The Surrender Experiment summary

You wake up, take one look out the window and your mood instantly sinks as you see a grim, gray day outside. You think, “How can this weather affect me so much?” and “Why does it always happen on a day when I have to be out and about?” Well, you can blame your resistance for feeling this way, because railing against things you can’t change – like the weather – leads to that anxious mind chatter. And you probably experience the same resistant thoughts about many other things, too.

So what makes us think in this nervous or irritated way? The answer lies in our personal preferences.

Do you recall a time when a friend asked you to look after their cat over the holidays and you refused because you felt you already had enough on your plate? Well, perhaps next time you should agree to it. Why?

Surrendering to service, rather than resisting other people’s requests, led the author from being a hermit to becoming a teacher and spiritual leader.

Oftentimes people assign meditation and spirituality exclusively to those who want to abandon the material world. But as the author discovered, spiritual principles can be just as life-changing to a business person as a spiritual guru or a monk.

In fact, living in line with his spiritual principles was what led the author to his first business.

It’s hard to believe that fewer than 40 years ago, computers were a futuristic novelty. When the author first saw a plastic keyboard attached to a 12-inch TV screen with a sign reading TRS-80-COMPUTER in a shop window, he could barely comprehend what he was looking at.

However, he had a hunch it would be useful to him, so he followed his instinct, bought the newfangled machine, and entered the rising world of computers and software.

Imagine if the phone rang every time you had a problem and on the other end of the line was just the answer you’d been looking for. Well, life often works like this and has curious ways of giving us exactly what we need.

In the author’s case, his company’s first big commercial job came from a woman who was an extremely demanding customer, frequently requesting changes and imposing hard-to-meet deadlines. But, rather than throwing in the towel, the author pushed on with the job and was paid $35,000 for his work. It really started to pay off when one of his neighbors called him a week later to announce that she was moving and was willing to sell her land to the author’s spiritual center for $37,000.

If you were offered a $300 million business, what would you do? Perhaps you’d be so dazzled by the cash that you’d be blind to the responsibility and complications that came with it. The truth is, experiencing massive success often means accepting that you’ll need to work very hard to maintain it.

In 1985, as more and more medical practices introduced computers, it dawned on the author that the next step for his medical billing software would be to replace paper billing with electronic billing. But this of course meant more work. Fortunately, he had the help of Larry Horwitz, who combed through each of the 250 specification books from the insurance companies and packaged them all into one program, Medical Manager. Thanks to Horwitz, Medical Manager became the forerunning product in its field.

When life serves up a million-dollar business, a perfect house or a wonderful partner, going with the flow is a cinch! But what if life offers you a prison sentence?

When life gets tough, learning to surrender and accept are essential to keeping your sanity.