An Interview with Duff McDuffee of Falling Fruit TV

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Today I have the opportunity to share a fascinating interview with a young businessman that is helping to change the world for the better! Duff McDuffee is an inspiring jack-of-all-trades. He is co-founder of Falling Fruit TV, a conscious online media company, as well as a deeply passionate philosopher, life coach, and yogin. His work is concentrated on the possibilities of global change through the transformation of business, and on applying systems theory to personal growth.

Duff earned his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Lawrence University, and has earned a great deal of experience with several conscious businesses and non-profits in the Boulder, Colorado, area. He has also served over 60 Life Coaching clients worldwide in tackling personal challenges and achieving goals. Duff also writes a fantastic personal blog at http://duff.zaadz.com, which I highly recommend, and he recently wrote GTD Mastery 100″ onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview (’/outbound/gtdmastery100.com’);”>a useful GTD resource that took off in the blog world. In this exclusive interview, Duff shares some of his encouraging thoughts on business, philosophy, and empowerment.

So tell us about the new startup, Falling Fruit TV. What separates you guys from the pack, and what is your mission?

Falling Fruit is a podcast network that is creating free audio and video shows on topics of personal and global transformation. We have shows ranging from how to change the world through business, to how to change your health through alternative medicine, as well as a popular show for serious meditators called Buddhist Geeks, and a new show exploring what it means to be a man, with many more to come. Our shows are currently audio-only, but we have some video podcasts in the works too, which are going to be HOT!

Our mission statement is “Through providing leading-edge media content, Falling Fruit connects, informs, and empowers world citizens who want to become effective agents of change.” Pretty lofty I know, but us Millennials tend to be pretty optimistic.

And for those not hip to podcasting yet, a podcast is an audio or video show broadcast over the web that you can subscribe to, usually through iTunes, usually for free, and then iTunes automatically downloads the newest episodes to your computer and/or iPod or other media player. We love new technology at Falling Fruit, and aim to use it for “technospiritual” ends, in other words asking the question “how can this cool new tech thing I’m drooling over actually be used to do good in the world?”

You co-host the Conscious Business show at Falling Fruit. What are some of the current trends in conscious business–and which organizations are on the cutting edge that we should keep an eye on?

Conscious Business is a name we’ve put on a number of emerging trends in the business world, especially trends for businesses that are addressing environmental and social justice issues, as well as businesses that are encouraging their employees to self-actualize.

One interesting thing to keep an eye on is the blurring of the line between for-profit and non-profit. The “triple bottom line” concept (people, profit, planet) is one example, where for-profit companies are actually creating metrics and pushing for new legal structures to hold themselves accountable to more than just quarterly profits. Another is “for-benefit,” the best example I know of being my friend Mathew’s business, eConsciousMarket.com, which is a “philanthropic eco-marketplace,” selling only socially and environmentally responsible goods, and 50% of profits go to the non-profit of your choice.

Another wild thing I’ve been noticing is how much innovation is occurring on the environmentally responsible end of things. We recently interviewed Joshua Onysko, founder of Pangea Organics, on our show. Pangea is almost not a business but an example of a business–they are innovating for the point of inspiring other businesses, to show them what is socially and environmentally possible while making a very significant profit.

My friend Christiana wrote up a great summary of other similar trends that’s worth reading.

Personally, I’m keeping an eye on Whole Foods. John Mackey has created an incredibly forward-thinking organization that has dramatically changed the grocery and health food industries.

You mentioned another show at Falling Fruit called Buddhist Geeks, and I know you practice Vipassana meditation. Please tell us more about Bhuddism and business. Do you think that it’s possible to reconcile a Buddhist philosophy with a mentality of career success and wealth-building?

I do practice Vipassana, and the teacher in my tradition, S.N. Goenka, was a businessman before becoming a Vipassana teacher. He too wrestled with the greed and corruption in the business world, and anyone who takes Buddhist teachings seriously will have to come to their own integration.

Personally, I don’t see any inherent contradiction between career success and insight into the fundamental nature of life, if you understand the purpose of business, which I believe is to serve human needs. Now keeping that in mind, we all have a need for food, and if you habitually overeat, then you are not truly meeting your needs for nourishment and health. A certain amount of wealth will feed your own needs — happiness studies in the US have shown that after about $36,000 in income, a person is no more happy if they make more money. However, it’s hard to fund a new venture without a stockpile of extra cash! Falling Fruit was started in large part because two of our friends had access to trust funds, which helped kick off the project. The purpose of large amounts of accumulated wealth is not to overstuff yourself with luxury, but to feed new things — new businesses, new projects, and yes, to feed people too, via philanthropy and the creation of new jobs!

