Nipun has received many awards, among them the Dalai Lama unsung hero of compassion award. Today, he gives lectures and speeches around the globe and spreads the message of »giftivism«.

What’s your personal background?

Ever since I was a kid, I would always ask the big questions of life. What’s the purpose of this whole charade? What happens after you die? What is the motive for action? Often, I didn’t find the answers I was looking for, so I would start investigating. Seventeen was a turning point of sorts in my life, when my spiritual search came into the foreground. I was playing a lot of tennis (secretly hoping to turn pro), I took a lot of advanced academic classes and was already a junior in college, and I was en route to a degree in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. My first (and only) job was as a software engineer at Sun Microsystems but my prime focus had shifted, somehow, to dealing with my unanswered existential questions. The journey still continues to this day, but where previously I was looking for answers, I now look to dissolve the questions.

Would you consider yourself an activist and if so, what are the tools you apply in your activism?

It depends on one’s definition of activist. If an activist is someone who tries to disrupt the status-quo to alleviate some suffering in the world, then definitely yes. But if an activist is someone who is angry with status-quo and the people who engage in it, then definitely no. I’m not motivated by anger, but I do think we can continue to innovate and upgrade our designs to improve our collective well being. You know, it took us 5 thousand years to put wheels on bags. In that sense, I see activists as innovative entrepreneurs — but with two key distinctions.

One is that instead of working in the confines of the monetary markets, they work in the commons of humanity. They know how to work with intrinsic motivations, not just carrot and stick models of extrinsic punishment and reward.  They are sensitive enough to value multiple forms of capital, well beyond financial returns and tangible metrics. And they have the patience to work with a longer timeline, that sometimes can span many generations.

Second, and this is really the most important for me, is they understand how their inner transformation is connected to external impact. All too often, in our haste for changing the world, we forget to pay attention to what’s happening inside of us. As a result, we help others on the outside, but forget to be kind to those nearest to us.  Burn out becomes common. Ultimately, in trying to build five bridges, we might just burn three others along the way. Social change giants like Gandhi taught us a much deeper way to serve: be the change you wish to see in the world. Anyone who serves in this way realizes just how difficult inner change is, and that alters how we engage in external service.  As Rachel Naomi Remen says, when we help, we see life as weak; when we fix, we see life as whole; but it is only when we serve with an understanding of how that act is changing us, our service become an offering of humility and gratitude. Such acts create a rich ripple effect.

Now, that’s not the typical definition of an activist. So we invented a new word, for this kind of inside-out service — giftivism, where it’s not this versus that. It’s this *and* that. It’s about considering both the oppressor and the oppressed, in our field of love.  That’s the real legacy of people like Gandhi and Mandela and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr.

In terms of tools, I think everything is at our disposal. The question is about being skilful, and using it in the right proportion. For instance, I’m a technologist from the Silicon Valley, so Internet is one of the biggest tools we use. We have millions of line of code that powers our work. But we don’t allow any ads in our networks or email, and we encourage using online networks to build offline networks. For someone like Facebook, this is a bad idea since you can no longer monetize engagement when you’re off the Internet, but we don’t design for monetization — so it creates very different patterns.  All the upcoming tools like machine learning and AI will also pose similar challenges and require collective wisdom of finding the right balance. This is usually where society runs the risk of going off kilter, because we are so focused on narrow metrics and short-term impact, a giftivist’s toolkit and intention is much broader and could offer a great counter balance.

How did the transformation from working at a Silicon Valley computer company to founding an organisation with the aim of spreading generosity come about?

In my third year of college, I was offered a job at Sun Microsystems, working on the C++ compiler. Lots of PhD’s in my group, and I got few promotion in a very short period of time. This is the late 90s, so the dot-com boom just started and my peers were all starting their own companies, and greed was very much in the air.  It felt like flaunting their fancy cars, big dreams, and their own startup. Some of it was exciting, but lot of it didn’t land with me. So I wondered if we can do something to channel that creativity, enthusiasm and energy of the Valley into a different direction. Gordon Gekko famously told us that “Greed is good”, but our hypothesis was that generosity is better. So we started with four friends, building a website for a homeless shelter. The thought was, “We can’t do what you’re doing, but perhaps we can amplify your capacity in this small way.” Website building was great, and got us a lot of attention in those days, but what was even more remarkable was generosity itself. It was transformative, and regenerative. The more we gave, the more we wanted to give. Not just for me, but for everyone. And rather quickly, ServiceSpace went from 4 volunteers to 40 to 400 to 4 thousand to 40 thousand, and now well over 400 thousand. It’s really a testimony to the power of love.

In 2005 you went on a pilgrimage with your wife. Can you tell me what it was all about?

Six months into our marriage, my wife and I dropped all our plans, went to the Gandhi Ashram in India and decided to embark on a walk.  We had no plans and no end date. Humanity poorest billion live on dollar a day, so we decided that’s what we’d have between us. We would serve wherever an opportunity showed up — from pushing stalled cars on the highways to helping old farmers carry loads to cleaning community places to sharing stories of everyday heroes.  We ate whatever food was offered, and slept wherever placed was provided. Sometimes things didn’t work, and that gave us an opportunity to grow in renunciation; sometimes things worked out miraculously, and that gave us a chance to cultivate gratitude. After about 1000 kilometers, we ended up at a monastery and flipped a coin to see if the pilgrimage would continue internally or externally — we ended up staying, and doing meditation retreats over the next three months.  “Just jump and the net will appear,” they say. That was our experience. It’s scary to jump and trust like that, but when we did, we happily discovered a net of compassion and interconnection that we were previously blinded to.

What was the most touching experience you had on your pilgrimage?

On our walking pilgrimage, we noticed that those who had the least were most readily equipped to honor the priceless.  In urban cities, the people we encountered began with an unspoken wariness: “Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?”   In the countryside, on the other hand, villagers almost always met us with an open-hearted curiosity launching straight in with: “Hey buddy, you don’t look local.  What’s your story?” In the villages, your worth wasn’t assessed by your business card, professional network or your salary. That innate simplicity allowed them to love life and cherish all its connections.

Extremely poor villagers, who couldn’t even afford their own meals, would often borrow food from their neighbors to feed us.  When we tried to refuse, they would simply explain: “To us, the guest is God. This is our offering to the divine in you that connects us to each other.”  Now, how could one refuse that? Street vendors often gifted us vegetables; in a very touching moment, an armless fruit-seller once insisted on giving us a slice of watermelon.  Everyone, no matter how old, would be overjoyed to give us directions, even when they weren’t fully sure of them. And I still remember the woman who generously gave us water when we were extremely thirsty — only to later discover that she had to walk 10 kilometers at 4AM to get that one bucket of water. These people knew how to give, not because they had a lot, but because they knew how to love life.  They didn’t need any credit or assurance that you would ever return to pay them back. Rather, they just trusted in the pay-it-forward circle of giving.

Nipun Mehta receiving the »Dalai Lama Unsung Hero of Compassion« award.

You then started Karma Kitchen. What is it all about?

Karma Kitchen is a pop-up, gift-economy restaurant. Like any other restaurant, you walk in and have a meal but here, your bill reads zero. It’s zero because someone before you paid for your meal, and you have a chance to pay forward for someone after you. Most people think that you can’t trust people like that, because people are fundamentally selfish. To be frank, even we didn’t know how long it would last. So that was our experiment. It turns out, that if you build a strong context, people respond to generosity with even greater generosity. Tens of thousands people were fed, and the chain is still going — and in fact, it has spread to more 23 locations around the globe!  It even inspired seminal research at UC Berkeley, which was aptly titled, Paying More When Paying For Others.

