A s we will see shortly, thisleased land was destined to play a much larger role in
what life had in store for us. It was not just with the T emple property or the
meteoric succe ss of the business that miraculous events
were taking place. Little things were happening on a
regular basis that were so unlikely, they chipped away at
the rational mind. One of these amazing events took
place d uring a business trip to Boston in the late ’80s. With so many Blue Cross B lue Shields private-labeling
The Medical Manager, I had received a request from Blue
Cross Blue Shield of Massa chusetts to come up for a
meeting. I arrived in Boston  late afternoon, and I was
starved. I had r ushed around all morning and not eaten a
thing all day. I nstead of eating junk food while traveling,
I figured I would get checked into the hotel and find a
nice vegetarian restaurant. I didn’t know Boston at all,
but I had a rental car, and how hard could it be? I go t very lost  trying to find the restaurant that the
concierge had suggested. After close to an hour’s drive, I
ended u p in Harvard Square. I drove around looking for
a vegetarian restaurant in th at area, but I couldn’t find
one. In  a big c ity like Boston, I had been hoping for a
high-end vegetarian meal. Now I would be perfectly
happy w ith just brown rice an d veggies. I decided to quit
driving around and just order room service from the
hotel—if I could find my way  back. Somehow I managed
to g et lost again  and ended up back in Harvard Square. It
dawned on me that perhaps the universe was trying to
tell me something, so I parked my car and got out. This time I loo ked more carefully to see if there was
even a small place that might have something a
vegetarian could eat. I noticed there were some narrow
alleys th at ran  between the b uildings. They were not for
cars, but shops lined both sid es of the walkway. I headed
for one of the alleys and, lo and behold, fifty feet down
the alley was a small blackboard stating, “Today’s
Special: Brown Rice and Fresh Vegetables.” I hung myhead in both r elief and gratitude, but I would soon find
out that I hadn’t seen anything yet. The sign  led to a narrow staircase that wound down to
a s mall restaurant. It was just perfect for the mood I was
in. I ordered, and a deep peace came over me as I
enjoyed the great meal that l ife had provided me. There
was one thing, however, that was disturbing my peaceful
respite. From the time I entered the restaurant, the man
behind the checkout counter kept staring at me. It was
enough to make me a little uncomfortable. When I was
done ea ting, instead of the waiter bringing me the bill,
the man from behind the counter brought it to me. As I
reached for my wallet, he ask ed me a question: “By any
chance, are you Mickey S inger?” I was completely
stunned as the unlikely sequence of events that brought
me to this restaurant flashed through my mind. What in  the world was this? I didn’t know this person. I responded affirmatively, and the energy between us
became intens ely spiritual. He said that I wouldn’t
remember him, but he remembered me. Back in 1972,
more than sixteen years ago, he was hitchhiking through
Gainesville, and I had picked him up in my VW van. He
had been going through a very difficult period in his life,
and he asked m e about the picture of Yogananda on my
dashboard. I explained to him that I was heavily into
yoga and was studying the t eachings of this great yoga
master. When he reached Atlanta, he was walking by a
bookstore and saw Yoganand a’s picture in the storefront
window. He went in and purchased a copy of
Autobiography of a Yogi  as I ha d encou raged him to do. Apparently, it changed his life. He ended up meeting
Baba during the world tour a nd was now living in a yoga
center in Boston. He said he had often wondered if I had
ever met Baba; then he saw a picture of us together at
Disney World. It brought him great joy, and he prayed
that som eday he would have the opportunity to thank me
in pers on for the important role I had played in hisawakening. With that p rayer now miraculously
answered, he stood quietly before me with tears in his
eyes and uttered, “Thank you.” That said, he turned and
walked away. As I headed down the alley toward my car, I looked
back at the b lackboard that had lured me into this
unbelievable e vent. I remembered that before I walked
into tha t restaurant I thought I knew what was going on:
a very interesting flow of events had brought me to my
brown rice and vegetables. I was wrong. It was much
bigger than that. It’s always much bigger than that—for
everyone. I was so glad I had decided to devote my life to
learning to surrender. I didn ’t know what was going on,
and I had reach ed the point of not even wanting to know. I j ust wanted t o cease to inte rfere with the perfection of
life. Apparently, even a business trip to Boston is fair
game for a miracle.S e c t i o n  V I I
When Dark Clouds Become
Rainbows3 9 . A  T o u c h  o f  M a g i c
M y bi rth sign is Taurus, and my nature has always been
to j ust settle i n and do my work. I wasn’t the type of
person who was always looki ng for change. I enjoyed the
repetition of a stable lifestyle and gradual, sustainable
growth. Both the business and the Temple went through
natural stages in their growth. I always thought each
stage would become the steady state. By t he early 19 90s, I certainly felt that we were done
with ou r rapid  growth. Personalized Programming was
in phenomenal shape. We were up to twenty employees,
and the bottom line was net ting a few million dollars a
year. I still ha d not changed my personal lifestyle, so I
continued using the money to build up an endowment
for the Temple  and to support various charities. At that
time, B arb was  living in my house, and I was in a small
guest accomm odation in the building the Temple used
for dinners. This building had a long wooden boardwalk
stretching across a wetlands area connecting it with
Personalized Programming’s office. That walk was my
commute to work. Those of u s living at the Temple were
all working hard and keep ing morning and evening
services toge ther. People from the Gainesville
community were coming out regularly for my Monday
and Thursday night talks, and a large crowd always
found their way out on Sunday mornings. Things were
good, a nd I thought the perio d of crazy growth was over. Apparently, I was wrong. To u nderstand  the next wave  of growth, it is important
to unde rstand what was going on inside of me at thattime. All the events that h ad unfolded so far in my
experiment wit h surrender had shown me that the more
I w as willing to let go of the inner noise created by my
personal likes and dislikes, the more I could see subtle
synchronicities in what was unfolding around me. These
unexpected co ncurrences of events were like messages
from life gently nudging me  in the direction she was
going. I listened to these subtle nudges instead of
listening to the not-so-subtle mental and emotional
reactions caused by my personal preferences. This is how
I pr acticed surrender in everyday life, and the purpose of
all t hese stories is to share wi th you the perfection of the
journey that unfolded. Take the case of the Temple property. As I’ve already
mentioned, we  had no interest in owning a lot of land. Yet, ove r the years, the Tem ple would end up with an
enormous amount of propert y, and each purchase along
the way seemed to have something magical about it. Such was the c ase in October of 1990 when I received a
call regarding a piece of pro perty that had come up for
sale in our area. The Realtor said it was eighty-five acres
of c ombined woods and field, and it was considered one
of th e most be autiful pieces of land in Alachua County. I
told him that I  doubted we would be interested since our
primary interest was in land that bordered the Temple
property. He insisted on giving me a tour, and we were
both very surprised when we discovered that this
exquisite piece of land actually did border directly on the
Temple’s lease d land. That was enough of a nudge for
me. I put ou t a minimal amount of effort, and the
purchase just seemed to fall into place by itself. I considered that land a gift from the universe. It came
to us completely unexpectedly, and I was speechless
seeing how these properties w ere lining up like pieces of
a jigsaw  puzzle. It was just three months later when the
golfer, Tom Jenkins, called to say they were going to
move, and we realized that his property was practicallysurrounded by our new purchase. This would mean that
the Temple would now own 1 70 acres of contiguous land. We couldn’t have done better if we had bought it all as
one piece of p roperty to begin with. It was as though
each pie ce wait ed until we co uld afford it. The perfection
of what  had unfolded was stunning, but we weren’t done
yet. After we closed on the Jenkins property, Radha moved
into tha t house . At the time, she mentioned to me that I
should have a better place to  live than that space behind
the kitchen building. The room was very small and had
almost no privacy because everyone kept coming in and
out of the main house day and night. I told her that I was
fine, and I liked waiting for the flow of life to make things
happen. She challenged me by saying that the flow had
given us plenty of land and s ufficient money. What did I
expect—that the universe would call me on the phone
one day and tell me to build a house? I told her that if I
was meant to have a house, something would happen
that wo uld make it perfectly clear. In the meantime, I
was fine with where I was living. It w as o nly two  weeks later w hen I got a call from one
of o ur neighbors informing m e that he was about to put
his house up fo r sale. The onl y lot lying between his land
and my original ten acres h ad been purchased by the
Temple years earlier. This meant that his property
directly bordered Temple property. Because of the
conversation I had with Radha just a few weeks earlier, I
paid sp ecial attention to what my neighbor had to say. He told me tha t he had spent  many years building a very
special house,  and he would like to show it to me. I
played it cool o n the phone, b ut I literally got shivers up
my spine realizing what was  about to happen. I called
Radha and told her that she s hould probably come along
with me to see this place—ju st in case this turned out to
be the call from the universe regarding a house for me.As w e p ulled u p the long wind ing driveway, a beautiful
chalet-style ho me awaited us on the back side of the
property. My first impression was that there was
something very special about this house. It turned out
that my neighbor was a boat-level carpenter. He had
spent twelve years handcra fting the house like some
people would build a high-end yacht or sailboat. The house was not large, only about eighteen hundred
square feet. It sat on a twelve -acre piece of land that was
so w ell kept th at it felt like a park. Once I looked around
inside, I realized that I could not have designed a more
perfect house for myself if I had tried. Though every bit
of the house h ad its own special character, there was
something magical about the small third story that sat
above the kitchen area. As I climbed up the steep open
staircase, I felt like I was goin g up into a tree house. But
what I found was the most perfect space for a meditation
room I could im agine. The top floor was a single ten-by-
twelve-foot room with every inch handcrafted into an
artisan’s drea m. All four walls were wrapped with
antique leaded glass windows that had been saved from a
centuries-old admiral’s house in Boston when it was
taken down. The result was so exquisite that standing
there you felt l ike you had been transported back to the
eighteenth century. As if that were not enough, when I
looked up, I realized that the top floor was covered with a
cupola. Its exposed beams c ame to a high peak in the
center of the r oom, making it feel as though you were
standing inside a pyramid. The space was so exquisite
that the mind became quiet just being there. Needless to say, I purchased the house and have lived
there ever since. The magic of how all these properties
joined together came to a crescendo with this latest
purchase. My neighbor had a lways entered his property
using h is front driveway. It only took a moment of
exploration to realize that the back side of the property
directly bordered the field we had leased from Wilbur.Once we cut an opening in the trees behind the house, I
could drive or walk to the Temple without leaving
Temple property. Amazingly, this one field now
seamlessly tie d together all the properties we had
purchased over the past twenty years into one
contiguous blo ck. No one planned it; it just unfolded that
way. To  say I was humbled by what life had done this
time would be an understatement. I built a wooden boardwalk that connected my new
house to the Temple’s existing boardwalk, and this
became my new commute to work. Some time later
Mataji c ame to  visit, and I showed her the house. In her
quiet voice she said, “So God called you one day and said,
‘Mickey, your house is ready .’ ” I think that pretty much
sums it up.Life calls me on the phone one day and says, “Mickey, your house is
ready.”My commute to work—truly amazing.4 0 . T h e  S c a r y  M e s s e n g e r  o f  C h a n g e
I  sett led into m y new house in  the spring of 1991, and it
seemed like I was living a dream. I was completely
content with everything around me: family, business,
and the  Temple community. The perfection of what I was
surrounded by was enough to challenge the rational
mind. And I w as always aware that I had never asked for
any of it—I was living in a life made by the flow of life. I c an look bac k now and see  the exact moment when
the winds ushering in the next period of change first
blew across my face. I didn’t understand what was
coming at the time, but at least I knew enough to
embrace what ever was taking place. I had already
learned time and again th at it didn’t matter if I
understood what was happ ening; it was sufficient to
devote myself to the present moment and trust that the
flow of life kn ew what it was doing. The flow of events
that happened  next was so miraculous that it had the
effect of permanently freeing  me from an entire layer of
my personal mind. If life cou ld pull off these events, how
could I not completely surrender to her perfection? Before we begin, however, I have a confession to make:
I cannot foretell the future. There was no possible way I
could h ave known that in order to keep up with
Personalized Programming’s  destined growth, it would
not be sufficient to double or even triple my current
twenty-five employees; I would need to grow to more
than three hundred employees. What is more, I could
never h ave imagined that our building needs  would have
to grow from our current forty-three hundred square feetto over eighty-five thousand square feet to provide for
what was coming. If someon e had tried to tell me this
back in the ea rly ’90s, I would have considered them
crazy! Yet to g row like that, there had better be some
planning. Apparently there was, but it certainly wasn’t by
me. This am azing story of how life’s perfection provided
for our future g rowth began one Friday afternoon when a
zoning inspector suddenly showed up at our office. He
seemed very surprised to see a business out here in the
woods, and he told me to call  his boss, the head of county
zoning, right away. That wa s how it all started, and it
seemed very ominous. I knew the he ad of zoning f rom my work with Built
with Lo ve. I gave him a call, and after some pleasantries
he e xplained to me that even  though the public was not
frequenting my business location, I did not have the
required zoning for a business out here. I explored
possible solutio ns with him, including getting the zoning
changed or obtaining a special exception permit, all to no
avail. T o make his point ironclad, he told me that due to
the state land usage plan, even if my father were
president of the United States  and I had a million dollars
to spen d on the effort—I could not get legal business
zoning on any part of our property. Realizing that I would be in big trouble if he shut me
down, I shifted to damage control. I told him that I
