Dr. Brilliant Vs. the Devil of Ambition

Fast Track to Enlightenment

After two years and more than 2 billion house calls, the Army declared a victory over smallpox. Brilliant had started off as the mascot of the UN team. All of the people who knew what they were doing had moved on or had died off, so Brilliant wound up running a program in northern India with an army of 100,000 workers. It was one of the largest peacetime armies ever assembled. So much for planning. No one could have planned a mission like that.

"Greater things have happened to me by accident than by planning -- getting to India, meeting my wife, finding myself at the head of the India smallpox program. I could not have planned any of those things. And now, when I meet someone who can help me, I will have done all of my planning beforehand, but still I have to leave myself open to the unexpected."

To explain the difference between responding to fate and driving yourself through ambition, Brilliant sings the words to a little song that he had once heard sung by a Sufi choir: "I love the sadhus [holy men]. I love the way they pray. When the wind blows their hair in their face, they go the other way." Then he asks a rhetorical question: "Have I been passive, in the sense that life happens to you? Being passive is almost as bad as being indifferent. But accepting what happens, going with the flow -- that's a good thing."

Where Do You Want to Put Your Dead Presidents?

Brilliant was deep into his love/hate affair with ambition. Every time that the conflict stirred, he directed his energy into something obvious and philanthropic. "How you get through this battle for your soul depends on where you're going to stick your photos of dead presidents," says Wavy Gravy. "You try and put your good where it will do the most."

That was the guiding philosophy of Larry and Girija Brilliant. When the war against smallpox in India was over, they came back to the United States, enrolled in graduate public-health programs at the University of Michigan, and started their family of three children. They also created the Seva Foundation and its mission to eradicate blindness -- a disease that they had seen firsthand while working in the smallpox program. Since Seva's beginning, doctors have performed 1 million free sight-restoring operations in Asia. "Seva started primarily as a spiritual organization," Brilliant says. "The work we did to alleviate blindness was a consequence of our spirituality. It was motivated by a desire to serve God by doing good."

By chance, Bob Weir, 53, legendary guitarist of the Grateful Dead, read about Brilliant's work in India. Wavy Gravy introduced Weir to Brilliant, and it wasn't long before Weir and fellow band member Danny Rifkin joined the board of Seva. Board members often would underestimate the number of beds needed for those impromptu overnight meetings, and Weir often bunked on the floor. "At least they remembered to keep the heat on," Weir says.

In the meantime, almost by accident, Brilliant continued to ricochet from generational icon to generational icon. He had crossed paths with Steve Jobs in India, and now he tried to recruit the young entrepreneur to head Seva. "Steve had just started Apple. I tried to tell him that Apple was a terrible idea. Why didn't he become the executive director of Seva and do some good? He kept saying, 'Computers are going to change the world. We're going to take away the power of the priestly class that runs these mainframes.' He wouldn't lead Seva, but he did give us money and computers. We were trying to do Steve a good turn, so we bought shares in Apple."

Another unplanned opportunity: With money earned from Apple stock, Brilliant built one of the first Internet companies, Network Technologies. "We put together one of the first online communities and eventually sold the company," Brilliant says. He had under-estimated what it would take to build on the Internet, but the experience prompted his next brush with destiny: He conjured up the idea of the WELL. It became one of the first expressions of online community, a gathering place for many of the brightest minds, the fiercest pioneers, and the keenest explorers of the just-gathering new economy. "It was the first electronic community," he says.

But, having had the initial idea for the WELL, Brilliant didn't see himself as its keeper. "I went to see Stuart Brand, whom I knew in the 1960s to be one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. I wanted Stuart to run the WELL, which he agreed to do." Brand ran the WELL for 10 years before he and Brilliant agreed to sell it in parts in 1993 and in 1995. The idea was to avoid entanglements with the world of business. But Brilliant's younger brother, Barry, challenged him over a personal unpaid debt: Their father had died when Barry was only 17. Rather than acting as a surrogate father, Larry had gone off to India. Now Barry wanted his big brother's help in starting a smart-card business. He got it. They dubbed the venture "Brilliant Color Cards," ran it for eight years, and sold it in 1998.