Michael Mervosh - Invest in Yourself (EP.402)

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2:32Hello, I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access premium content at CapitalAllocators.com.

3:21It's an edited replay of a conversation with Michael Mervosch, the executive director of the Hero's Journey Foundation. Michael created the Hero's Journey Foundation to provide experiential opportunities for human development and transformation based on Joseph Campbell's mythic Hero's Journey. A few weeks ago, I received a FaceTime call from Michael at the tail end of his annual men's journey. He was joined by someone I didn't know, who had listened to the podcast six years ago and planted a seed that sprouted at his participation this year. He's also a recently retired partner of 20 years from a very well-regarded multi-billion dollar equity manager.

4:03His ear-to-ear grin and expression of thanks led me to share this again in case you find the call to adventure at a future moment in your life. And if you feel the call right now, the Hero's Journey Fall Immersion Program will take place in a few weeks from September 19th to 22nd. You can learn more by visiting heroesjourneyfoundation.org. My conversation with Michael took place in the mountains of West Virginia for the end of a hero's journey. We discussed the program, how Michael came to create it, and lessons across perfectionism, uncertainty, and fear. Before we get going, here's a shout out to all the investor relations and business development professionals.

4:46Your role is one of the toughest in the industry, because unlike in many other industries, the functions of marketing, sales, and customer relations rarely drive purchase decisions and investing. It's often hard to know how to move the ball forward when allocators are busy and opaque about their process. So we decided to create a Capital Allocators University experience just for you. On December 3rd and 4th in New York City, I'll be joined by your peer and superstar Rahul Mutgal, branding expert Jen Procek, founder of Procek Partners, conference wizard Ron Biscardi, founder of iConnections, and investment leaders Sarah Samuels from NEPC, Dave Moorhead from Baylor, and Shannon O 'Leary from St.

5:33Paul and Minnesota Foundation. to help you learn best practices for understanding allocators, developing relationships with investors, and building a brand through workshops and peer discussions. You can learn more and sign up to join us at capitalallocators.com slash university. Thanks so much for spreading the word about our newest Capital Allocators University course for investor relations and business development professionals. Please enjoy my conversation with Michael Mervosch. Michael, we are in the mountains of West Virginia in the late innings of another Bureau's Journey. Why don't you describe what it is, this journey we're on here this week?

6:20Right now, we're on a mountaintop in a remote setting in the middle of a national forest in West Virginia in the United States. and we are up here to take leave of our minds really and the fabric of our culture that's shaping us every day into who we are to be. And we're spending seven days or one lifetime or eternity, whatever comes first up here to undo the things that are called unquestioned assumptions about what is unquestioned and unexamined assumptions and expectations about how we believe life to be. What we do is we come up here and we go into a giant reflecting mirror called the natural world where we have wide open skies, vast, vast horizons up over that high plains area over there.

7:12We have deep green forest fields to get lost in over here. We have cave systems underground here where there's these underwater currents flowing underneath us right now that no one can see or touch or feel that are shaping us right now. And so we come up into this nature bowl and we soak in that to get out of the limitations of four walls and we bring the background forward. We're in a Mongolian yurt built by Bill Copperth's way in 1970 that people are still amazed by. And so you come up here and you enter into a living myth because where can you actually live it? Because most people will read about it and can discuss it.

7:50But where do you say, I am going to leave everything I know behind. And then I'm going to undo this next. And now I'm going to deal with what happens when none of that is here defining me anymore. And now I will define me, but I don't know how that goes. And now there are no instructions and the prescriptions are all gone. And that's the reorientation process towards mythic worlds where your ability to be right here, right now, or to animate something that starts to take over and then you got to pay attention to it. And then you have to yield. Great hero act of our times is to surrender to something beyond ourselves that starts to seep into us.

8:35These water droplets that we are, oceans start to swim in us when we yield to the ocean. So we use elements. We use different things to take us up in the air and under the ground and into the forests and around fires and all kinds of things to exchange on a body level, something else that gets animated. My experience here on the mountain was truly transformative for my life. And I know it has been for the men that I've been here with. And I wondered if it made sense to share a little bit about that. I'm not quite sure how to go about it, but why don't we dive in? Yeah, I think that's the way in just like that is to say, I don't know how this goes or how to share this or where we can go, but that's in the spirit of the journey.