appreciated his position and asked him what I should do. He told  me to start looking f or a piece of land down on
the main highway since that would be the closest
business zonin g to our property. My heart dropped as I
realized that this little piece of heaven that had come
together organically over the years was about to change. The main highway was a min imum of three miles away,
and the distance to available property would likely be
much greater.I too k a deep breath, raised my chin up, and gave him
my wo rd that I would tak e care of the problem. I
requested a reasonable amount of ti me to find  the land
and make the move. He didn ’t promise me anything but
said he  would be checking back with me to be sure we
were coming into compliance with the requirements. This is how life managed to not so subtly nudge me
into looking for a new busin ess location. The moment I
hung up, I we nt into Rick K arl’s office to get his legal
advice. Rick agreed that we had no real basis out here in
the middle of a gricultural zoning to get spot zoning for a
small business . So we called a Realtor to start looking for
the closest possible business property. I, of course, didn’t
want to move the business from the Temple, but my
experiment wit h surrender meant I had to stay open and
see where the f low of life’s events would lead me. Months
went by, one after another, but nothing suitable showed
up. Wit h each passage of time , the risk increased that the
county would shut us down. Nonetheless, I was patiently
waiting for life to make her move. In S eptember of that year, l ife made her next move. We received a phone call fro m the person who had sold
us the beautiful eighty-five-acre piece of property a year
earlier. He now wanted to sell the adjoining fifty acres
that ran up to  the paved cou nty road. It fit in perfectly
with the  Temple property, so we went ahead and bought
it. Ther e was no way at the time we could have ever
imagined that this purchase would end up related to
Personalized Programming’s  search for legal business
zoning. We were just dealing with what was put in front
of us. A few months later another property event unfolded
that we had to deal with. It seemed that someone was
planning to build a 185-acre construction waste dump
directly across the street from the fifty acres the Temple
had just purchased. We looke d into the matter and were
shocked to find that it was true. The piece of land hadbeen an nexed into the City of  Alachua years ago and was
no l onger under county zonin g. The land was owned by a
prominent city commissioner, and he had recently sold it
to b e used as a construc tion waste dump. It was
projected that for the next twenty years, a hundred large
dump t rucks w ould be driving down our road seven days
a week and dumping on property directly adjoining ours
and our neighbors’. So mu ch for the flow of life—I
thought we were supposed to  be led into green pastures,
not garbage dumps! The neighborhood was in an uproar. The Temple was
the largest landowner in the area, and people started
asking u s what  to do. We looked into it, and it appeared
that the City of Alachua had the authority to grant a
special use permit for a waste dump—if city
commissioners chose to do so. We really had no choice
but to focus our attention on this matter, to the
detriment of the search for our new office property. We decided that our best course of action was to write
a let ter informing the citizens of Alachua that since there
was no  compr ehensive waste management plan for the
city, a dump co uld be placed anywhere, including on the
vacant lot next to their house. The goal was to push the
city into passing a compreh ensive waste management
plan instead of arbitrarily issuing special use permits, as
they were about to do for this dump. Believe it or not, it actually worked. The night of the
city commissioners’ meeting on the topic, City Hall was
jam-packed w ith a standing-room-only crowd. Before
calling t he meeting to order, t he mayor stood up and told
everyone not to worry becaus e there was not going to be
a vo te on a special use permit tonight, or any other night,
until the city passed a comprehensive waste management
plan. The commission thanked the citizens for their
input a nd committed to working on a plan as soon as
possible.Little did we know that our victory regarding the
garbage dump  was really lif e’s miraculous hand taking
care of Personalized Programming’s zoning issue. A few
days later, we got a call informing us that because the
waste dump did not get its p ermit, the 185-acre piece of
property had suddenly com e up for sale at a very
reasonable price. Since the property was in the City of
Alachua, we were told that it was possible to get it zoned
for b usiness usage. I will neve r forget Rick’s face when he
walked into my office to tell me of his conversation with
the Rea ltor. Th e impossible had happened—the flow of
life had  just unfolded in a w ay that led to a phone call
telling us that i nstead of a waste dump adjoining Temple
property, we could put our business there. Rick and I just
sat i n si lence fo r a while. The  feeling of awe and grace in
that roo m was so powerful th at neither of us could move,
let alone speak. Just look at what Rick and I had witnessed in the past
six months. First, life had in formed me, in no uncertain
terms, that I h ad to leave my office on Temple property
and find a new location. When I tried to comply, nothing
would fall into place. Then, out of the blue, we were
presented with a piece of land that would ultimately
connect Temp le property to our future office property,
without us having the slight est idea of what was really
going o n. The flow of life then presented us with what
appeared to be a terrible situation wherein someone was
preparing to build a waste dump adjoining our property. But what was really going on was that life was preparing
to give us a gre at gift—the most perfect piece of land for
Personalized P rogramming’s future. This land adjoined
Temple prope rty and could get legal business zoning,
something we had previousl y been told was impossible
out here where we lived. And  let’s not forget that all this
happened while I only had twenty-five employees and
could not possibly have known that I would ever need
anything like this—but apparently life knew, and she
certainly took good care of us. So it came to be.Personalized Programming now had legal business
zoning on property adjoining the Temple’s land. It was
time to build. With so  much land having come in such a miraculous
manner, I was forced to rethink my plans for the size of
the new  office building. I stretched my thoughts into the
realm of building something that assured that we would
never have to build again. We designed a beautiful,
14,500-square-foot office building that was worthy of a
company as successful as P ersonalized Programming. Built with Love, which I had sold many years ago to one
of m y job fore men, built the building, and it turned out
exquisite. In June 1993, Personalized Programming
moved its twenty-five employees just down the road to
their new home. We moved  from 4,300 square feet to
14,500—at least we would never have to build again. Amazingly, tha t did not turn out to be the case. Over
the nex t year we more than doubled in size and had to
start planning for another building. Building 2 was even
larger than Building 1 and ad joined to it with a covered
walkway. It’s a good thing th at life had given us enough
land to handle this totally unexpected expansion. By the
time it was al l done, we ended up with five buildings,
giving us more than 85,000 square feet of high-tech
office s pace. To this day, I stand in awe of how life
unfolded so perfectly to provide us exactly what we
needed, exactly when we needed it.Personalized Programming, 1993. They said it was impossible, yet
life manifests this gorgeous new office building bordering Temple
property. What an amazing flow of events!Medical Manager Corporation R&D facility, 2003. Life even knew
enough to  allow for undreamed of exp ansion—from one building to
a pristine five-building office campus.4 1 . T h e  F o u n d a t i o n  I s  B u i l t  f o r  t h e  F u t u r e
P ersonalized Programming’s growth was astonishing. With it came all the problem s associated with a rapidly
growing technology company. Managing ten to twenty
people is one thing, managing fifty-five is quite another. At some point you have to start hiring managers just to
manage the people. I resisted creating middle
management as much as possible. I tried to let the teams
manage themselves with my constant guidance. Because
we h ad grown from the grou nd up, and very few of my
people e ver left, we had a tremendous wealth of technical
and industry knowledge in our programming group. With tw enty-five percent of all independent physicians
across the United States using The Medical Manager, the
practice management industry flowed through Alachua,
Florida. We didn’t have to de cide what direction to go in;
we were surfers riding the powerful wave of industry
demand. There was so much work to do that it was
almost impossible to keep up. By l ate 1994, I  began to realize that I couldn’t possibly
run all the programming groups and the financial and
management aspects of a multimillion-dollar business,
as w ell as prepare for the next wave of growth. I needed
some serious help. So I did what I always did—worked
even harder and waited for the flow of life to do its thing. It w as in this backdrop that I first met Tim Staley. Tim
was a professional software developer and senior IT
consultant who  had decided to move his family out to the
country. He had chosen the tiny town of High Springs,
just a few mile s north of Ala chua, as his new home. Ifyou’re a professional IT person and you move out to my
neck of the wo ods, you are certainly going to hear about
Personalized Programming. Tim applied for a job just
like any one else would. But T im was not like anyone else
—Tim was another miracle. Just like everything else that
showed up exactly when it was supposed to, life had
dropped this highly skill ed and experienced IT
developer/executive in my lap. He would not only end up
being the solution to the software development problems
we w ere having, he would als o end up being the solution
to a much larger problem that hadn’t even surfaced yet. I remember the first time I met Tim. He was in a rush
to find employment in the area so he could move his
family up before school started for his children. After
seeing his résumé, I allowed HR to set up a Saturday
meeting so Tim did not ha ve to miss work. He was
young, very clean and prope r looking, and in his right
hand he  was carrying a bible . That’s an unusual thing to
bring to a job interview, but Tim was clearly a very
religious Chris tian, and he wanted me to know it. I had
no problem with that, but I was not sure that he would
not have a problem with a ponytailed, sandal-wearing
yogi for a boss. We went up to my office, and we began to get to know
each other. Tim was, in fact, a rocket scientist. He had
worked for years at Harris Corporation writing code for
missile guidance systems. I immediately realized I could
check off the “smart enough” box. He had been a
developer, tea m leader, and project manager. Tim
excelled so thoroughly at his overall project development
and peo ple skills that he was now a senior consultant for
Texas Instrum ents running large projects for clients. Interestingly, at that time he was consulting on a major
IT project for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. We began to discuss development philosophy, and we
were as  different as the way we dressed. To me, software
development was a creative art—to him it was anengineering project. The truth is, I knew it had to be both
in orde r to be successful in  the long run. Tim clearly
brought to the table the e xperiential discipline that
comes from being a senio r software engineer  in a
Fortune 500 technology company. We were desperately
in need of that knowledge and experience. Tim and I spe nt hours together and really got to like
each other. He was a perfect fit for what Personalized
Programming needed, both professionally and
personally. Bu t I still had one issue that needed to be
resolved. If Tim was going to seriously consider taking
the job , I needed to be sure he was going to be
comfortable with who I was. At some point he was
certainly going to hear about the Temple across the
street. I  decide d the only fair  thing to do was to take him
over there and show him around. I was amazed by how open T im was to the Temple. He
was fascinated by the artifacts of the various religions
and asked a lot of deep questions about meditation and
yoga. It turned out that Tim was much more than a very
religious person—he was deeply spiritual and was truly a
lover of God. R ather than being offended by how I had
come up, he w as inspired by it. A very deep spiritual
bond formed that day as we shared our spiritual
experiences and beliefs with each other. This bond of
spiritual friendship grew stronger and stronger over the
next ten years that we worked together. Apparently, life
had outdone itself once again
I h ired Tim, an d we decided to quietly bring him in as
a de veloper instead of as top management. He wanted to
work directly with my people to get to know the
development e nvironment fi rsthand. The plan was that
after so me months he would start to reorganize and take
charge of the development teams. I would remain in
charge of product direction; he would be in charge of
engineering. I couldn’t wait t o find out how much of the
load Tim would be capable of carrying.The Me dical M anager product was more than fifteen
years ol d by the time Tim began working with it. It had
been designed for small doctor practices and was now
being used to run large clinics and sprawling managed
care or ganizations. It was not unusual for some of our
larger d ealers to install systems that supported hundreds
of users . If this kept up, we w ould eventually outgrow the
technical capabilities of the software. In addition, our
clients were beginning to ask us to modernize the overall
product. The writing was on the wall: unless we did
something, our days were numbered. If we wanted a
solid foundatio n for the future, we were going to have to
completely rewrite the product. This was not a  decision for the faint of heart. It was
going to take a tremendous investment, putting at risk
years of development resources and millions of dollars. As I  pondered over the enor mity of the project that lay
before us, it fin ally hit me—this was the real reason that
Tim had been sent to us. He had been sent to reengineer
The Medical Manager into a t otally new product with the
latest development technology. We couldn’t afford to stop the rapid pace of
development o f the existing system, so I gave Tim the go-
ahead to hire an entire additional development team to
build the new product. Intergy would be the new
product’s name, and it was a good thing we were building
more buildings because we were certainly going to need
them. I trusted Tim implicitly and gave him whatever he
asked fo r. It took us close to five years to release the new
product, but when all was sa id and done, we ended up
with a product that would kee p us in the marketplace for
many y ears to come. As I loo k back now, it is so obvious
that we could never have su cceeded as we did without
Tim showing up exactly when he did. How in the world
does this keep happening, again and again?4 2 . M e a n w h i l e — B a c k  a t  t h e  R a n c h
T here was so much work to do at Personalized
Programming that I pretty much worked all my waking
hours—except for my morn ings and evenings in the
Temple. The Temple community was so stable that it
hardly took any of my management time. Radha was able
to manage the Temple and its finances even though her
position as the chief financia l controller at Personalized
Programming kept her working day and night. In the
midst o f all this transformatio n, the Temple was about to
experience a change of its own. At the end of 1994, Amrit had a major falling-out with
his followers. As is the case with so many people we put
up on a pedestal, some inappropriate behavior from his