Of course, this need not just to limited to a restaurant context.  Much in the same way, we run a rickshaw in Ahmedabad, an art magazine in the US, and so much more. Such a “gift economy” model that cultivates a shift from transaction to trust can be applied in umpteen ways, and is much needed in our culture today.

What do you think is the reason, that people in western societies ended up with such a self-centered way of life?

Today’s culture favors individual merits over collective intelligence, immediate gratification over equanimity, personal grit over unearned grace. Invariably that me-centered approach is going to disconnect us — systemically, socially, and spiritually.  We are seeing ripples of that gap across the board. We desperately need to reconnect, and generosity is such an elegant and accessible lever to bridge that chasm towards a we-centered life and society. The small act of kindness reconnects us, first and foremost, to ourselves; by its very nature, it reconnects us to the other; and in a matrix of such nodes of trust, it allows very different systemic designs to emerge.  So what seems like a simple thing, a little act of service, is a rather revolutionary act in today’s era of disconnection.

Apart from the “Survival of the Fittest” approach of Darwin, one can also find an approach of survival of the kindest in his mostly unknown publication “The Descent of Man, and Selection In Relation to Sex”. Do you integrate scientific research into the development of your projects? Which theories are most important to you and why?
When I’m talking to school kids, I will often ask them, “Do you think we are fundamentally compassionate beings who sometimes have selfish experiences, or are we fundamentally selfish beings who sometimes have compassionate moments?” It’s usually 50-50. But science is quite clear that we’re actually innately compassionate, that the untold story of evolution has indeed been about “survival of the kindest”. During World War II, for instance, an army general found that more than 80% of the troops intentionally misfired, simply because we aren’t wired to kill! His findings have been corroborated by many other studies. Of course, it’s a sad tale that we have now built sophisticated methods to numb our innate nature, but there is overwhelming science that tells us that we are wired to care, wired to be connected to each other. Even before we learn words and concepts, toddlers already have a propensity towards generosity.

In a thousand ways, neuroscience has opened up radically new conversations as we see just how deeply we are connected to each other. Dacher Keltner has probably done the most comprehensive work on this. Mindfulness, similarly, has seen a massive explosion of compelling research that one of our friends in the UK, Jamie Bristow, got the whole UK parliament to meditate! Robert Emmons has done some ground-breaking work on the science of gratitude. In one study on awe, Paul Piff showed that looking at a tree — instead of a building — for just 30 seconds, made people behave more pro-socially.  Just a simple smile release incredible hormones in our body.

So, really, there is no shortage of science around well being. But, as a culture, we have been painfully slow in adopting these insights into our systems.

In ServiceSpace, we are constantly looking at new research and cultural trends. For instance, we see across many studies that behavior change doesn’t happen by individual will alone. That repeated practice and community is a huge factor. So on KindSpring.org, we created a 21-day challenge platform across many different themes like kindness and gratitude and mindfulness, that you would engage with your community.  And moreover, our entire basis of being volunteer-run, is a testimony to power of intrinsic motivation — which Edward Deci and many other scientists have repeatedly shown to far more powerful than extrinsic motivations like money. [More in: Making Gratitude Viral]

Service Space has several projects with a pay-it-forward approach running. Can you explain how the pay-it-forward mechanism works in the cases of Smile Cards and Karma Kitchen? Why do these models leave something in people’s brains and hearts?

Pay it forward idea is fundamentally rooted in gratitude. When we engage in a transaction, we engage in direct reciprocity. Me and you. It’s very narrow. A gift economy, on the other hand, invites us into a much broader engagement of indirect reciprocity. Someone who came before me has paid for me, and I hold gratitude for that. Then I pay forward for people after me, who will never be able to say thank-you to me. It’s not tit-for-tat at an individual level, in that I might give more or receive more than what I put in, but all together, it affords us a circle. And the beauty of the circle is that it is greater than the sum of its parts. So by letting go direct reciprocity, we birth an entire new realm of possibility.  It’s rooted in a shift from me to we. [More in: Three Stages of Generosity]

At a practical level, the way something like Karma Kitchen works is this — we rent the restaurant for X amount of money. Then we take over the restaurant, from its ambiance to its processes. Our aim is to build a strong context of love. Volunteers do everything from serving food to busing tables. When guest come in, they have their food just like they would at a regular restaurant, but at the end of their meal, the check reads zero. They can pay forward whatever they are moved to offer. At the end of the day, we add it all up and pay for next Karma Kitchen’s rent. Sometimes, we have a deficit, but on average, there’s always a surplus and the chain keeps going.

Similarly, with Smile Cards, we ship them out as a gift to anyone who wants them. People will do an anonymous act of kindness for someone, and leave a Smile Card behind which tells the recipient that they don’t know who did this, but they can pay it forward and make someone else’s day like that.  Because giving is such an intrinsically rewarding experience, people are typically moved to make a financial offering even when it is unsolicited. Using this gift-economy model, we’ve put millions of Smile Cards in circulation. It works, because generosity works. Any act of kindness make us feel great, and more often than not, we will want to pay it forward and return to our innate state of connection with others. It’s just human, and our model of operation counts on that.

Where else can this model be applied?

Ultimately, this can be applied wherever there is a transaction.  And that’s everywhere.

Practically speaking, though, it is easier to pilot this idea in a context where subjective value matters, where marginal costs are low, and volunteer labor can be easily integrated. If Karma Kitchen was a buffet instead of a full-service restaurant, it wouldn’t work as effectively because you are stripping out the possibility of subjective value of the interaction between a volunteer and a guest.  We run a print magazine, works & conversations, in this way but that’s probably not going to be as effective with your Lexus car dealership because your fixed costs are so high. Similarly, this works really well for all kinds of services, like our gift-economy rickshaw or a gift-economy health clinic, because the premium is on the service.

All in all, the key to making this work is context.  Just as quid-pro-quo transaction is very narrow, context driven design is very broad. Generosity never fails, but the question really is — can we create a strong enough context for people to feel and then respond to generosity?  It’s always possible to turn any transaction into an expansive experience of compassion, but we need to shift our orientation to tap into this. It takes a fair amount of inner growth to become a black-belt in regenerative generosity. In fact, we started Laddership Circles as peer-learning virtual circles to help support this kind of growth.

You use the term Gandhi 3.0. Can you give us an overview of what is meant by that term?

In the times of Gandhi, social action organized in a one-to-many formation.  One Gandhi and many of us. His successor in India, Vinoba Bhave, came along and built a stronger network by walking across India and cultivating one-to-one connections.  Along the way, he also pointed to what was emerging: “What rises up like a fountain, will return in the form of many distributed drops.” That’s exactly what we’re seeing now.  We call it Gandhi 3.0, where Gandhi stands for the age-old principle of leading with inner transformation and 3.0 represents the many-to-many networks that are popularized by the modern-day Internet.  In a sense, it’s a bridge from the Internet to the Inner-Net. It’s a journey of building distributed and decentralized movements that lead with inner transformation, of leveraging technology to nurture generosity, of cultivating practices that encourage “being the change”, and ultimately of putting priceless gifts — like empathy, trust and compassion — into greater circulation.

What is the main transformation that people need to aim for to change their lives?

I would identify four key shifts. First would be consumption to contribution; can we open each door and ask, “What can I give” in place of asking “What am I going to get?” Second is a shift from transaction to trust; can we move from direct reciprocity to indirect reciprocity, that affords us the circle?  That leads to a fourth shift from isolation to community; can we learn to hold multi-dimensional relationships with tolerance, in place of seemingly comfortable echo-chambers? And lastly, scarcity to abundance. We’ve created this implicit equation of wealth equal money, when, in fact, there are multiple forms of wealth. Can we create value in the world, even if it doesn’t advance the GDP?

