easy to find, and even less easy to walk through. The door is to become a source person for Next Culture Entrepreneurship. When the existing gameworlds no longer please you, your job shifts into being a new gameworld builder.
Your main occupation as a Next Culture Entrepreneur is to ongoingly upgrade your thoughtware. Thoughtware is what you use to think with, see with, interact with. School has given you Standard Human Intelligence Thoughtware that limits what you think about, and school specifically avoided investigating what you think with. If you want to expand what is possible for you to think about, you will need to upgrade your thoughtware.
It is a kind of foolishness to expect yourself to generate sustainable or regenerative Value while at the same time using thoughtware that is rapidly causing the extinction of life on Earth. The ‘discovery of the century’ is that new results are created by new thoughtware.
For example, the scarcity-based purposes of ‘making profit’ or ‘looking good’ (rescuing poor victims) are rooted in the thoughtware that there is not enough: not enough money, not enough jobs, not enough resources, not enough time, not enough love, etc. This particular thoughtware, which emerges from the capitalist patriarchal empire context, automatically creates competition, hierarchy, and separation. It is based on the seemingly-obvious idea that if someone else gets those resources, then you will lose, so you strive to do everything you can to get the resources and be the winner, no matter what dies.
What thoughtware would you need — as a Next Culture Entrepreneur — for your projects to create Next Culture Value? Who would you need to become such that you replaced ‘making profit’ at the center of your life with such valuables as Distinctions, Possibility, Authentic Adulthood Initiations, Emotional Healing Processes, Collaboration, Invention, Transformational Spaceholding, Guardianship, Weaving Togetherness, Love, Generosity?
One answer reveals itself if you make a thoughtware upgrade such that the opposite of scarcity is no longer abundance, but that the opposite of scarcity is creating. Then whenever any kind of scarcity seems to be arising (scarcity of ideas, energy, status, power, love, acknowledgement, money, resources) your approach is to apply your Team’s nonlinear creation skills.
Here are three fundamental nonlinear creation skills for a Next Culture Entrepreneur:
To be honest, each of these three creation skills deserves an entire book to build out the core distinctions, clarify necessary procedures, illuminate thoughtware foundations, and consider examples of the multi-dimensional results they create. If you are writing such a book, please let me know. For now, I invite you to explore the following distinctions and try the following experiments.
Creating Value.
Creating Value obviously depends on what is considered valuable. For example, as mentioned earlier, modern culture considers money as having Value in and of itself. The consequence of valuing the medium of exchange (rather than valuing the Value which money was intended to transfer) is that people will give their time and life away to desperately accumulate computerized-zeros on a software platform called a ‘bank account’.
A Next Culture Entrepreneur recognizes that euros, dollars, rupees, or any of modern culture’s currencies do not have Value in and of themselves. This does not mean that they cannot have certain uses in specific circumstances. It simply means that bank and block-chain digital currencies have no independent Value. A Next Culture Entrepreneur holds modern culture currencies at the interface boundary between their gameworld and other gameworlds. The currency is not permitted to pass through the buffer zone. They keep modern culture’s currencies outside so as not to contaminate their gameworld with other gameworld’s currencies. If you fail to make this boundary, the modern culture currency makers (the bankers) own your gameworld.
What A Next Culture Entrepreneur uses as Value, in other words what their gameworld uses as currency is, for example, the capacity to create real Possibility for others. Being a Possibility-Creator means that you can create new options from which others can actually choose, and which choices, when enacted, produce valuable results that the others could not create before. Similarly, you create Value when you provide Transformation, Initiation, Love, Adventures, Clarity, Empowerment, etc.
Rather than cutting down ancient forests to sell to Ikea, blowing up mountains to burn coal, poisoning water tables through fracking, or making brutal ‘regime changes’ to engage slave labor to pull rare earth minerals out of open-pit mines to make car batteries, Next Culture Entrepreneurs learn to create Value by tapping inexhaustible inner and outer nonmaterial resources, Forces of Nature, such as Bright Principles.
By becoming a space through which Bright Principles can do their work in the world, you also give your life away. However, you give it away to be in service of those forces of Nature. You are no longer a slave of your own survival strategy.
