Jan

7

I was reading about entrepreneur Bill Liao to keep myself entertained on New Years. He is very impressive and went from high school dropout to wealthy magnate.

It doesn't take long, when researching him, to come across a handful of Irish articles trying to brand him a cultist for his participation in the Landmark seminars. Landmark is quirky, but just a self-motivational system. And clearly quite an effective one for Bill.

I find it interesting that such approaches to life are easily branded as "cults" or otherwise disparaged. Similar labels are found for Transcendental Meditation and Tony Robbins' work. Robbins' fire-walk seminar recently had a few participants out of thousands receive a burn (and even this may have been exaggerated) - much schadenfreude ensued.

However, if you study impressive men, you will so often find they had some toolset like this to help them during inevitable tough times: Bill Clinton and Paul Tudor Jones both are big Tony Robbins fans; Ray Dalio a Transcendental fan; Bill Liao a Landmark graduate; Warren Buffett a convert of Dale Carnegie.

The classic instance is Clinton calling Marianne Williamson, Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey to Camp David for a supercharge. Say what you like about Clinton, but you can't much question the resilience or achievement.

This is a common response to anyone who follows a belief set outside of the mainstream. I wonder why instinct is to be disparaging? Perhaps the strong leveling instinct in humans? Or the risk that wide adoption might crowd out the more stationary outlook of mainstream belief systems?

Tangentially, witness Mark Zuckerberg, pre-IPO, being subject to leaks of IMs he made as a youngster, quipping about the safety of subscribers data. Or any well known investor going through a tough time; suddenly all their prior victories are forgotten.

Are jealousy and self-motivation two sides of the same coin. Thus the evolutionary benefit of the latter necessitates the former?


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