فصل 32

Section V

Something Priceless Is Born

32

From the Personal Self to the Personal Computer

It was in the fall of 1978 when, without a clue, an event took place that changed everything once again. It is so inspiring to look back and see how a handful of moments in your life define your destiny. What if life had not presented those moments to you, or if you had interacted with them differently? Over time, everything would be different.

I thought I knew what was being asked of me by then: run Built with Love to the best of my ability, and use the funds to support the beautiful work being done through the Temple. As usual, I was wrong, very wrong. What life had in store for me was much grander in both size and scope. How could I ever have imagined that I would end up running a $300-million-a-year computer software company, with twenty-three hundred people reporting to me, all without leaving the woods of Alachua or putting aside my spiritual pursuits? How could the flow of life’s events pull that off, especially since I had never even touched a computer in my life and was totally content with my finances? As I sit here today, if I were forced to answer that question, I would utter the word surrender. My experiment with surrender had taught me to always be present in the current moment and do my best to not allow my personal preferences to make decisions for me. Instead, I allowed the reality of life to determine where I was going. It had certainly led me on a fantastic journey up to that point, and it was about to do something phenomenal with the next thirty years of my life. If you would like to know how these phenomenal events unfolded in a perfectly choreographed sequence, I would be very honored to share the story with you.

It all began one uneventful day when I walked into a neighborhood Radio Shack store to pick up something for Built with Love. On my way out, I noticed what appeared to be a plastic typewriter keyboard attached to a twelve-inch TV screen. The two items had a TRS-80 COMPUTER sign displayed above them. As fate would have it, I had just encountered one of the first personal computers on the market. Being a curious person, I walked up to the display and punched a few keys. As if by magic, the keys I touched appeared on the monitor above. I had never experienced that in my life. I had only taken an introduction to computers course in college, and everything we did was on punch cards. We were never allowed to go near the workstations that were actually connected to the computer itself.

I was absolutely fascinated by this Radio Shack device. It opened something inside of me that can only be described as love at first sight. I stood there playing with the machine for a long time. I marveled at typing in simple and complex math computations and seeing the results pop up. I finally tore myself away from the display, but I knew I’d be back. From the first time I touched that machine, there was an inner calling from the deepest recesses of my being. I had no choice but to surrender to that calling. When I returned to the Radio Shack store a few days later to lay out $600 for their best computer, I really had no idea what I was going to do with the thing when I got it home. I just knew I was meant to have it.

My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I with just 16k of memory, a twelve-inch monitor, and a standard cassette recorder for storage. That was all that was available at the time. It came with a simple user’s manual for the BASIC programming language, and that was about it—you were pretty much on your own.

When I got the computer home, I buried myself in learning the programming commands and seeing what they could do. For some reason, everything was so natural to me. It wasn’t like I was learning something new; it was like I was remembering something I had always known. My mind became very quiet the moment I sat down at the machine. It was very much like entering meditation. The energy would rise up and focus beautifully at the point between my eyebrows, and a peace would come over me. Apparently, I was meant to be working with this computer. I didn’t question it—I just continued to surrender to what was happening.

Before the computer showed up, I already had two full-time jobs: Temple of the Universe and Built with Love. To find time for my new computer, I began to go back to work after evening services. I would often work into the wee hours of the morning, getting only three or four hours of sleep before rising for morning services. I was so passionately inspired while working with the computer that I didn’t get tired. It was clear to me even then that something very special was going on.

I played around writing some programs just to get a feel for what the thing could do. Within a few weeks I decided that I was ready to write a real program. The first task I gave myself was to write a computerized accounting system for Built with Love. I had to teach myself everything. The salespeople at the Radio Shack store knew nothing about programming, and I didn’t know anyone else to talk to. I just used trial and error as my teacher.

Once I had completed Built with Love’s accounting system, things progressed very rapidly with my programming. I had made friends with the manager of the Radio Shack store, and whenever I went in I would show him printouts of the work I had done. He was impressed with what I had gotten the machine to do and began asking if he could refer some clients to me. To my surprise, he ended up sending me people who wanted programs written. All of a sudden, I had a new business. As unbelievable as it seems, this humble beginning was the birth of what was to become Personalized Programming, a nationwide, multimillion-dollar software company.

As with everything else in my life since I decided to follow the flow, Personalized Programming just started itself. There were no meetings, business plans, or venture capitalists. Just as with the Temple of the Universe and Built with Love, I simply accepted the challenge of serving the energy that came my way. I never left the woods; all of this came to me unasked for and unwanted. Fortunately, I really loved helping people. I didn’t care if they were coming to me to learn how to still that voice in their head, to build them a house, or to write them a program—it was all the same to me. I passionately loved programming, and I loved getting to use that talent to help people.

At first the jobs were small, and I had no idea what to charge for them. I wrote a grading program for a University of Florida professor for $300. I was such a perfectionist that I just kept making it better and better before I was willing to give it to him. From the very beginning of my programming career, my heart demanded that every line of code had to be the absolute best I could do. It didn’t matter what I was being paid; everything had to be perfect.

During 1979, I began spending more and more time sitting in a room programming by myself. When the manager at Radio Shack asked if he could refer his customers to me, I had no idea what to expect. I started getting calls from Radio Shack stores all around Gainesville and from stores as far away as Jacksonville. Soon I was getting more requests than I could handle. Being schooled in economics and understanding the law of supply and demand, I began raising my prices. It didn’t help; the jobs just kept on coming. Around that time, I began noticing that every job seemed perfectly sequenced to advance me to the next level in my programming career. Though I was sitting in the woods working alone, let there be no doubt about it, life was turning me into a professional programmer.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that writing custom software took a lot of time, and I was better off selling available software to satisfy my client’s needs. I became a dealer of one of the top accounting software packages sold by a company called Systems Plus in California. I don’t recall how I selected that particular software, but as I look back now, it must have been an inspired decision—I ended up having some serious destiny with that company.

By late 1979, I was doing more and more work selling the accounting package and the related hardware and support. I took such good care of my clients that even Systems Plus began referring customers to me. Just as I had learned all my programming skills through the jobs that came to me, so these new jobs were teaching me how to analyze, implement, and support the computerization of various-sized businesses.

Word spread like wildfire, and the demand for my products and services kept increasing. Between references from Systems Plus, Radio Shack, and my existing clients, I started getting requests from businesses scattered across the state. But I was only one person, and I was very committed to attending morning and evening services at the Temple. To avoid overnight business trips, I just let those opportunities go and fully surrendered to putting my spiritual practices first. I would have gone on like that, but then James showed up.

James Pierson was a very sincere seeker who had just moved into one of the houses on Temple property. As perfection would have it, James had a pilot’s license. One day he overheard me discussing my inability to take on out-of-town clients, and he offered to fly me around. If we rented a small, single-engine plane for the trips, James’s rates were more than reasonable. We began to do day trips to the out-of-town clients who were willing to pay a premium for my services. These tended to be upscale businesses, like a client in West Palm who brokered private jets. With life as my teacher, little by little this non-suit-wearing hippie from the woods of Alachua was learning to deal professionally with successful businesspeople. My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself—because it was.

Personalized Programming was always an exciting business. Now I got to fly above the clouds in a tiny two-seater plane. I would often look out over the expansive sky and wonder, How did I get here? I had moved out to the woods to drop out and devote my life to my spiritual practices. I never left the woods, and I never for a moment took my life back. Now a boutique business in West Palm, one of the most affluent cities in the United States, had hired me to fly down and computerize the business. It was all beyond my comprehension. I was never even trained in any of this. I was just living in a fairy tale.