Money never motivates you.

Sure, we love to have it. We think about it a lot. But it’s not money we seek – it’s freedom.

It might be freedom from a past. It might be freedom from a situation. It might be freedom from an identity.

Many successful entrepreneurs – enough to establish a pattern – have an origin story of epic proportions. Often one of their parents died or disappeared on them at an early age. Another is abject poverty: the “rags to riches” story. Another is a clever, misunderstood kid out to prove something.

Whatever.

Ikigai (生きがい) is a Japanese word derived from ikiru (生きる) which means “to live”. It is usually translated as “reason to live” although in common everyday usage “gai” is often heard as “I like this.”

Therefore it can literally mean: “living like”.

In a country which averages more than 70 suicides a day, have a “living like” in your heart becomes pretty important. In Okinawa, where Japanese live well into their 100s, ikigai has been adopted as an everyday concept that prolongs life.

But is it only Japan that needs this?

Recently I was staring at my Mac’s screen, listening to a distressed man wonder if he had got it all wrong for the last 10 months. He had joined ATSuccess Pro to discover how he could share the work with an aged community living in close proximity to his home.

It took a while for me to recognize the fact that this man was himself in his 80’s!

On July 4th, 1907 Willie Keith stood helplessly in Battle Creek, Michigan watching a fire consume his precious factory.*

Willie was 46, yet he had launched his company barely a year before. He’d already worked for 25 years as the unofficial business manager for a famous Seventh-day Adventist Sanitarium (re-invented from the word ‘sanatorium’) under the shadow of his gregarious and extroverted brother Dr John Henry.

Viktor E. Frankl - in his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning - tells the story of a well-known composer and librettist whose death illustrated a mechanism of hope. One day the man gushed to Viktor that he had dreamt he would be free of the Nazi concentration camp. “When?” asked Frankl. “On March 30th, 1945” whispered back his friend.

He died on March 31st.

Cause? The death of hope in Frankl’s estimation. The loss of his hope triggered a deadly weakening of his immune system, and the man ultimately fell to the ravages of typhus.

In May 2007 I was sitting on a plane on my way to New York. One of the highlights of my visit was to ask advice from Lucy L. Brown Ph.D. at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, on our BodyData project in BodyChance at the time.*

As preparation for our meeting, I was brushing up on her Alexander orientated speculations by re-reading her Paper on Sensory-Motor Contagion† from the first Lugano Conference in Switzerland.

Jann and I were on Skype call together.

Jann has almost finished a year deep-diving into the ATSuccess makeover for teachers who join our community. I was asking her how her experience now compared with the period of her post-graduate teacher training in 2010.

Back then, she said…

‘’I literally had to break down my concept of who I was and what I was, and start again. And I am feeling that same thing now. It’s like I am falling apart, I don’t know which way to go. I know what, but I don’t know how to get there.”

Once at breakfast, I remember being interrupted by a girlfriend pleading with me in an exasperated voice:

“What’s wrong with you this morning?”

I was genuinely surprised (and a little irritated).

“Nothing.” I lifted my eyebrows.

“Fine”, she re-joined “have it your way.”

I was fed up with this.

“What are you talking about!?”

I was in Betty and Paul Collins’ house in Onslow Gardens, N10 in London.

It was 1977 and I was in my second year of AT training. Robert Rickover was waxing lyrical about this American teacher I had never heard of – Marjorie Barstow.

“She talks about the head moving…” I remember Rickover whispering to a few of us in the back room. I was scandalized.

That’s dreadful, I thought to myself, doesn’t this woman understand non-doing?

Numbers matter.

Every area of knowlege involves numbers and mathematics, even philosophy.

When you tune in, numbers both reveal and predict behaviour.