past came to light, and the situation proved extremely
difficult for everyone. When I heard that Amrit had
actually left the community, I invited him and his wife to
come s pend s ome quiet time living with us at the
Temple. To be there when a person is soaring high is an
easy relationship. To be there during hard times requires
deep fri endship. All of us had  received a great deal from
Amrit over the years. We were humbled at the
opportunity to give something back. Radha had been living in the Jenkins house for several
years by then. Since it was  the nicest house on our
property, she immediately offered to move out. In
December 1994, Amrit and his wife moved into that
house a nd ended up living t here for the better part of
three years. It w as an amazing experience to be that close
to such an evolved person going through such a life-changing experience. While he was here, Amrit simply
allowed the situation to p ut him through whatever
changes he needed to go thro ugh. Situations like this are
like fir e, and Amrit just w anted to use that fire for
spiritual purification. He wasn’t sad, he wasn’t hurt, and
he wasn ’t scare d—he was just completely surrendered to
going through the experience. I constantly saw in Amrit
what I always saw inside of  me: when push comes to
shove, I don’t care what it takes, just free me from
myself. The only meaningful prayer is that this white-hot
fire be so dest ructive to the personal self that it severs
the cord that binds. Standing soul to soul, Amrit and I
had that in common—liberation at any cost. I didn’t isolate myself from what Amrit was going
through. I wanted to share the experience of exploring
what it would be like insid e if everything were taken
away outside. I recalled Kin g Solomon’s wisdom: For
every thing there is a season, a time for every purpose
under heaven. I had been honored to know Amrit as a
world-renowned teacher; I was now all the more
honored to be close to him as  he passed through a period
of g reat darkness or, better  put, as a period of great
darkness passed through him . He never complained, and
he never got depressed or despondent. He just spent
each day surrendering at a deeper and deeper level. Reality was what it was—mig ht as well use it to let go of
the personal self. As with  all things, in time the energy began to shift. The noise of the past subside d and opportunities for the
future began to open up. One  day Amrit asked me to take
a dr ive with him to see a place he had found in the Ocala
National Fores t. It was in a very small town less than an
hour and a ha lf south of the Temple. I couldn’t believe
the place when I saw it. It w as an absolutely beautiful
giant house sitting on the sh ore of a gorgeous lake, and
there were also five or six cabins on the property. It was a
perfect home for Amrit and  his family. Every place Iwalked, I felt Amrit. I had k nown him for years, and I
knew his taste. You could no t have custom built a home
specifically for him that was more perfect than this place. I ha d to hold back tears as I realized—it was over. The
period of darkness had passed. I encouraged him to buy
the property if he could afford it. He then told me the
price. I  couldn’t believe my ears—it was the deal of the
century. I learned a lot  about surrender by being with Amrit
during this whole ordeal. What I saw was that no matter
who we are, life is going to p ut us through the changes
we n eed to go through. The question is: Are we willing to
use this force for our transformation? I saw that even
very int ense si tuations don’t have to leave psychological
scars, if  we are willing to proc ess our changes at a deeper
level. My surrender experiment had already taught me to
deeply honor the transformative power of life. Sharing
that time with Amrit would  prove to be all the more
important since life as I knew it was once again about to
go through a major, unexpected change.S e c t i o n  V I I I
Embracing Explosive
Expansion4 3 . T h e  M e d i c a l  M a n a g e r  S p r o u t s  W i n g s
I f yo u ha d asked  me in 1995 what I thought the future of
Personalized Programming looked like, I would have told
you tha t we had grown about as big as we could, and the
challenge was  going to be staying at the top of our
industry. If you had asked me about my surrender
experiment, I would have told you that the relentless
practice of letting go of myse lf in order to fully embrace
what was unfolding around me was having a profound
effect on my sp iritual growth. It had, in fact, become my
way of life. I h ad seen time a nd again that letting go not
only led to amazing results, but it also left me in a state
of p rofound inner peace. I w as not in charge; life was in
charge, and there was an underlying sense of enthusiasm
and excitemen t about getting to see what was going to
happen next. After all, just lo ok at what had happened so
far. By the end of  1995, Personalized Programming had
grown t o seven ty-five employees and had enough work
to keep  us busy for a very long time. I loved what we
were doing, and we were obv iously very good at it. Our
revenues had reached ten million dollars a year, and
since most of that was royalty payments, we were
profiting five to six million a year. The Medical Manager
itself was more than fifteen years old by then, and it was
touching the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In
my limited view of things, I saw us going on like this for
the foreseeable future. The first clue that dramatic c hange was once again on
the horizon came when I learned that Systems Plus andmany of the dealers were discussing the possibility of
merging toget her into one c ompany. Apparently, they
felt this  would  help them com pete better at the national
level. S oon afterward, I received a visit from one of our
larger d ealers, John Kang, who was headquartered in
Tampa. He informed me that he had been working on a
proposal to consolidate the Medical Manager dealers
into a combin ed company. He laid out his plan of
initially purchasing Personalized Programming, Systems
Plus, and three or four of the larger dealerships. He
explained that it would take a large initial investment,
but he already had that lined up. John’s presentation was
very professional, but I didn’t see why Personalized
Programming had to be involved. I told him that I would
be willing to legally commit to providing The Medical
Manager software to the new company. He then dropped
the bombshell : any investors in the company would
insist that the foundational software be owned by the
company itself. I was very uncomfortable with the thought of selling
Personalized Programming. But I was even more
uncomfortable thinking that I would be the reason that
all these hundreds of dealers, and Systems Plus, were
unable to get their hard-earned value from their
businesses. I told John I was not interested in selling the
business at any price, but if my reluctance was truly in
the way  of everyone else’s dr eams, I would have to give
his proposal some consideration. I told him he could
come back to s ee me if he succeeded in getting others to
buy in to his p lan. What I w as really hoping, however,
was that the whole thing would just fall through by itself. John returned a few weeks later having obtained buy-
in from  some of our largest dealers as well as Systems
Plus. The handwriting wa s on the wall—this was
becoming like all the previou s times I had to put aside
my strong personal preferences and surrender to what
was ma nifesting before me. I didn’t like it one bit, but Iwas fully committed to seeing where the path of
surrender to life was going to lead me. John Kang made me a persuasive offer for
Personalized P rogramming t hat included both cash and
stock in the n ew company. He then set out on the
difficult journey of merging five businesses into one and
raising the funds needed to  pull the merger off. The
bankers decide d it would be  best to raise the necessary
$150 million by selling shares of the new company
publicly. The date for an initial public offering (IPO) was
set for early 1997, but a lot of work still needed to be
done. What a world to be thrown into. Personalized
Programming had grown g radually from its humble
roots of one employee—me. It was now a very well
organized, highly successful private company. This level
of orga nization was not going to exist when a bunch of
independently run businesses first get thrown into a pot
together. There were going to be the expected power
struggles, deal er acquisition  issues, and constant legal
and financial issues to be ironed out. Nonetheless, I
didn’t allow myself to get cau ght up in all those negative
thoughts. I just remained open and completely intrigued
by what was unfolding. It was decided  that the new company would be called
Medical Manager Corporation. I must admit, I liked that. I flashed back to 1981 when I was finishing the software
and firs t came up with the name “The Medical Manager.”
Fifteen years later, Medical Manager was now going to
become a public company. Standing at the threshold of
this major event, I was total ly in awe seeing where my
experiment with surrender had managed to lead me.4 4 . M e d i c a l  M a n a g e r  C o r p o r a t i o n — M M G R
W hen the smoke cleared, I was to be the chief executive
officer (CEO); John Kang, the president; and Rick Karl,
the general counsel. Corporate headquarters would be
established in Tampa at John Kang’s facilities, and Rick
Karl and I wo uld work out of the Alachua offices. The
company would trade on the NASDAQ exchange under
the symbol MMGR. As we headed  toward the e nd of 1996, the cadre of
lawyers and bankers was finishing up all the paperwork
to m erge the companies together and simultaneously do
the IPO . I remember that this  was an interesting time for
me in my relationship with my dad. My father had been a
stockbroker m ost of his life, and he had been working at
Merrill Lynch for more than thirty years. His only son
had dro pped out of graduate school in business to live in
the woods and meditate. I ne ver left the woods, yet all of
a sudden I was in my dad’s world. He kept telling me that
he just couldn’t believe that Morgan Stanley, one of the
premiere brok erage houses in the world, was interested
in m y company. He was also  surprised to find out that
Merrill Lynch’s health-care analyst was closely
monitoring our upcoming transaction. My dad was very
interested that my company was going public, and we
talked to each other more during this time than we had
for the previous twenty years put together. It makes
sense—we now had something in common to talk about. I was humbled by this opportunity to get closer to my
father. I  saw it as just another miraculous thing that had
happened as I surrendered t o the flow of life. It wasn’ttoo muc h later  when my dad died. But you can be sure he
enjoyed being able to give his son his lifetime-learned
advice about becoming a public company, the health-
care sector, and Wall Street in general. Despite the amazing sequenc e of events that led up to
this point, nothing could have prepared me for what
happened next . A week or so before the IPO, I received a
list of action it ems from my New York attorney. One by
one I worked through the list, signing required
documents and locating required paperwork. The final
item wa s due the next day, so  I rushed down to my bank
to acces s my safety deposit box. I rarely had reason to
touch th is box I had rented b ack in 1971 to store my only
possession—the deed for my original ten acres. Once I was le ft alone with the storage box, I began
looking for the document my attorney had requested. There wasn’t much in the bo x, but what was there had
the effect of a time machine. I came across the original
deed on my property—how much had happened since
then. N o one in their right mind could have imagined the
flow of events that unfolded since I decided to drop out
and live in t he woods. My trip back in time was
interrupted when I came upon the document I was
looking for. I pulled out the trifolded piece of paper and
opened it up. It was the Personalized Programming stock
certificate sent to me when I incorporated the company
fifteen years earlier. When I had originally dropped the
certificate in my deposit box, it was pretty much
worthless to anyone but me. Then it hit me like a ton of
bricks. The most savvy investors in the world were
valuing this piece of paper at over a hundred million
dollars. My mouth went dry, and tears welled up in my eyes. I
had given everything up, and it kept coming back
tenfold. When I had decided to let go and devote my life
to s erving what was unfold ing in front of me, I was
earning less than five thousand dollars a year. WhenBuilt with Love came together, it grew from tens of
thousands to hundreds of th ousands in revenue. When
Personalized P rogramming came together, it quickly
grew to millions and then mo re than ten million in sales
and royalties. Now I was dealing with a hundred-million-
dollar asset. It wasn’t the mo ney that moved me; it was
the invisible hand of life that blew me away. I stood there
in the bank and offered that piece of paper back to the
universe from whence it had  come. I vowed to serve the
company I had watched life build, brick by brick, and to
use the money entrusted to m e in a way that would help
others. I took a deep breath, closed the deposit box, and
prepared to ship the stock certificate up to New York.4 5 . B e c o m i n g  C E O
M edical Manager Corporation was born out of a
successful IPO  on February 2, 1997. Out here in the
woods o f Alachua, not only di d I maintain my position as
president of our large R&D facility, but I also became
CEO an d chairman of the bo ard of directors of the new
company. I was completely naive as to how much work I
would b e taking on as CEO. I quickly realized that it was
going to require all the one-pointed focus I had
developed thr ough my years of meditation. I had
surrendered, a nd this was t he task life had given me. That made it part of my spiritual journey, and I was fully
prepared to devote myself to it to the absolute best of my
ability. The first thing I did was tak e the steps necessary to
assure that I would know what was going on in the
company. I was in Alachua, a nd a group of independent-
minded execu tives accustom ed to running their own
businesses were scattered around the country. If I was
going to take responsibility for the company, a thorough
flow of inform ation needed to pass across my desk. This
was going to require regular group conference calls and
an enor mous amount of reporting to keep up with what
everyone was doing. When I announced that each
executive had to turn in a weekly report on the major
activities under their domain, there was definitely some
grumbling. But together we had an enormous amount of
experience, and I wanted the group-mind making
decisions, not any one person’s mind.It wasn’t long, however, before I realized that I
couldn’t possibly keep up with all the weekly status
reports plus be properly prepared for the executive
conference call s. I needed some serious help, and as you
may have guessed by now, that is exactly what I got. We won ’t call it a miracle, but this time life’s magic
showed up in the form of a young lady named Sabrina. Paul Dobbins had met her years earlier at one of our
national dealer seminars, and apparently, it was love at
first sig ht. Not too long after  that, Paul informed us that
Sabrina was moving here, and they were getting married. I didn’t know Sabrina, and I was concerned that Paul
expected her to move int o a yoga-based spiritual
community when she wasn’t even into yoga or
meditation. He  assured me that she would fit in just fine,
and he also inf ormed me that I would be very pleased to
have he r work at the company. Surrender, surrender,
surrender—like I had a choice. As it turns out , Sabrina’s family business was a small
Medical Manager dealership in California. She had been
selling, installing, and suppo rting practice management
software since she was thirteen years old. Though she
was only twenty-two when she began working at
Personalized P rogramming, and had never even been to
college, I soon found out that senior-level business
analysis was completely natural to her. Despite the fact
