22Apr 2018

Appearance on Men Of Purpose Podcast

0 Biohacking, Coaching, Education, Entrepreneurship, Futurism, Health, Life Purpose, Meditation, Motivation, My Personal Journey, Physical Fitness, Video 1

I have a new podcast appearance on the Men on Purpose Podcast that I’m excited to share with you.

Here’s how Emerald Peaceful GreenForest the host of the show describes it:

“Speaking of BURSTING – I’m bursting with excitement to bring the Magnificent Max Marmer to you today – listen CAREFULLY to this interview – you could review it maybe several times – pause, let the words really sink in and then go listen again!

Max is THAT kind of guy – who when he opens his mouth or more accurately directs his energy and intention – amazing things happen! There is so much juice in this interview I seriously want to make the time to listen again myself.

We covered a huge range of topics from Biohacking to Startups to stock trading to confidence to dancing to what it means to be a polymath. WHEW! Please, I’m asking SERIOUSLY, listen with focused attention to today’s episode.

How do you develop the courage to jump off a ledge and ‘assemble a plan on the way down’? Max Marmer believes that confidence comes from knowing who you are and developing that. So what tools are out there to help you achieve that kind of self-understanding and clarity of purpose? And how exactly do you practice stepping into your courage, developing confidence as part of your skill set?
Today, Max sits down with Emerald to explore his early awareness of multidimensionality and how he navigates between maps and territory to further his understanding of himself and the universe. He explains the concept of biohacking, sharing how he utilizes its principles to increase his energy and mental sharpness. Max walks us through the life cycle of a successful startup, discussing how self-awareness and clarity of purpose have contributed to his confidence as an entrepreneur and the dynamic tools for self-understanding offered by his new company TrueSelf. Listen in for Max’s insight around the power of integrating across disciplines and the opportunity for men to design a new model of masculinity in the current cultural moment.

What You Will Learn
Max’s early awareness of multidimensionality

How Max navigates between maps and territory to understand himself, the universe

How Max leverages biohacking to increase energy and mental clarity

Max’s take on the crossover between the inner and outer world

How Max uses applied kinesiology to identify his body’s needs

The life cycle of a successful startup

Discovery

Validation

Efficiency

Scale

The idea of confidence as a practice and a skill

How self-understanding and purpose informs confidence

How Max employs faith to endure the darkness of the ‘crash and burn’

How Max’s new company TrueSelf offers dynamic tools for self-understanding

The definition of a polymath

How power and innovation comes from integrating across disciplines

The opportunity to develop a new model of masculinity in this cultural moment”.

And I encourage you to check out episodes with other Purpose-Driven Brothers Michael Hrostoski and Satyen Raja

16Mar 2018

What Einstein Had to Say About Alignment

0 Culture, Education, Health, Learning, Life, Meditation, Motivation, Philosophy, Success 0

Einstein is speaking to proper alignment within the Immanent Holarchy of the Spirit -> Soul -> Personality.

Your agency is your self. Your Body/Mind.

Your True Identity is All of Existence.

Your Task is to over come the persistent illusory prison that you are your Body/Mind.

Your Process is recognizing all the energetic Self-contractions that manifest as limiting beliefs, unresolved traumas, and negative emotions like fear, uncertainty and doubt that stand between you and Identifying as All of Existence.

It is here where unending Liberation and Positive Flourishing is found.

15Feb 2018

Pithy Post Potpourri – Winter/Spring 2018

If you and your partner(s) can’t both reliably access a state of awakened awareness beyond the ordinary sense of self then any exploration of non-monogamy will inevitably lead to an increase in pain and suffering.

#PsychographicEntryCriteria

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When you lose your cool, when you get triggered do you tell yourself to raise your game and live up to a higher standard?

Or do you justify why it was okay to lose your cool and ascribe fault to other people and external circumstances?

This is one of the key regular decisions that separates the extraordinary humans from the ordinary.

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I love my morning meditation view so much.

There is a reason yogis go to the mountaintop.

