When we allow an Easeness plan to come together, we lean on a snappy set of tried-and-true techniques. Our planning exercises feel like play as we set about 

. This is a strength training method that leverages the power of enjoyment to yield effortless improvement. We wrap our planning exercises in 

 in order to make space for inspiration and sacred genius to arise. Meanwhile, we fully focus our awareness on intending the desired outcome, surrendering to what is, and allowing the circumstances to manifest according to the 

Feynman's Lecture on the Principle of Least Action

Plan your Easeness through playful, intentional rituals.

When work gets hard, it's time to stop. This may contradict the narrative of the military, the empire, the colonist, the capitalist, the monarch, and consequently of business, but research shows across the board that when we endeavor to learn new skills or acquire new habits, we have more success sooner if we keep it fun and take it easy. Ask LeBron James why sleep comes first.

When training our bodies, 80% effort consistently beats 100%. The same goes for our minds. We need adequate rest and recovery to let our upgrades crystallize.

If we acknowledge the ubiquity of the Pareto principle, the story of optimal effort continues to relax. As Pareto would have us observe, in many natural and cultural systems, most of the result comes from the first bit of effort, typically to the tune of 80/20.

If we can achieve 80% results with 20% effort, and the last 20% takes 80% of the effort, when is enough 

? We grease the groove when the impulse arises, while interest holds, and until it feels like work. Then we move on and grease another groove, staying in flow by avoiding the grind.

Life is ceremony, a collection of rituals that shape our sense of self and fashion our feelings.

We stand at the summit, as our ideal self, then plot the path back to now. From such a vaulted vantage, obstacles fail to daunt us, our faults dry up and flake off, and we swell to fill our fresh new skin with a gooey concoction of strength, resilience, and courage.

Concretely speaking, we plan from the desired future backward. The map we draw is not the territory, but it gets us moseying on down the trail every morning.

It's easy to get busy talking about making work about work. We keep our eyes on the prize using the GIST method. We maintain focus on the next task of the current step within the idea most likely to reach our goal, while steadily refining our goals, generating ideas, honing the steps, and defining tasks in rhythmic daily and weekly rituals that include everyone but only when necessary.

An Easeness plan begins with an audit centered on 

First, we mindmap a tree of intention, beginning with the central mission of our endeavor.  For example, with Easeness we aim to bring ease to business.

Which habits and practices are both well-resolved and repetitious? These require no additional intent, so we automate them and let them run as so many daemons in the background.

Which habits and practices bring us no joy? These we can discard, or, at worst, pass to someone who enjoys them. And sometimes a subtle adjustment in perspective that helps us pinpoint and release resistance can allow us to find new joy in what seemed mundane, undesirable, or unpleasant.

Which habits and practices do we fail at, but feel driven to improve? Which hold us hostage? Which fill our sails? Plotting our drives and drains on the motivation continuum can invite piercing insight into how work (or play) makes us feel.

All of these inquiries move us toward the ideal state of easy being. We set intentions with love, then observe them manifesting within and around us. We surrender to what is and allow what dreams may come to emerge from the infinite realm of possibilities. When we focus our awareness on how a change comes about, working hard to make it happen, we lose the majority of our power, which swims in the matrix of shared intention in the collective subconscious.

Say you're making a BLT. If the knife doesn't slice the tomato skin, would you rather:

a. smash the tomato with the flat side of the knife?
b. keep sawing until the tomato falls apart?
c. sharpen the knife with a whetstone?
d. drive the knife to the kitchen store at the mall?
e. order sliced tomatoes on Postmates?
f. use another knife that is sharper?
g. bite the tomato?
h. stare longingly at the tomato until someone else slices it for you?

If the goal is to enjoy a sandwich made of bacon, lettuce, and tomato (and mayo and avocado and sourdough toast), then which is the best option? If you are making the sandwich for your lover? For your spouse? For your kiddo? For grandma?

What if the sandwich is a TPS report? Or a pitch deck? Or a birdhouse? When is choosing the hard way helpful?

When does hard work generate more well-being than ease would?

This chain of questions seems to point at the great mystery underlying the folly of business. Why do we hurry? Toward what do we progress? Besides ecological and economic collapse, pandemic heart 

, epidemic obesity, chronic stress and fatigue, generalized anxiety and depression, widespread panic, apocalyptic fantasies, crippling isolation and loneliness, the virtualization of reality and nature themselves, and, of course, missions to Mars.

