Last month I went to my first event at the New York Vedanta Society. My friend Nikhil invited me, and I always enjoy checking out new philosophies and ways of thinking, so I hopped on the subway and made my way into Manhattan on a Sunday morning.
The train was delayed, so I ended up jogging with my snow boots on from the subway stop in the upper west side and made it just as they were closing the doors. At this point in my life I am pretty good at powering through awkward situations – I was able to negotiate with the anxious usher and I politely excuse me’d my way up to where Nikhil had saved me a seat.
The society was founded in 1894 and is currently located in an old brownstone house near central park west that has been converted into what felt like an intimate church sanctuary. Most of the room was filled with rows of chairs facing a lectern and shrine with pictures of Swamis.
The Minister, Swami Sarvapriyananda, gave a talk about the founder of the society, Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda passed away in 1902 at the age of 39, and much of the talk was about how driven and dynamic he had been during his short life. He had often talked about how he didn’t have long to live on earth so he had to fulfill his purpose decisively. He had predicted his own early death and said his goodbyes right before passing away even though he seemed otherwise healthy.
I have heard of practices where monks will become so attuned to the functions of their bodies that they are able to shut them down intentionally and choose their time of death, so I was wondering if something similar had happened here.
There was also a point about how Swami Vivekananda felt that his mission was something that had been assigned to him by higher powers, something that he had to do – he would have preferred to meditate in solitude, but he had been called to spread his message to the world and so he had done so.
The older I get, the more I believe that there are divine/cosmic messages that we can receive. The thing is, most people are not listening in the right way to receive them. I am pretty confident that anyone who does weeks and months of silent meditation and contemplation with master teachers will begin to hear things arising in their minds that most people would never be able to detect. I know I have received many insights through meditation and self-hypnosis, and I can only imagine what I could begin to tune into if I really devoted myself to the practices.
After the talk, Nikhil and I got some vegan chili and talked about life purpose and how to choose the right path. Nikhil told me that he had been looking up Vedic Astrology charts for his newborn daughter, and he recommended that I look up my chart on ChatGPT and see what it says.
I love personality tests, self-assessments, astrology, tarot, and I’ll try any kind of reading, so I went home and researched my Vedic chart. The most interesting thing that stood out to me was the concept of the Mahadasha, a sequence of years-long periods each representing a planetary energy, calculated based on the placement of the moon at your time and place of birth.
When I saw the time periods of my Mahadashas, I was honestly shocked. I had just left Jupiter Mahadasha (2008–2024, ~16 Years), a period marked by (selecting for the most relevant for me) career stability, wealth accumulation, marriage, and a stronger connection to spirituality or religion. I graduated college in 2008, and had grown my video production career into something stable, accumulated wealth through my corporate jobs, and had met my wife and gotten married.
I had also come to the realization that video production wasn’t going to be my next chapter, and had done a lot of spiritual reflection into what the point of it all was. This had brought me to my current chapter of life transformation work.
The next phase? Saturn Mahadasha (2024–2043, ~19 Years), a period of discipline, hard work, structure, and karmic lessons. Damn. It can present challenges or delays, pushing you to learn important life lessons about humility, responsibility, and service – avoid shortcuts or unethical behavior.
And this was pretty wild because although I had been working up to it for the past few years, 2024 was the year that I had officially left the corporate video world for good and stepped fully into the next chapter. And now… 19 years of discipline, hard work, humility, responsibility, and karmic lessons. Oh boy.
But the more that I think about it, the more true it feels. Every time I have tried to take a shortcut this past couple years, I have received a brutal karmic lesson. The biggest was when I decided to hire an outbound lead generation agency at the beginning of 2024 in an attempt to brute force my way to a full coaching client roster. It was one of my inner fear’s final grasps at certainty, trying to guarantee that it would all work out.
Basically they “crafted a marketing message” on my behalf (which I later realized was basically the same message for all of their clients), and then sent LinkedIn messages and emails to potential clients from some kind of database algorithm, encouraging them to sign up for a call with me. I spent a lot of money with the agency, but I felt in my gut pretty quickly that it was the wrong decision – it was a shortcut.
When people started signing up for consultations they would come onto the call skeptical and wary because they could feel that the messaging was designed to sell something to them. From the second they joined the call I was working against that “sales-ick” feeling that I myself hate and avoid like the plague.
In the end I had spent a bunch of money to learn the lesson that I don’t want to be that dickhead spamming people’s LinkedIn inboxes with inauthentic sales copy in an attempt to get strangers into my “client acquisition funnel”. I hate that shit, but I had fallen for the shortcut trap and had allowed myself to participate in unethical marketing behavior to get results. I canceled all the CRM software subscriptions, fired the agency, and filed it all away as a business expense that I wouldn’t look at again until tax season.
I knew what the right approach was. I had known it all along. It’s not something that is taught at sales trainings or by LinkedIn growth strategists.
It is building actual relationships, organically, authentically, slowly. One by one.
It is so simple, and so naturally human, but… it takes time. Time that many of us feel that we don’t have, especially when we are constantly seeing stories of quick wins and viral growth. There are entire industries built around trying to bypass this process, to fast-track it, to streamline it. Sounds a lot like a shortcut, doesn’t it?
And maybe for some businesses this makes sense. For a product or transactional service or something. But I also wonder if that entire way of thinking is why the earth is burning and infrastructure is crumbling and the world’s wealthiest man has taken over the US government…
But is that how I want to move through life? How can I expect someone to trust me with helping them transform their life and rewire their mindset based on a lame cold LinkedIn message or form marketing email?