The sparkling, harmonious, blissful, spacious, luminous nature of reality is unassailably clear.

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People who don’t utilize the tool of debt and credit in their life have been afflicted by a false sense of lack.

They lack sufficient belief in themselves.

And they lack a willingness to invest in themselves for the long run and to bet on themselves.

The question for analyzing whether debt and credit is worth utilizing is very simple:

Can you create more value, faster with the money you are loaned than the interest rate you are given?

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One of the worst decisions the masculine can make is to seek comfort.

The masculine grows through setting big goals, pushing to exhaustion and then savoring accomplishment in the recovery phase before setting a new bigger goal that lies beyond the new expanded comfort zone.

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From the higher perspective there is no such thing as rejection.

There is just energy jostling around trying to find its way into proper alignment.

From the higher perspective there is no such thing as failure.

There is just feedback about what needs to be improved and recalibrated.

—

Black Panther was so much better than the Last Jedi.

Plot and Story Arc.

Character Development & Consistency.

Visual Effects.

Empowering portrayal of Cultural Minorities.

…the script for Luke Skywalker was particularly terrible…acting like someone who was never a Jedi

…so many of the Star Wars characters felt like forced affirmative action plays rather than authentic casting.

…One disappointing feature of the Wakandan’s was that for being so technologically and culturally advanced in many dimensions, they still had an Ethnocentric Worldview when looking to the outside world, opining about how to help downtrodden and oppressed blacks around the world rather than how to help downtrodden and oppressed humans with their technological prowess.

All for now. No time to be a detailed movie critic.

—

I am currently reading the Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.

Who else has read it?

My personal website is titled In Quest of Super Humanity and I’m coming to see how my intuitive guidance has been (previously unbeknownst to me) plugged into the same source as Aurobindo’s, especially with respect to his articulation of the Supermind and its Divine Unfolding through Humanity’s Involutionary Process.

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Your body is an instrument that the Consciousness of your Soul learns to play.

An Evolved Soul is therefore a masterful musician.

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Back on my own again and restarting my cooking skills after 2 years of dormancy.

Immediately noticing a shift in my relationship to food preparation as I’ve deepened my relationship to the fundamentally universal nature of subtle energy in all things.

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Succinct infographic of a lot of misguided class warfare and anti-wealth sentiment from the Liberal Left.

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Always remember that how we react to every moment of our life will reinforce either our negative habits or positive habits. No matter how challenging life may be, each moment can be seen as either a problem or an opportunity. If we can understand this, we can start to bring our entire life to the path.

~ Chamtrul Rinpoche

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You might ask, ‟If I have Buddha nature, why can’t I perceive it right now?”

It is because, like gold hidden in its matrix, that nature is hidden by our habits that we have accumulated since beginningless time. These habits have been created by our disturbing emotions and then reinforced by the actions that those disturbances have produced.

~ Shechen Gyaltsab

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The ultimate nature of the mind is empty and without basis. It is intangible like empty space. But this is not a nihilistic view. Self-arisen, primordial consciousness is original, clear consciousness. Self-arisen and self-illuminating, it is like the essence of the sun.

~ Guru Rinpoche

29Dec 2017

If You Want to Level Up Your Consciousness…

0 Education, Philosophy, Psychology 0

YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE INTERPRETATIVE NATURE OF YOUR MIND.

When I type in caps I am not yelling.

NOR HAS ANYONE EVER YELLED IN THE WRITTEN WORD FOR THAT MATTER.

How do you know I’m not sitting here in Zen?

Your mind only imagined I was yelling through the interpretative process of converting symbols on a page into an auditory dialogue inside your head.

if you want to level up your consciousness…

YOU NEED TO DECONSTRUCT YOUR REACTIVITY.

You need to increase your Witness Consciousness.

WHERE DOES THE PROGRAM IN YOUR MIND LIVE THAT INTERPRETS CAPS AS YELLING?

What if all caps meant whispering?