that she had no prior experience at this level, Sabrina
was the  person I turned to for executive help when I
became CEO. With Sabrina at my side, one of my main
responsibilities as CEO beca me growing the company. Fortunately, this was no ordinary company; the
prospects for growth in th e newly created Medical
Manager Corp oration were phenomenal. To start with,
our growth would come naturally as we acquired our
dealers. We had close to two  hundred dealers, many of
which would be very good ac quisitions for us. As long aswe had  a steady stream of new dealers merging into the
company, we had a natural source of growth. Much more interesting to me, however, was the
tremendous growth that could come from our ability to
electronically c onnect our enormous number of doctors
to the rest of the health -care industry, including
insurance companies, laboratories, and pharmacies. Once we rolled support of our practices under one roof,
we could provide a level of automation for the health-
care sys tem that would not o nly cut costs but also result
in improved efficiency and patient care. I sa t down wit h Sabrina and told her that getting our
hundred-thousand-plus doctors fully up on electronic
claims and other health-care  transactions was going to
be our first new corporate business initiative. I then
informed her that she was going to be in charge. This was
the birth of what we called Medical Manager Network
Services. The success of this venture at so many levels
was practically incomprehensible. It started out as an
inspired vision and grew into a $100-million-a-year line
of busin ess. In a very short period of time, we led the
industry in electronic transactions. Over the next two years, the  company grew by leaps
and bounds. We kept acquiring more and more of our
dealers, and our nationwide  presence meant we could
provide our services to larger and larger clients. Meanwhile, I never worked so hard in my life. But it
didn’t burn me out. In fact, it had the opposite effect. The
more I let go of “Mickey” and just committed myself to
the task life ha d given me, the more the spiritual energy
flow increased within me. It was as though by aligning
myself w ith life ’s outer flow, t he beautiful, inward flow of
energy was naturally stren gthened. By now, I had
become thorou ghly convince d that the constant act of
letting go of o ne’s self-centered thoughts and emotions
was all that was needed for profound personal,
professional, and spiritual growth.4 6 . T h e  I n t e r n e t  a n d  H e a l t h  C a r e
A fter almost thirty years, I’d seen enough perfection
unfold around me that nothing in me wanted to interfere
with the flow ever again. I had seen time and again how
what at  first appeared to be a  problem turned out to be a
guiding force of change leading us forward. That was
certainly the case toward the end of 1998 as our
executive strategy calls began to focus on how the
Internet was going to affect our business. It concerned us
that our competitors would so on have inexpensive access
to all physicians nationwide without the need to build
out a dealer ne twork. John Kang and I were well aware
that two  health -care Internet  companies, Healtheon and
WebMD, were already soliciting our doctors on an ever-
increasing basis. We knew we had to do something if we
wanted to be able to compete successfully in the
upcoming world of Internet connectivity. Around this time, John Kang had been introduced to a
company calle d Synetic, in New Jersey, that was in the
process of building a very advanced health-care Internet
portal. Synetic had one of the finest management teams
in the industry, and it appeared that none of the other
start-up companies stood a chance against it. Synetic executives were very interested in a possible
merger with Medical Manager Corporation. Their dream
was to handle all the industr y’s health-care transactions
through their Internet portal. When they looked at us,
they sa w more than one hundred thousand physicians
already connected electronically for a broad range of
services. If they handled the transactions for all ourphysicians, everyone in the industry would want to do
business with them. Synetic w as in a position to leverage
the asset we had built to an entirely new level. In May of 1999, John Kang set up a meeting for me to
meet Synetic’s  chairman, Marty Wygod. Marty and I
lived on opposite sides of th e country, so he suggested
that we  meet at an aptly named private airport in
Midway, Texas. Midway wa s, in fact, almost exactly
halfway between California and Florida. I chartered a
private jet and flew in by myself. Sitting alone in a six-seater jet at forty thousand feet is
a v ery peaceful  place. I fell into meditation and my mind
became very still. When I opened my eyes, I absorbed the
tremendous difference in my  environment from when I
had firs t decid ed to let go and see where life would take
me. I still live d in the same woods and kept my same
practices morn ing and evening, but somehow the rest
had changed rather dramatically. I reflected back at how
many times life had presented me with changes I was
uncomfortable with. In the  beginning, it had been
difficult to ignore the resistant mind. Over time, as I saw
what ha d transpired by taking the risk of letting go of
me, the  process had become much more natural. I was
surrounded by the results of letting go. There was
nothing in my life I could point to that hadn’t come from
surrendering to life’s flow. I was so humbled by the
process that nothing in me w anted to resist ever again. I
was deeply in love with the excitement and wonder of
experiencing what would unfold next. It was in this
frame of mind that I was off to Texas to meet Synetic’s
chairman. To me, this proposed merger was simply what was
happening nex t. I didn’t need to think about it; I already
knew th at nothing inside of me wanted to merge the
company with Synetic or anyone else. I loved what I was
doing. I had a vision burning inside of me that had
driven me for twenty years. It started while I was firstwriting this amazing program, and it never subsided for
a single moment. That vision inspired me day and night. I didn’t  want to eat, and I didn’t want to sleep. I was
driven to perfect the program, its distribution, and the
support of the doctors who had entrusted their practices
to u s. I felt like life had giv en me this task, and I was
honored to do it. I had not  lost one drop of my early
focus or yearning to explore t he deeper inner states. This
surrendering t o life was  my  path to self-realization, and
there was no doubt that it was working. I was not living a
life based on w hat I wanted or didn’t want. Those types
of thoughts had ceased passing through my mind long
ago. I was way too busy tryi ng to do the work life had
given me. This was Karma yo ga at its highest. I had given
my life to the Universal Flow, and it had not only taken it
—it had devoured me in the process. I didn’t care at all
what happened to me. I car ed about the company, the
employees, the doctors, and, above all, the vision of
perfection that drove the very beat of my heart. As beautiful as that sounds, I found myself on a jet
flying to a tiny  airport somewhere in the middle of Texas
to meet  a total stranger and discuss arrangements to put
the company under his control. That was the bottom
line. Events had unfolded such that the greatest potential
for t he company had outgrown what we could provide by
ourselves. My discussions w ith John Kang about the
proposed deal had shown me how sharp Marty was. Control was definitely my ma jor issue. I wanted to be in
a p osition to keep the dream alive and protect the
company from being abused for strictly financial gain. Marty had agreed to put J ohn, me, and some other
Medical Mana ger Corporatio n board members on the
board of directors of the combined company. He also
agreed to make me co-chairm an of the board, and John
and I would become the co-CEOs. For added incentive,
the new  comb ined company would keep our name,
Medical Manager Corporation.Though I was a  novice at mer gers of public companies,
I w as astute enough to kno w what granting us these
high-level positions really m eant. It meant that Marty
was so confide nt of his position of power that he did not
feel the slightest bit threatened by ceding this amount of
power t o people with whom he had no history. Any way
you cut it, if the deal went through, Marty was going to
be my boss. T his was all th e more interesting since I
never re ally had a boss befor e, and I was fifty-two years
old. I had rese arched all I could about Marty. He was a
self-made billi onaire who bred and raced thoroughbred
horses for a h obby. He had grown up on Wall Street
buying and selling companies, and he had also built
some very successful compa nies from the ground up,
including Medco, which he had sold to Merck
pharmaceuticals for six billio n dollars years earlier. Most
important, he was highly respected in the upper echelons
of business. More than one a rticle about him freely used
the term “genius.”
Marty h ad made an offer of $1.3 billion for Medical
Manager Corporation. Our board of directors was
leaning very favorably toward the deal. I felt pretty
certain that all vectors were flowing in that direction—
that’s why I wa s flying out for this meeting. What I didn’t
know was what life would be  like in this larger corporate
environment. I realized I could never know beforehand,
and I was read y to surrender once again to the flow of
life. From a p ersonal point of view, I was much more
interested in seeing how Marty did with me than how I
did with him. I was a ponytailed, non-suit-wearing yogi,
and Marty was sure to be a more traditional
businessman. Was this going to work? Marty flew in on his jet w ith one of his business
development people. The meeting lasted only a few
hours and everything went fine, as would be expected
under these circumstances. W e each had already spent
sufficient time analyzing the proposed merger, so by thetime we met, the synergies  were quite clear. I found
Marty to be ve ry down to earth and approachable. He
was all busines s, and I really liked that. I made a point of
discussing (or more accuratel y—disclosing) the existence
of the Temple, and my commitment to meditation and
my alte rnative lifestyle. I knew I wasn’t going to give any
of that up, so it  seemed appropriate to let him know what
he was getting into. It was obvious that Marty was way
past the small stuff. He was  a big picture person, and
what he cared about was corporate development. He
couldn’t have cared less about my personal lifestyle, but
he paid close attention when I discussed how hard I
worked every day. He told me his wife did yoga, and I
figured that being from Calif ornia he was bound to have
been ex posed to the likes of me. As Marty and I shook
hands a nd went our own ways, there was no way I could
have known how much I would end up learning, both
personally and professionally, from this man.4 7 . M e r g i n g — B u t  N o t  w i t h  t h e  U n i v e r s e
O ver the  years, I had come to  see that I really had no
idea wh ere life was going to  put me on any given day. And, in  truth, it was none of my business. My job was to
simply continu e surrendering and serving what was put
in f ront of me . Such was th e case on the day I found
myself chairin g a Medical M anager Corporation board
meeting speci fically called to discuss the proposed
merger with Synetic. Medical Manager had a very active board of directors,
many of whom had tremen dous business experience,
including a previous treasurer of General Motors. The
board was seriously considering our various options
going forward. We had done $140 million of business the
previous year versus Synet ic’s $70 million. But the
tremendous potential value of its web portal had pushed
Synetic’s market value way beyond ours and made the
company an attractive partner. In the end, the board
unanimously decided to accept Synetic’s $1.3 billion offer
for the company. I, of  cou rse, ha d never been in volved in a billion-dollar
merger before. But we had great outside counsel and a
good team of b ankers to assist us. I turned to Sabrina to
work by my si de on this enormous project. Marty had
put the merger on the fast track, and all the details had
to be worked out in a few weeks. We worked day and
night to get the final deal presented to both boards, and
the merger was announced publicly on May 17, 1999. The merger between Medic al Manager Corporation
and Synetic created quite a st ir. It was the main businessstory on CNN that evening and was prominent in the
Wall Street Journal  the next day. The new company kept
the Medical Manager Corporation name, and John Kang
and I were co -CEOs and sat on the board of directors
with Marty as chairman. Though I still lived at the
Temple of the Universe and simply drove across the
street to  get to work, my world had instantly expanded. My responsibilities now stretched beyond the practice
management business and included all the areas of
business Marty’s team had been working on. In truth,
that was the most exciting part of the merger. I now had
an entire team of world-class executives to work with. Marty surrounded himself w ith the best of the best, and
it was really an honor to get to work with these people. As it turned out, Synetic’s main competitors were our
old friends, WebMD and H ealtheon, who had merged
together by now. Their com bined company provided
serious competition for our health-care Internet portal. The question was simply one of time—would there be
enough time for us to build o ut our highly sophisticated
web of fering before Health eon/WebMD attracted too
much of the available funding? The answer to that question came on January 25,
2000, just six months after our merger with Synetic. We
awoke to the news that Healtheon/WebMD had
managed to acquire Envoy, the largest claims
clearinghouse in the industry, for $2.5 billion. That was
quite an  acquisition consideri ng that Healtheon/WebMD
was a web start-up company reporting enormous losses,
and Envoy was a well-established, highly profitable
clearinghouse f or health-care  transactions. It was quickly
determined th at we could n ot maintain a competitive
position in light of this deal. From Medical Manager’s
point o f view, the deal meant that our competitor now
owned the clearinghouse through which we were
channeling all of our clients’ hundreds of millions of
claims a year. There were tim es when I was very glad Iwas no longer in charge—late January 2000 was
definitely one of them.4 8 . B u i l d i n g  R o m e  i n  a  D a y
M arty was calm and collected at the ensuing board
meeting. In fact, he seemed even sharper than usual. It
turned out he was just as good at playing downside
situations as he was at lever aging upside opportunities. He went over the options with the board, and it was
decided we had best try to negotiate a decent merger
agreement with Healtheon/WebMD. It was a classic case
of “ if you can’t  beat them, join them.” The problem was
that we were well aware that the underpinnings of
Healtheon/WebMD were very weak. The company had
been b uilt up  based solely on the vision of future
performance, y et the market was valuing it at $7 billion. Unfortunately, our most promising road to success
meant merging with them and doing the hard work
necessary to make it all a reality. As unbelievable as it seems, Medical Manager
Corporation and Healtheon/WebMD announced their
merger agreement just three weeks after we learned of
the Envoy deal. It was on Va lentine’s Day, February 14,
2000. T he dea l valued Medical Manager Corporation at
$3.5 billion, and Wall Street characterized it as the
merger of two behemoths in the health-care industry. It
drew he adlines everywhere. The announcement pushed
Medical Manager’s stock pric e to a peak of $86 a share. This can  be compared to $17. 60 per share when we went
public three years earlier. The joy was short-lived. The infamous Internet bubble,
caused by overinflated e xpectations for Internet
companies, began to burst just weeks after the mergerannouncement. We had not even closed the deal, yet by
April 2 000, H ealtheon/WebMD had already lost 70
percent of its valu e. Our stock fell accor dingly because it
was tied  to their stock by the merger agreement.