You even question Maslow’s pyramid… What’s your approach?

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs refers to a linear progression from material to emotional to spiritual well-being. We’ve just seen it rendered false across the board, and Maslow himself changed his mind. When Victor Frankl narrated stories from concentration camps, about how “basic needs” were not met but it was “higher needs” that increased their chance of survival, Maslow admitted, “Frankl is right.” What social scientists are now using to frame this conversation is that our various are more like Vitamins. We don’t finish life’s entire need for Vitamin C before we get to Vitamin D. We need it in balance. So yes, we have to pay attention to the basic needs, but Vitamin G(enerosity) is not a luxury sport. It’s not something you arrive at when you retire. You need it now, no matter who you are and where you are planted.

Why do you think is it, that the idea of connection is approached so much when it comes to making profits and starting protest movements, but not when it comes to spreading love and generosity?

Prior to the Internet, we often heard this phrase, “strength of loose ties.” But what modern day social networks have done is turned everything into a loose tie. We optimized for the quantity of connection, and forgot about the quality. That has disconnected us altogether. People nowadays have very few deep friendships, and that’s creating all kinds of unexpected problems in society.  If 50 of us are watching TV, we just 50 connections; if 50 of us had phones and talk to each other, we would have 1225 connections; but if 50 of were on group-forming network like Whatsapp, we have the potential of 100 million trillion connections. This is what a “many to many” network is all about.

For the past 15-20 years, we’ve seen the power of this play itself out in the world of profit, and to a smaller degree, in the world of protest. But we have hardly seen this applied to the possibilities of compassion. CNN’s of the world lead with bad news, not good news, because it gets you more eyeballs. There is no dot-com around kindness. No one is trying to increase trust in society with artificial intelligence algorithms. Part of the reason is because the only lever for organization we are familiar with is commercial — hierarchies operating with carrot and stick incentives, for short-term results. That may work well for certain things in society, but not everything. We owe it to ourselves to keep an entire spectrum of organizing alive, and to do that we need the younger generation to be equipped with not just “leadership” skills but also what we call “laddership” skills.

Your approach is very much focused around the individual. Some of the biggest challenges need systemic change. Do you think individual generosity, even in networks, are the basis for the change it needs to save the planet and make it a more social world for everyone?

Oh, I’m all for systemic change. During Obama’s presidency, I served on his advisory board for addressing poverty and inequality, and we argued for a shift from transaction to relationship.  There are very many concrete things that can be done to address this. Separately, I was part of a global group for deepening the conversation around well-being, where we spoke with the prime minister of Bhutan who implemented Gross National Happiness, and with president of Costa Rica which had abandoned it’s army since late 40s, and Ecuador’s leadership where they have given rights to rivers and trees. I also sit on the board of Greater Good Science Center, whose upcoming project is about bringing science-backed empathy exhibits into major museums around the United States. Just last week in London, I spoke to 500 investment bankers about ethical considerations in the realm of technology.

At a macro level, society has three major spheres — private sector, public sector and the voluntary sector. In theory, public sector is supposed to balance out the private and public sectors, but in reality what’s happened is the private sector of gobbling up the public and also voluntary sector (as most recently witnessed with the sharing economy bubble). If we want to create change, in today’s context, we are required to be subservient to the private sector. I’m not saying private sector is all bad, but it is far too narrow to be the king of the hill. Both private and public sector should actually be in service to the voluntary sector.

So that is the system that actually needs a change, a radical upending, a revolution. Sure other “systemic” changes may provide some short-term relief, but it’s not going to last unless we shift our core organizing principles. Internet is not the Internet without Net Neutrality. For that deep, seismic, cultural shift, I think individual generosity and transformation is place of highest leverage. If an individual gives, is held in a web of deep ties, has space for inner transformation to arise, it will create the foundation for rich, sustainable growth.  That’s what ServiceSpace is committed to.

Do you think we need new idols?

We desperately need new idols, and new stories.  Israeli professor, Yuval Noah Harari, articulate this concept of “inter-subjective” reality. There’s the objective and subjective realities, but what makes human beings unique is that we can cooperate at varying scales, and we do this through our manufactured narratives. Money is a story, Europe is a story, Google is a story. What makes it powerful is that it’s a shared story. Can we create a new story? And can we find heroes and sheroes who are courageously living into that new story? I think we must, if we are to create change.

What’s your strategy of spreading your messages to the world and scaling your projects internationally?

You know, when Mother Teresa was asked about her strategy for sustaining 400 centers around the world, she just said, “Well, I pray.” She never kept any cash reserves. In secular terms, I see that as a radical trust in emergence.

If you’ve built a strong field, with a rich matrix of interconnections, your job goes from “plan and execute” to “search and amplify”. In place of seeking and strategizing, you are focused on keeping the field in integrity with its organizing principles. And our principles are to: (a) be volunteer run; ie. driven purely by intrinsic motivations; (b) don’t fundraise; ie. unlock alternate forms of capital; (c) honor the small; ie. trust in the process and let outcomes take care of themselves. After 20 years of building such a field, with millions of inputs coming in every month across a myriad different doors, you can imagine just how many things are arising on a moment to moment basis. It’s mind blowing. I could’ve never predicted this, 20 years ago, and if I’m being really honest, I can’t even predict what’s going to happen in the next 2 years.

In that sense, my strategy is to trust in the core values. We have never pitched a story to the media, and yet received ample media coverage; we have never asked to speak at any place, and yet been in front of hundreds of thousands;  we have never done any fundraising and yet have never felt a lack of financial capital. On paper, it might seem magical, but in practice, it’s just hard work — but in a particular way. First, I have to live into the values; to the degree that I can “be the change” is the degree to which I can see the emergence (and not have it in my blindspot); this requires an untiring mind. Then, I have to ensure that the entire ecosystem stays aligned with these values; this takes immense skillfulness when you don’t have any coercive power to use. And lastly, it invites you to “search and amplify” patterns of positive deviance; and one has to learn to “ladder” projects from the back of the room in place of leading from the front of the room.

So many people seem to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of issues we are facing as humanity. What do you tell people who ask you: “What can I do”?

Yeah, sometimes it can be overwhelming to see the suffering in the world. My wife knows this — I will sometimes just walk on the streets and notice a homeless person, and start crying. Or even just a waiter in a restaurant.  You know, we want to share our love with everyone, don’t we? What helps me, though, is to remember the flashlight principle. If I’m at point A, and I shine my flash light at my destination, point Z, I won’t get anywhere. But I stay humble, focus on life in front of me, I would see point B, and then point C, and then bit by bit, realize that I’m progressing towards point Z. No matter what state the world is in, no matter what state we are in, the only thing we can do is serve in this moment.

So to anyone, and everyone, my first suggestion would be: do a small act of kindness, for life in front of you. Here and now. Surely, it will create an inexplicable external ripple effect, but it will create even more significant inner ripple effect. It will change the eyes through which you look at the world. And my second suggestion would be: support others doing acts of kindness. In supporting others, you will build a web of deep friendships — and that will give you resilience when the going gets tough.

If you could take 3 books to an island, which ones and why?

I’m not sure I would take books to an island. But three significant books that I have deeply enjoyed: (a) Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, for the reminder about the eternal pursuit of “Who am I?”, (b) One Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka, for the design principles of permaculture, (c) Hind Swaraj, by Gandhi, for a vision of a society that leads with inner transformation.

Additional Information

Nipun’s talk at TEDxBerkeley gives a deep insight in his approach to project design in the context of giftivism:

The post Nipun Mehta: Changing the world through generosity appeared first on DREAMA TV.