9:19You use two words, truly transformative. And maybe we start there like what's really true. I think these universal truths about the way the world really is or how it works in this world. I think the biggest suffering that I saw, you know, the deep wound a lot of us carry is nobody showed us how the world works. Do you show me or do you do it for me? Does that work? Not unlike the priests with access to God. Do you show me God or do you talk to him for me or do you barter it or broker it? One of my favorite Campbell quotes is if you want to help this world show people how to live in it. There's so much shame when we don't know how.

10:09I can't tell you how you come alive inside, but I can create conditions that allows me to come alive and maybe others to come alive. I can't tell you how to get that raincoat off of you, but I can get a sun beating on you maybe pretty hard. I can't make you take the raincoat off. I can't make you want to reveal what's under there, but I can turn up some heat to make you want to take your shirt off. It's that kind of thing. We need the right conditions, but no one ever shows us how to, I think. And part of what we do is show people how. What is it that brings someone here? That's the call, right?

10:46To an adventure, right? Someone, you hear a call, something sticks. And it's been really humbling to look around here with men that are here. They're all ones I'd have never figured. They do not look the part. They do not look like someone who would sign up for something like this. Yeah. Present company included. They don't look like it. They either look like the guys I grew up with, the guys I worked in the mill with, the guys you would have walked down Wall Street with who are humming a different tune, like an anthem, a legion to it and shaped by it. And it shapes their reality. And it's this self-closed loop.

11:27You don't do anything about that. You just wait for the trouble to come because it always comes. Does someone have to have that, I had a rough patch? Does it have to happen that way? It doesn't have to be like that, but trouble always comes. People, I think, come through one or two doorways. Everything fails or everything works. Both ways get you there. This term currency is an interesting term to me. What it means to have currency. What does it mean to be current? Any kind of valuable currency is the ability to exchange it, not to collect it. When we have a lively, a life-giving exchange, it holds value to the two of us.

12:08And when we turn it into a thing, when we objectify a currency, it becomes this static thing. You have a false idol, it rigidifies and it's dulled, it has no life in it. In the end, it becomes the final danger. Now you've accumulated great wealth. Well, I guess now you better start protecting it and separating yourself off from the rest of everybody else. They don't take it from you. And now begin the suffering. What's wrong with accumulation of anything? Wealth, status, success. It's great. Enjoy it. Now when you cling to it, you're starved and you're on a survival mode. Here's this interesting comparison about where the Christian Bible has evolved.

12:49That's what Campbell said. These myths are alive in all cultures and all times. Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Well, man, that's a fairy tale for children. Ask. First of all, ask. Ask what? And ask when you really need help. How hard it is to ask, number one. When you ask, you don't receive. You don't just get the answer. So ask and you shall receive. No. Seek and you shall find. No. Knock and the door should be opened to you. No. Ask and be troubled. Seek and get lost in the seeking. knock and feel the barrier knock against the barrier and where do you go from there so in the upanishads would say the trouble that's worth it so that you evolve and grow and learn how and find out how it works not to get to the end to get into it by the end be fully in this world before you leave it and then in that the boon is underneath the ordeal and you get an adventure and you get an ordeal and they overlap.

14:06One becomes the other. So then something rises out of that mix is where God is. Then ask and then you receive beyond what you ask for. Then you seek and in how lost and disoriented you are, you find a new orientation. And when you knock, you can get through the barrier and at the belly of the beast where you feel like there's no way through. It's not the way you were looking. The forest finds you and something opens beyond what you could see before. What is a boon? A boon is the gift you receive from the world beyond your wildest ability to imagine. It's beyond your comprehension. It's the thing waiting for you that you can't even conceive of yet that would like to come through if only it were allowed.

14:53So the boon is for the boy has been that deep longing, your deepest Christmas wish. And it's something that only you can have. It can be for no one else. It can only be for you. And it can't be for you because you wish for it. It has to be more and other than that. It can't just be your ego's desire. That's just a win. And the winning makes you small when you win like that. The boon is something that you're given and you feel bestowed. You feel like it's been bestowed on you and you're like, wow, you feel and worthy of it as you should. You don't know if you're up for it. You don't even know if you can digest it.

15:32It's beyond what you imagine possible, a love, a way of life, a wonder. How did you create this experience called the hero's journey? I used to think I was steering and I steered my life exactly how I was trained to steer. I learned how to drive well. I know how to take hold of the wheel. I know how to take charge of the gas pedal, and I knew how to drive it into the ditch. Or actually, the car took itself there with the ways the culture shaped me and taught me, if you follow this way of life and you do exactly how we train you, and you follow the commandments, and you obey the rules, and you climb this ladder, you will enter the kingdom of something and get your due.

