Dr. Brilliant Vs. the Devil of Ambition

Which brings us to Larry Brilliant's current adventure. "I met the kid who wanted to turn SoftNet into an Internet company," he says. "The company's stock was at $4, and it had a market cap of $30 million. I was recruited for the board. Now our stock is at $10, and our market cap is at $280 million. I agreed to be the interim CEO and to stay only six months. That was two years ago. I recently told the board, 'You'll have to pry me out with the jaws of life.' It's fun. Bringing in people of color, building a company, building a team, making good products, bridging the digital divide -- all of it is fun."

In the meantime, Brilliant was still doctoring the Dead when one of its members had a sprained ankle or a cold. Perhaps the only clinical failure of his career was Jerry Garcia. "The advice that Larry gave him, which we all gave him, was to take it easy," says Garcia's bandmate Bob Weir. "And that finally killed him."

In the Belly of the Belly of the Beast

Consider the parts of the body a person pays attention to. An inferior person, according to Confucius, pays attention to inferior parts of the body, while a superior person pays attention to superior parts of the body. In your choice of parts of the body is your destiny.

Brilliant chooses the stomach. He is not just in the belly of the beast: He is the belly of the beast. "I'm no different from most indulged CEOs," he says. He wants to win. He wants everything. Appetite is front and center at SoftNet. From the minute that you walk in the door you are not only invited to act with ambition but also to think about your own desires. Right next to ther recepetionist is an 8-foot-tall bronze statue that dominates the entry: It's Ganesh, the ancient, elephant-headed Hindu god. Ganesh is carrying a complete set of communications tools: a pen made from his own tusk, a book, a bird for sending messages.

According to one legend, Ganesh had a troubled past. He was the victim of his own appetite and of his own unsatisfied ambition. He once walked in on his parents' lovemaking, and, as punishment, his father, the god Shiva, cut off his head. "Now, see what you've done?" Ganesha's mother complained to Shiva. "Our son has no head." Shiva was sent out to find the first head that he came across and to use it. He found an elephant's head, put it on Ganesh's shoulders, and, because the elephant was considered to be the wisest animal, Ganesh became the god of wisdom.

Ganesh is also the embodiment of desire. He's the one god who has seen the mysteries of love. He looks like a clown, with his big elephant nose and with his many arms--and, because he has a great appetite, he boasts a very big stomach. But Ganesh also has wisdom. "He's the god that people love to worship, not out of fear or out of respect but out of admiration," says Brilliant, standing next to the statue. You'd think they were brothers.

So who's going to win the battle for the soul: Briliant or Silicon Valley? Will the Valley corrupt him? Change him?

Every life takes the shape of this parable: an arrow coming home to the bow. True ambition is this: After you do something amazing, you do something ordinary--and you discover the importance in it. Compared with taking the slowest bus ride in the history of the world in order to save a country of victims, compared with curing smallpox in India, with inventing the WELL, with paying a family debt to your brother, compared with all of that, working as the CEO of an Internet company is nothing. But a man who is driven by ambition and by appetite sees it as more than that. If Brilliant can keep his soul alive here, his soul can survive anywhere. Silicon Valley is like a bad case of new-economy smallpox.

His mantra of ambition--to live ambitiously but without ambition--is the centerpiece of Nish Kan Karma yoga. "Yoga means 'being yoked,'" says Brilliant. "in yoga, the individual self is liked to the larger soul, Brahma, which, in Hindu, means 'the mind of God.' You have one job: to find out who you are. Like the asymptote, the mathematical function, you are always approaching your goal, but you never achieve it. You are always reaching for the flame, but you'll never be the flame. You always fail. You always aspire.

"Capitalism has wonderful lessons to teach us. I'm happy to be called a capitalist. To make a change in the world, you must creatively employ capital. You have to understand how the engines of commerce work. To lament that those engines concentrate wealth is not going to help you or anyone else.

"But as long as I have ambition, I will not have good judgment, because my ambition is based on trying to get something. That means I am attached to the results, to the fruits. That means I am violating a rule that I know is intuitively true. And that is the crucible. I need to be tested this way. I need to fail in the way that I fail. Every time that I get confused and see a person who works for me or with me as a customer, a competitor, a colleague, I fail. And every time that I am unable to see that person as a human being--and instead only see what's useful to me--I fail. In those moments, I fall victim to my ambition. But in those moments when I see people as human beings, as real people, I inspire them.