The bulk of this post is a letter I wrote to the other members of a team I’d been on for years, but since it begins in the middle of things, I’ll lay out a bit of context here first. Feel free to skim it if you already know much of the context or just want to dive into the meatier part. (I say “meatier” in part because communication into a specific situation is often more evocative in general, and also because I was feeling quite inspired and in touch with new insight when I wrote the letter itself, compared to writing this backstory.)
In late 2016, I started working with my friend Benjamin Carr on some projects related to my intentionality app business, which was at the time known as Complice and is now known as Intend. We explored a few different projects, and the one that had the most staying power was a workshop series we started running, which was called the Goal-Crafting Intensive (GCI). The team was organized in a very loose way—we often decided how to split the profits we’d made after the workshops rather than before. It had a vibe of sort of a family business, reflective of the fact that Benjamin and I were living together when we started it, and that over the years as we tapped our romantic partners for help, they ended up taking on substantial roles on the team, although at first mostly not directly getting paid, for various reasons.
In a way, from my perspective, those early years saw us running mostly on vibes and implicit precedent, rather than on clear agreement, and that was satisfyingly flexible but also sometimes left unclarity about decisions. Benjamin and I mostly saw each other as equal cofounders/co-owners (though from an economic perspective he was a contractor working for me, and I controlled most of our non-financial resources as well, such as the websites). This was a bit confusing when we would sometimes try to use Peter Koenig’s Source model, which states very plainly that any initiative has exactly one person as its source.
One of the things that was messy about the situation is that it seemed pretty clear to me that I was the Source, in the sense of having taken the first risk and in the sense of continuing to feel a pretty strong sense of ownership over certain key aspects of the project… and yet by a few years in, I was also least excited about the project, which was a conundrum that was also kind of hard to acknowledge.
Anyway, in 2022, following multiple of those romantic relationships ending, we discerned that for the time being we were willing to keep working together, but that we needed to make things a bit more professional and formal, so we came up with an agreement for dividing the money we made from each workshop, based in part on the work of organizing each workshop session and in part on historical contributions. When Mary first took a sabbatical and then left the team in early 2023, the remaining team members continued giving her a small contribution in recognition of the role she played getting things off the ground.
In mid-2023, we found ourselves realizing that we wanted to overhaul the workshop content, and the overall framing of it, which we started calling the Beyond Goals Intensive (instead of the Goal-Crafting Intensive), to acknowledge that a lot of the approaches we were most excited about were no longer specifically oriented to goal-setting—although they continued to be based on getting clear about what you want in life. And, largely given my aforementioned lack of excitement, the other team members—Benjamin, Sarah, and Teresa—did most of the work on that (with me giving a bit of input).
We launched that for New Years 2024, and the conversations around money in the context of the overhaul led me to realize that I wanted out—and had sorta wanted out for awhile but was afraid to say it. But it was increasingly unignorable to me that I needed to reclaim my attention for other things and get more space from a work context that I’d started when I was at a different phase of my life. And on some level it was more obvious that there could be enough momentum without me to make it work. But my first attempts to instantiate this change were confusing and contradictory, and left things in a kind of stuck mess. I was simultaneously trying to create space and also trying to maintain control of various things such as how much I got paid for my past involvement and also some of the technical details.
Then, in the spring, I started reading The Surrender Experiment by Mickey Singer, and paying attention to a sensation I’m provisionally calling “going against the grain”… a kind of awful slog of a sensation, that life is fighting me every step of the way when I try to do something. Then the question is… what is the grain, and how do I let go of trying to fight it? And the letter below is the answer I got in this case, after months of waffling about what I was and wasn’t available for in relation to the transition process here. (I’m struck by how in the book, his practice of surrendering involves a lot of saying yes, and mine here involved saying no.)
I didn’t know how this would play out, but once I was willing to look at the scary feeling in my gut telling me that what I needed to do was to stop trying to control the situation, it was clearly the thing I needed to do. I’m sharing it now, with permission from its recipients, as part of telling our story and as a case study of an unusual way of doing business.