WHY ARE YOU SO PERMEABLE TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD?

How is it that by typing in all caps I can rev up your nervous system?

WHAT IF YOU COULD CONSCIOUSLY CHOOSE HOW TO INTERPRET AND MAKE MEANING FROM ANY PHENOMENA THAT ENTERED YOUR REALITY?

Real yogis can.

“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” – Bruce Lee

14Dec 2017

Books I Read in 2017 // Do You Have Recommendations for 2018?

0 Culture, Education, Entrepreneurship, Learning, Motivation, Poetry, Politics 0

As 2017 comes to a close I was taking inventory of the books I’ve read this year.

All of the ones I read were pretty great and I would highly recommended them.

What are some of your favorite books that you read this year?

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1) Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level by Mark Divine (H/T to @Daniel Schmachtenberger for the recommendation)

2) The Precious Treasury of Pith Instructions (The Seven Treasuries Series) by Longchen Rabjam (A core text in the Buddhist Dzogchen lineage)

3) The Dark Challenge by Nick Scott Ram (A lord of the rings style allegory of the battle between light and dark in the universe. Fiction that is much closer to reality than you might think.)

4) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.

5) The Everything and the Nothing by Meher Baba

6) The Divided Mind by John E. Sarno

7) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance

8) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

9) The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by Jim Rickards

10) Answers by Mother Meera

11) Trump and a Post-Truth World by Ken Wilber

12) The Accelerating TechnOnomic Medium (ATOM) by Kartik Gada

24Nov 2015

Learning, Dropping Out of Stanford & Bold Life Decisions

0 Education, Life Purpose 0

“Education is not the learning of facts but training the mind to think.” – Albert Einstein

This is a big reason why I dropped out of Stanford before ever completing a homework assignment…

…that was not part of my independent study work with Steve Blank.

I took a gap year after high school and after spending a few weeks on ‘The Farm’, I realized I could train my mind better in the Dojo of the Real World, than I could in their beautifully impressive but rapidly antiquating, de-personalized, industrial era originating Educational Factory.

I do not regret my decision to drop out of Stanford.

In fact, the only times I’ve ever considered returning to Stanford have been in the difficult transition periods after ending projects when I was too weak and too permeable to social influences from some friends and family who pray at the False Altar of Affiliation.

Brand Affiliations are incrementally nice. But they are supplements to one’s path, not meals or milestones.

Hacks are nice though, such as when I realized when I was considering dropping out that “there was way more Effort/Reward in getting into Stanford than getting out.” In hindsight, it was a few essays vs. 4 Years of Sub-Optimal Drudgery.

I could not have gotten to where I am now, as quick as I have, without making bold decisions like trusting my gut to drop out of Stanford within a Quarter.

“I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.” – Thomas Jefferson

“Freedom lies in being Bold” – Robert Frost.

22Oct 2015

Journaled Reflection on Integral Theory, Entrepreneurship and My Journey

0 Education, Entrepreneurship, Learning, My Personal Journey, Psychology, Startup Science 0

Journaled Reflections on:

– The Societally Transformative Power of Integral Theory

– The Intersection of Integral Theory and Technology Entrepreneurship

– Highs and Lows on My 6 Year Journey to Develop a New Paradigm for the Management Science of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

————————————————————————–

Bold, eloquent profundity from my friend Zak Stein at the Integral Theory Conference this July on a debate panel on Human Development and Global Crises.

“Although we are sometimes in dialogues like this [pitted against each other], we are so fundamentally on the same team. And it is critical to understand how essential it is we get our acts together as a team, even though we have diverse perspectives. You have to understand we are in the midst of a compounding meta-crisis at the global level. One of the crises, is a crisis of Capability, which is an Educational crisis. And as the situation gets worse we’re going to have increasingly coercive measures used to change the nature of human capital. The most obvious one is psychopharmacology. Which is an actual physical intervention into the central nervous system of over 6 million children in the United States. And this is because we have a psychology that does understand development organically— or development at all. So there’s a way in which we are debating, but a much more profound way, in which one of our tasks is to change the way we think about what it means to change people’s minds. And that requires thinking deeply about developmental psychology, and developmental measurement, and trying to supplant what has become a Human Capital Management System on a global scale, that is decimating the life prospects of up and coming generations. So there’s an urgency I feel to align and to build a way forward for Human Development as a field, if only so that the Educational Systems of tomorrow are dignified.”