Today, Wise fights against the construction of the new Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota and is the head of the international indigenous youth council. We talked about the start of the protest movement, the situation of indigenous people in the USA and her hope for future generations.

How did the movement against the Dakota pipeline start in general and how for you?

The dakota access pipeline was led by a group of youth who had met President Obama in 2014 when he had visited the reservation and they felt deeply moved because he had told them “I love you” and “I think of you as my own children, I’m going to protect you”. Even though the project was on the table for 2 years already. When they found out, they went all the way to Washington. And when Obama didn’t meet them there, they went all the way back and talked to their elders. They asked how they should proceed. The elder women said that they have some land and they could make an occupation of the land. I don’t think that the 10 of them ever thought that this would turn into a multimillion movement. People from around the globe got involved.

For me: I had read articles about this youth who were running. My brother and sister had graduated from high school and weren’t doing anything and their mother called me and asked me to say something that would prompt them into the next phase of their life. I shared the article with them and the next morning their mom called me and said that they have gotten into the car with all their things and were on the way to North Dakota. Our grandma told us when we were kids that when you want to know how much the US government hated indigenous people, you had to go to the Dakotas. So I felt very strongly that I had to go protect them from this thing that they a…

When I got there they had all this wonderful people with them. And they said: This is my big sister and she has the wallet and a car and I unwillingly became the mother for 30 youths immediately for my six months stay.

Where are you from originally?
From new Mexico, about 24 hours away from New Mexico.

Why did you decide to go there?

I think every indigenous people felt the will to go there as you coul. For once in a life you saw what it would look like if they would have left us alone. For all of us it was really a healing moment that it had taken away from us but that it’s possible that it could happen again.

You became an activist as a safeguard for the younger?

No, it started way younger. Every indigenous person is born with the knowledge that we are responsible for the next 7 generations. The decisions that they make impact all those who come behind us. So the responsibility to care for our land and for everyone who cannot speak for themselves. Our relatives, our animal relatives, the water has its own spirit, the air has its own spirit. And for people who so much disregard the beauty that is in every living thing really broke our heart. And for our youths knowing that their futures would being denied to them by people who didn’t care if they would live or die was really cumbersome and they decided to lift the burden.

Which methods did you use to stop the pipeline?

There was a lot of ceremony. We were always in peace and prayer. Everything that we did, there was singing, non-violent direct action. People who were locking down to the equipment trying to prevent construction. People who were putting their bodies on the line, trying to make it more difficult to construct. Because where they constructed was over and through the graves of several hundred ancestors. We told them that the bodies where there. They disregarded us and them went through anyway. It’s already horrible enough to know that your mother earth is desecrated in such a way. But seeing that on top of seeing the greed earth and the bones of your ancestors. This told us to do whatever is necessary but we have been told in the ceremony that we would not be successful and if we remain in peace in prayers.

Sioux at Standing Rock chained to a Bulldozer.

What did the corresponding police brutality do to you emotionally?

I think that was really fucked up, I don’t know how to put it any other way. And it’s not even post traumatic, these oil companies are still attacking us. They arrested almost 900 people. They are not even halfway through the trials. They still have a friend, a sister of us in jail, she’s a prisoner of war and she’s been in jail since December 2016. You know that though you are not in Standing Rock anymore, the local communities are still abusing indigenous youth for being indigenous, even if they haven’t been involved in the camps. The amount of terror that the non native communities spread among indigenous people is awful. We are now 2 years away from the camp being set up and nothing has changed in north or south dakota. It’s only gotten worse. You feel a horrible responsible for having been so bold and ambitious to trying to stop a pipeline to protect water for 16 million. You carry the burden of knowing what the home? community is feeling and you also carry the burden of knowing that no matter how hard we fight that we are still less than nothing, that we are still 0,1% of the population in a country that was ours. Everyone else has a place to go. We don’t have anywhere to go. I think it’s even more dramatic to see that no matter what happens everyone else has the ability to leave and you just have to stay because everything that your ancestor resisted is the reason for your existence and you have to buckle down. We are all horribly sad. I can’t see no fireworks no more. I don’t feel safe in public spaces. I am only one person, I took care of the youth. I can imagine what the more popular faces at the core are facing when I see what I’m facing today.

What were the consequences? I heard of a 2 billion lawsuit…

They didn’t file the 2B lawsuit against the NGOs and organisations that were supporting us. My theory is that they wanted to scare the NGOs to help and support us again. At any given time we had more than 10.000 people in the camp.

The police used tear gas and rubber bullets against the peaceful protesters at Standing Rock.

How did it feel to get Trump elected?

On the day Trump was elected, we didn’t have any signal at the camp, so we didn’t believe it when we heard it. It took several hours for us to finally believe that trump had been elected. When he got into office the first executive order he signed was to open the KXL pipeline again and to approve the dakota access pipeline. His very first executive orders were just a slap in the face, saying: how dare you even try? But I think it emboldened communities, especially communities of colour to reclaim the power. To say: You’ve taken everything from us, even your ancestors cared so less about people besides yourself that you think you deserve anything. And you do not. So I think we have the right to exist and the right to thrive. And just because some overinflated, egoistical, narcisticall, womanising, machoistic bastard says we can’t doesn’t mean we can’t, because we can and we have done.

What did the Standing Rock movement do to the youth?

A lot of the people that came to the encountments brought all their skills with them, skill that the kids haven’t seen before. We had medics who were doing acupuncture and massage therapy, not just street therapies. We had carpenters and builders and engineers who built stuff, people who built solar energy. They would bring solar energy to the camps. The kids they were saturated with these great minds. When we left Standing rock, they were heartbroken, but then they started thinking ok, where are we gonna go next? My little sister is starting to put together solar panels, others are fighting Fracking in new Mexico. I went to Minnesota to fight Line 3. Others went down to Louisiana to find the end of the Dakota access pipeline. There have been more resistance camps since standing rock than there have ever been. And the kids recognise that it doesn’t only have to be frontline work they are doing. They wanna be journalists, photographers, media makers. Any field that they saw were valuable for the movement. They now wanna be a part of it. Because they realise that every person is a part of the puzzle and they see that the only way we can all fit together is if we all work together. So I think that they are brilliant. And I’m so proud of them, that they are overcoming all the fear that was prevued upon them by the police, by the local law enforcement, by the private security. Everything that they were told they can’t do they are now doing.

The Standing Rock Camp was covered in snow for weeks during the protests.

Why do you think standing rock became the greatest indigenous protest movement in history?

I think that through many many years, especially with repercussions of boarding schools, people were too scared to be themselves. It was horrible to say that you are native, because if you said so. There are still signs in North and South Dakota that say “No dogs and natives”. They would prefer dogs before they would prefer native people. And for once in our lives to be able to say: You know what, there is nothing wrong with us, there has never been anything wrong with us. And we are beautiful and we have so much to offer this world. And we have been offering it. This country wouldn’t even exist hadn’t we fed and housed and clothed these people. For all of us to remember that and then have people see us in our true form, not this scared cartooned charactered versions of ourselves, to not see us as the cowboys and Indians from the Hollywood westerns. But to see us as doctors, as educators, as philanthropists, movement makers. I think was really empowering. I think The reason we all came together was because people finally saw who we were and recognised “oh sorry we weben living on your land without permission. You are actually really lovely and we would love to get to know you. And because we are kind we said that’s great, because we love all of our relatives please come join us. And when people did, there is something beautiful of being part of something that you haven’t been part before. I think the reason that it became so big is that people realized that something was happening that they had never seen in their lifetime. And I hope that we continue this. I don’t want this anymore. It is the only model in my life where I remember what it is like to be an indigenous person without any boundaries. I never want to forget the feeling that I had or have the youth forget what it felt to be their own leaders in their own right to not be questioned, to be embolden and empowered to do more.

