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Days are scrolls; write on them what you want to be remembered. Bachya ibn Pakuda
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There is a line from Walt Whitman that always brings Michael to mind for me:
"I am large. I contain multitudes."
Mike was an artist, an athlete and an entrepreneur.
He was my friend, my business partner, my student and my teacher.
We met in the early 80s when we both consulted to a very early Internet startup; he to help with marketing, me to provide training and create a customer service department.
We became friends immediately.
After that project, he asked me to help him computerize his business and he hired me to help on several of his market research projects. We liked working together so much that we decided to form a partnership.
He was a thoughtful, careful, as attested to by the 6 months it took us to work out our partnership agreement.
We spent a year having a lot of fun working for a bunch of big corporations. Circumstances eventually took us in different directions professionally, but that never impinged on our friendship. In fact, our friendship thrived as we went on to be part of each other's lives in many different ways across the years.
I especially remember one trip we took to
Michael served with me on the board of the apprentice alliance where we stewarded hundreds of people looking for a way to learn about business and the arts into apprenticeships with small businesses and artists who were willing to teach them.
And we worked together on the Briarpatch consulting team that went out for years, once a week, to help local Bay area businesses grow and prosper.
I learned a lot over the years from Michael because he was a great teacher.
But one of the biggest lessons he taught me was how important it was to keep learning. He had a hunger for new information and experience that kept him constantly involved in new projects and he was always willing to share what he was learning.
While I never had a single conversation with Mike about spirituality, he was one of the most spiritual people I've known. He just didn't do the things most of us do to satisfy our egos. When we were in the Apprentice Alliance together, he kept pushing me to let him apprentice with me, because, somehow, he thought there was something I could teach him. But he was 10 years my senior and I had already learned so much from him, I just felt uncomfortable about it. It's a testament to the control he had over his ego that he was willing to put aside his seniority in the interest of his learning.
A few years later, I created a masters program in business at the California Institute of Integral Studies and one of the first applications I received was from Mike. At the age of 55, he was willing to put himself into a group of 20-something hot shots and suffer through their competitiveness and ageist ribbing to expand his personal knowledge.
And even in his masters project, he reflected his desire to help others learn by creating a non-profit think tank called "Shared Resources" that put on satellite broadcasts of seminars with famous thought leaders in the business world.
Michael made life richer and more interesting for himself and those around him. He truly contained multitudes and I will really miss him.
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