Plus the definition of career success seems to be changing. A lot of young people are being raised by parents who have accumulated all they ever wanted and yet are obviously unfulfilled. We don’t want to go through their suffering, so we are looking to have our cake and eat it too, to make a good living AND to live out our passions AND have 2 months off a year to meditate and do personal development AND to serve the world in the highest ways we can possibly imagine. Nothing else feels like “success” anymore.

How can Generation Y best set about making positive changes in their lives and in the world through their careers?

There are so many ways! Now more than ever. Let me give you a little of my personal history first.

I was a Philosophy major, and almost a Psychology and Environmental Studies triple-major. When I graduated college in 2001, I was a member of something like 5 activist groups (several of which I started), and figured that all business is run by greedy, environment-killing capitalist pigs. So naturally I couldn’t find any work, and ended up in telephone tech support, which I hated with a passion. Luckily I did like people and solving problems though, so I was able to survive long enough doing this and web design work to figure out what I was good at and how I could make money while making a difference.

Along the way I found that business is not evil by definition, and that many people in business actually want to serve the fulfillment of human needs. Also many new exciting trends were emerging that were creating opportunities for people like me who want to make a difference but not starve working for a non-profit startup (which I did for a while), and who want to change the way business operates to make it more environmentally and socially responsible.

Here are my the top 3 things Millennial kids can do to change the world through work:

1. Know yourself. Engage in a study of your strengths and weaknesses. Take strengths assessment tests like Martin Seligman’s signature strengths assessment, or the Discover Your Strengths book, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the Enneagram, etc. Learn exactly what it is that you are good at, passionate about and love, and do these things.

Account for your weaknesses by partnering with people who are good at those things, then figure out how to avoid ever doing those things on the job. There are already far too many people doing someone else’s job! Design your career path consciously, and then follow opportunities.

2. Follow your bliss. Keep doing what you love. The world needs people who are ALIVE, who are living at their full potential. Don’t settle for a crappy job, position, or project! Start a business, or two, or three. Every day ask yourself, “What do I want? What do I want to do today? What do I want to create today? What huge problem could I solve with my creativity and ingenuity? What great group could I organize?”

Don’t fall for the line of BS that you “have to” do X, Y, and Z. There’s almost nothing that you have to do nowadays. All the rules have been broken. Ask “what if?” questions often. “What if we could create houses that didn’t consume energy but actually produced energy back onto the grid?” “What if I could get paid to read personal development books?” (What my friend Brian Johnson is asking.) Great things happen from great questions like these.

3. Study marketing. Great ideas that nobody hears about don’t impact the world. Your idea must be good and cool to succeed. Plus you need to market yourself — be willing to brag about your passions and your goals, and your accomplishments if you have any.

The median age at Falling Fruit is 25. Until recently our president was one of the youngest guys in our company. Don’t believe the crap that “you are too young to start a business” or to do whatever it is you want to do. Dream big, and find a way! The world needs what you have to offer.

Tell us more about your life coaching practice. What methods do you use to help your clients achieve personal growth?

Coaching is wonderful work, really. It’s the kind of work where after a session you pinch yourself and say “I just got paid for that??” I help people become more alive and live their full potential — it’s my favorite conversation! And I’ve been lucky enough to work with 60+ clients all over the world so far.

I’ve been obsessed with personal growth work for as long as I can remember. So I use whatever intuitively seems appropriate for my clients. But more specifically, I help people get productive and organized using David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology (see my GTD checklist here). I also use a bunch of stuff I learned from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Tony Robbins, personality typing models like the Enneagram, as well as just general goal-setting and belief management tools and techniques. For a summary of tons of little techniques, I recommend The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, or checking out my friend Brian Johnson’s website ThinkArete.com, where he has 500+ “big ideas” — summaries of books and teachers — available for reading and listening! Lately I’ve been reading some wackier but very interesting stuff from Robert Anton Wilson like Prometheus Rising, which blew my mind when I read it last week.

What I find most amazing about the work is how our maps of reality keep us from experiencing joy and aliveness, and keep us from achieving what we want, and how incredibly flexible these maps truly are.

What does GTD mean for you? How do you use it in your business and personal life?

GTD has been a lifesaver for me. I’m an idea guy. You know those ideas that could change your life and the world if you applied them? Well I get like 5 an hour — faaaaar too many to ever actually apply!

GTD keeps me real. “What’s the next action?” and the “someday-maybe” list have been wonderful at getting me to take my ideas and put them into action, or to shelf them for another day. And I keep my email inbox to 0 or close to it every day now, which keeps me sane, and sometimes even peaceful at work. I can’t fathom having more than 20 emails in my inbox now. I came back from a meditation retreat recently and had 257, and I cleared them out in a couple hours right away.