What’s your mission statement?

To overthrow the United States government (laughs). Well partly. My mission is just to ensure a future for the youth and I know that it sounds silly but people underestimate young people. Young children – people talk down to them like they can’t understand. But I think children are so much smarter than we are as they are not impacted by all these biases that we carry around. And I think that it is my mission that the kids remember that they have a voice and a path. Our ancestors resistance is the very reason for us existing. And I want them to remember that there are people that have suffered way harder than we have for our ability to stand up for the next 7 generations. And if it got easier at that point of time, it will even get easier in the future. So my mission is to overthrow the US government and make sure that the youth are the ones making the decisions from here on now.

Do you think that grassroots movements can lead to systemic change?

Absolutely! Because governments didn’t always exist. Governments fear among, they elbowed their way in, but they didn’t always exist and they are not stable. Grassroots are communities of people that are working towards a common goal. And a movement used to stay in a movement. Not just with the same people for years and years, but by bringing in new generations of people to carry the message on. So I think grassroots are the heartbeat and governments and politics are just the clothes that you put over the body. They are not the life itself.

How do you feel then if you loose at standing rock, if you lose the battle against state authorities and the projects are still being built?

It was hard. But pipelines can be dismantled. We had a group of people that went and turned off the pipes. Right now we have people that are now in jail, because they decided to turn off the pipes. We didn’t stop the Dakota access pipeline, but we sure woke up the entire world. And made them start talking about extracting industries. Make them start looking through lenses that they have never looked through before. And make them accountable for everything that they have been part of, all their privileges that they carry and make them acknowledge their role and why it is that we as indigenous peoples are fighting for what is right. And I think that I am not sad because everywhere I look everyday there is a new form of resistance and more than half of the time it is led by the youth. I couldn’t be more proud to know that the kids that I worked with that kids that I cried with and prayed with every single day are doing something that is impacting youth around the globe in such a way that they are starting their own movements and leading the people in a brighter direction.

What’s your advice for future activists?

I’d say be open for new learning opportunities and be open for teaching and learning opportunities. You will never know everything. When you’re entrained into a community I would say get in touch with the people or build around the community that has already existed and don’t build around existing communities. I would also say for young activists to be vary and to think very much about safety culture and the necessity of being cautious. I think so often we ware open and welcoming. In activism you can’t really afford to be so warm and friendly. You wanna build community but you also protect yourself and the people. The best way to do that is to have a decreeing eye and an open heart.

What is your next project?

I’m moving back to the southwest. Trump recently reduced a national sacred monument to about 1/8 of the original size, he wants to open up everything for Fracking. So it is my goal to go and preserve my own people now to if I ever have kids in this horrible world that they a have a place to go. And I can tell them the story of our people. It breaks my heart that Palestinians have to know that their children will never ever see where they came from. They’ll never know what their lands used to look like. I don’t want this to be the case in my home. They’ve already taken so much from us, I refuse to let them take anything more.

What’s your big wish to the world?

I wish that we all remember the humanity and that we treat each others as human beings. We all have that one thing in common and if people stop this directing and segregating of everyone and everything they see and they remember aside from my skin color and aside of my hair we are all made of the same things inside. I would love for people to remember their humanity and to start caring for one another again. I know it’s a fabulous wish, but it’s easier than world peace. It’s easier to treat each other well. Following the saying: Treat each other as you want to be treated.

In your workshop yesterday, you talked about grassroots activism. What topics did you see in Austria?

The guests talked about the 3rd rundway at the airport. And I told them about a leck in a refinery near the pipeline. And they recognised that it can happen here too. So they felt empowered and it also empowered me to see that. It would be great if also in Austria more power would go to the youth. I was telling them: A lot of people will maybe be angry on you now, but if you buy them and your children more time on this planet by your decision, your voice will be heard. The youths have the strongest voice because they don’t have this societal standard that we adults have. So it may not be possible to stop the 3rd runway, but the participants had a whole list of things that shall be changed and they will change it.

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Albert Frantz is a world-class pianist from Pennsylvania who started playing at the extraordinarily late age of 17. His early piano teacher told his mother to throw her money in the garbage rather than spend it on piano lessons for Albert. He discovered his love for classical music while in high school and his passion made him accomplish seemingly impossible things. He was the first pianist in nearly a decade to win a Fulbright scholarship to study in Vienna just a few years after starting out. This led him to study at the official conservatory of the city of Vienna in Austria, the home country of many of his musical idols.

Even before he could finish his education, he started suffering from scoliosis, first discovered in his adolescence, that virtually incapacitated his piano playing for more than six years. Desperately looking for a therapy that would promise any amount of relief, he found relief through Bikram yoga. No sooner did he recover from his back pain when he broke his left wrist upon getting hit in the face by a tram on a cold and icy Thanksgiving weekend. Breaking a wrist is a nightmare for a pianist. For Albert, it turned out positively in the end, as the injury led him to play pieces by Charles-Valentin Alkan, a 19th-century French virtuoso and one of the only composers to write music for the right hand alone. His music was considered unplayable for over a century and is regarded as the most athletically challenging music ever written for the piano. Albert took it as a challenge, which led to his critically acclaimed debut CD dedicated to Alkan’s music. His debut album was an official jury nomination for the prestigious German Record Critics Award, designed to recognize the “most rigorous standards for supreme achievement and quality” in the field of music recording.

Besides turning his interest to the works of Alkan and Liszt, his back pain also led him to pursue an IRONMAN triathlon. This is especially notable, as there were two situations in which he almost drowned during his childhood. Swimming in open water made Albert panic throughout his adult life. After a change of perspective, Albert found himself training for one of the most challenging sports competitions in the world. He finished his first IRONMAN triathlon – 3.8 km swimming, 180 km cycling and a 42.2 km marathon – on June 28, 2015.

INTERVIEW

Pianists at your level normally start at the age of 8 or even younger…

Even younger! A colleague of mine, a very famous pianist, is sometimes asked by interviewers, “You started the piano late, didn’t you?” to which she answers, “Yes, very late, I was 8.” Often they start at two or three these days, though four or five is very normal. My teacher and mentor Paul Badura-Skoda started at six and he even called that “rather late.” At least that’s what we tend to assume. If there is one thing that I want to communicate – and I hope to do it through my own work in my own field – I think we place limitations on ourselves. We don’t really know our true capabilities, or we let the world place limitations on us. We let other people and society tell us what we can’t do. What if we ask ourselves what we really care about? “What would I do ideally and how far can I go?” We simply don’t know our own potential.

How did you accomplish becoming a world-class pianist and teacher starting at the late age of 17?

I am happy that on the one hand I did have a natural talent, but, on the other hand, I really attribute so much to having found great teachers. I’m absolutely not self-taught. I was just fortunate enough to find wonderful teachers who recognized that I had talent and took me under their wing and really helped me to maximize that. I still need that until this day. I think it’s incredible important to have teachers and mentors and trainers.

“YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO NORMAL THINGS, LIKE STARTING A FAMILY, GETTING YOUR HOUSE IN THE SUBURBS WITH A WHITE PICKET FENCE, THE FAMILY DOG, ETC. I DIDN’T GO FOR THAT LIFE.”

Which effort was needed to achieve what you achieved so far?

