After we got out of graduate school, Jenn [Barry's wife] and I bought our own little boat (we could take six passengers) and that was graduate school in business for us. We were the "granola boat" on the bay. We were vegetarian, macrobiotic. We did yoga cruises and men's cruises and women's cruises and kind of cutting edge sailing themes. We were doing the Zen of Sailing and promptly went bankrupt, literally. We realized, and isn't this a life lesson, that being poor was not going to provide any sense of contentment. It looked good from the outside, but after you live for a month on soy beans and carrots - which admittedly is more than many people in Bangladesh have - for our expectations of our lives, we realized we were just going backwards. We had dumped every life savings that we had in there and just lost our shirts. We had to sell the boat and get out of that kind of business. See the problem with people who are socially conscious is that they don't make enough money to go on vacation [laughs].

We meet people from every walk of life imaginable, some I'd care to visit and some I wouldn't care to visit... everybody I meet on that boat has expectations of success or contentment. Some of which would work for me. Some of which I wonder if they really work for them. Even the most successful looking people from our cultural stereotype still have to wrestle with success and contentment and the two are very different. Success I tend to line up with things. Contentment I line up with my heart.

So that's where we're at now, trying to take what is still a financially marginal business, and hardly anyone would call it a highly successful business, but for right now... We don't have kids yet and that will undoubtably change our entire perspective of what success is. But for right now, that's okay. We don't make much, but we don't eat much. We don't go on vacation. We work. They call it a lifestyle choice. We work so hard year-round. I mean I'm supposed to be able to take winters off, but it never seems to work out that way. There's no trouble worrying about downsizing. For years we have taken other jobs during the winter and I'll be looking for part time stuff this winter to make ends meet. We're very close to owning the business and we're putting the finishing touches on a buyout plan. We've spent four years busting our butts to make that happen.

The whole notion of success is a real personal one for everyone. It's a personal decision. My notion of success changes all the time. It's not a static thing by any means. Especially in Western culture, we're so aculturerated by our families, our school systems, by all the institutions that we kind of get on bended knee to. Our teachers say success is this. Our parents have very different ideas of what success is for us. My path to success, and I do consider success as personal fulfillment, is feeling content. It's not about money, obviously. I work on a windjammer, which is a marginal business. As you can see I have a nice view from my office window today [points to the beautiful vista of Camden docks]. My only hope is that I come out from all this with some feeling of contentment.

I'm fairly people focused and I get a lot of satisfaction from being with people. It also fills in the gaps that I can't fill in myself. So playing music with people on the boat, for example, helps fill in some of the gaps in my life. I have fun doing it. They have fun and everyone feels good. Sailing with people is real easy. Even when it's raining, most people just love the thrill of sailing. That's what makes us a fairly positive vacation story for people. It's easy for me to have fun with people sailing, not to say that it isn't work, but it is easy.

I do get to the end of the season and all those people go away and I still have to face that question of "how am I doing here?" There's always this withdrawal symptom. Usually I'm fried enough that I don't want to see people and you need a break from the constant barrage of questions. So wintertime is different. It's more of a time to draw back and gather enough energy for the next season. It's more of a time for introspection. It's a nice seasonal thing to regroup, shut down for awhile.

I don't have a dream I'm moving towards. Maybe a nightmare [laughs]! Maybe it's because in some ways... I'm not saying I'm already there, but I'll be blunt. I'm pretty confused with what I want to be when I grow up. The problem is this schooner thing is the only thing I know how to do right now. I'm not a computer programmer. I can do a lot of things - Jack of all trades, but master of none. I've faced the proposition of career changes. If I've had a dream, it's been to have a family, have a business of our own so that we can have some amount of control over our time. But as anyone who has run there own business will tell you, you have no free time, but at least you're doing something that works.

My brother is a lawyer in Los Angeles and he loves it and thrives on it. I often think of my brother and I as the same people doing two completely different things, but striving toward the same thing in the end. We're both striving to feel good about ourselves and be content and treat the people around us with dignity and respect. But we're doing it through completely different paths. My path wouldn't work for him and his wouldn't work for me, but we'll both probably end up in the same place.

