20 Who Do You Think You Are?
question. I’ve been meditating now for over 30 years and by persuasion,
I am probably a Taoist or a Zen practitioner. I don’t ask these kinds of
questions and expect unpretentious answers. From what I’ve learned in
our conversations with some of the world’s most enduringly successful
people, from Nobel Prize Laureates to billionaires, poets and artists,
former US presidents and heads of state, together with people many of
us have never heard of⎯people who are changing the world for the
better⎯they don’t ask themselves questions like this either.
If you ask them what they think it’s all about, they’ve pretty much
come to the conclusion that as you mature emotionally and mentally,
you move from self-obsession and the expectation that life should serve
you, to, as Senator John McCain told us, “being committed to a cause
greater than oneself” and the realization that at the end of the day we are
here to serve life.
What events or series of events led to your discovery?
The short story is that I was born to artist parents of very modest
means. My father left after I was conceived and went off to serve in the
Second World War. He was wounded and came back and passed away.
Our home in the Blue Mountains of Australia was an isolated cabin con-
structed of gasoline cans filled with clay topped with a tin roof and basi-
cally without indoor plumbing. My father used to go there to paint wa-
tercolor landscapes. That’s where I lived for the first 12 years of my life.
Needless to say, it was pretty unpretentious.
I studied philosophy, psychology and economics at the Univer-
sity of Sydney. I taught design at the University of South Wales School
of Architecture and along with a couple of very talented friends ran Honi
Soit, the student newspaper of the University of Sydney.
I went from there to become highly successful in Australia as an
advertising photographer and cinematographer and ultimately one of the
creative directors of one of the largest ad agencies in the world. I was
accountable for the look and feel of their television advertising and bring-
ing it to creative acclaim. I woke up one day and realized I had solved
the problem of being poor and had enough stuff to start my own world,
but it hadn’t made much difference as to how I felt on the inside. I still
felt like the lonely little kid growing up in the Blue Mountains.
I had gotten to be pretty famous in a relatively small fishpond.
Then one day I saw an issue of Look Magazine, edited by George Leonard,
devoted to what was going on in California in the late 60s. By way of