The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living Read Free Page A

will explain what's going on. Instead, I take his instructions to heart and let it go. For now.
    With a final nod, Mr. Wizdom retreats, leaving the question with me as a souvenir of Mount Popa. We're back on the motorcycle, me and my wayward monk. This time, the monk leads me to gas. Forget gas stations in rural Burma; instead, dusty bottles lined up at infrequent intervals along the side of the road, each with an old rag stuffed in the mouth like a wick. When you stop to fill up, local merchants mysteriously materialize to take your money.
    On we go, yo-yoing silently across the desert. As we approach Bagan, gorgeous brick and stone temples rise up everywhere—some reaching toward the sky, some so tiny you cannot enter without evicting the Buddha in residence. This intricately variegated line of pinnacles and spires is backlit by the fiery red sun dropping into the desert, the Aye Yarwaddy ablaze from the sun's torch.
    We keep driving, looking for the old town and my hotel. It has been an exhausting, dusty, hot day on the road, but suddenly I am delighted to be here, at sunset cruising the wonders of Bagan on a motorcycle, a monk on my back. When we first left Mount Popa, I wanted nothing more than to get to my destination, but now I don't have the slightest desire for this trip to end.
    The answer comes to me.

Chapter One
     
    T HE
P ITCH
     
    “W E'RE GOING to put the fun back into funerals.”
    With that declaration, the meeting began. It was a curious elevator pitch.
    “The fun back into funerals?” I asked.
    “Absolutely. We're going to make it easy to make choices when someone dies. You know, the casket, the liner, flowers, that kind of thing.”
    “Fun?”
    “Sure. All those decisions. It's not easy. So why not use the Internet?”
    “But fun ? Why fun?”
    “Come on. Catchy marketing. You know, a play on words.”
    “Ah, the fun in fun-erals.”
    “Right. That's it. How many hits do you think you get now if you put the words ‘fun’ and ‘funeral’ into Yahoo!? Hundreds? I doubt it. You'll get one, just one. Us.”
    Giving the pitch is a fellow named Lenny. Something about using the Internet to sell items most people buy at a funeral home when someone dies, items that arouse as many varied and complex feelings as sex toys.
    We are seated in the Konditorei, a comfy coffee shop nestled in bucolic Portola Valley. With the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and Palo Alto and Route 280 to the east, we are but one exit away from Sand Hill Road, the famous home to Silicon Valley venture capital. The Konditorei is where I meet people like Lenny, the pitchmen of the Internet era. Here, or in a couple of restaurants in the same rustic strip mall. This is my office. (Forget Buck's Restaurant in next-door Woodside. That's where venture capitalists prefer to meet supplicants and huddle around deals under a giant painting of Roy Rogers on Trigger rampant. If you sit in the corner of Buck's all morning, starting with the power breakfast crowd, you can quietly observe who is funding whom. It's a voyeur's embarrassment.)
    Every morning a stream of humanity stops at the Konditorei for coffee — joggers fueling up, businesspeople in a rush, Stanford students on their way to class, and a handful of deal makers en route from hillside homes to Sand Hill castles. It's also, ironically, a stop for the parade of incoming workers who saw, mow, paint, rake, and hammer away busily at the homes of the Valley shakers. Porsches, Mercedes, and BMW's queue up to enter the freeway, indifferent to the oncoming line of pickup trucks that replace them each morning.
    I had arrived a few minutes earlier, and Lenny was waiting for me.
    “You're Randy,” he began. “I'm Lenny. Frank said you'd be easy to spot.”
    Shaved head, cowboy boots, jeans, motorcycle jacket—I seldom get mistaken at these blind dates.
    With a solid grip, he shook my hand; then, his left hand on my elbow like a politician, he guided me to the table where he'd