Can you see how a business plan as we typically conceive it today is an exercise in futility? Do you see that doing things the hard way is choosing to suffer when we could choose to enjoy ourself? If not, if you really must insist on a written and detailed plan for your endeavor, I have a suggestion…

 that as soon as we write down an idea, we kill it dead. Even this little piece was dead when I picked it up again today. And it will be dead when I put it down, when I publish it. Reading it now, you breathe life back into these thoughts and ideas. You may take the bones I've arranged here and imagine a more beautiful creature than I have seen.

So treat your plans well. Don't kill them dead. Sure, write down pieces you want to remember. Draw and refine the contours of your heart-mind's (to borrow Pancho Ramos' parlance) deepest intentions. But remember that the plan is only ever a map, not the territory. That's why I suggest cultivating your plans like a garden. The territory is a verdant plot of fertile heart-mind in the endless center of peaceful silence. With a little water and light, here beauty blooms.

post

Plan Better through Intentional, Ritual Play

Here at Easeness, we enquire within, wondering what might be left of society if Business weren't so busy.  Eventually, these inquiries will have us spelunking the bottomless well of being in search of the heart of our desires, but as with any excavation, we must start on the surface. So we'll address the shallowest of our 

 first, that of the station of humanity in the grand, supposed pyramid of nature.

In the business world, as humanists, we take it for granted that humans are exceptional, among animals, among lifeforms, astride the universe. We rule with an iron fork, seated, bloated, atop the food chain. Nature and all its savage denizens bend helplessly to our technological might.

But is it true? Are humans exceptional? Are we on top?

If so, why and how and how can we stay that way? If not, why do so many of us act like we are? Do we reign over the animal kingdom? Who says it's a kingdom? Some guy?

And that's just where most of our discarded sneakers will spend the brunt of their thousand-year lifespans. In a blind rush to turn a profit selling cushioned steps to kids who want to look as cool as the cats on TV sportsball games, we've created millions of tons of shoe-shaped plastic trash in a flash, every two treads trod upon for maybe weeks or months, then outgrown or outmoded, tossed to the back of the closet, into the goodwill bin, over a power line, or sometimes flung straight into the ocean.

Busyness is booming for sneakers and kicks, and while the shelf life is short, the life span of these wonders of textile technology far surpasses anyone who touches them by a factor of twenty.

Yes, your sneakers may outlive you twenty times over.

See, the rubber sole may take 50 to 80 years to decompose, but if the upper is synthetic leather, it is likely to be made of PVC (

), which was discovered in 1872 (148 years ago, at the time of writing). Since then, no one has yet witnessed the natural decomposition of PVC. We know that it takes longer than 148 years, and the natural decomposition we have observed has been so incomplete that the estimated life span of PVC is more than 1000 years. 

In 2016 alone 61 million tons of PVC were produced

What will they do in the centuries to come when plastic displaces the ocean? Will we seal the seabed in polymers so we can swim our VR drones from coast to coast, reef to barren reef, without encountering any gunky carbonoids? Le sigh…

And on the other side of the coin, the consumer side, we find just as much harmful busyness. Nike ushered in the padded-foam-soled running shoe in the 60s. 

In the earlier days, they cobbled and peddled sponge-rubber-soled Cortezes out of the backs of vans

. Then, in the 70s, Nike and their pacing competitors began to layer EVA (ethylene vinyl acetate, which also lasts at least 1000 years) into the midsoles for support and cushioning and "shock absorption" and the market exploded. But why? What was behind this epidemic demand for shock absorption?

. If we were to extend our examination to the paving and flooring industries, I bet we'll find a boom in sidewalks, streets, and cement foundations that tracks the skyrocketing sneaker biz. And pavement is hard on the bones, especially for us upright apes to stomp around on all day. Our hips, ankles, knees, and toes were made for forest floors, not terrazzo mall tiles. These so-called sneakers must have felt like heaven, pillowy rescue boats for our parents' and their parents' barking dogs.

