Mark Eckhardt On Creativity, Inspiring Others, and Dealing with Racism
“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.”
Seeds have nearly everything within them that they need to survive. It's not as if the germination process provides any physical feature that the seed did not previously have within it. Germination is just a period of time where a sprout is placed in the proper environment to grow into a spore. From there, the spore, with all the matured material from the seed, develops into a plant. However, the key is to make sure the seed is in the right environment so that everything within it can be expressed. You could say that thriving, in this case, means that everything within the organism is in a place where it can be expressed fully.
Sometimes, plants must be transplanted from where they were conceived to a new environment in order to flourish. And, it's common for plants to be repotted once they have outgrown their initial growing place. It's a concept that reaches beyond horticulture and farming, though.
The same is true for ideas, for the human mind, and for connection. Have you ever been running the same problem over and over in your head, almost like you're stuck in a loop? But, when you voice it to someone else, you hear it in a new way? Or perhaps, the listener can offer a perspective you had not previously considered. Ideas need new environments, too—places where they can thrive. Just like seeds, they have everything within them to grow. So do people and ideas. They need to have access to the right fuel and the right place to be fully expressed.
This concept permeates every endeavor Mark Eckardt pursues. Mark runs each of the platforms that have sprouted from seemingly unrelated ideas, intending to spread ideas to places outside of their typical environment to somewhere they will thrive and even benefit others. Zen Buddhism was the catalyst that inspired Mark to develop a unique, self-aware, and collaborative business development model. And it was understanding the interconnectedness of all things, how isolating ourselves from each other, and segmenting social issues from each other, is what inhibits our ability to grow and heal as a society.
These precepts guide his growth through fatherhood, the cultivation of his organization One Million Truths, and Common, where he serves as CEO. These companies aim to take stories from their original conception points to reach broader audiences to create unity to help heal societal wounds and create a better world and better businesses. In this podcast, we discuss everything from Mark's past life as a musician, how it lead him to zen Buddhism, and how Buddhism influenced how he expressed his life's purpose through business.