The-Surrender-Experiment-by-Michael-a-Singer.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        A s we will see shortly, thisleased land was destined to play a much larger role in
what life had in store for us. It was not just with the T emple property or the
meteoric succe ss of the business that miraculous events
were taking place. Little things were happening on a
regular basis that were so unlikely, they chipped away at
the rational mind. One of these amazing events took
place d uring a business trip to Boston in the late ’80s. With so many Blue Cross B lue Shields private-labeling
The Medical Manager, I had received a request from Blue
Cross Blue Shield of Massa chusetts to come up for a
meeting. I arrived in Boston  late afternoon, and I was
starved. I had r ushed around all morning and not eaten a
thing all day. I nstead of eating junk food while traveling,
I figured I would get checked into the hotel and find a
nice vegetarian restaurant. I didn’t know Boston at all,
but I had a rental car, and how hard could it be. I go t very lost  trying to find the restaurant that the
concierge had suggested. After close to an hour’s drive, I
ended u p in Harvard Square. I drove around looking for
a vegetarian restaurant in th at area, but I couldn’t find
one. In  a big c ity like Boston, I had been hoping for a
high-end vegetarian meal. Now I would be perfectly
happy w ith just brown rice an d veggies. I decided to quit
driving around and just order room service from the
hotel—if I could find my way  back. Somehow I managed
to g et lost again  and ended up back in Harvard Square. It
dawned on me that perhaps the universe was trying to
tell me something, so I parked my car and got out. This time I loo ked more carefully to see if there was
even a small place that might have something a
vegetarian could eat. I noticed there were some narrow
alleys th at ran  between the b uildings. They were not for
cars, but shops lined both sid es of the walkway. I headed
for one of the alleys and, lo and behold, fifty feet down
the alley was a small blackboard stating, “Today’s
Special: Brown Rice and Fresh Vegetables. ” I hung myhead in both r elief and gratitude, but I would soon find
out that I hadn’t seen anything yet. The sign  led to a narrow staircase that wound down to
a s mall restaurant. It was just perfect for the mood I was
in. I ordered, and a deep peace came over me as I
enjoyed the great meal that l ife had provided me. There
was one thing, however, that was disturbing my peaceful
respite. From the time I entered the restaurant, the man
behind the checkout counter kept staring at me. It was
enough to make me a little uncomfortable. When I was
done ea ting, instead of the waiter bringing me the bill,
the man from behind the counter brought it to me. As I
reached for my wallet, he ask ed me a question: “By any
chance, are you Mickey S inger. ” I was completely
stunned as the unlikely sequence of events that brought
me to this restaurant flashed through my mind. What in  the world was this. I didn’t know this person. I responded affirmatively, and the energy between us
became intens ely spiritual. He said that I wouldn’t
remember him, but he remembered me. Back in 1972,
more than sixteen years ago, he was hitchhiking through
Gainesville, and I had picked him up in my VW van. He
had been going through a very difficult period in his life,
and he asked m e about the picture of Yogananda on my
dashboard. I explained to him that I was heavily into
yoga and was studying the t eachings of this great yoga
master. When he reached Atlanta, he was walking by a
bookstore and saw Yoganand a’s picture in the storefront
window. He went in and purchased a copy of
Autobiography of a Yogi  as I ha d encou raged him to do. Apparently, it changed his life. He ended up meeting
Baba during the world tour a nd was now living in a yoga
center in Boston. He said he had often wondered if I had
ever met Baba; then he saw a picture of us together at
Disney World. It brought him great joy, and he prayed
that som eday he would have the opportunity to thank me
in pers on for the important role I had played in hisawakening. With that p rayer now miraculously
answered, he stood quietly before me with tears in his
eyes and uttered, “Thank you. ” That said, he turned and
walked away. As I headed down the alley toward my car, I looked
back at the b lackboard that had lured me into this
unbelievable e vent. I remembered that before I walked
into tha t restaurant I thought I knew what was going on:
a very interesting flow of events had brought me to my
brown rice and vegetables. I was wrong. It was much
bigger than that. It’s always much bigger than that—for
everyone. I was so glad I had decided to devote my life to
learning to surrender. I didn ’t know what was going on,
and I had reach ed the point of not even wanting to know. I j ust wanted t o cease to inte rfere with the perfection of
life. Apparently, even a business trip to Boston is fair
game for a miracle. S e c t i o n  V I I
When Dark Clouds Become
Rainbows3 9. A  T o u c h  o f  M a g i c
M y bi rth sign is Taurus, and my nature has always been
to j ust settle i n and do my work. I wasn’t the type of
person who was always looki ng for change. I enjoyed the
repetition of a stable lifestyle and gradual, sustainable
growth. Both the business and the Temple went through
natural stages in their growth. I always thought each
stage would become the steady state. By t he early 19 90s, I certainly felt that we were done
with ou r rapid  growth. Personalized Programming was
in phenomenal shape. We were up to twenty employees,
and the bottom line was net ting a few million dollars a
year. I still ha d not changed my personal lifestyle, so I
continued using the money to build up an endowment
for the Temple  and to support various charities. At that
time, B arb was  living in my house, and I was in a small
guest accomm odation in the building the Temple used
for dinners. This building had a long wooden boardwalk
stretching across a wetlands area connecting it with
Personalized Programming’s office. That walk was my
commute to work. Those of u s living at the Temple were
all working hard and keep ing morning and evening
services toge ther. People from the Gainesville
community were coming out regularly for my Monday
and Thursday night talks, and a large crowd always
found their way out on Sunday mornings. Things were
good, a nd I thought the perio d of crazy growth was over. Apparently, I was wrong. To u nderstand  the next wave  of growth, it is important
to unde rstand what was going on inside of me at thattime. All the events that h ad unfolded so far in my
experiment wit h surrender had shown me that the more
I w as willing to let go of the inner noise created by my
personal likes and dislikes, the more I could see subtle
synchronicities in what was unfolding around me. These
unexpected co ncurrences of events were like messages
from life gently nudging me  in the direction she was
going. I listened to these subtle nudges instead of
listening to the not-so-subtle mental and emotional
reactions caused by my personal preferences. This is how
I pr acticed surrender in everyday life, and the purpose of
all t hese stories is to share wi th you the perfection of the
journey that unfolded. Take the case of the Temple property. As I’ve already
mentioned, we  had no interest in owning a lot of land. Yet, ove r the years, the Tem ple would end up with an
enormous amount of propert y, and each purchase along
the way seemed to have something magical about it. Such was the c ase in October of 1990 when I received a
call regarding a piece of pro perty that had come up for
sale in our area. The Realtor said it was eighty-five acres
of c ombined woods and field, and it was considered one
of th e most be autiful pieces of land in Alachua County. I
told him that I  doubted we would be interested since our
primary interest was in land that bordered the Temple
property. He insisted on giving me a tour, and we were
both very surprised when we discovered that this
exquisite piece of land actually did border directly on the
Temple’s lease d land. That was enough of a nudge for
me. I put ou t a minimal amount of effort, and the
purchase just seemed to fall into place by itself. I considered that land a gift from the universe. It came
to us completely unexpectedly, and I was speechless
seeing how these properties w ere lining up like pieces of
a jigsaw  puzzle. It was just three months later when the
golfer, Tom Jenkins, called to say they were going to
move, and we realized that his property was practicallysurrounded by our new purchase. This would mean that
the Temple would now own 1 70 acres of contiguous land. We couldn’t have done better if we had bought it all as
one piece of p roperty to begin with. It was as though
each pie ce wait ed until we co uld afford it. The perfection
of what  had unfolded was stunning, but we weren’t done
yet. After we closed on the Jenkins property, Radha moved
into tha t house. At the time, she mentioned to me that I
should have a better place to  live than that space behind
the kitchen building. The room was very small and had
almost no privacy because everyone kept coming in and
out of the main house day and night. I told her that I was
fine, and I liked waiting for the flow of life to make things
happen. She challenged me by saying that the flow had
given us plenty of land and s ufficient money. What did I
expect—that the universe would call me on the phone
one day and tell me to build a house. I told her that if I
was meant to have a house, something would happen
that wo uld make it perfectly clear. In the meantime, I
was fine with where I was living. It w as o nly two  weeks later w hen I got a call from one
of o ur neighbors informing m e that he was about to put
his house up fo r sale. The onl y lot lying between his land
and my original ten acres h ad been purchased by the
Temple years earlier. This meant that his property
directly bordered Temple property. Because of the
conversation I had with Radha just a few weeks earlier, I
paid sp ecial attention to what my neighbor had to say. He told me tha t he had spent  many years building a very
special house,  and he would like to show it to me. I
played it cool o n the phone, b ut I literally got shivers up
my spine realizing what was  about to happen. I called
Radha and told her that she s hould probably come along
with me to see this place—ju st in case this turned out to
be the call from the universe regarding a house for me. As w e p ulled u p the long wind ing driveway, a beautiful
chalet-style ho me awaited us on the back side of the
property. My first impression was that there was
something very special about this house. It turned out
that my neighbor was a boat-level carpenter. He had
spent twelve years handcra fting the house like some
people would build a high-end yacht or sailboat. The house was not large, only about eighteen hundred
square feet. It sat on a twelve -acre piece of land that was
so w ell kept th at it felt like a park. Once I looked around
inside, I realized that I could not have designed a more
perfect house for myself if I had tried. Though every bit
of the house h ad its own special character, there was
something magical about the small third story that sat
above the kitchen area. As I climbed up the steep open
staircase, I felt like I was goin g up into a tree house. But
what I found was the most perfect space for a meditation
room I could im agine. The top floor was a single ten-by-
twelve-foot room with every inch handcrafted into an
artisan’s drea m. All four walls were wrapped with
antique leaded glass windows that had been saved from a
centuries-old admiral’s house in Boston when it was
taken down. The result was so exquisite that standing
there you felt l ike you had been transported back to the
eighteenth century. As if that were not enough, when I
looked up, I realized that the top floor was covered with a
cupola. Its exposed beams c ame to a high peak in the
center of the r oom, making it feel as though you were
standing inside a pyramid. The space was so exquisite
that the mind became quiet just being there. Needless to say, I purchased the house and have lived
there ever since. The magic of how all these properties
joined together came to a crescendo with this latest
purchase. My neighbor had a lways entered his property
using h is front driveway. It only took a moment of
exploration to realize that the back side of the property
directly bordered the field we had leased from Wilbur. Once we cut an opening in the trees behind the house, I
could drive or walk to the Temple without leaving
Temple property. Amazingly, this one field now
seamlessly tie d together all the properties we had
purchased over the past twenty years into one
contiguous blo ck. No one planned it; it just unfolded that
way. To  say I was humbled by what life had done this
time would be an understatement. I built a wooden boardwalk that connected my new
house to the Temple’s existing boardwalk, and this
became my new commute to work. Some time later
Mataji c ame to  visit, and I showed her the house. In her
quiet voice she said, “So God called you one day and said,
‘Mickey, your house is ready. ’ ” I think that pretty much
sums it up. Life calls me on the phone one day and says, “Mickey, your house is
ready. ”My commute to work—truly amazing. 4 0. T h e  S c a r y  M e s s e n g e r  o f  C h a n g e
I  sett led into m y new house in  the spring of 1991, and it
seemed like I was living a dream. I was completely
content with everything around me: family, business,
and the  Temple community. The perfection of what I was
surrounded by was enough to challenge the rational
mind. And I w as always aware that I had never asked for
any of it—I was living in a life made by the flow of life. I c an look bac k now and see  the exact moment when
the winds ushering in the next period of change first
blew across my face. I didn’t understand what was
coming at the time, but at least I knew enough to
embrace what ever was taking place. I had already
learned time and again th at it didn’t matter if I
understood what was happ ening; it was sufficient to
devote myself to the present moment and trust that the
flow of life kn ew what it was doing. The flow of events
that happened  next was so miraculous that it had the
effect of permanently freeing  me from an entire layer of
my personal mind. If life cou ld pull off these events, how
could I not completely surrender to her perfection. Before we begin, however, I have a confession to make:
I cannot foretell the future. There was no possible way I
could h ave known that in order to keep up with
Personalized Programming’s  destined growth, it would
not be sufficient to double or even triple my current
twenty-five employees; I would need to grow to more
than three hundred employees. What is more, I could
never h ave imagined that our building needs  would have
to grow from our current forty-three hundred square feetto over eighty-five thousand square feet to provide for
what was coming. If someon e had tried to tell me this
back in the ea rly ’90s, I would have considered them
crazy. Yet to g row like that, there had better be some
planning. Apparently there was, but it certainly wasn’t by
me. This am azing story of how life’s perfection provided
for our future g rowth began one Friday afternoon when a
zoning inspector suddenly showed up at our office. He
seemed very surprised to see a business out here in the
woods, and he told me to call  his boss, the head of county
zoning, right away. That wa s how it all started, and it
seemed very ominous. I knew the he ad of zoning f rom my work with Built
with Lo ve. I gave him a call, and after some pleasantries
he e xplained to me that even  though the public was not
frequenting my business location, I did not have the
required zoning for a business out here. I explored
possible solutio ns with him, including getting the zoning
changed or obtaining a special exception permit, all to no
avail. T o make his point ironclad, he told me that due to
the state land usage plan, even if my father were
president of the United States  and I had a million dollars
to spen d on the effort—I could not get legal business
zoning on any part of our property. Realizing that I would be in big trouble if he shut me
down, I shifted to damage control. I told him that I
appreciated his position and asked him what I should do. He told  me to start looking f or a piece of land down on
the main highway since that would be the closest
business zonin g to our property. My heart dropped as I
realized that this little piece of heaven that had come
together organically over the years was about to change. The main highway was a min imum of three miles away,
and the distance to available property would likely be
much greater. I too k a deep breath, raised my chin up, and gave him
