The Surrender Experiment: My Journey Into Life's Perfection
The Surrender Experiment is one of the most fantastic biographies I’ve ever read.
Mickey Singer was a pretty typical late-60s dude, a grad student in economics in Florida with the usual grad student problems. One day, hanging out with some friends, he noticed that there was this annoying voice in his head that was just spilling out an unending stream of gibberish, and wouldn’t SHUT UP. Like a lot of people at the time, he decided to try meditation, starting with The Three Pillars of Zen and Autobiography of a Yogi. Uncommonly, he stuck with it.
Very soon, meditation was the only thing Singer gave a damn about. His wife divorced him and he came to the very brink of dropping out of his grad program. In these early years he made a vow to surrender absolutely to what life brought him. If opposition to something was a matter of fear or personal preference, he’d breathe, meditate, and just do it. Everything that follows came from that vow.
A few chance encounters set Mickey’s early trajectory. He had enough money to buy a plot of land on the outskirts of Gainesville and build a simple house, and his plan was to meditate in the woods forever. He also had enough credibility with the econ department that he was given a job tutoring another student, a banker who had been appointed as President of a new community college and needed a PhD ASAP to be able to fill the slot. From his mentee, he got a one class a semester gig teaching whatever was on his mind: meditation, enlightenment, unity. This was exactly what 70s college students were interested in. Very soon, his isolated cabin in the woods turned into a bonafide spiritual center, hosting weekly gatherings and tours of famous yogis from India.
Material matters also kept up. His cabin and various other buildings made for his friends turned into a genuine hippie contracting firm, Built With Love. And then in the late 1970s, he saw a TRS-80 at Radioshack, and fell in love. In a few years, he had another business, Personalized Programming. When two clients asked for an electronic medical record software and he couldn’t find anything good on the market, he decided to write it himself.
That software, Medical Manager, turned into one of the premier electronic medical record systems, handling scheduling and billing as well. It grew into a large company, with hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. In the 1990s, it merged with several other companies, including WebMD, and when the dust of the dotcom crash settled, was the core of the business because it was the only thing which had cashflow rather than hype. And throughout becoming a tech executive, Singer kept his lifestyle, living in a spiritual community, meditating for several hours each day, and basically being a ponytailed hippie.
Which was important, because between 2006 and 2012, WebMD and its entire executive staff were embroiled in a massive legal fiasco. A lower level employee had been taking kickbacks from doctors, and in an effort to save his hide, went to the government as a whistle-blower alleging the entire company was involved in this corruption. The FBI and DOJ went through everything, a multiyear white-collar crime case that ended with the Feds dropping the charges first against all the ancillary defendants, then against Singer, and while two executives were convicted, the judge overturned the conviction because the statute of limitations had run out. Singer decided to take the time to retire and write some books, including this one.
Part of me is absolutely impressed at the dedication to the experiment, and to meditating as someone who can do so for about 45 seconds. Maybe I’m fighting my own life too hard. And another part of me is like “Ok boomer”, because it’s absolutely impossible that anyone these days could bounce around in a VW van for years, become a spiritual guru, and then a business-owner and major executive, without having to do a bunch of shady #hustle bullshit.