162: Greg Marcus

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Greg Marcus has a BA in Biology from Cornell University, and earned his Ph.D. in biology from MIT. He worked for ten years as a marketer in the Silicon Valley genomics industry, after which he became a stay-at-home dad, writer, life balance coach, and biotech consultant. Greg’s first book, Busting Your Corporate Idol: Self-Help for the Chronically Overworked, is a five star Amazon best seller. His latest book is called The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions: Finding Balance Through the Soul Traits of Mussar

The One You Feed parable
His book, The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions: Finding Balance Through the Soul Traits of Mussar
Mussar: A Thousand Year Old Hebrew Spiritual Practice
Soul Traits
That you can be too truthful and it can be counter productive
That being untruthful to spare yourself embarrassment is not ok
That being untruthful to spare someone else’s feelings can be ok
And the intention is the most important determiner of whether or not to tell the truth
Choice points
The evil inclination and the good inclination
Mussar helps us by opening the space between “the match and the fuse”
That we all have free will but it’s not always accessible to us
What qualifies as an act of kindness
Mussar = “Extreme Spiritual Fitness”
Morning Mantra, Daily observations and practices, Evening journaling
Mussar helps you specialize and deepen your knowledge and practice of the Soul Traits
The four assumptions of Mussar:
We all have a divine spark that is occluded by our baggage
We all have the same Soul Traits but we have different amounts of each
We have a conflict between the good inclination and the evil inclination
We all have free will and it’s not always accessible to us
That patience is the cure for helplessness
Mussar: repairing the Soul Traits within us and how it can help the world