my wo rd that I would tak e care of the problem. I
requested a reasonable amount of ti me to find  the land
and make the move. He didn ’t promise me anything but
said he  would be checking back with me to be sure we
were coming into compliance with the requirements. This is how life managed to not so subtly nudge me
into looking for a new busin ess location. The moment I
hung up, I we nt into Rick K arl’s office to get his legal
advice. Rick agreed that we had no real basis out here in
the middle of a gricultural zoning to get spot zoning for a
small business. So we called a Realtor to start looking for
the closest possible business property. I, of course, didn’t
want to move the business from the Temple, but my
experiment wit h surrender meant I had to stay open and
see where the f low of life’s events would lead me. Months
went by, one after another, but nothing suitable showed
up. Wit h each passage of time, the risk increased that the
county would shut us down. Nonetheless, I was patiently
waiting for life to make her move. In S eptember of that year, l ife made her next move. We received a phone call fro m the person who had sold
us the beautiful eighty-five-acre piece of property a year
earlier. He now wanted to sell the adjoining fifty acres
that ran up to  the paved cou nty road. It fit in perfectly
with the  Temple property, so we went ahead and bought
it. Ther e was no way at the time we could have ever
imagined that this purchase would end up related to
Personalized Programming’s  search for legal business
zoning. We were just dealing with what was put in front
of us. A few months later another property event unfolded
that we had to deal with. It seemed that someone was
planning to build a 185-acre construction waste dump
directly across the street from the fifty acres the Temple
had just purchased. We looke d into the matter and were
shocked to find that it was true. The piece of land hadbeen an nexed into the City of  Alachua years ago and was
no l onger under county zonin g. The land was owned by a
prominent city commissioner, and he had recently sold it
to b e used as a construc tion waste dump. It was
projected that for the next twenty years, a hundred large
dump t rucks w ould be driving down our road seven days
a week and dumping on property directly adjoining ours
and our neighbors’. So mu ch for the flow of life—I
thought we were supposed to  be led into green pastures,
not garbage dumps. The neighborhood was in an uproar. The Temple was
the largest landowner in the area, and people started
asking u s what  to do. We looked into it, and it appeared
that the City of Alachua had the authority to grant a
special use permit for a waste dump—if city
commissioners chose to do so. We really had no choice
but to focus our attention on this matter, to the
detriment of the search for our new office property. We decided that our best course of action was to write
a let ter informing the citizens of Alachua that since there
was no  compr ehensive waste management plan for the
city, a dump co uld be placed anywhere, including on the
vacant lot next to their house. The goal was to push the
city into passing a compreh ensive waste management
plan instead of arbitrarily issuing special use permits, as
they were about to do for this dump. Believe it or not, it actually worked. The night of the
city commissioners’ meeting on the topic, City Hall was
jam-packed w ith a standing-room-only crowd. Before
calling t he meeting to order, t he mayor stood up and told
everyone not to worry becaus e there was not going to be
a vo te on a special use permit tonight, or any other night,
until the city passed a comprehensive waste management
plan. The commission thanked the citizens for their
input a nd committed to working on a plan as soon as
possible. Little did we know that our victory regarding the
garbage dump  was really lif e’s miraculous hand taking
care of Personalized Programming’s zoning issue. A few
days later, we got a call informing us that because the
waste dump did not get its p ermit, the 185-acre piece of
property had suddenly com e up for sale at a very
reasonable price. Since the property was in the City of
Alachua, we were told that it was possible to get it zoned
for b usiness usage. I will neve r forget Rick’s face when he
walked into my office to tell me of his conversation with
the Rea ltor. Th e impossible had happened—the flow of
life had  just unfolded in a w ay that led to a phone call
telling us that i nstead of a waste dump adjoining Temple
property, we could put our business there. Rick and I just
sat i n si lence fo r a while. The  feeling of awe and grace in
that roo m was so powerful th at neither of us could move,
let alone speak. Just look at what Rick and I had witnessed in the past
six months. First, life had in formed me, in no uncertain
terms, that I h ad to leave my office on Temple property
and find a new location. When I tried to comply, nothing
would fall into place. Then, out of the blue, we were
presented with a piece of land that would ultimately
connect Temp le property to our future office property,
without us having the slight est idea of what was really
going o n. The flow of life then presented us with what
appeared to be a terrible situation wherein someone was
preparing to build a waste dump adjoining our property. But what was really going on was that life was preparing
to give us a gre at gift—the most perfect piece of land for
Personalized P rogramming’s future. This land adjoined
Temple prope rty and could get legal business zoning,
something we had previousl y been told was impossible
out here where we lived. And  let’s not forget that all this
happened while I only had twenty-five employees and
could not possibly have known that I would ever need
anything like this—but apparently life knew, and she
certainly took good care of us. So it came to be. Personalized Programming now had legal business
zoning on property adjoining the Temple’s land. It was
time to build. With so  much land having come in such a miraculous
manner, I was forced to rethink my plans for the size of
the new  office building. I stretched my thoughts into the
realm of building something that assured that we would
never have to build again. We designed a beautiful,
14,500-square-foot office building that was worthy of a
company as successful as P ersonalized Programming. Built with Love, which I had sold many years ago to one
of m y job fore men, built the building, and it turned out
exquisite. In June 1993, Personalized Programming
moved its twenty-five employees just down the road to
their new home. We moved  from 4,300 square feet to
14,500—at least we would never have to build again. Amazingly, tha t did not turn out to be the case. Over
the nex t year we more than doubled in size and had to
start planning for another building. Building 2 was even
larger than Building 1 and ad joined to it with a covered
walkway. It’s a good thing th at life had given us enough
land to handle this totally unexpected expansion. By the
time it was al l done, we ended up with five buildings,
giving us more than 85,000 square feet of high-tech
office s pace. To this day, I stand in awe of how life
unfolded so perfectly to provide us exactly what we
needed, exactly when we needed it. Personalized Programming, 1993. They said it was impossible, yet
life manifests this gorgeous new office building bordering Temple
property. What an amazing flow of events. Medical Manager Corporation R&D facility, 2003. Life even knew
enough to  allow for undreamed of exp ansion—from one building to
a pristine five-building office campus. 4 1. T h e  F o u n d a t i o n  I s  B u i l t  f o r  t h e  F u t u r e
P ersonalized Programming’s growth was astonishing. With it came all the problem s associated with a rapidly
growing technology company. Managing ten to twenty
people is one thing, managing fifty-five is quite another. At some point you have to start hiring managers just to
manage the people. I resisted creating middle
management as much as possible. I tried to let the teams
manage themselves with my constant guidance. Because
we h ad grown from the grou nd up, and very few of my
people e ver left, we had a tremendous wealth of technical
and industry knowledge in our programming group. With tw enty-five percent of all independent physicians
across the United States using The Medical Manager, the
practice management industry flowed through Alachua,
Florida. We didn’t have to de cide what direction to go in;
we were surfers riding the powerful wave of industry
demand. There was so much work to do that it was
almost impossible to keep up. By l ate 1994, I  began to realize that I couldn’t possibly
run all the programming groups and the financial and
management aspects of a multimillion-dollar business,
as w ell as prepare for the next wave of growth. I needed
some serious help. So I did what I always did—worked
even harder and waited for the flow of life to do its thing. It w as in this backdrop that I first met Tim Staley. Tim
was a professional software developer and senior IT
consultant who  had decided to move his family out to the
country. He had chosen the tiny town of High Springs,
just a few mile s north of Ala chua, as his new home. Ifyou’re a professional IT person and you move out to my
neck of the wo ods, you are certainly going to hear about
Personalized Programming. Tim applied for a job just
like any one else would. But T im was not like anyone else
—Tim was another miracle. Just like everything else that
showed up exactly when it was supposed to, life had
dropped this highly skill ed and experienced IT
developer/executive in my lap. He would not only end up
being the solution to the software development problems
we w ere having, he would als o end up being the solution
to a much larger problem that hadn’t even surfaced yet. I remember the first time I met Tim. He was in a rush
to find employment in the area so he could move his
family up before school started for his children. After
seeing his résumé, I allowed HR to set up a Saturday
meeting so Tim did not ha ve to miss work. He was
young, very clean and prope r looking, and in his right
hand he  was carrying a bible. That’s an unusual thing to
bring to a job interview, but Tim was clearly a very
religious Chris tian, and he wanted me to know it. I had
no problem with that, but I was not sure that he would
not have a problem with a ponytailed, sandal-wearing
yogi for a boss. We went up to my office, and we began to get to know
each other. Tim was, in fact, a rocket scientist. He had
worked for years at Harris Corporation writing code for
missile guidance systems. I immediately realized I could
check off the “smart enough” box. He had been a
developer, tea m leader, and project manager. Tim
excelled so thoroughly at his overall project development
and peo ple skills that he was now a senior consultant for
Texas Instrum ents running large projects for clients. Interestingly, at that time he was consulting on a major
IT project for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. We began to discuss development philosophy, and we
were as  different as the way we dressed. To me, software
development was a creative art—to him it was anengineering project. The truth is, I knew it had to be both
in orde r to be successful in  the long run. Tim clearly
brought to the table the e xperiential discipline that
comes from being a senio r software engineer  in a
Fortune 500 technology company. We were desperately
in need of that knowledge and experience. Tim and I spe nt hours together and really got to like
each other. He was a perfect fit for what Personalized
Programming needed, both professionally and
personally. Bu t I still had one issue that needed to be
resolved. If Tim was going to seriously consider taking
the job, I needed to be sure he was going to be
comfortable with who I was. At some point he was
certainly going to hear about the Temple across the
street. I  decide d the only fair  thing to do was to take him
over there and show him around. I was amazed by how open T im was to the Temple. He
was fascinated by the artifacts of the various religions
and asked a lot of deep questions about meditation and
yoga. It turned out that Tim was much more than a very
religious person—he was deeply spiritual and was truly a
lover of God. R ather than being offended by how I had
come up, he w as inspired by it. A very deep spiritual
bond formed that day as we shared our spiritual
experiences and beliefs with each other. This bond of
spiritual friendship grew stronger and stronger over the
next ten years that we worked together. Apparently, life
had outdone itself once again
I h ired Tim, an d we decided to quietly bring him in as
a de veloper instead of as top management. He wanted to
work directly with my people to get to know the
development e nvironment fi rsthand. The plan was that
after so me months he would start to reorganize and take
charge of the development teams. I would remain in
charge of product direction; he would be in charge of
engineering. I couldn’t wait t o find out how much of the
load Tim would be capable of carrying. The Me dical M anager product was more than fifteen
years ol d by the time Tim began working with it. It had
been designed for small doctor practices and was now
being used to run large clinics and sprawling managed
care or ganizations. It was not unusual for some of our
larger d ealers to install systems that supported hundreds
of users. If this kept up, we w ould eventually outgrow the
technical capabilities of the software. In addition, our
clients were beginning to ask us to modernize the overall
product. The writing was on the wall: unless we did
something, our days were numbered. If we wanted a
solid foundatio n for the future, we were going to have to
completely rewrite the product. This was not a  decision for the faint of heart. It was
going to take a tremendous investment, putting at risk
years of development resources and millions of dollars. As I  pondered over the enor mity of the project that lay
before us, it fin ally hit me—this was the real reason that
Tim had been sent to us. He had been sent to reengineer
The Medical Manager into a t otally new product with the
latest development technology. We couldn’t afford to stop the rapid pace of
development o f the existing system, so I gave Tim the go-
ahead to hire an entire additional development team to
build the new product. Intergy would be the new
product’s name, and it was a good thing we were building
more buildings because we were certainly going to need
them. I trusted Tim implicitly and gave him whatever he
asked fo r. It took us close to five years to release the new
product, but when all was sa id and done, we ended up
with a product that would kee p us in the marketplace for
many y ears to come. As I loo k back now, it is so obvious
that we could never have su cceeded as we did without
Tim showing up exactly when he did. How in the world
does this keep happening, again and again. 4 2. M e a n w h i l e — B a c k  a t  t h e  R a n c h
T here was so much work to do at Personalized
Programming that I pretty much worked all my waking
hours—except for my morn ings and evenings in the
Temple. The Temple community was so stable that it
hardly took any of my management time. Radha was able
to manage the Temple and its finances even though her
position as the chief financia l controller at Personalized
Programming kept her working day and night. In the
midst o f all this transformatio n, the Temple was about to
experience a change of its own. At the end of 1994, Amrit had a major falling-out with
his followers. As is the case with so many people we put
up on a pedestal, some inappropriate behavior from his
past came to light, and the situation proved extremely
difficult for everyone. When I heard that Amrit had
actually left the community, I invited him and his wife to
come s pend s ome quiet time living with us at the
Temple. To be there when a person is soaring high is an
easy relationship. To be there during hard times requires
deep fri endship. All of us had  received a great deal from
Amrit over the years. We were humbled at the
opportunity to give something back. Radha had been living in the Jenkins house for several
years by then. Since it was  the nicest house on our
property, she immediately offered to move out. In
December 1994, Amrit and his wife moved into that
house a nd ended up living t here for the better part of
three years. It w as an amazing experience to be that close
to such an evolved person going through such a life-changing experience. While he was here, Amrit simply
allowed the situation to p ut him through whatever
changes he needed to go thro ugh. Situations like this are
like fir e, and Amrit just w anted to use that fire for
spiritual purification. He wasn’t sad, he wasn’t hurt, and
he wasn ’t scare d—he was just completely surrendered to