Benjamin, Sarah, Teresa—
With apologies for the third—but final—Reverse Uno card…
I realized why my move in January didn’t liberate y’all the way that I’d hoped. In short: I was still trying to have a kind of control. Such a move might make sense for some other person or in some other context—I don’t know. But I can now tell that it’s not in integrity for me here. I wasn’t ready to see that in January, let alone say that. And I’m sorry for how janky that has made things for all of you, over the past months and the prior years. I was doing my best, and sometimes the results were kinda shit. And the control that I did have—via the technical skills and branding and other things—means that I had an asymmetrical role in things being janky, and an asymmetrical responsibility for making it not janky.
I sensed into things more this evening, in a conversation with my roommate Vincent. Lots of tributaries flowed into a new sense of vivid, sober clarity: notably a book I’ve been reading, a conversation with a friend in a similar situation, and the whole experience of our call today—which was so clearly draining for all of us. And, nervously at first but then with conviction, it became obvious that the move I need to make here to be in integrity is to completely let go.
I want to put our professional expectations of each other back to nothing.
I want y’all three to be totally free to do whatever makes sense to you: with the BGI content & brand, with its marketing, and most crucially, with the money you make from it going forward. More like how Mary left. (Some differences of course, which I’ll discuss below.)
I don’t want us to have to sign a contract in order to get out of this mess, because I sense that if we do, we will be still on some level signing the mess into the contract. I want our future agreements and interactions with each other to be freely chosen, not to come from a place of trying to make something work that feels strained. I can sense ways in which the contract we were drafting was an attempt to constrain things into a workable shape while feeling like we had no other choice.
We’ve been feeling stuck with each other (that’s my assessment; I don’t want to put words in other mouths). We’ve been managing that. And there are things that we’ve appreciated about the arrangement we’ve had. We’ve done some good work, changed lives, made money, and learned. But it has felt stuck, in various ways, and my pronouncement in January didn’t resolve that.
I was scared to fully let go of control primarily because of a kind of grasping scarcity around money. I got vivid clarity today that I don’t want to organize my life with that energy. I would rather have less money than organize my life that way. And I’d rather have BGI be a wholesome creature that I don’t have control over, than have it be serving me but less-than-wholesome.
Back in January I was still kind of trying to have my cake and eat it too, on some level. I didn’t think that I wanted to control BGI, but I wanted to control the transition process to a degree that ended up being the same thing. And I still had doubts about whether it could work without me. I guess I genuinely thought the multiple things I wanted might all be possible. And life told me it wasn’t. Sarah was maybe trying to point this out when she said “sounds like you want to get paid more to do less work… well, you can want that!” And not only can I want that, I can negotiate for it! I can ask for it! I can, in general, in my life, use whatever power I have to ask for whatever terms feel good for me. But in order for that to be wholesome, other people need to be free to say no, not already-committed in some weird muddle of half-agreements. So I’m done negotiating with it from a place of holding the project hostage. And I felt today the way in which that was going against the grain of how things want to unfold, and causing us all misery.
So: I am hereby releasing my demands on each and all of you, and on BGI’s future profits, and I’m hereby reneging any and all expectations of me that you understand me to have agreed to (specific or vague).
And! That doesn’t mean I won’t help. You are free to request my help or involvement, as a friend/supporter or as a contractor. But in order for me to freely say yes to such requests, we need to first allow the default to be “no”. To clean the slate of any sense of obligation.
I’ll walk through some specifics of that with reference to the open questions drafted in the contract. Perhaps we will end up wanting a contract for something that we come to agree upon in the coming weeks, but I am no longer demanding one here and now.
Regarding the transition: I’ve written some answers/explanations re most of the questions/systems in the spreadsheet. If you would like to talk to me further about those, feel free to message me to ask, book a paid call here, or ask in a message if I’m willing to have an unpaid call. In terms of heuristics of whether to consider this paid work, you might imagine how you’d reach out to me with a question if you were asking for advice on setting up a new workshop project. Obviously I have relevant experience, and there are questions you wouldn’t hesitate to just DM me about, because we’re friends etc. But there are other things where you wouldn’t presume that I’m open for that degree of investment. But also just feel free to ask! You don’t have to guess about it.