16:20I, like many, many people, bought in fully and I played that game. I looked to be good at it. And one day in my late twenties, and then again in my early thirties, I realized the prescription does not work and it all fell down and the wheel came off. What happened for you when the wheels came off? When marriage failed and it wasn't like the fairy tale. You can do all the right things and you can love one another even, that doesn't mean it works. And I started to buy in and feel like, oh shit, I'm a failure. Because if you don't follow the rules and it doesn't work, then you failed and then you try harder.

17:00I was fortunate enough to slip through into another way and have opportunities conspire to show me there's a world beyond right and wrong, good or bad, you and me. Which opportunity stands out for you? What happened was as I went into interior spaces, I didn't know were in me. I didn't know they were there. I had a glass ceiling in my life. I didn't know that that was a glass ceiling. I didn't know they were doorways. I just thought that was the four walls of the world. And it opened up a whole new world. I cried so hard, you know, my insides turned inside. I laughed so hard. I thought my eyes would explode.

17:39My cheeks hurt. So that it It opened me to magic and wonder. It took a long time for that other world to come foreground in a way that said that's as real as anything. It's as real as going into Walmart or more real than what I watch people do every day. They call that for a living. For a living? They don't look alive to me. Then the next thing, these are all things that happen. I'm reading a man by the name of Joseph Campbell. And it was like one of those things where the words jumped off the page. I wasn't just reading on flat paper, but something was being transmitted. And what I was reading, and I remember this one time we're reading, there's this thing called the zeal of eternity that longs for incarnation in space and time.

18:34I'm like, what does that mean? like what that makes no sense like the zeal my body and something in my psyche is animating the zeal of eternity for incarnation in time i didn't know that was my job description i never knew that but now i know this is my job description that's what i do for a living i do that for aliveness to become the zeal of eternity the way something just has this passionate zeal that lives outside of time that wants to incarnate into one thing it doesn't have, which is form. And so that started it. And I got a hole in, that took me down like, who's this Campbell dude? Another rabbit hole, another facet on the diamond, ropes, courses, family systems, theory, religion, all these different variables, rehabilitation.

19:25What the hell does that mean? What was the call for you that led to the creation of what we're experiencing here? Well, a call always comes when something's missing. You have to be deprived of something. Something has to be absent or undeveloped, and the part of you that's awake and aware knows it. That part of you knows something's missing. That was making me want it to seek out of the absence of what was there. So I just always felt like I was seeking and longing for something I knew was missing. And that's the compass heading. What came through that was a vision quest with Joseph Jostrom in 1992, whatever it was that I did it.

20:12And that seeded it, of course, because I did a journey to get away from everything enough to know not to be shaped by forces around me what to do, but to really feel what that ignited in me and to find what was really alive for me that would be worth doing. I think a lot of the listeners on this show are a certain personality type in those four walls. Type A, high achieving, financial, we know the model. I'd love to have you take me through some of the common aspects of that personality type and just share with me what comes to your mind when I mention these things. So the first is a highly self-confident, know-it-all type person.

20:55A fool. Fool's a certain of everything. What makes a fool a fool is you don't know that you're one. And you can't make use of it. And the biggest fools are the smartest people, the brightest bulb in the room, who are seduced by their own minds into a belief that they know. And they know more than others. And they know better than others. and it's a really useful tool because they have cool things you get. You get things like money and power and status and prestige. Those are deep allures. But, you know, on the hero's journey myth, if we look at it through that terrain and that map, it's an interesting thing about the boon.

21:36The boon you get is commensurate to the consciousness you have at the time you're gifted with something. so if I'm awake this much and you say hey man I got a genie I'm gonna let it out of the bottle and I'm gonna give you one wish what do you want and someone's going to say I want a beautiful woman okay now here's a beautiful woman and you got your bone and now the trouble begins with that And now, you know what I want? I want status. I want to be rich. Oh, fucking A when I'm rich. Let's give you all the money you could ever spend. That's your boon. And you get the trouble that comes with that because it's coming.

22:25So what do you really want? And what else is there to want besides any of those things? And what do you do with it when you get it? So the fool, back to where you asked me, won't see the trouble coming. Won't know what the trouble actually is. and everything will eventually burn down. How about perfectionism? I just had a conversation with probably one of the smartest people I ever met in my life. This little punk is 24 and he's way, way, way smarter than me. He's got an intellect and a wit that just makes me want to drop my jaw and he suffers from perfectionism. The reason we suffer is because he's after something that doesn't exist in nature.