Our business has been infused with GTD. We’ve created an incredible number of processes around the production of our shows, covering every detail, and always focusing on greater efficiency. Our website has only been up for a couple months, but we’re already a month or two ahead on most our shows! I can’t take credit for the efficiency though, we’ve got a great team of people much more productive than I am. I use GTD to keep up!

But it’s not just the system of GTD, it’s the discipline. At the GTD Roadmap seminar I attended, David Allen talked about how it takes about 2 years to fully implement the system. I think it’s maybe more like 5 years, but maybe I’m a slow learner. But I figure I’m going to be doing things for the rest of my life, I may as well do them productively!

And at the end of the day, “productivity” is about what you are producing in the world — what goals and dreams you are making real…and how! GTD can help make your dreams real and help you enjoy the process too.

And I’m interested in this concept you have about our “maps of reality” and how they can prevent us from achieving individual and collective happiness. I too have a lot of passion for helping people overcome fears and reach for their dreams. Please tell us more about your thoughts on experiencing joy and aliveness, as you say above, and reaching other BIG goals.

Well, according to Buddhism, achievement of your goals is temporary, because everything is subject to the law of impermanence. So the challenge with achieving happiness and other big goals is that if you were to ever achieve them, life would keep on changing and then you’d be unhappy again!

But Buddhism is not a pessimistic philosophy. The recommendation is to practice equanimity with subtle subjective experience with the aim of achieving total equanimity and emptiness (Nirvana), which of course also changes, but life is different at that point. I’m aiming for that in my practice, but it will of course take time. A Buddhist teacher and author I respect suggests that full enlightenment can definitely be done with regular meditation retreats and daily practice though!

In the meantime, temporary happiness can also come from flow, a state of total engagement with what you are doing, where the challenge meets your ability. Anyone can do this by discovering their passions and then going for them wholeheartedly. Simply ask yourself “What do I really, really want?” and then “What’s the next physical action I can take to get a little closer?” I’m big on visualizing and goal-setting, and creating mindmaps and written plans to achieving my goals. I set yearly personal goals, and set goals and intentions for other areas of my life whenever I feel dissatisfied or like I’m “settling” for less than the best. It requires continuous revisiting! But your life will be full of passion, you will sleep satisfied that you gave your best, and when you die you will know you lived and loved fully.

Alright, and the big question: what are 5 things that students and young professionals can do to prepare for a conscious life and career?

I don’t know if these things will help you attain worldly success, but they will certainly lead to a more conscious, fun, and interesting life and career!

1. Engage in personal growth. Deeply examine yourself and your experience, whether through psychoanalysis, Vipassana meditation, the Enneagram, ecstatic dance, philosophy, interpreting your dreams, psychedelic drugs, or whatever. Really know that someday you will die, and choose to live fully now. Figure out why it is you are here, your purpose for living, then go about living that purpose in everything you do, every single day. Study success, and how to make your goals and dreams real. Hang out with people you want to become more like. Cut out bad habits like watching TV and endlessly surfing the web. Develop good habits like meditating and exercising daily.

If you aren’t growing, chances are you are dying (slowly and invisibly).

2. Question everything. You’ve got to learn to create. In order to do so, you’ve got to learn to question. The world is a place full of opportunity and abundance, but in order to access it, you must be free of limiting beliefs and ideas about the world. Get curious about everything! Go out and explore! Ask “why must these two things be at odds?” Try to integrate everything and see what happens. Do something weird and outrageous daily.

3. Assume wild success. Henry Ford said “Whether you think you can do a thing, or you think you can’t, you’re probably right.” Ask “what if…?” questions daily. Assume that you can have it all, that you can get paid to do what you’d happily pay to do, that there are multiple solutions to this impossible problem, that of course it’s possible and profitable to make a product that brings the entire developing world out of poverty. Whatever you want most for the world or yourself, assume that it could be even more successful than you imagine and then go about making it real! The world needs people to think this way if we are to overcome the complex and “impossible” problems of today.

4. Get things done. It’s ok if your head’s in the clouds as long as your feet are still on the ground. This is called growth! Learn and practice GTD. Every day take 5 actions towards your most important goal. Keep your email inbox at 0. Get your typing speed up. Learn the disciplines of the digital age while you are young!

5. Serve people. In business and in life, you will be more successful and feel wonderful if you are serving the needs of others in all that you do. Make a habit of “networking” by asking yourself whom you could contact today and create extra value for. Reach out to people you don’t know and offer them something that could help them reach their goals!

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