(Source: http://www.zakstein.org/human-development-and-global-crise…/)

Zak is a trailblazer in the field of Developmental Psychology and it’s applicative dissemination in the worlds of Education, Business and much more.

I was at this debate live in July at the Integral Theory Conference. It was a true highlight: Zak, this panel, and this community of Integral Philosophers, Scholars and Practitioners, who are light years ahead of the mainstream Intelligentsia.

This differential between cutting edge thought and mainstream Intelligentsia has led to a world where the leaders of Education, Business and Politics are “in over their heads”, working with tools and models with insufficient requisite capacity to handle the enormous complexity of today’s 21st century world. As a result: Societal Chaos, all around, barely being held together by systemic inertia.

Essential aspects of the Future of Humanity live in the minds of those attended the Integral Theory Conference in July. Potent Visions waiting to virulently spread through Culture as a Memetic Virus as soon as the conditions are right.

A big part of my work right now is in setting the conditions for this Academic to Market transference by integrating Integral Theory’s cutting edge philosophical and psychology paradigms, methods and tools into the world of Technology Entrepreneurship — the most powerful engine of socio-economic progress. The co-arising of Integral Theory, Startup Management Science and a Transformational Ethic generating Societal Bliss like Peanut Butter and Jelly…or Shiva and Shakti.

What I am able to do with these Integral tools often astounds me in its power and its simplicity. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke who wrote 2001: a Space Odyssey famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Learning from brilliant Integral thinkers like Zak, Ken Wilber, John M. Smart, Robert Kegan, Clare Graves, Bill Torbert, Susanne Cook Greuter, Michael Commons, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Dustin DiPerna and so many more…I feel like I’m working with true 21st century Magic.

My work has been ramping up with exponentiating pace the last few months. I’ve started applying my latest Startup Science work with founders, in service to their vision, and in service to generating case studies and conceptual and methodological refinement.

I’ve put more brain cycles into the development of the Management Science of Entrepreneurship than anything else in the past 6 years; and to feel its present coherence, clarity, fractality, power, and precision in describing and prescriptively guiding transformational tech startups warms my heart with love, gratitude, and quite frankly relief — that all my intellectual wandering was not for naught.

I am in deep gratitude to my Intellectual Forefathers and Foremothers whose Giant Shoulders I stand on that make my work possible. At times I have felt incredibly isolated, alone and weary, journeying into the disorienting worlds of undiscovered and uncreated thought forms.

Attempting to build a new paradigm for the Management Science of Entrepreneurship and Innovation is not a quest for the faint of heart. But “No Man is an Island”, and my inextricable, interconnection to the aforementioned ideas and thinkers gave me the strength I could wander through the Intellectual Valley of Death, not get lost and make it out alive with Buried Treasure.

I don’t have any exciting new quantifiable results to share with you yet, but I know a Golden Thread when I’ve found it and I trust the autopoetic process of unfolding that is occurring before my eyes.

I’m very much looking forward to sharing and co-creating Magic with you all in the near future, so that we may Realize a more Perfect World.

A ho!

22Sep 2015

“You can’t Learn Entrepreneurship in the Classroom” Is No Longer True

0 Education, Entrepreneurship, Startup Science 0

Many entrepreneurs believe you can’t learn how to do entrepreneurship better from “the classroom”.

This is an adage that is no longer true.

For most of the last few decades there were no good entrepreneurship workshops, classes or schools, so what people taught was mostly Harvard Business School and Wharton Business School style knowledge, which, respectively, are designed to train managers to lead businesses from 100M to 1B in annual revenue and train high performing Wall Street Traders. That knowledge was ultimately irrelevant for starting a company.

