Mihaly’s Heaven and Our Living Hell
In 2004, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published a paper, “What we must accomplish in the coming decades.” He is a retired Hungarian-American professor, having taught an thought at the University of Chicago, later at the Claremont Graduate School in Southern California. He introduced concepts of “positive psychology”, most famous for his teachings about “flow” in relation to happiness and creativity.
He had to learn quickly. The son of a Hungarian ambassador, he and his family were caught up in the throes of the European wars and social disturbances of mid-century. Some died; they all suffered. It was the meanness of the times from which he leveraged his positive program as he worked his way to Chicago. He once wrote:
“Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
He carved out a heaven, or the pattern for this, leading to his 2004 article.
Lamentably, society used that time to descend into hell. I learned a lot about hell in the 1980s in my own Southern California adventure. The hell part cannot be placed on California’s doorstep. I loved the place — or, I should say, California’s places, and most all aspects of living there. The hell part had to do with my own little business triangle, me and my partners. Then and there I faced privately what society at large has been struggling with on a grand scale — not unrelated to the world that vexed the Csikszentmihalyi family amid the wars and turmoil of the mid 20th Century.
I am LDS, which is to say that I am a Mormon, raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Within our canonical works is a book, the Doctrine and Covenants, that includes Section 88, one of the longer chapters of the book of scripture. That chapter is of the flavor of Revelations in the New Testament. In Section 88 is a simple test, the operational definition of hell, as well as two other living environments that are hopefully more appealing. Growing up, I had never thought of these in such a light as I learned to appreciate from the experience in question. It took my little love-less triangle of business entanglement to sort it out for me. I will describe what I learned, how it relates to the Section 88 message, and how it summarizes life’s lessons. Then, I will go through the details of how we can perhaps reorient ourselves as Csikszentmihalyi suggests.
I was in the partnership for five years. It probably should have been shorter. I stayed for two reasons. First, we were doing exactly what I had wanted to do, that I felt would be both profitable and satisfying. We were organizing the first institutionally-sponsored venture capital fund south of Los Angeles, with offices in Irvine and San Diego. We were, in my words, “building companies,” mostly spinoffs from the University of California, San Diego, mostly in medical and biological markets. We had no silver spoon, we had to learn how to get the money, how to bring in many partners to do so, and how to get the attention of people with more money and more options than most people cannot even imagine.
As a newly-minted MBA, my role was that of recruiter — even of them — and main cajoler and documenter of all that needed to be done. I went to sessions held by the Practicing Law Institute in San Francisco, where I met the leading attorneys in the field. They were more than eager to teach the trade and provide all of the documentation that was needed to set up funds and the entities that were needed. I learned very early on that existing venture capitalists would do nothing of the kind — until we had made some progress and were let into the tent, at least on the periphery. The good thing was we could source deals to them, which ultimately made us popular, at least in the biotech niche.
Second, I didn’t really know how to leave. I thought I had a plan with one of my partners. It turned out I was being played by him in a deeper form of intrigue than I wanted to admit.
There were three of us. I talked the first of my partners into the venture and he gave me a small table outside his office in Newport Beach and we started carving out some deals while we put together the framework of the fund. After some months, with the documentation in place, he found our other partner in San Diego out of the lists of contacts we were constantly grooming. We had some support from Orange County — most particularly the founders of Printronix, who were the first to commit to invest and support us. That San Diego partner would also invest. From that point, I moved to San Diego and we shifted our Orange County office to a suite in Irvine.
A few months into the effort, I noticed that my first partner had a loose relationship with, well, the truth. It was annoying and awkward at first. I wondered about his memory. I got phone calls from prospects wanting clarification. I worked out a process of ‘tidying up’ matters that surfaced from things he said and didn’t say. With time, it became clear that he wanted to make up stuff and that he wanted all parties to go along with his pronouncements — in fact, he insisted on it. We came up with the phrase — now enshrined in our national discourse — “He lied when the truth was a better story”. He thought he was a lot better at it than he really was.
Working out of the San Diego office, I worked more closely with the other partner. We commiserated about the prevarication of our partner. My San Diego partner assured that we could get through the problem together. We bonded in activities like reading Lous D'Amour stories, which he loved and he introduced me to. There was a kind of virtue there than lended encouragement to me that we were on the right path, though rocky.
At one point, both of my partners were enraged when I collected the first significant check from the San Diego community after months and months of promises. I got the money by going to the office of the person in question, who literally came out for lunch and threw it at me — both the check and the signed documentation. My partners from that time did a kabuki dance around me to make sure that I was never to be a hero in that way again. That was a big hint that I didn’t entirely miss, but dealt with.
What I learned with time was that they both lied. Toward the end, our main administrative assistant told me that they were on the phone between the offices for hours on end, comparing notes, walking through the details of what each of them said to each party in question. There was serious note-taking. The point was to keep their stories straight. In short, she said, “You need to get out”. At the time, I was spending most of my time with our portfolio companies. I was so deeply-embedded, I didn’t know how to get out with some semblance of a career. There were other signs of problems. They asked me to stop putting my name on documentation. I had developed two significant computer systems to track deals and the financial details of our portfolio. My San Diego partner thought he was pretty clever in suggesting that I give them over to his nephew, who was a computer guy. So it seems we were down to,
“Duh, we are pretty sure you are stupid by now.”