Fast forward to fifty years later, we've leveled and paved exponentially more of the surface area of fair Gaia, and 

we've pumped out tens of millions of tons of EVA

 and hundreds of millions of tons of PVC all of which will probably be around in the year 3030 (better keep 'em 

), long after the pavement has returned to dust. All in the name of what? Comfort? Style? Progress? Legacy? Happiness, or more accurately the futile and failing pursuit of happiness?

In all likelihood during this potentially irreparable plastic bonanza, we simply didn't ask "Why?"

This brings us to the premise in question: humans are exceptional. That's the reason we never stopped to wonder whether we ought to keep paving, or whether we ought to break ground on a new EVA or PVC production plant, or whether we ought to clad the kiddos in knockoff Jordans. We are the supreme beings. We do these things because we can. Those other apes can chew bamboo, check out my Sketchers Safari boots. Yup, 40% off on Black Friday.

That was rough. Before we end up neck-deep in acidic analyses like these, let me assure you, I am guilty of all of the crimes of consumerism mentioned above. This is not a criticism of the Other, it is an examination of the Self we share. I'm looking at my worn old sneaks now. They're too small, hurt to walk in, the foam is all but flattened, and the outsole has pretty well worn off. But they have more miles to go than I'll ever know. What do I do with these? How can I take it easy on the kicks?

A Tenet of Easeness: Humans are acceptable.

Meanwhile, in many parts of the world, there are folks who have walked a lifetime of steps with nary a mile in thousand-year shoes like mine. They operate on a different premise, one not nearly as hyperbolic as the exceptionalism that would dwarf the Andes with Air Jordan Mountains and pave the Amazon River to bring 2-day delivery to the last bastion of nature's chaotic wickedness. They will admit that humans are acceptable and sacred, and nothing more, just like every child of Gaia.

These of Earth's children also tend to their tender soles without forgetting to tend better still to our tender souls. Their brave young glide through the trees shod in the generous hide of a fallen four-footed friend, a joy we in the technocracy encounter in mangled echoes as we dart through traffic to slip into grippy Vibram at the rock gym.

While we are sitting in a national timeout, we continue to ease up on the gas, ease back on the kicks, and return to the Source for shoe tips. The Source would have us outlive our shoes. We would know their origin, care for them as they care for us, and when they have put in their paces, we would dedicate them as food for another being, another process.

So far only the most sovereign cobblers have begun to operate thusly and to encourage their shodden followers to trot along. Pioneers like 

 in Ethiopia ensure that all their cobbling materials come from sustainable sources: recycled tires for rubber soles, organic cotton liners, free-range leather uppers, integrated with plant-based fibers like jute and koba.

These are nascent days for the conscious footwear movement. Pioneers like 

Vivo Barefoot who offer an array of vegan shoes

 strive to convert reclaimed and recycled materials into fashionable, functional shoes. But the path to responsible footwear is fraught with the pitfalls of capitalism and shrouded in the mists of 

 deception. How might we avoid the ethical quicksand when 

 (which has upwards of a 700-year life span)?

When you see this logo, you know we kind of tried.

Even Nike offers a glamourless afterthought in this direction with their 

 greenwashing campaign. At least they impliedly (but not culpably) admit just how far there is to go. Peep 

: "Made out of 50% recycled materials, Nike's new VaporMax sneakers are the brand's most 

 shoe to date and are leading the way forward to the brands [sic] Move to Zero 

There must be a way out of this downward spiral. Before plastic lines the ocean floor. Before we wrap the skies in cellophane. Before cell towers outnumber the trees.

Before the recent pandemic, before we inhabited the 

, before "lockdown" was a word, I was certain we were irrevocably circling the drain, stuck in this vicious maelstrom of technology as magic, capitalism as order, power as control, science as religion, ideology as faith, and identity as self. Now though we have had a glimpse of hope. Last spring we saw the skies clear and nature resume after only a few weeks of stillness. We can steer the ship up and out of this cataclysmic whirlpool. The question left is "Will we?"

If we scan the quote-unquote leaders of quote-unquote civilization for clues as to whether we are likely to crash and burn or sail and soar, we may find ourselves discouraged. The techno-plutocrats would have us automate everything we can until a handful of oligarchs own the world's resources. Following their lead, we'll grow faceless meat in Ziploc bags and stock every town in the world with Oreos that taste like anything. They would have us cataloging, categorizing, commoditizing, controlling, and consuming every last speck of nature, converting Chaos to Order wholesale.