So I don't know what my dream is now. I used to dream that I'd have a boat and go sailing and it doesn't feel like a dream anymore. I feel pretty jaded to tell you the truth because it has not been easy to get here. I used to say that the day I owned this business I'd be jumping up and down and it'd be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now I say to myself, "if it happens, good. If it doesn't happen, even better" [laughs]. I don't feel wistful, dreamy about it. I don't even know if it'll work once we get there. If the economy goes down the tubes and people stop going on vacation, then we really are going to loose it all. So, again, what I come back to is that I hope to be able to feel contentment.

Jenn can work like no one I've ever met. I can't do that. I've got to take time out so I can reflect and not do anything and sit and stare out the window and recharge. Jenn doesn't need to do that as much. I need to do that because if I don't keep track of where I'm at and what I'm doing and how I'm feeling about myself, it's too easy for me to end up feeling lousy about myself and the people around me. So I have to work hard at feeling okay about myself. Going back to what I said earlier about being with people, if I can spend a lot of positive time with people that's just one place where it fills in the hole in my self esteem. The more time I spend with other people, the more perspectives I get about the world, the more they reflect back to me who I am. Other people as they reflect me back to myself they enable me to keep things in checks and balance. I can't always acknowledge myself for what I'm doing and they help me see that and find that acknowledgment. I don't think anyone can do it all on their own. It may be nice, but we can't live in a vacuum. There are times when it's good to be in a vacuum because it gives a different perspective, but I don't think one can live in a vacuum.

I forget where I heard this - I think I heard from some park ranger in some part of Utah - but someone once told me these two things. One was people spend a lot of time fighting against things, being against something. Wouldn't it be a different place if people were fighting not against something, but for something? Do you see the difference there? It's the difference between saying, "stop the clear cutting" versus "let's work to preserve old growth forests." There's a certain antagonism with going against something, but if you can find the common values to strive towards we should be better off.

The other thing he told me was, "start by doing what you're good at." Everybody is good at something. I don't care who you are. It might be just smiling. It might be as simple as walking down the street and saying good morning and sharing a smile with someone. I'm not talking just about a career path. Find something that you're good at and let that be your springboard into the rest of the world.

The high school I went to was a school predicated on the idea of character growth. The way they tried to facilitate character development was that every student was asked to participate in three sports a year, every student obviously did academics, and every student did performing arts, as well as, community life on and off campus. So here's this program that is pushing people to explore themselves in a multifaceted way. I wasn't that great academically. I was okay in sports. Again I was jack of all trades and master of none. But what really happened for me was I became a part of a traveling performing arts group. Traveling and performing with that group was such a high and it carried over into all other aspects of my life. I felt great about community involvement, sports, everywhere. It was that one little thing that carried over into everything else. I wasn't the best at it, but I felt good about it and I had fun and that feeling permeated the rest of my day.

Find something that you feel good about doing, and I don't know if "good at" is the right term. Find something you feel good about doing and do it in a way that respects yourself and the rest of life and the planet around you. To me, that is what works.

I think about the number of people who come on this boat. I play music with them and we go sailing and we live out in the elements for a whole week and 30 some odd of us (and we do get odd at times) share two heads and shower for the week ... I can't tell you how many letters I get every year. I have people walk off that schooner in tears because they had such a good time. My parting comment to everybody is this: I hold up my hands and take a deep breath and I say, "Walk, don't run back to your vehicles. Take a moment to do what we call Schooner Shivasana." In yoga at the end of every practice the last posture you do is you lay down. This is the most important thing that you do after bending a stretching and pulling for an hour, you let every bone and muscle in your body relax. The most important part of Shivasana is you take that relaxed feeling and you absorb it into the marrow of your bones and carry it with you into the day ahead of you. What I tell people on the schooner is to take a deep breath, walk, don't run to your vehicle. Keep breathing. The office will still be there when you get back. If you run off the boat back to your vehicle, you will undo in 10 minutes what it took six days to achieve. Walk, don't run, keep breathing. For most people that one week has to last them an entire year before they get a chance to come on vacation again.