An enormous effort. I wish it hadn’t been quite so much. Actually my parents were not exactly happy. At that time, their idea for me was to go to university and study something that would get me the best job. You’re supposed to do normal things, like starting a family, getting your house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, the family dog, etc. I didn’t go for that life. I think it is a wonderful life path – I know plenty of people who did and lead very happy and very fulfilled lives – but it wasn’t necessarily for me. Growing up, I was always fascinated by science and I always knew that I would become a scientist or an engineer of some sort. Then I discovered music very late, but I knew that it was my real passion, even if I had to go my own way back then, with some significant challenges. At one point, unfortunately I had some major problems with my spine. It looked like I would never be able to perform again. This made me unable to perform for a long time and I did a lot of physical therapy and a lot of sports. Fortunately, I was able to avoid surgery and I am very happy that I didn’t have to go under the knife. In the end, I always kept going. So when It looked like there might not be a way, I just thought to myself that I just need to find it, because there is always a way. It’s just a test. So whenever there is an obstacle and we think we can’t go further, to me that means it is just a test. A test of real power, a test of our commitment, our determination.

Later on you got a Fulbright scholarship and today you are playing in great concert halls and also play endorsements for Bösendorfer. Did you think about that when you were 17, when you started out with playing the piano? Could you imagine something like that back then? 

Yeah, young people, young athletes for example, dream of playing in the major leagues and young creative people, actors, musicians dream of making it big. I don’t know if I thought about that. I just knew there was something in me that I have to pursue. I don’t have some big, glamorous career right now; I am not unknown either, but for me what is most important is the quality of the work that I do. This, for me, is really an important topic. I think in our society, too often we look for shortcuts. We see certain pop stars for example, we see them rise and fall, and sometimes it seems to me that we seek cheap fame, because we think that the fame is going to bring us something. We think that if millions of people like us, then we get all this love. To me it is better to do my best work and to know I really strive to be the best that I can and to find mentors that help me to get better and know that I have done good work. That’s more important to me than doing mediocre work but becoming very famous for it.

On which level do you categorize your playing today?

The important thing is to reach the level of artistry where hopefully nobody cares about how fast your fingers are, and people just concentrate on what you have to say artistically. That is when you transcend technique, what every artist really works on. To me that’s what it is really all about.

Do you think you reached that level already?

Well, it’s my job to be an artist! Which is not to say that other people are not able to play the same pieces better and more expressively. At some point it becomes subjective.

Who is your favorite composer?

Okay, I will give you two answers. One is Beethoven, because of what Beethoven stood for. He represented a real revolution in the concept of what a musical artwork can be. Beethoven created truly self-contained masterworks. Beethoven wrote in a very idealistic manner, and he was extremely aware of his place in cultural history. In some of his later works he really wrote for the future and even said as much.

In the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, for example, he wrote to his publisher: “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when they play it in 50 years,” because he knew that it was not for his current generation of pianists. There, he’s referring not only to the extraordinary technical difficulties of this piece, but also to the incredible musical complexity. It was difficult on all levels. I don’t wish to make the argument that a future generation was required to understand it musically. I’m sure there were also other people who understood it in his time, but aesthetically, it was so futuristic. The same can be said of his last string quartets. Some of it sounds like it was written yesterday. Incredible. So Beethoven is one answer.

And the other is: I have this unhealthy obsession with this composer, Charles-Valentin Alkan, whose music I just recorded for my first CD. He is an unjustly neglected and incredibly interesting composer. He was Chopin’s neighbour and best friend in Paris. He wrote the most fascinating and unfortunately the most purely athletic music ever written for the piano. He really makes the performer sweat.

With which historical composer would you like to have dinner?

Definitely Franz Liszt. He is the most interesting.

Why?

Because he was a rock star! He had such an enormous personality. He was also true cosmopolitan. He wasn’t just huddled up in a little apartment, just writing music day and night. He really lived life, he lived a large, grand life. He was surely the most interesting.

“TRY TO DO EVERYTHING TO FIND THE VERY BEST TEACHER AS EARLY IN YOUR STUDIES AS POSSIBLE.”

Which suggestions would you give to young people starting to play the piano? Which tips would you give them? How should they start out playing the piano?

The most important thing is to find a really good teacher, and this is advice for the parents as well. Try to do everything to find the very best teacher as early in your studies as possible. There is a misconception. All too often we make the assumption that an entry-level teacher is good enough. It’s understandable—parents just want to see whether their child likes music. Yet I think the most advanced, the most experienced and the very best teachers need to be teaching as early in the learning process as possible and not simply at the very advanced, already professional stages.

Which hobbies do you have besides playing the piano? Lately, I saw you quite often in fast cars!

Yes that’s a new hobby (laughing out loud). Racing cars.  I have to be careful about that. I’ve gotten to chase Formula One drivers around the racetrack! It definitely makes me nervous. But that’s a fun hobby. I decided one day that life consists of more than just working. There are so many rich experiences to be had. At some point I thought, I have to live more. So when an opportunity comes up, now I say yes, and then find a way. Often these kinds of opportunities are opportunities for growth. We tend to limit ourselves way too much. I am definitely nervous sitting at the wheel of a supercar on a racetrack. But that is an opportunity for growth. We regret the times when we say no to such opportunities. That’s my latest hobby. Another one is that I do a lot of sports and I trained for several years to complete an Ironman. It was a goal I had for several years, actually more of a fantasy than a real goal. And then I thought – wait a second – I am not getting younger. The time to start is now.

What was it like training for the Ironman?

Above all there’s a major time commitment. The official recommendation from the Ironman organization is at least 15 hours a week of endurance training just to get to the finish line. It requires total dedication. No excuses. I didn’t always feel like working out for hours in bad weather but I knew I couldn’t let that stop me from reaching that finish line. I learned to love extreme heat or cold since it makes for such great training opportunities. People don’t work out because it’s uncomfortable. It’s easier to sit at home. Then, when they do work out it’s too easy to seek comfort in discomfort, to make the inherent discomfort as comfortable as possible. This attitude makes it all too easy to convince yourself it’s “too this” or “too that” to work out that day. I learned to turn this around: The worse the weather, the greater the motivation! You can’t control the weather on race day, so you just have to be prepared for anything.

I spread my Ironman dream out over three years. This included starting running again after twenty years (after a very halfhearted attempt the year before), learning to ride a fast time trial bike with aerobars, and learning how to swim. I’m still surprised every time I don’t drown!

How did it feel to cross the Ironman finish line?

It was exhilarating. The first thing my coach, Paul Nelsen, said to me was, “You don’t even look tired.” And amazingly I didn’t feel tired. I was just so overwhelmed.

Is this your advice for other people? Just speak out your dream and go for it?

Yes, absolutely. It’s not about just going for things recklessly, though. I think that deep down we know – I say this but then I remember Steve Jobs said it as well, and much more eloquently – deep down we know who we really want to become. Everybody has dreams. Some dreams only have to be done once to realize, like skydiving. That can be done once and it is accomplished. Other dreams are more about who you become, becoming a pianist in my case. That was something that took years and is ongoing. I think often our dreams are much closer than we think. I don’t think we could seriously entertain a dream unless some part of us deep down knew that we are capable of achieving it.

Coming to the last question: What is your dream?

I have so many of them actually. My biggest one is to make as much of a contribution as I am able to in my lifetime. That’s truly my biggest dream. Even if it’s in this tiny part of the world called classical music and even if it’s a relatively small number of people who care about it or appreciate my work. My biggest dream is to make as much of a contribution as possible. And I want to do that in three ways: through my playing, by becoming as good as I can become and leaving behind my best work. The second way is through education. I am equally passionate about education as I am about playing. And the third way is that I hope to inspire some more people to question our limitations. I think we are capable of so much more than we think we are.