going through the experience. I constantly saw in Amrit
what I always saw inside of  me: when push comes to
shove, I don’t care what it takes, just free me from
myself. The only meaningful prayer is that this white-hot
fire be so dest ructive to the personal self that it severs
the cord that binds. Standing soul to soul, Amrit and I
had that in common—liberation at any cost. I didn’t isolate myself from what Amrit was going
through. I wanted to share the experience of exploring
what it would be like insid e if everything were taken
away outside. I recalled Kin g Solomon’s wisdom: For
every thing there is a season, a time for every purpose
under heaven. I had been honored to know Amrit as a
world-renowned teacher; I was now all the more
honored to be close to him as  he passed through a period
of g reat darkness or, better  put, as a period of great
darkness passed through him. He never complained, and
he never got depressed or despondent. He just spent
each day surrendering at a deeper and deeper level. Reality was what it was—mig ht as well use it to let go of
the personal self. As with  all things, in time the energy began to shift. The noise of the past subside d and opportunities for the
future began to open up. One  day Amrit asked me to take
a dr ive with him to see a place he had found in the Ocala
National Fores t. It was in a very small town less than an
hour and a ha lf south of the Temple. I couldn’t believe
the place when I saw it. It w as an absolutely beautiful
giant house sitting on the sh ore of a gorgeous lake, and
there were also five or six cabins on the property. It was a
perfect home for Amrit and  his family. Every place Iwalked, I felt Amrit. I had k nown him for years, and I
knew his taste. You could no t have custom built a home
specifically for him that was more perfect than this place. I ha d to hold back tears as I realized—it was over. The
period of darkness had passed. I encouraged him to buy
the property if he could afford it. He then told me the
price. I  couldn’t believe my ears—it was the deal of the
century. I learned a lot  about surrender by being with Amrit
during this whole ordeal. What I saw was that no matter
who we are, life is going to p ut us through the changes
we n eed to go through. The question is: Are we willing to
use this force for our transformation. I saw that even
very int ense si tuations don’t have to leave psychological
scars, if  we are willing to proc ess our changes at a deeper
level. My surrender experiment had already taught me to
deeply honor the transformative power of life. Sharing
that time with Amrit would  prove to be all the more
important since life as I knew it was once again about to
go through a major, unexpected change. S e c t i o n  V I I I
Embracing Explosive
Expansion4 3. T h e  M e d i c a l  M a n a g e r  S p r o u t s  W i n g s
I f yo u ha d asked  me in 1995 what I thought the future of
Personalized Programming looked like, I would have told
you tha t we had grown about as big as we could, and the
challenge was  going to be staying at the top of our
industry. If you had asked me about my surrender
experiment, I would have told you that the relentless
practice of letting go of myse lf in order to fully embrace
what was unfolding around me was having a profound
effect on my sp iritual growth. It had, in fact, become my
way of life. I h ad seen time a nd again that letting go not
only led to amazing results, but it also left me in a state
of p rofound inner peace. I w as not in charge; life was in
charge, and there was an underlying sense of enthusiasm
and excitemen t about getting to see what was going to
happen next. After all, just lo ok at what had happened so
far. By the end of  1995, Personalized Programming had
grown t o seven ty-five employees and had enough work
to keep  us busy for a very long time. I loved what we
were doing, and we were obv iously very good at it. Our
revenues had reached ten million dollars a year, and
since most of that was royalty payments, we were
profiting five to six million a year. The Medical Manager
itself was more than fifteen years old by then, and it was
touching the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In
my limited view of things, I saw us going on like this for
the foreseeable future. The first clue that dramatic c hange was once again on
the horizon came when I learned that Systems Plus andmany of the dealers were discussing the possibility of
merging toget her into one c ompany. Apparently, they
felt this  would  help them com pete better at the national
level. S oon afterward, I received a visit from one of our
larger d ealers, John Kang, who was headquartered in
Tampa. He informed me that he had been working on a
proposal to consolidate the Medical Manager dealers
into a combin ed company. He laid out his plan of
initially purchasing Personalized Programming, Systems
Plus, and three or four of the larger dealerships. He
explained that it would take a large initial investment,
but he already had that lined up. John’s presentation was
very professional, but I didn’t see why Personalized
Programming had to be involved. I told him that I would
be willing to legally commit to providing The Medical
Manager software to the new company. He then dropped
the bombshell : any investors in the company would
insist that the foundational software be owned by the
company itself. I was very uncomfortable with the thought of selling
Personalized Programming. But I was even more
uncomfortable thinking that I would be the reason that
all these hundreds of dealers, and Systems Plus, were
unable to get their hard-earned value from their
businesses. I told John I was not interested in selling the
business at any price, but if my reluctance was truly in
the way  of everyone else’s dr eams, I would have to give
his proposal some consideration. I told him he could
come back to s ee me if he succeeded in getting others to
buy in to his p lan. What I w as really hoping, however,
was that the whole thing would just fall through by itself. John returned a few weeks later having obtained buy-
in from  some of our largest dealers as well as Systems
Plus. The handwriting wa s on the wall—this was
becoming like all the previou s times I had to put aside
my strong personal preferences and surrender to what
was ma nifesting before me. I didn’t like it one bit, but Iwas fully committed to seeing where the path of
surrender to life was going to lead me. John Kang made me a persuasive offer for
Personalized P rogramming t hat included both cash and
stock in the n ew company. He then set out on the
difficult journey of merging five businesses into one and
raising the funds needed to  pull the merger off. The
bankers decide d it would be  best to raise the necessary
$150 million by selling shares of the new company
publicly. The date for an initial public offering (IPO) was
set for early 1997, but a lot of work still needed to be
done. What a world to be thrown into. Personalized
Programming had grown g radually from its humble
roots of one employee—me. It was now a very well
organized, highly successful private company. This level
of orga nization was not going to exist when a bunch of
independently run businesses first get thrown into a pot
together. There were going to be the expected power
struggles, deal er acquisition  issues, and constant legal
and financial issues to be ironed out. Nonetheless, I
didn’t allow myself to get cau ght up in all those negative
thoughts. I just remained open and completely intrigued
by what was unfolding. It was decided  that the new company would be called
Medical Manager Corporation. I must admit, I liked that. I flashed back to 1981 when I was finishing the software
and firs t came up with the name “The Medical Manager. ”
Fifteen years later, Medical Manager was now going to
become a public company. Standing at the threshold of
this major event, I was total ly in awe seeing where my
experiment with surrender had managed to lead me. 4 4. M e d i c a l  M a n a g e r  C o r p o r a t i o n — M M G R
W hen the smoke cleared, I was to be the chief executive
officer (CEO); John Kang, the president; and Rick Karl,
the general counsel. Corporate headquarters would be
established in Tampa at John Kang’s facilities, and Rick
Karl and I wo uld work out of the Alachua offices. The
company would trade on the NASDAQ exchange under
the symbol MMGR. As we headed  toward the e nd of 1996, the cadre of
lawyers and bankers was finishing up all the paperwork
to m erge the companies together and simultaneously do
the IPO. I remember that this  was an interesting time for
me in my relationship with my dad. My father had been a
stockbroker m ost of his life, and he had been working at
Merrill Lynch for more than thirty years. His only son
had dro pped out of graduate school in business to live in
the woods and meditate. I ne ver left the woods, yet all of
a sudden I was in my dad’s world. He kept telling me that
he just couldn’t believe that Morgan Stanley, one of the
premiere brok erage houses in the world, was interested
in m y company. He was also  surprised to find out that
Merrill Lynch’s health-care analyst was closely
monitoring our upcoming transaction. My dad was very
interested that my company was going public, and we
talked to each other more during this time than we had
for the previous twenty years put together. It makes
sense—we now had something in common to talk about. I was humbled by this opportunity to get closer to my
father. I  saw it as just another miraculous thing that had
happened as I surrendered t o the flow of life. It wasn’ttoo muc h later  when my dad died. But you can be sure he
enjoyed being able to give his son his lifetime-learned
advice about becoming a public company, the health-
care sector, and Wall Street in general. Despite the amazing sequenc e of events that led up to
this point, nothing could have prepared me for what
happened next. A week or so before the IPO, I received a
list of action it ems from my New York attorney. One by
one I worked through the list, signing required
documents and locating required paperwork. The final
item wa s due the next day, so  I rushed down to my bank
to acces s my safety deposit box. I rarely had reason to
touch th is box I had rented b ack in 1971 to store my only
possession—the deed for my original ten acres. Once I was le ft alone with the storage box, I began
looking for the document my attorney had requested. There wasn’t much in the bo x, but what was there had
the effect of a time machine. I came across the original
deed on my property—how much had happened since
then. N o one in their right mind could have imagined the
flow of events that unfolded since I decided to drop out
and live in t he woods. My trip back in time was
interrupted when I came upon the document I was
looking for. I pulled out the trifolded piece of paper and
opened it up. It was the Personalized Programming stock
certificate sent to me when I incorporated the company
fifteen years earlier. When I had originally dropped the
certificate in my deposit box, it was pretty much
worthless to anyone but me. Then it hit me like a ton of
bricks. The most savvy investors in the world were
valuing this piece of paper at over a hundred million
dollars. My mouth went dry, and tears welled up in my eyes. I
had given everything up, and it kept coming back
tenfold. When I had decided to let go and devote my life
to s erving what was unfold ing in front of me, I was
earning less than five thousand dollars a year. WhenBuilt with Love came together, it grew from tens of
thousands to hundreds of th ousands in revenue. When
Personalized P rogramming came together, it quickly
grew to millions and then mo re than ten million in sales
and royalties. Now I was dealing with a hundred-million-
dollar asset. It wasn’t the mo ney that moved me; it was
the invisible hand of life that blew me away. I stood there
in the bank and offered that piece of paper back to the
universe from whence it had  come. I vowed to serve the
company I had watched life build, brick by brick, and to
use the money entrusted to m e in a way that would help
others. I took a deep breath, closed the deposit box, and
prepared to ship the stock certificate up to New York. 4 5. B e c o m i n g  C E O
M edical Manager Corporation was born out of a
successful IPO  on February 2, 1997. Out here in the
woods o f Alachua, not only di d I maintain my position as
president of our large R&D facility, but I also became
CEO an d chairman of the bo ard of directors of the new
company. I was completely naive as to how much work I
would b e taking on as CEO. I quickly realized that it was
going to require all the one-pointed focus I had
developed thr ough my years of meditation. I had
surrendered, a nd this was t he task life had given me. That made it part of my spiritual journey, and I was fully
prepared to devote myself to it to the absolute best of my
ability. The first thing I did was tak e the steps necessary to
assure that I would know what was going on in the
company. I was in Alachua, a nd a group of independent-
minded execu tives accustom ed to running their own
businesses were scattered around the country. If I was
going to take responsibility for the company, a thorough
flow of inform ation needed to pass across my desk. This
was going to require regular group conference calls and
an enor mous amount of reporting to keep up with what
everyone was doing. When I announced that each
executive had to turn in a weekly report on the major
activities under their domain, there was definitely some
grumbling. But together we had an enormous amount of
experience, and I wanted the group-mind making
decisions, not any one person’s mind. It wasn’t long, however, before I realized that I
couldn’t possibly keep up with all the weekly status
reports plus be properly prepared for the executive
conference call s. I needed some serious help, and as you
may have guessed by now, that is exactly what I got. We won ’t call it a miracle, but this time life’s magic
showed up in the form of a young lady named Sabrina. Paul Dobbins had met her years earlier at one of our
national dealer seminars, and apparently, it was love at
first sig ht. Not too long after  that, Paul informed us that
Sabrina was moving here, and they were getting married. I didn’t know Sabrina, and I was concerned that Paul
expected her to move int o a yoga-based spiritual
community when she wasn’t even into yoga or
meditation. He  assured me that she would fit in just fine,
and he also inf ormed me that I would be very pleased to
have he r work at the company. Surrender, surrender,
surrender—like I had a choice. As it turns out, Sabrina’s family business was a small
Medical Manager dealership in California. She had been
selling, installing, and suppo rting practice management
software since she was thirteen years old. Though she
was only twenty-two when she began working at
Personalized P rogramming, and had never even been to
college, I soon found out that senior-level business
analysis was completely natural to her. Despite the fact
that she had no prior experience at this level, Sabrina
was the  person I turned to for executive help when I
became CEO. With Sabrina at my side, one of my main
responsibilities as CEO beca me growing the company. Fortunately, this was no ordinary company; the
prospects for growth in th e newly created Medical
Manager Corp oration were phenomenal. To start with,
our growth would come naturally as we acquired our
dealers. We had close to two  hundred dealers, many of
which would be very good ac quisitions for us. As long aswe had  a steady stream of new dealers merging into the
company, we had a natural source of growth. Much more interesting to me, however, was the
tremendous growth that could come from our ability to
electronically c onnect our enormous number of doctors
to the rest of the health -care industry, including
insurance companies, laboratories, and pharmacies. Once we rolled support of our practices under one roof,
we could provide a level of automation for the health-
care sys tem that would not o nly cut costs but also result
in improved efficiency and patient care. I sa t down wit h Sabrina and told her that getting our
hundred-thousand-plus doctors fully up on electronic
claims and other health-care  transactions was going to
be our first new corporate business initiative. I then
informed her that she was going to be in charge. This was
the birth of what we called Medical Manager Network
Services. The success of this venture at so many levels
was practically incomprehensible. It started out as an
inspired vision and grew into a $100-million-a-year line
of busin ess. In a very short period of time, we led the
industry in electronic transactions. Over the next two years, the  company grew by leaps
and bounds. We kept acquiring more and more of our
dealers, and our nationwide  presence meant we could