You create Value for no reason. Not because you will be rich and famous for doing so. Not because you will be loved for doing so. Not because you will be important by doing so. You become a Value-Creator for others, for the village, for humanity, not for your unconscious shadow purposes. In return, what we are finding is that E.C.C.O. seems to take care of Next Culture Entrepreneurs in little ways that augment your ability to create next-culture Value wherever it is needed.
Here are some experiments you can explore which help shift your Point of Origin from being a cog in modern culture’s economic slave system into being a Value-Creating Next Culture Entrepreneur:
BEINANCE.01 (Matrix Point: 1 for www.startover.xyz): Meet with two other colleagues for 15 minutes. Ask both of them to speak to you for a total of 3 to 5 minutes each explaining something they would like you to commit to by way of providing Value, even if you don’t know how. Without hesitation, select one of the options they offer you. Stand up and speak out your commitment to providing that Value to specific people before a certain deadline. Meet again after you have completed your commitment to share what you have each learned.
BEINANCE.02 (Matrix Point: 1 for www.startover.xyz): Go to a gardening shop and buy a clay pot with a hole in the bottom. Fill it with good earth. Plant a seed from a fruit that you like in that soil. Keep the pot in a warm place and water it every couple of days until the seed sprouts and grows into a plant. Care for the plant so it thrives. This is exactly the same kind of ongoing care and attention needed to grow a person, an organization, or a project into a thriving organism. Apply your care-giving skills as a Value you can deliver. Write a 3–5 page article on what you have learned and publish it online.
BEINANCE.03 (Matrix Point: 1 for www.startover.xyz): Make a list of 10 nearly impossible things that you would like to be able to do. Choose one or combine two together and offer 2-day online or offline workshops in learning this exact skill. Your workshop needs to include context-setting distinctions, actual practical experiments, skill-building sessions with feedback and coaching from other participants (Winning Happening), whatever thoughtmaps are necessary, even if you have to invent all these because you have never seen them before. Charge money for your workshop. Deliver it at least three times, in three months. In this way, you can see the Value you provide by committing to learn new things yourself.
Creating an Evolutionary Team.
There are at least two general classifications of Teams. One classification is an ‘Ordinary Team’, people pulled together through coercion, either with the promise of a reward such as money, or by means of compromise, for example ‘if you do this for me I will do that for you’.
A second classification is an ‘Evolutionary Team’, which has neither employers, nor employees. An Evolutionary Team emerges when Team members Commit to an extraordinary purpose, and work together to create extraordinary Value. It may not be conceivable from the thoughtware of modern economy, but by providing Value, you receive Value, and the Value you receive makes for an extraordinary life. In the Evolutionary Team it is clear that you cannot buy commitment, or force someone else to commit, because Commitment changes the shape of your Being, and that transformational change process is not comfortable. Participating wholeheartedly in the transformational change processes is one of the Values you provide in your Evolutionary Team.
But, how do you create a Team of committed people without manipulation or punishment, knowing that their commitment might change from one moment to the next because their commitment is not coerced? Your main leverage point to bring in and stabilize people in your Evolutionary Team is your capacity to Create Value for them.
Here are experiments for strengthening your skills for attracting people to feed and get fed by your Team:
BEINANCE.04 (Matrix Point: 1 for www.startover.xyz): Create Legend-Making actions that ripple through the field. Attracted people will surf back to you on the reflections of your legend waves asking to work and collaborate with you. Legend-Making actions are for example, taking an unreasonable stand, providing Value to people who are ‘bigger’ than you, creating unexpected extraordinary spaces that serve evolutionary purposes. Make it a practice to do two visible Legend Making actions each week.
BEINANCE.05 (Matrix Point: 1 for www.startover.xyz): Take a Stand for the Stand that you take. Keep informing, educating and inspiring your circle of people by explaining practical uses for the Value your Evolutionary Team is creating. This would show up, for example, by your enthusiasm for talking in detail about your Evolutionary Team in seminars, conferences, private calls, on Facebook, Instagram, in your articles, videos, interviews, etc. For this experiment, make a short video blog or write a clear article revealing a secret that is buried deep in the context of the Stand your Team has taken to create the Value you create.