23:07So it doesn't exist. An ideal is something that you strive for, but it just has no landing. We seek perfection like it's a destination. And it doesn't exist, but we don't know that. So we jitify ourselves and we point ourselves like a rigid arrow aiming for something in a linear world. And we go along a timeline or a path or a ladder and we climb. And usually that's when the crisis happens. Uncertainty. We're dealing with uncertainty. Oh, again, same thing. Put it in the same category as trouble. What are you supposed to do with it? Relate to it or conquer it? Which one do you want to do? You want to conquer?

23:45Okay. Get to work, man. You're going to be busy and tired and bitter. But the work of the hero is to embrace a relationship to uncertainty, to understand that the more you grow your capacity for uncertainty and complexity, the more you have ability to navigate terrains in whole new ways when the uncertainty is a doorway, not a problem to be eliminated, which is again, this unconscious wedding to an impossible task. What about dealing with fear? I think the hardest thing about fear is when you don't understand that you're afraid. You're scared and you don't even know. I remember when I didn't even know I was afraid.

24:23I didn't know what fear really was. but you know, this lack of oxygen moving through the body for one thing, this constriction in us and this tightness, this holding on, but I didn't know it was a doorway. And I remember being up on a catwalk and I remember how afraid I was about being afraid. I remember starting to shake and I was ashamed and afraid. And then I realized, I mean, I am really afraid right now, but I wasn't afraid about it anymore. And I wasn't ashamed of it. I was just like really afraid. Like, yeah, well, you're high in the air. So you're afraid. and I didn't have some impossible task in mind anymore.

24:59And I could finally have fear live in me and not be contained in me, eating at me, or it could move through me. It's the ability to have things like any emotion move through and not just shut down or spit out. If you're on a journey and you're any kind of man on it, you pick a fear you're worthy of. And what you want is a fear that can take you somewhere. Again, the trouble is trying to get rid of trouble because he can't do it. But so much of our easy, prescriptive four steps to this, they're beautiful lies, beautiful, seductive. Or they give you a boon that's way down here, way low on the scale.

25:43But when you choose a fear that you're worthy of and you really get one you're worthy of, it takes you somewhere. It takes you on a journey that you would have never chosen to go on. And before you know it, you have trouble worth having. You have a challenge worth facing. You have a dilemma worth wrestling with that makes you more and brings something out of you that you didn't even know was in you. That's the function of fear. And when that happens, as you know, in your own body from your own lived experiences here, that fear turns to excitement. That's the alchemical force that fear is really unprocessed and unformulated excitement.

26:29Some of the things we do here, you talk a lot about the power of the we as opposed to the I. Yeah. You listen to guys here say over and over, I feel inadequate. I feel uncertain. I feel doubt. I has all those feelings all the time. And I am always going to feel inadequate. We're always inadequate because we're shooting for perfection because we reject ordinary worlds. We don't know how to be in them and among them. We don't know how to have a base of good enough. So when I have this I, what I don't know is the I will always, always be inadequate because I is just part of something larger than I cut off from the whole.

27:14And that's the great big myth in my opinion and many others who pursue this path of understanding. it's the great lie of a western white civilized world that there actually is an I called my body here because I live in a house that gives me a lot of privacy with small windows and shutters to blind everything that makes me feel that who I am is something cut off from everybody and everything else and it's out there and I exchange with that but the sense of we when I feel who I am beyond I, as I as a part of a relational field, who I am is who I am through this way of talking and looking at you right now and feeling you.

27:58Who I am is myself through that. This is me through our exchange. I'm becoming myself again in a new way right now. I feel like me with you. That's a dynamic living I. And that's what happens here on this journey. It gives me a sense of I. What's the myth of the hero? Well, the myth of the hero used to be to become more and more a superpower. This idea that you become larger than life and you stand among the others as an example for others to follow. And that's been a real popular myth. But as culture changes, it reshapes the myth it needs for itself. So then it creates a new myth, which is still arriving in our times.

28:43we're not there because there's no more one person that can be the hero. But the hero, I would say, is someone who's always called into unknowing, not not knowing, but an unknowing, always called beyond the bounds, the rigidifying bounds of the familiar. And what a hero does is it goes beyond the established parameters of the way the world actually is now and experiences what's beyond that world and then brings that back into this world in order to reshape it and renew it and redefine the culture which then reshapes the people in it. The heroic task is facing what is and not trying to change what is.