Additional information:

Official Website: http://key-notes.com/

Photography: David Visnjic

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Leo Widrich wears a permanent smile on his face. He is the cofounder of one of the most-loved social media apps on the market – 700,000 people use his Buffer service each month. The app is helping lots of companies with marketing and Leo himself has demonstrated how successful marketing can work. Together with Joel Gascoine he founded the Buffer app in 2012 and shortly after they both quit university and moved to Silicon Valley. Since then their path has taken them around the world in a blitz of success.

The boy from Melk, a quaint town north of Vienna, originally wanted to become a professional footballer. He was part of the football academy in St. Pölten before injuring his knee at the age of 15 and deciding to train his brain more than his legs in the future. After finishing school in Vienna, the young Leo was motivated to move abroad by his fellow students, who had dreamt of Harvard and Cambridge from a young age.

Leo decided on Warwick Business School, one of the leading economics universities in the world. It was there that he got to know Joel Gascoine. Gascoine was working on social media management software for which Leo started working an hour a day doing marketing. Working on their own project quickly became more exciting than any lecture and a one-hour-a-day job became a full-time job, so much so that the pair decided to quit university and move to Silicon Valley. It took 7 weeks for the first users to start paying and 400,000 euros was from business angels only a few days before their money completely ran out. The size of these figures was no guarantee of a visa either, and their search for a permanent home took them first to Hong Kong and then to Tel Aviv.

Nowadays Buffer is one of the leading social media apps and the company behind it has advanced as a shining beacon of entrepreneurial culture. The company works with a fully remote team from more than 25 countries and just recently shut down its only physical office. Total transparency and a positivity policy are just two principles, that make Buffer an outstanding company. Leo became a prototype of a digital nomad, who achieved to build a company that would give him the freedom to live this lifestyle to the fullest.

INTERVIEW

Tell me about your background. Where do you come from? What did you want to become as a child? Was there any inspiration for what you do from your surroundings, parents or other people?

I grew up in Austria, in a small, rural town called Melk. My biggest passion growing up was sports and I started playing football when I was 5. Until I turned like 15 or 16 that really was the only thing on my mind and so I tried to become a professional. I think the most important thing that sports taught me is the idea of training, which sounds really simple I know! At school you could start at the last minute and still succeed but in sports that doesn’t work and I really learnt that. You need to work hard and train every day to be successful. I try to take this philosophy forward with Buffer.

I went to university in the UK and then dropped out to join my co-founder Joel and start Buffer. At Buffer we build social media management software; we help people schedule, analyse and publish to all their social networks. I think originally the passion was just to be free, to have something that allows us to participate in the world instead of just being in school and having people tell us what to do. From the very beginning, the idea was not to be creative, we just wanted to do something in the real world! You are young and feel you want to contribute to the world instead of just taking or consuming, we wanted to create and give something back. That was how I got started with Buffer and I have been doing it for the last four years or so.

Everything you say, as well as the way you lead your company, is about freedom and a kind of non-authoritarian approach. Where does this come from?

Looking back it’s actually quite ironic. Joel and I felt like we wanted to be free and do things in a crazy, unique way that many people were keen to tell us wouldn’t work. Luckily we figured we were our own bosses and could do whatever we wanted and were able to make enough money from Buffer to live off. As Buffer grew and we started to hire people, we recognised that we hadn’t quite extended the freedom that we had achieved ourselves to the people we hired, which is so ironic because we wanted so much to escape. Being at a company for a long time and being told what to do stifles your creativity so we said to ourselves, “Why can’t we just give everyone the same freedom that we wanted to have?” That was a big part of the inspiration to achieve self-management and to let people live their life without telling them what to do all the time. Another part was purely to do what’s right. Is it right to tell people what to do or is it better to let them be what they want to be and let them contribute in their own way? I think that’s a different approach. There’s also a book called Reinventing Organisations that really helped work out the concept whereby people can really work on their own without asking for approval all the time.

It also has to be strongly dependent on which people you hire.

Extremely important! The way we hire is also very different – we say weird. Sometimes if people don’t get a job with us, they ask for feedback on how they can improve in the future and I’m always a little reluctant to say anything as what gets you hired at Buffer won’t help anywhere else! You really have to fit in to our culture; we have a set of values which we believe in and we try and go to find people who aspire to live their lives by this values. I say it’s weird because people ask us, ‘Don’t you want to find the best programmer, the best marketing person?’ and we’re like, “Sure, the person needs to be skilled enough to contribute to the company but that’s not the most important part. The most important part is that they are aligned with our values.” Two of our most important values are positivity and transparency. Some people see this and think, ‘That’s nice’ but we try to take it to an extreme and really live our lives by it. In order to run a company in this way, you need a special set of people – not always special talented but special in that they’re aligned to a core principle.

Was there a certain moment in which you decided to quit college?

Yeah, there was. I remember it really well. I’m sort of surprised looking back at how confident I was about that decision. I’m proud of my younger self of being that bold and even right now I’m like, ‘I’m not sure if I would do that right now’. I was in my third semester at uni and cruising along when Joel came to me with Buffer and I asked if I could help on the marketing side – just 30mins a day with the social media stuff. I got sucked in so quickly that within a few weeks I was just day and night working on Buffer. It was much less of a conscious decision, rather just the flow of life that I ended up in. I wasn’t even going to lectures anymore, I was just writing articles to get the word out about Buffer. It kind of became obvious that it was my calling in life but I was still cautious about it. People think it’s cool to say, “I quit uni to do this”, but I took more of the Mark Zuckerberg approach and first took a year out to try it and see if it was something for me. Luckily, in that year we raised some money and we got a significant amount of traction and paying customers. After that it was easy to stay with the company and not go back to university.

Two personal questions: Where does your passion for travelling and now remote working come from? and ‘How did people around you react when you said, “I’m leaving the country!”’

I really hadn’t travelled a lot – I didn’t board a plane until I was 16 or 17. The fact that I’m so remote now is not thought out, it’s more of an accident. When I was in the UK we heard about Silicon Valley as this mythical place where all the startups were and so we just went there on a one-way-ticket. What we didn’t know was that we needed long-term visas to stay there and we didn’t manage to get them. So we were like, “We can’t stay here, where should we go?” We had just raised some seed money and weren’t so financially constrained anymore so we brainstormed South America and ended up in Hong Kong. From then on remote working really started to take hold of us. Afterwards, as the company kept growing, we knew we couldn’t ask people to come with us between Hong Kong and Tel Aviv, it was too much, and so we came up with the principle that you can work from wherever you want as long as it’s good work!

About how people responded: my parents didn’t go to university so having a son who did was a big deal for them and me dropping out was hard for them to hear. I say you have to have a kind of parent management, i.e. I needed to talk to them and make them understand. Sometimes it’s not parents raising kids but the other way round! The fact that I took a year out rather than quitting straight away helped me a lot with them but even when everything was going well and it was clear that I wasn’t going back, my parents weren’t sure whether it was a good idea. In their eyes I was still off gallivanting around the world so I had to tread lightly and maybe hold some information back from them to stop them worrying.

Was there a will to go out in the world because you hadn’t travelled until you were 16 or 17?

I think I always had this sense of freedom and although I didn’t know it back then, travelling is one of the best ways to live that out in life. I quickly got hooked on travel and now I know people everywhere. I used to think Hong Kong was a crazy place very far away but now I realise that the world is very small. The uncertainty of going to a new place is still filled with adrenaline though and I think travelling is definitely an exercise in freedom.

What was the most remarkable high point in your time with Buffer? Was there a complete ‘wow’ moment?