Over the years I have developed a philosophy of “just do the thing”. This is a topic for a whole other piece, but it feels relevant to talk about here. I have had a lot – A LOT – of hobbies over the years, and when I choose a new hobby I go all in. At one point I joined a medieval combat group and bought armor and built a “pell” (a big padded thing you hit with a sword to practice your strikes) on the roof of my apartment building in Brooklyn.
And in the course of all these hobbies I have seen a pattern. There are a lot of people who get stuck in the “avoiding doing the thing” phase. They will fantasize about becoming really good at this thing, talk to other people in the xyz hobby community at length about it, post on the xyz forum about it, and buy lots of equipment and gear. But they never actually practice, and so they never improve, and so they eventually give up or just stay at the entry level phase indefinitely.
But then there are the people who just do the thing. I am a drummer, and a few years ago I joined an all ages marching band drumline in Brooklyn – yes, another hobby that I went all in on. I ended up teaching lessons to some of the kids, and I had a student, Jesse, who had never picked up drumsticks before. Over the course of a year he went from absolute beginner to playing better than some of the adult drummers in the group. He would practice, and then come back each week ready to learn more. All he needed was a pair of sticks and the willingness to take the risk of making mistakes and learning from them. And lots of practicing.
The more time I spend in the professional self-improvement and coaching world, the more I see this same pattern playing out. The equivalent of buying the really expensive drum set but never practicing, and then wondering why it doesn’t sound good.
I met someone at a hypnosis training recently who had been going to trainings for something like 10 years – Ericksonian storytelling, conversational hypnosis, symbolic modeling, mind bending language… you name it. I was impressed and asked them about their favorite ways to apply these techniques with their clients, and they said, “Clients? Oh no, I’ve never used any of this on anyone outside of the trainings, I don’t know enough yet.”
I know this is an ode to slow growth, but c’mon!
A year ago I talked to a successful business/career coach in my network and his advice was, “Don’t worry about ads, don’t worry about hiring anyone, what you need is a whisper campaign.”
I was intrigued.
He continued, “You already have a network, so all you need to focus on right now is having 50 conversations with people that already know and like you. Tell them about what you are up to, and if it makes sense in the conversation you can ask them if they know anyone who would benefit from what you are offering.”
This felt right. It was the seed of what later became my 100 session giveaway. It gave me a reason to reach out and catch up with people in a way that I was genuinely excited to do, and I wasn’t “selling”, I was just letting people know what I do and offering them an experience. I have also gotten so much practice and improved my coaching approach so much over the course of these sessions that many of the people I do free sessions with now want to have a conversation about becoming a client.
This was the result I was looking for in the first place – authentic connections with people that I can genuinely help – but it couldn’t be bought. There was no shortcut.
One summer when I was a teenager, my parents offered to pay me to re-glaze the windows of the house. It was an old house with those windows that have 6 or 8 small glass panes each, with wooden dividers in between. I had never really looked closely at windows – and I hope that I never have to spend that much time with window panes again – but this what I learned:
Each window frame has carved out slots where the glass panes sit, and each pane is held in place with little metal pins that you tap into the wood frame. Then you apply the glaze with a putty knife around the edges of the glass, spreading it at a precise angle to match the wood detailing and seal the pane in place. You then allow the glaze/putty to dry and paint over it to match the frame.
It is very tedious and detailed work. Even worse was the fact that before I could do any of the actual glazing, I had to scrape out the old crumbling glaze/putty from each pane. I think there were over 100 panes – it felt like several hundred – and I would take a razor blade and pick away at the glaze. Sometimes it would be loose and would peel away effortlessly. Those were incredibly satisfying.
But most of it was hardened and fused to the wood and the glass. Press too hard and you would damage the wood, or worse, break the glass pane and have to replace it. One time I was feeling especially impatient and got too forceful and my hand went through the glass pane. I still have a scar. I even experimented with using a blowtorch to soften the putty, but that mostly just singed the wooden frame and cracked a couple more panes.
You can imagine the kind of lessons you learn when you realize that there is no way to speed up the process, and you have to just put on some good music and start scraping away. The time you spend trying to invent ways to avoid the scraping is time you could have spent scraping. There is a relief in accepting that the work is the work.
And the awesome thing about life is that you can choose what kind of work you want to do. You can change your mind and try something new. The work I am doing now is infinitely more enjoyable and engaging than scraping dried putty out of window panes!
Find something you want to try and go all in. Practice a lot. Put yourself in new situations where you get to learn from experts and then practice what you’ve learned – a lot. Find out what works for you and create your own techniques. If you get tired of it you can quit and move on to something new. You can come back to it later with a new perspective and practice more with what you know now.
Let it marinate. Put it in the slow cooker. Plant seeds and water them and go away. Come back later to see what’s sprouting.
I generally avoid guarantees, but in this case I GUARANTEE that if you find something that really lights you up and you do the work for long enough – not just thinking about the work, talking about the work, or looking for shortcuts to get around the work – SOMETHING will happen. It may not be what you expected, but it will be something. New people, connections, opportunities, and situations will appear. They will reflect the quality of the work you have put in. And then you can celebrate and do more work.
So have fun, and if it feels like a big chore, you’re not doing it right. Try something else.
Meanwhile, I’ll be over here in my Saturn Mahadasha for the next 18 years. I’m sure I’ll have more karmic lessons to share soon.