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What started nine years ago today as an epiphany as I rode my bicycle through the vineyards of California's Napa Valley where I live, is now an ongoingly expanding collection of over seven hundred and fifty essays so far which have received over six hundred and fifty thousand page views. In the nine years comprising the Conversations For Transformation era, this represents on average 1.6 new essays a week, 6.4 new essays a month, 83.2 new essays a year receiving 866.67 page views per essay, and 247.62 page views a day.
The essays in this Conversations For Transformation internet series are regularly listened in Australia, Brunei, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. And these are only the countries my software can reliably identify. 38.41% of all internet traffic to the Conversations For Transformation website originates from other countries my software can't reliably identify.
The title of this website, Conversations For Transformation: Essays By Laurence Platt Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard, And More, is carefully crafted (no, meticulously crafted) conveying in as few words as possible in optimal phrase order the context for this body of work. Conversations For Transformation aren't intended to impart new information. They're not a blog and they're not about anything per se. They're intended to leave you with an experience of transformation. Their inspiration, as their title tells it, is the ideas of Werner Erhard, a neverending, indefatigable source of breakthroughs in transformation, thinking, acting, indeed in living and the possibility of being for human beings.
There's literally too many of Werner's ideas to ever get to the end of writing every essay that presents itself to me, grabbing me by the throat (so to speak) demanding to be written, to showcase them all, either as a precursor to or as a result of Werner's work. There are simply too many of them. It's just not possible to ever get to the end of them all. And even if I could get even close to the end of them all, I'd soon discover more I missed the first time around, making it truly impossible to ever get to the end of them all.
When There's Nothing Going On - Really!
And yet every once in a while, something happens which belies this state of affairs. I'll sit down to write ... and nothing comes. There's nothing there to say. Ordinarily the way I'd handle a situation like this would be to let it rest for a while, for a day or two or more, and then come back and sit down to write again.
But this isn't just any ordinary situation. These are Conversations For Transformation of which I've promised and have committed to generate two a week every week which are announced on Sundays and Wednesdays at midnight. For a promise like this ie inside a commitment like this, sitting down to write with nothing coming is simply a minor irritating detail - and a very trivial minor irritating detail at that.
Still, confronting and dealing with, managing, and mastering these very trivial minor irritating details when there's nothing coming to write, has given me a totally unexpected experience of a particular facet of transformation, an exposure to a particular facet of transformation actually which, had there always been something coming, had there always been something to say, had there always been something demanding to be written, had there always been something waiting to be announced every Sunday and every Wednesday at midnight, I wouldn't have uncovered otherwise.
Not only that, but if these Conversations For Transformation weren't created as a promise and inside a commitment, there's simply no way this new experience of this particular facet of transformation would have become available to me.
The New Opportunity
In the ninth year of the Conversations For Transformation era, Conversations For Transformation morphed from being inspired by the ideas of Werner Erhard, to include recreating the experience Werner Erhard generates to inspire (you may want to read that sentence again ...). So if I sat down to write and there's something which inspired me, something which demanded to be written, I wrote it. But on those occasions when I sat down to write and nothing came, I started noticing what was present to me was the new opportunity to recreate the experience Werner generates to inspire, to make it up out of nothing.
Instead of being stopped when, sitting down to write, nothing showed up inspiring me or demanding to be written, I started to see these moments as precious, rare opportunities to create something truly original, an original expression of transformation, an original expression of Werner's work made up out of nothing.
This is when Conversations For Transformation (gradually at first, so gradually even I hardly knew it was happening) became proofs ie demonstrations of themselves, if you will. Up till that point in time, they had simply (and powerfully) existed as an expanding collection of essays, as a prolific genre.
What I want to make clear here, what I want to underscore here is this new approach, this breakthrough actually, is still perfectly consistent with "Conversations For Transformation: Essays By Laurence Platt Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard, And More" if not more so. Here's why: by itself in isolation, Werner's work isn't yet fully Werner's work like a possibility.
Next I'll say what I mean by this assertion.
Werner's Work Fully Recreated
Werner's work is fully Werner's work when you make it your own, when you take it out into the world. Werner's work anticipates, requests, and intends to be recreated in your life as your own work. When Werner's work is recreated in your life as your own work, when you take it out into the world, then it's fully Werner's work. But until you've recreated Werner's work in your life as your own work, yes it's whole and complete ... and ... it's not yet fully Werner's work. In other words, it hasn't yet fulfilled its possibility.
Now, there's something absolutely crucial I don't want to miss, overlook, or avoid, which is this: please notice with regard to Werner's work I said "recreated" - I didn't say copied or taken or plagiarized. "What's the difference?" you may ask. The difference is when you copy or take or plagiarize someone else's work, you don't acknowledge the source of the work you copied or took or plagiarized. When you copy or take or plagiarize someone else's work, you pass it off as your own. There's no expression of relationship with or affinity with or respect for or honoring of the source of the work you're copying or taking or plagiarizing.
When you recreate someone else's work, on the other hand, you acknowledge them as the source of the work you're recreating - which is an authentic expression of relationship with and affinity with and respect for and honoring of the source of the work you're recreating.
This is the new opportunity, this is the new context for the ninth year of the Conversations For Transformation era in which I morphed from being inspired by the ideas of Werner Erhard, to including recreating the experience Werner Erhard generates to inspire, and also including taking the recreated experience Werner Erhard generates to inspire, out into the world, thereby making the experience my own.
In the ninth year of the Conversations For Transformation era, Conversations For Transformation crossed a threshold from being inspired (awesome, but too small) by the ideas of Werner Erhard, to fully recreating the experience they generate to inspire, thereby becoming the fulfillment of their possibility.