Thus education around entrepreneurship has gotten a deservedly bad rap.

But this is no longer true.

The Stanford Business School has many great classes on how to create a startup. So does Harvard Business school. YC Startup School and Lean Startup Conference are great conferences on the startup creation conference. There are many great books about how to create a successful tech startup from scratch. Practitioners from the trenches write dozens of blog posts with useful information everyday.

If anything, in terms of how to run their business the entrepreneur is entering a realm of information overload.

And the hubris of many founders, thinking they have nothing to learn about how to do entrepreneurship is a big reason why 90+% of startups fail.

Ultimately, entrepreneurship is a new kind of management science, that can be taught, learned, trained, honed and mastered.

Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan and Fredrick Taylor laid the foundation for the discipline of Scientific Management that is taught in business schools all around the world.

I draw inspiration from them and their process in my nascent book project where we are constructing a meta-integrative, modular, data backed paradigm for the Management Science of Entrepreneurship.

01Nov 2012

Distractions and The Good Life

0 Creativity, Education, Learning, Life Purpose, Psychology 0

This post originally appeared on facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/maxmarmer/posts/4240294119669

Distraction and procrastination are contextually relative terms. From one perspective intellectual discussions are “distractions” from work and execution. But work and execution can also be seen as “distractions” from our intellectual development and fulfillment.

And in a good life, the two are not separate. They inform one another. Our intellectual development inspires us to work on new problems and see them in different ways. And our work and execution tests and refines our intellectual and theoretical knowledge against reality. This lets us find out where we are strong and where we need to do more work.

We need to commit to both paths of development to actualize our potential. We just have to get good at balancing our time allocation. But this varies throughout our life. Sometimes intellectual development is leading the dance and work is following along. But then circumstances enable a partner switch.

It is humbling, and can be overwhelming when we awaken to the fact that life is a juggling act of developing not just these 2 dimensions but dozens of them.

We must prioritize.

With long view as our guide and eyes focused on the horizons of our becoming.

22Dec 2011

Meta-Cognitive Prowess And The Danger of Meta-Cognitive Frameworks

1 Education, Learning, Philosophy, Psychology 0

After my last post, “Mapmakers, Toolmakers and Complex Developmental Systems” I was encouraged by a friend to read about Robert Keegan’s Constructive Developmental Theory as an alternative model to Spiral Dynamics for how human’s consciousness, thought and values evolve. Here was the best quick overview I found.

I thought I would post this quick take on how I think people increase their meta-cognitive ability and some of the dangers of I’ve seen with falling in love with meta-cognitive frameworks.

After reading about Constructive Development Theory I’m pretty sure I’m in the process, over the last 6 months, of making the jump from thinking in systems to thinking in “systems of systems”. I’m not sure what triggers this jump for most people, but it seems my jump was both a combination of realizing the limitations of just one system, expanding my own self-awareness through interior practices and specifically learning new systems that would allow me to concretely think in multiple perspectives, not just have an intuitive feel that multiple perspective are better.

What I’m getting at, is that I’m not sure “5th order” thinking will just “emerge” on its own, unless people specifically commit to learning the intricacies of new systems, like Constructive Developmental Theory, Integral Theory, EvoDevoUniverse etc. People don’t just learn new systems intuitively, it requires deliberate action to seek them out.

I think it’s also important to differentiate high order meta-frameworks from more practical frameworks. CDT is very meta-cognitive. Moving up the developmental hierarchy of CDT won’t directly improve any hard skill. Hard skills still require a lot of practice, although increases in meta-cognitive ability should lead to more effective and efficient practice, and thus an overall faster rate of practical skill acquisition.

I want to clarify this because it seems that many people who learn about these meta-frameworks never apply their increased freedom and complexity of thought to anything practical because they get obsessed with “leveling up” and mistake meta-cognitive expansion as a means rather than an end.

Category Education