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  1. "Integrity (and excitement)" - Tim Bui Terry McMullen 53:48

My guest today, Tim, has a really diverse and interesting background. He’s trained martial arts for most of his life, he’s been a successful serial entrepreneur, he’s studied under Buddhist monks, and he’s now a high performance life coach. He wants to use all of these experiences and learnings to help shift the world into the most inspirational and connected place possible. That is what Tim is about, maximizing potential.

As he put it during the show, humans in many ways are god-like but we don’t realize it. We have such an amazing ability to connect, collaborate, and create; but often we get caught up with so much other baggage that we don’t take advantage of it. That is why integrity is so important to him. He calls it a “container” value, that allows you to effectively pursue all the other values while still holding you true to what matters most.

We spent a lot of time trying to determine what maximizing potential is really all about. Is it just exciting and fun, is it functional, is it moral, is it divine? Tim has a belief that we all have a purpose that we should be trying to work towards, so that is why we should be trying to maximize potential. So we tried to dissect that “purpose” concept too, to understand what it actually is. Where does our purpose come from, do we choose it or it chooses us, how do we know when we found our true purpose, etc?

As we often do, we got into the realm of subjectivity and nuance. These theories and concepts all sound good in the abstract but what do they actually mean in our day to day life. So to try to make it more real we looked at a recent instance with my son, where it appeared to me the nuance of the situation made it impossible to know for sure how to proceed.

What I appreciated so much about this discussion was the passion Tim had. You could feel it come through at times when he talked about his purpose and the ability for humans to create. I still wish I knew exactly where that passion came from (at a first principle level), but regardless I still aways enjoy experiencing it.

I spent much of my career trying to consult companies on how to better achieve their goals. I was a Finance major, a Harvard Business School graduate, and a business strategist. I've always been curious and I've always loved trying to solve problems. It was a really good fit for a while, but then life happened.

Within the span of a couple of years I had a son, my sister tragically passed away, and my wife became severely ill with Multiple Sclerosis. All of a sudden everything I thought I knew about life didn't seem to make sense anymore. I needed to raise my son and teach him how to be a good person but I realized I didn't even know what it meant to be a good person, let alone know how to teach him to be one. I also realized that I wasn't capable of being the person my wife needed me to be to help care for her. Simply put, I wasn't good enough.