Regarding marketing: I will probably link to BGI, especially if there is an affiliate/referral program but maybe even if not. It’s up to you to set the terms of that, just as you would with any third-party, and I can take them or leave them. As part of fully cleaning this up, I am at this moment not promising to link to it. But you are welcome, as part of your orienting, to ask me if I will agree to do so in the future! I’m not saying we can’t have advance agreements here, merely that moving forward is not conditional on us having agreements here. I want/need this reset before I feel free to make agreements from a place of integrity (and to some extent, in order for me to be able to sense each of your integrities as well).
Regarding technical development: I am concluding that, as cool as the code I wrote is, it may be best if y’all use other systems. But, having said that, you are welcome to ask me if I’m open to continue to host the BGI landing page and to be available to support it—and to negotiate the terms of that. You are likewise welcome to inquire about hiring me for my help in setting up other systems. I have some niche relevant expertise but I might not be the ideal person for the job. You are welcome to use any snippets of the front-end JavaScript or HTML/mustache source code (in this gdrive folder) as part of handling the landing page—probably with help from another developer (or LLM). The main thing I’m imagining being useful there is a couple of timezone-related functions. I am potentially open sharing the backend/server source code too (which handles payments via stripe and interfaces with the spreadsheet and sends emails) but that would be a bit more work to extract from the intend codebase and also I might want y’all to agree to some other terms for that stuff (mostly not sharing/selling it) hence I’m not including it in this message which is demanding no agreement from y’all!
Regarding profit-sharing: if y’all make profits from future BGI events, that y’all would like to share some of with me, then y’all are free to send me money. I like money! TransferWise works great. And if you don’t, then I accept that. Or whatever the amount. And you can choose this in advance and inform me, or you can choose later.
I’m serious about this. I imagined how I’d feel if y’all chose to send me various amounts of money, and with this new releasing/liberating move I felt at peace with lower amounts than we’ve been talking about. I imagined y’all sending absolutely nothing, and while that struck me as unlikely in the world where you’re still sending something to Mary, I felt a sense of “okay, if that’s actually what makes sense to them to send me, then I accept that!” I can see various reasons why numbers that are less (or that decline much faster than 1-2%/year) could make sense, whether emotional-relational or pragmatic. Or maybe you start with zero while the nascent project is still getting off the ground, then later when it feels more robust you feel inclined to send me something. It’s up to y’all. I’m happy to receive any profits you want to share with me, but I don’t want you to feel forced to share profits with me—at all, or as a condition of moving forward with the project. That vibe feels bad, in the context of that not having been a formal condition of us starting to work together. I don’t want to live like that. I want only money freely given.
In other words: whatever you choose, it’s the right amount 😉
Regarding the IP stuff: what you wrote in the contract [which was drafted back when we figured we needed an agreement in order to move forward] seems fine. I might like to use little bits of the new BGI content here and there, credited, but I won’t go do a whole big thing with it without y’all’s permission. It seems obvious to me that you three own that content (except if someone else wrote it, obviously, including me). I’d like to have more freedom to remix the old GCI stuff if I want, since I feel more ownership of that (I have no plans there though). So yeah. I make no claim on rights to the BGI content or the BGI brand, or the ongoing use of the GCI brand. You’re free to do what you want with it.
Regarding the relationship between Intend & BGI: well, no matter what, they share a backstory. The exact phrasing of what we say about the ongoing relationship depends, it seems, on what we choose from here. I figure we do what makes sense and then tell the story honestly from our respective vantage points. Which may include ways in which the transition process hasn’t been easy or graceful or, as Sarah noted, simple. In some ways, my stepping back the way I am here is a betrayal or desertion, and I will own that. I will say that I have been wanting to tell the story of this transition as something like “I handed the BGI project off to the rest of the team”, and that was feeling untrue of how things were going so far. But it feels true (although not the full story) to me now, with this letter.