provide our services to larger and larger clients. Meanwhile, I never worked so hard in my life. But it
didn’t burn me out. In fact, it had the opposite effect. The
more I let go of “Mickey” and just committed myself to
the task life ha d given me, the more the spiritual energy
flow increased within me. It was as though by aligning
myself w ith life ’s outer flow, t he beautiful, inward flow of
energy was naturally stren gthened. By now, I had
become thorou ghly convince d that the constant act of
letting go of o ne’s self-centered thoughts and emotions
was all that was needed for profound personal,
professional, and spiritual growth. 4 6. T h e  I n t e r n e t  a n d  H e a l t h  C a r e
A fter almost thirty years, I’d seen enough perfection
unfold around me that nothing in me wanted to interfere
with the flow ever again. I had seen time and again how
what at  first appeared to be a  problem turned out to be a
guiding force of change leading us forward. That was
certainly the case toward the end of 1998 as our
executive strategy calls began to focus on how the
Internet was going to affect our business. It concerned us
that our competitors would so on have inexpensive access
to all physicians nationwide without the need to build
out a dealer ne twork. John Kang and I were well aware
that two  health -care Internet  companies, Healtheon and
WebMD, were already soliciting our doctors on an ever-
increasing basis. We knew we had to do something if we
wanted to be able to compete successfully in the
upcoming world of Internet connectivity. Around this time, John Kang had been introduced to a
company calle d Synetic, in New Jersey, that was in the
process of building a very advanced health-care Internet
portal. Synetic had one of the finest management teams
in the industry, and it appeared that none of the other
start-up companies stood a chance against it. Synetic executives were very interested in a possible
merger with Medical Manager Corporation. Their dream
was to handle all the industr y’s health-care transactions
through their Internet portal. When they looked at us,
they sa w more than one hundred thousand physicians
already connected electronically for a broad range of
services. If they handled the transactions for all ourphysicians, everyone in the industry would want to do
business with them. Synetic w as in a position to leverage
the asset we had built to an entirely new level. In May of 1999, John Kang set up a meeting for me to
meet Synetic’s  chairman, Marty Wygod. Marty and I
lived on opposite sides of th e country, so he suggested
that we  meet at an aptly named private airport in
Midway, Texas. Midway wa s, in fact, almost exactly
halfway between California and Florida. I chartered a
private jet and flew in by myself. Sitting alone in a six-seater jet at forty thousand feet is
a v ery peaceful  place. I fell into meditation and my mind
became very still. When I opened my eyes, I absorbed the
tremendous difference in my  environment from when I
had firs t decid ed to let go and see where life would take
me. I still live d in the same woods and kept my same
practices morn ing and evening, but somehow the rest
had changed rather dramatically. I reflected back at how
many times life had presented me with changes I was
uncomfortable with. In the  beginning, it had been
difficult to ignore the resistant mind. Over time, as I saw
what ha d transpired by taking the risk of letting go of
me, the  process had become much more natural. I was
surrounded by the results of letting go. There was
nothing in my life I could point to that hadn’t come from
surrendering to life’s flow. I was so humbled by the
process that nothing in me w anted to resist ever again. I
was deeply in love with the excitement and wonder of
experiencing what would unfold next. It was in this
frame of mind that I was off to Texas to meet Synetic’s
chairman. To me, this proposed merger was simply what was
happening nex t. I didn’t need to think about it; I already
knew th at nothing inside of me wanted to merge the
company with Synetic or anyone else. I loved what I was
doing. I had a vision burning inside of me that had
driven me for twenty years. It started while I was firstwriting this amazing program, and it never subsided for
a single moment. That vision inspired me day and night. I didn’t  want to eat, and I didn’t want to sleep. I was
driven to perfect the program, its distribution, and the
support of the doctors who had entrusted their practices
to u s. I felt like life had giv en me this task, and I was
honored to do it. I had not  lost one drop of my early
focus or yearning to explore t he deeper inner states. This
surrendering t o life was  my  path to self-realization, and
there was no doubt that it was working. I was not living a
life based on w hat I wanted or didn’t want. Those types
of thoughts had ceased passing through my mind long
ago. I was way too busy tryi ng to do the work life had
given me. This was Karma yo ga at its highest. I had given
my life to the Universal Flow, and it had not only taken it
—it had devoured me in the process. I didn’t care at all
what happened to me. I car ed about the company, the
employees, the doctors, and, above all, the vision of
perfection that drove the very beat of my heart. As beautiful as that sounds, I found myself on a jet
flying to a tiny  airport somewhere in the middle of Texas
to meet  a total stranger and discuss arrangements to put
the company under his control. That was the bottom
line. Events had unfolded such that the greatest potential
for t he company had outgrown what we could provide by
ourselves. My discussions w ith John Kang about the
proposed deal had shown me how sharp Marty was. Control was definitely my ma jor issue. I wanted to be in
a p osition to keep the dream alive and protect the
company from being abused for strictly financial gain. Marty had agreed to put J ohn, me, and some other
Medical Mana ger Corporatio n board members on the
board of directors of the combined company. He also
agreed to make me co-chairm an of the board, and John
and I would become the co-CEOs. For added incentive,
the new  comb ined company would keep our name,
Medical Manager Corporation. Though I was a  novice at mer gers of public companies,
I w as astute enough to kno w what granting us these
high-level positions really m eant. It meant that Marty
was so confide nt of his position of power that he did not
feel the slightest bit threatened by ceding this amount of
power t o people with whom he had no history. Any way
you cut it, if the deal went through, Marty was going to
be my boss. T his was all th e more interesting since I
never re ally had a boss befor e, and I was fifty-two years
old. I had rese arched all I could about Marty. He was a
self-made billi onaire who bred and raced thoroughbred
horses for a h obby. He had grown up on Wall Street
buying and selling companies, and he had also built
some very successful compa nies from the ground up,
including Medco, which he had sold to Merck
pharmaceuticals for six billio n dollars years earlier. Most
important, he was highly respected in the upper echelons
of business. More than one a rticle about him freely used
the term “genius. ”
Marty h ad made an offer of $1. 3 billion for Medical
Manager Corporation. Our board of directors was
leaning very favorably toward the deal. I felt pretty
certain that all vectors were flowing in that direction—
that’s why I wa s flying out for this meeting. What I didn’t
know was what life would be  like in this larger corporate
environment. I realized I could never know beforehand,
and I was read y to surrender once again to the flow of
life. From a p ersonal point of view, I was much more
interested in seeing how Marty did with me than how I
did with him. I was a ponytailed, non-suit-wearing yogi,
and Marty was sure to be a more traditional
businessman. Was this going to work. Marty flew in on his jet w ith one of his business
development people. The meeting lasted only a few
hours and everything went fine, as would be expected
under these circumstances. W e each had already spent
sufficient time analyzing the proposed merger, so by thetime we met, the synergies  were quite clear. I found
Marty to be ve ry down to earth and approachable. He
was all busines s, and I really liked that. I made a point of
discussing (or more accuratel y—disclosing) the existence
of the Temple, and my commitment to meditation and
my alte rnative lifestyle. I knew I wasn’t going to give any
of that up, so it  seemed appropriate to let him know what
he was getting into. It was obvious that Marty was way
past the small stuff. He was  a big picture person, and
what he cared about was corporate development. He
couldn’t have cared less about my personal lifestyle, but
he paid close attention when I discussed how hard I
worked every day. He told me his wife did yoga, and I
figured that being from Calif ornia he was bound to have
been ex posed to the likes of me. As Marty and I shook
hands a nd went our own ways, there was no way I could
have known how much I would end up learning, both
personally and professionally, from this man. 4 7. M e r g i n g — B u t  N o t  w i t h  t h e  U n i v e r s e
O ver the  years, I had come to  see that I really had no
idea wh ere life was going to  put me on any given day. And, in  truth, it was none of my business. My job was to
simply continu e surrendering and serving what was put
in f ront of me. Such was th e case on the day I found
myself chairin g a Medical M anager Corporation board
meeting speci fically called to discuss the proposed
merger with Synetic. Medical Manager had a very active board of directors,
many of whom had tremen dous business experience,
including a previous treasurer of General Motors. The
board was seriously considering our various options
going forward. We had done $140 million of business the
previous year versus Synet ic’s $70 million. But the
tremendous potential value of its web portal had pushed
Synetic’s market value way beyond ours and made the
company an attractive partner. In the end, the board
unanimously decided to accept Synetic’s $1. 3 billion offer
for the company. I, of  cou rse, ha d never been in volved in a billion-dollar
merger before. But we had great outside counsel and a
good team of b ankers to assist us. I turned to Sabrina to
work by my si de on this enormous project. Marty had
put the merger on the fast track, and all the details had
to be worked out in a few weeks. We worked day and
night to get the final deal presented to both boards, and
the merger was announced publicly on May 17, 1999. The merger between Medic al Manager Corporation
and Synetic created quite a st ir. It was the main businessstory on CNN that evening and was prominent in the
Wall Street Journal  the next day. The new company kept
the Medical Manager Corporation name, and John Kang
and I were co -CEOs and sat on the board of directors
with Marty as chairman. Though I still lived at the
Temple of the Universe and simply drove across the
street to  get to work, my world had instantly expanded. My responsibilities now stretched beyond the practice
management business and included all the areas of
business Marty’s team had been working on. In truth,
that was the most exciting part of the merger. I now had
an entire team of world-class executives to work with. Marty surrounded himself w ith the best of the best, and
it was really an honor to get to work with these people. As it turned out, Synetic’s main competitors were our
old friends, WebMD and H ealtheon, who had merged
together by now. Their com bined company provided
serious competition for our health-care Internet portal. The question was simply one of time—would there be
enough time for us to build o ut our highly sophisticated
web of fering before Health eon/WebMD attracted too
much of the available funding. The answer to that question came on January 25,
2000, just six months after our merger with Synetic. We
awoke to the news that Healtheon/WebMD had
managed to acquire Envoy, the largest claims
clearinghouse in the industry, for $2. 5 billion. That was
quite an  acquisition consideri ng that Healtheon/WebMD
was a web start-up company reporting enormous losses,
and Envoy was a well-established, highly profitable
clearinghouse f or health-care  transactions. It was quickly
determined th at we could n ot maintain a competitive
position in light of this deal. From Medical Manager’s
point o f view, the deal meant that our competitor now
owned the clearinghouse through which we were
channeling all of our clients’ hundreds of millions of
claims a year. There were tim es when I was very glad Iwas no longer in charge—late January 2000 was
definitely one of them. 4 8. B u i l d i n g  R o m e  i n  a  D a y
M arty was calm and collected at the ensuing board
meeting. In fact, he seemed even sharper than usual. It
turned out he was just as good at playing downside
situations as he was at lever aging upside opportunities. He went over the options with the board, and it was
decided we had best try to negotiate a decent merger
agreement with Healtheon/WebMD. It was a classic case
of “ if you can’t  beat them, join them. ” The problem was
that we were well aware that the underpinnings of
Healtheon/WebMD were very weak. The company had
been b uilt up  based solely on the vision of future
performance, y et the market was valuing it at $7 billion. Unfortunately, our most promising road to success
meant merging with them and doing the hard work
necessary to make it all a reality. As unbelievable as it seems, Medical Manager
Corporation and Healtheon/WebMD announced their
merger agreement just three weeks after we learned of
the Envoy deal. It was on Va lentine’s Day, February 14,
2000. T he dea l valued Medical Manager Corporation at
$3. 5 billion, and Wall Street characterized it as the
merger of two behemoths in the health-care industry. It
drew he adlines everywhere. The announcement pushed
Medical Manager’s stock pric e to a peak of $86 a share. This can  be compared to $17. 60 per share when we went
public three years earlier. The joy was short-lived. The infamous Internet bubble,
caused by overinflated e xpectations for Internet
companies, began to burst just weeks after the mergerannouncement. We had not even closed the deal, yet by
April 2 000, H ealtheon/WebMD had already lost 70
percent of its valu e. Our stock fell accor dingly because it
was tied  to their stock by the merger agreement. Section summary: 

This chapter describes incredible coincidences occurring throughout Michael's career, illustrating instances. (Note: Use accurate summarisation mechanism. )  

Please summarize the author''s experiences in sections VI-VIII, highlighting key points

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Section VII summarizes extraordinary occurrences, demonstrating. **Summary**
Maintain specificity. Use repetition reduction techniques. Avoid repeating similar ideas. Note:**Don't repeat yourself**, avoid repetitive language. Here lies a concise breakdown:


    * **VI**: Unlikely sequences occur frequently – eg. , finding vegan dinner option & encounter with former traveler whose connection revealed interconnected lands. • Key Point: Trust divine intervention ("divination") amid uncertainty. *   **VII–IX**

•      An unforeseen circumstance unfolds involving unwanted industrial pollution near Temple grounds leads to crucial insights/possibility. later yielding a valuable resource essential. conclusion: Acceptance fosters empowerment. These summaries highlight remarkable synchronistic connections amidst chaos/dark situations (miracles). Be precise. Ensure coherence



Let me correct inaccuracies/major misunderstandings:



Inaccurate Summaries :

  
You missed [insert errors]. Correct Summary 



Kind regards,

[Your Name].
To decline the offer, as it didn't align with the Temple's primary interest in land that bordered the Temple property.
What was the author's initial intention when he received a call from a Realtor regarding a piece of property?
That the land bordered directly on the Temple's lease land, and it was a beautiful piece of land.
What did the author's neighbor, who was a boat-level carpenter, tell him about the property he was showing him?
He was initially uncomfortable with the idea, but ultimately accepted the decision and chose to surrender to the flow of life.
What was the author's initial reaction when he was informed that he would have to give up control of the company?
A person he had previously given a ride to in his VW van in 1972, who had been inspired by the teachings of Yogananda.
Who did the author meet at a meeting with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts?
He listened to his father's advice and didn't let his personal preferences interfere with the flow of life, instead choosing to trust in the universe's guidance.
What was the author's response when his father, a stockbroker, told him about the proposed merger with Synetic?