Finally, we had a face-off in the Mercedes-Benz. My San Diego partner and I were riding in his modified Rommel tank in the evening alongside Camp Pendleton after a day of meetings in Irvine. He said,
“You need to stop saying we are in the business of building companies. We aren’t in the business of building companies. We are in the business of making money for our investors. If we make money for our investors and the companies go out of business the next day, we have done our job.”
I responded with, “That would mean we were making a pretty bad product. That would surely catch up with us.” In short we didn’t agree to disagree, we just disagreed. The details of that are a matter of song and story — not this story. This story is about heaven and hell, what they constitute, and how to get into or out of them.
To make it clear, that little conversation along the California coast was about a big lie, one to accept after all of the little ones. Everything we were doing, or that we would be doing, was to be fake.
Section 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants outlines three states of being for everyone. These are characterized as kingdoms. The highest one — the Csikszentmihalyi one — is called celestial. The middle one is called the terrestrial. The lowest one is called the telestial. As an interesting turn in Mormon Doctrine, even the lowest kingdom is a nicer place in terms of the general living environment than the world we inhabit now. The point there is that God is not mean.
The rubric for separating out the parties is a simple one. It relates to my little venture capital party. I didn’t really sort it out until I was making sense of the aftermath. The key to the celestial realm — the really, really, really good one — was to embrace all truth. That would be the guide to everything. The middle realm was the parvenue of good and honorable people that were “blinded by the craftiness of men.” The third was most interesting. These were people “who loved and made lies.”
This third item really shocked me. I had grown up in the literature, of course, but in my experience, my growth and community, a lie was something people stumbled into. They might fib to get out of a difficult situation. It was a mistake, something they wanted to fix, something that was embarrassing and ultimately undesirable. I could see now that this new way opened the door to an entirely different way of life. Manufacturing and selling lies in that way becomes a game — resulting in an enormous rush in some cases. Once people get going along that route, they develop pecking orders as to what they can manufacture and sell. Ultimately, the goal is to get people to buy up on things that they know you are making up. This is characteristic of what is now known as the “alt” world. It is kind of like riffing in jazz.
This was the thing with my Irvine partner. His prevarications were preposterous. They formed into great channels of complexity, like a child’s garden of mazes, or rules and nuances that only he could devise. If others joined in the pursuit, they always had to check with him, as it was his game. As long as he didn’t get caught, he was having a ball. With all due respect, he wasn’t pulling it off well. Most people knew he was a blowhard.
The other one was smooth. He was the man of the “Mercedes speech”. He was very, very smart and very, very well-spoken. He had two particularly useful skills to our business. He could deliver a description of the distinctive message of the ventures — the famous elevator speech — brilliantly. He could position the science and the application market clearly and credibly. He also could do “finance talk”. He would listen to finance radio on the way to work and he always knew the rates and the economic picture of the day. These were ‘mother’s milk’ to navigating the troubled waters of small company finance.
But his was the bigger lie, because it was more insidious and dangerous.
So, that is the “make and love a lie” thing. The polar opposite is the lifestyle that is grounded in the truth. This, we learn, involves process. There are ways of learning the truth about something, involving intensive study, studying about study. It is difficult. It is a challenge. It involves educating and being educated. One thing is fundamental about this, once something is learned, the often-difficult prospect of adapting to that truth. This is an “oil-and-water” thing when compared to “loving and making lies”.
The middle way is a fallback position, but it is the most precarious of all. They might appeal to the high way at times, but are not immune to the low way. There are secondary motivations, kind of a consumer attitude. As consumers, they are dependent on production of one kind or another. As per scripture, not being grounded, they give in to volume. In our time, to say that the ratio of lower to higher influences was an 80/20 proposition would be highly optimistic. It might be more like 90/10 bad over good or even worse.
The problem with the middle is that if you accept a lie, and accept a lie, and accept a lie, etc., and start to enjoy doing so, time after time, and passing them along to others, are you becoming a part of the factory? This doesn’t make you a “bad person”, does it? Maybe it is all opinion, anyway.
This is the telestial, right, and not necessarily a noxious environment, but still a social and psychological hell of our own making. This was my challenge with the venture fund. I never excepted the lies, but I did allow for them. I mixed it up with them. I didn’t publicly challenge them. I was compromised through association. I enjoyed that people called me for the straight answer, the correct one. The problem with the middle path — the terrestrial one — is that the gravity of the times pulls you down. Your are thus in the gutter of being at the behest of people with the most base of motivations.
Csikszentmihalyi wants us to go up. I think that most people would want us to rise, but how is this to be done? Embrace truth. That is the short answer. In his 2004 article, he lists understanding that humanity is complex, development of a new social compact and reward system, and understanding the power of joy. He concludes his article with the following:
“Challenge and cooperation bring joy and commitment to life. Unless we provide that kind of joy in productive activities, materialism and selfishness will consume more and more of our lives. Twenty-five centuries ago Plato wrote in the Republic that the most important task for educators is to teach young people to find pleasure in the right things. He knew that children find please in things that promise enjoyment, even if they do not lead to either personal development or social order. It is our responsibility to make sure that there are opportunities for joy that lead to growth.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 2004
Taking a page from accounting, we begin with the end in mind: Joy. Is there joy in a lie, well-told? Not for very long, as the ice of prevarication is always melting. Why do liars always pretend to be good? Is there joy in the middle ground, searching high and low for answers, always the consumer of these? That might be the biggest challenge of all. It is not heaven.