Thus, with no strings attached: here are the keys 🔑🗝️ [a link to a google doc containing the relevant login details etc]
Malcolm
PS: In one sense, with this message, I am expecting nothing from y’all. But of course, I am also expecting you to respect that I am holding myself to be under no obligation to y’all. But it’s fine if you don’t: I will simply reassert my “no” until it is clear, and then we can begin from there. I am aware that in some sense this is a breach of our implicit agreements. I hope you’ll forgive me. It is the only way I know how to fully clean up agreements that were made under circumstances that were not themselves conducive to self-listening and self-alignment. If you know of another way, I am very interested as a matter of general principle. With respect to this situation, I’ve made my move here already. However, it’s not an “and I’m done negotiating.” It’s very much the opposite: more of an “I’m here to negotiate freely.” (and an “I’m done pretending my previous negotiations felt free or fully honest”).
PPS: I don’t know if any of you also feel a need to make a move like this in relation to each other. I have the sense that the implicit culture of the team has been stuck at a level of development that is lower than where each of us is at individually, as a kind of artifact of where we were at when we started it. But maybe the BTS team feels a lot saner already, and y’all don’t feel stuck with each other in the same way! Anyway, that seemed worth naming, and I’m curious about it, but aside from some minor extent to which this might affect my desire to collaborate, this is not really my business now!
Regarding that final postscript, Teresa reflected to me:
I think the teams culture shifted dramatically upon your departure (not solely because of a reconfiguration of membrane but likely bc of all the talkaboutability that felt liberated in many directions and seems to have stayed that way)
We definitely miss you at times. You held a very strong pole on the team that we can’t replicate in the same way (a kind of directed assertiveness, and also just your awareness / technical experience) and it feels meaningful to recognize and appreciate that energy.
& the vibe of the whole thing is different. You’ll see if you come to the January events—it’s just generally more chill vs hype. Still awesome and life changing and nourishing for people. Just different
So where are we now, 6 months after the letter? Well! The new 3-person team took on the complex technical challenge of transitioning from the incredible duct-tape-and-string system that had evolved over the years to track participant-signups in some creative and uniquely useful ways, which was half inside the intend.do website codebase and half inside a giant spreadsheet with complicated formulas… into something else, that doesn’t require me to change some lines of code in order to set it up each season, or to be involved in debugging it.
Then they ran some small workshops in October to see how it would go, and it went well on both the logistical levels and in terms of the impact on workshop participants! They also chose to pay me an amount from that that feels good to me, in part as recognition of my making the whole thing possible, and in part as a referral bonus for sending them people.
…which… is what is lighting the fire under my ass to post this blog post now and not later (though I’ve been stoked about the idea of publishing this letter since I first wrote it). Because lo, it is the New Years season and they have more workshops coming up on Jan 4th, 5th, 11th & 12th.
For those unfamiliar, the basic premise of the workshops is that all you have to do is show up (there’s optional prepwork but no rigid homework) and then you get 5 hours in which to orient to your life and what matters to you, with the support of some structured coworking blocks and your own coaching channel where you can think out loud about what’s going on for you on various scales and get support from coaches—ranging from quick takes (eg tips, introductions, book recommendations) to extensive 1-on-1 guidance (eg emotional re-patterning / partswork, or making a big career or relationship decision). The event is long enough that you can sometimes even start taking action on something, notice you’re getting stuck, get help untangling it, then get back into it to ensure that the apparent unstuckness is real.
I’m intending to go be one of the volunteer coaches at one of these sessions, though I haven’t yet picked which one. I’m also intending to go participate at one of the sessions—I’m in major need of some life orientation since I became a dad in August and everything got turned upside down. And the couple times I’ve had the chance to be in the participant role at one of these workshops, I’ve found it really helpful.
So! Perhaps I’ll see you there! Here’s the link to learn more and sign up.
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
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