Amazon Priming a hot iPhone case we saw on Insta while our Tesla Model 3 drives us to Costco. Meanwhile, as the techno-plutocrats amass fortunes, they pour their resources into spaceships, colonies on Mars, and refuges on Aotearoa (New Zealand), in Alaska, and even in abandoned missile silos. Their silicon server farms running on cheap wind power replace carbon food farms, crunching data for the AIs that already can predict our decisions before we even become aware of them.  How exceptional can we be if we are also mechanically predictable?

In January of 2020, before the intense condensation of wealth that occurred during the pandemic (or 

what those in Davos referred to as the Great Reset

twenty-six billionaires possessed the wealth of the poorer half of humanity

. The distribution of wealth is likely to be more polarized by now, the summer solstice of 2021. Do these twenty-six, or these 2,153 billionaires who could outspend sixty percent of humanity, do they represent us?

Can the wealthiest few channel what we need, what we want, what we know, and what we love well enough to warrant the resounding economic trust we place in them? Surely not. Then why do we go on allowing them such outsized votes? How might we balance the scales?

The poorer half of humanity numbers nearly four billion.  Privation like theirs hardly leaves room for idealism, for dreams.  But with a tiny, subtle shift in many, many minds and hearts, we may be able to make space for dreams.  We may be able to begin to balance the scales.

The trick is not to attempt to take money from the ultra-rich and give it to the poor but to give them something more valuable than money, or rather to remind ourselves that we will receive all we need when we share our gifts freely. The gift I refer to is an old story, an ancient way of life, one we have all but forgotten in these modern times. When we set ourselves apart as exceptions to nature—when we see humans as exceptional—we forget that life is a gift, that the sun freely gives us nearly all the energy we experience or wield, that the food we eat is a gift, that the air we breathe is a gift.

Instead, to validate our separate, exceptional human status, we must justify ourselves as deserving of these gifts, as having somehow earned them. To this fallacious end, we commoditize and quantify the gifts of nature in a vain attempt to settle the score.

Ceteris paribus, my contributions to society last week were valued at more than 666 

. I'm not sure what this means for my self-esteem or my career trajectory.

To have any hope of escaping the maelstrom, we need a critical mass of the passengers on the H.M.S. Monetization to realize that we can find shelter and abundance as we return to 

 of Nature into which we were all born.  This is a major shift for any one of us, and a profound, epochal shift for civilization.  In my short lifetime, I have seen us transition from information scarcity to information abundance, the impact of which has been gargantuan.  Extending this transition from scarcity to abundance to our economic systems will reshape society from the inside outward and the outside inward all at once.

I live in a petri dish of iconoclastic ease and quasi-frugality

In 2015 I made a dramatic commitment to this shift in my own life. I quit my salaried career, gave up my urban apartment, gave away my furniture and belongings, and hit the road with three bags on a motorcycle to reboot myself on abundant firmware.  Six years later I am still stabilizing my new operating system and establishing a reliable, low-latency, high-trust network.  I'm still wrapping my head around what my heart knows wordlessly, innately, and completely.

And as I struggle to interface with the tribes of civilization that still cling tightly to the story of separation and scarcity, I realize even more fundamentally that we are all doing our best to understand who we are and how we got here. We are ignorant by nature and hopelessly fallible, but we mean well, I mean, we love Love.  Yes, even me, trotting hypocritically around town in my new sneakers while writing this piece. (They're for research. That's why I have so many.)  Yes, humans are acceptable.  And acceptance is the first step on the path to Easeness.

Humans Are Exceptional: A Business Premise

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About Easeness

Contact Easeness

The Three Legs of Easeness

The Tenets of Easeness

It's the System we all know and perhaps secretly endorse or despise.

-industrial-complex staffed with economic slaves and actual slaves of the 

 assembled into the hierarchical pyramids of personnel in 

 that amount to headless volcanoes of commodified technology and heartless lava floes of world-destroying 

Easeness.

Unpacking COMPACT Culture

What is COMPACT Culture?

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Plan Better through Intentional, Ritual Play

Humans Are Exceptional: A Business Premise