In addition, your Evolutionary Team will grow in depth and quality when the Team members commit, beyond the purpose of the project, to each other.
BEINANCE.06 (Matrix Point: 1 for www.startover.xyz): As a Next Culture Entrepreneur, you enhance the commitment in between your Team members by challenging each of them to Create Value for each other, and with each other for still others on your Team. You know that each of your Team members has Value (Possibility, Clarity, Love, Presence as well as capacity and skills) that other members lack. Have them work with each other and together! This experiment is to create a weekly context-deepening meeting with your Team during which time you send them out in breakout rooms in groups of 3. One person holds space, while the second person listens and takes notes, while the third person spends 3 minutes completing two sentences. First: “I cannot commit to you because…” giving clear specific details. After 3 minutes, switch to: “I want you in my village because…”
The result is a Team founded on Commitment, Love, Honesty, Collaboration, in which each member serves the Evolutionary purpose of the project from their own Authority. Your challenge will be to continuously strive for the unattainable balance between ongoingly empowering centered, grounded, clear individuals with their own authority, and, at the same time, embracing a togetherness in a Team that needs each other in their path of Evolution.
Creating Evolution.
Mainstream entrepreneurs often wait for extreme external pressure (market fluctuations, investors changing their mind, public opinions wavering, political parties warring against each other, etc.) to consider that there might be a need for Evolution. In that strategy, their Team culture often defends itself and the culture grows rigid. Plus they make themselves victims of circumstances, often lagging far behind the possible evolution available to them to offer more Conscious, Responsible Value.
As a Next Culture Entrepreneur, your strategy is the opposite. Instead of turning your back on Evolution, you move towards it by serving as a powerful Evolutionary source. In that way, you do not wait for E.C.C.O. to hammer your projects to the ground before you take them into evolutionary phases.
The question is how can you become a source of Evolution in your project? Here are two more experiments for creating ongoing conscious Evolution.
BEINANCE.07 (Matrix Point: 1 for www.startover.xyz): Your role in your project is not your position. Your position evolves, sometimes rapidly. Your role remains the same: providing both internal and external Value. This experiment is to disidentify with your position. In Next Culture Entrepreneurship, nobody has a position to hold on to because nobody is irreplaceable. Create a buffer zone — a space of Possibility — between you and your personal identification with your position. At the same time, be very clear that your purpose is your Value-making role. Radically rely on the clarity and decision-making power that comes with it. When it is time for you to pass on your position to the next person, you can slide on with elegance and grace.
BEINANCE.08 (Matrix Point: 1 for www.startover.xyz): Arrange to replace yourself. Every position you have in a project is temporary. You are in that position so you can learn skills that you don’t already have. This experiment is to bring two or three apprentices into your daily creation efforts to prepare them to take over your current position. Let them see how you listen, how you assess things, now you negotiate offers, how you transform challenges into new possibility. Along the way give them jobs to do that help you move things forward. Have them coach each other to greater capability in those jobs. You coach their coaching. When they are able to take over your position, step out, even if you do not know yet what your next position might be. Don’t worry. You could not see your next position while you were so thoroughly involved serving your current position. By replacing yourself you become a free agent who E.C.C.O. can more easily slide into a position or project that never existed before.
There are so many dimensions of current business culture that need to be completely reinvented. Whole new areas of life open up for Value creation and exchange, for example: the culture of Earth guardianship, toroidal power structures, five-body health, unschooling, community gameworlds, holistic food, authentic adulthood initiations, inner and outer resources that modern culture knows nothing about, village weaving, radically responsible innovation, conscious evolution, regenerative energy housing, womanhood, manhood, brotherhood / sisterhood, parenthood, justice, and many more.
We have been trained to be poor victims, thinking there are not enough jobs out there. The Next Culture Entrepreneur is a job-maker, creating a life of fabulous jobs as an evolutionary Teamworker. There are already so many cultural creatives waiting for you on the other side of the door. And many other doors to go through after that one.
We are waiting for you!