There is one moment that I distinctly remember. The site went down and users couldn’t access it. We got an email from someone that said that they were furious. It said, ‘I can’t use the site, what’s going on? I can’t run my business.’ It’s the worst thing for a website and yet when I read that, I was so grateful. I read the email and realised, ‘Wow, because Buffer isn’t working, someone else can’t run their company. That’s amazing’. For me this is truly the essence of creating that other people value, they need your product to get by in life. I felt the true connection between the customer and our creation and a real sense of meaning to our work. Of course we tried to help him as soon as possible too!

 You created Buffer using a lean startup approach. Do you think this was the right way to go?

I think one of the things we learnt was that the lean startup method tries to be as scientific as possible but this isn’t always the best way. When making a decision you still need a certain intuition as only looking at data won’t always give you the best result. At Buffer we try to not only understand what the customer wants but understand the problem the customer has. It’s only a very small distinction and it took me a while to learn. Through this and the lean startup approach, I feel we tap into people’s behaviour more than their wishes, which change so often. This interpretation of the lean approach is very useful I find.

With all success that has come in the last 4 years with Buffer, are there low points to what you do?

I’m in a very reflective stage right now about my life. I’ve been travelling and doing what I want for the last few years and something that I’ve neglected is to build a close circle of friends who I can really connect with. It’s great to travel so much but it can get lonely too and you don’t have the chance to build up any really meaningful relationships with anyone. I’ve been reflecting on this and I’d like to improve it – maybe stay somewhere for a bit longer and build up a group of truly close friends.

Another question related to travel: Do your employees need to be travellers?

That’s a great question. I like to ask in interviews if people like to travel – they don’t have to say yes but I’d like to see how open-minded they are. I kind of learnt not to force travel onto people. You know, I’m a single guy, 25, no responsibilities, no commitments except working for Buffer and not everyone is in that situation. We now have employees who are married with kids and can’t jet off around the world. I’ve been really humbled listening to other people’s life stories and so I now know that travel doesn’t have to fit into their lives the way it fits into mine.

Coming to the total transparency approach. In a more global sense: Do you think it could be important for the global economy and could solve the problems of people not feeling connected to politics or economics?

The way I’ve started to think about it is: I’m trying to find the right balance between doing what is right and letting that be the message in itself. Just doing whatever I’m doing and not needing to say it’s the right thing to do and that everyone should do it. I believe that transparency is really helpful for a lot of things, for gender and equality for example. Equal pay, trust, loyalty – a lot of things come with transparency but I understand that it’s not the right thing for everyone. Some people come to me and say, “I like the transparency, I’m going to do that as well!” but it might not fit into their company culture; they might be hurting people more than they’re helping them. I hope that I’m an example and can say, “This is what happens if you’re transparent and let people decide things for themselves” without trying to force it on people. Hopefully I can inspire them to become transparent rather than force them to do it.

Are you a political person?

No, I don’t think so. I have huge respect for politicians because they have to please all the people all the time, which is an impossible task. At Buffer, I have the luxury of building a product for one certain market segment and not for everybody. I don’t have to worry about childcare for 3-year-old nor about senior citizen’s homes. I can pick and chose whereas a politician doesn’t have this luxury.

If Arnold Schwarzenegger came up to you and asked you to become a politician because he liked your values would you think about it?

Possibly. There’s always a chance but right now I’m happy to be building up Buffer and want to keep going with what we’ve started.

Is what you’re doing now, mostly writing and thinking about how to go on with developing Buffer your true passion or have you found anything besides that that really drives you? Or did it become your passion with all the success?

I think it’s more the second. I encourage people to find passion by being at the intersection of three things: what they’re good at, what they like to do and what they think the world needs. Although some of these things might be out of your control, this is undoubtedly where you’ll do your most fulfilling work. I personally see that there is a need in the world for the type of company we’re building and the more I see this, the more I start to really enjoy what I do. This is what has become a passion for me. And so I really enjoy that element and I feel that that’s definitely become a passion for me.

What inspired you to take your positivity approach?

There is a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and in the very first chapter talks about how he tried to simply start smiling at people. When you actually think about it and try it, it’s fascinating how simple and powerful that really is. Just go out and try to consciously smile at people for a day. I think that’s what really got me excited about the idea of choosing positivity as a something proactive and not something that simply happens to people.

The other thing that got me going was Buddhist teaching. I discovered Buddhism when Buffer wasn’t going so well and I found myself not being as happy as I might have been. For me, happiness and success were clearly still linked but this cannot be the case. I remember I googled ‘who is the happiest person in the world?’ and there is apparently a Buddhist monk who has had his brainwaves scientifically analysed and it has been proven that he is the happiest person on earth! The neuroscientists were baffled by his brain activity and that’s when I really realised that positivity and happiness is a skill and a habit and not just this elusive and vague idea that most people have.

After all that you’ve experienced, what would you advise your younger self to do differently?

That’s a good question. Right now I think that with my sports background, I always tried to force everything, to train hard and create the right conditions for success. In the early phase of Buffer this was especially important so I wouldn’t completely take it away but I’ve also learnt that forcing everything isn’t ideal. It’s good to be proactive and give yourself direction but you don’t have to take it to an extreme or try to be a radical. I’m not saying I’m completely like this but I have seen that moving more in the direction of letting good things happen would probably feel a bit better. That’s what I’d say to him.

So you’re still very much pushing yourself?

I think so, but I’m getting a bit better. Nowadays I can go out for a night and not be super focused on work. I can enjoy a glass of wine whereas I never drank alcohol before as I thought it was integral to my success. I’ve loosened up a lot but am still probably way more extreme that most people would prefer! I’m working on it though.

How do you feel about the Silicon Valley philosophy? Do you think it’s a good thing that this Silicon Valley is inspiring people in startup scenes around the world and iconizing people like Elon Musk?

What I’ve learned is that it’s not quite the right method for me anymore. I used to believe that it’s all about work and success but if you asked me now, that’s not what I would choose anymore. I still want to make things happen and I still enjoy the fast pace action of it all but not at the expense of family or relationships anymore. I feel that Silicon Valley is moving in this direction as well and the idea that working smarter not harder is spreading, like Ricardo Semler or what we are trying to do or the Zappos approach, slightly different models of approaching work than what was considered normal. I’m glad they exist and make an impact and hopefully they inspire some people and balance things out.

You said you could imagine settling down somewhere for a little bit longer. Where springs to mind?

I’m going back to Santa Cruz after this. I still enjoy California a lot but somewhere outside of San Francisco, so Santa Cruz is very appealing. There’s the beach, lots of sun and it’s remote enough to have it’s own feel yet I can still be in the city quickly if I need to be. That’s the first thing that comes to mind now but if you asked me again in two weeks maybe I’d say something different!

In general, where do you see yourself in 10 years?

(Laughs) Great question. I think I’m generally trying to move my life towards a more relaxed situation where I don’t have to rush through things and feel pressured to work. I would like to see myself as very open-minded and in tune with what I’m doing and what I’m feeling. I would like to be able to meditate freely, be more patient and be part of a community. The best way I can put it is being in sync with time and the people around me and not rushing and moving so fast. I know it’s a little bit vague but that’s what I’d like to be doing (laughs).

Would you quit Buffer if there were an opportunity?

We had a big opportunity to quit Buffer last year as we received a big offer that we had to really think about. I think I would have made over 20 million or something like that but it didn’t feel right for us. There’s an article by Derek Sivers that I’ve come to enjoy, and also one from our mentors Shaaa from Kissmetrics, which say that you should sell when you’re done and at this point I’m not done with Buffer. There may be a point where I feel that I’ve done all the things that I wanted to do and now it’s time to do something else but that’s not yet. It’s one thing to say that I’m not done with Buffer without an offer on the table but having rejected one, I feel a bit different and feel more motivated to go on with our future plans for Buffer.

Additional Information:

Leo recommends to read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Photography: Manuel Gruber

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