What a thrill for this was!

I had the chance to have a wonderful conversation with August Turak, author of the Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks.

We chatted about so many things including:

• how he came to the decision to write this book
• how it's in our self-interest to forget our self-interest and what that means for capitalism
• what a middle manager can do to be unfailingly effective and create massive positive change
• what it means to aim past the target
• the importance of selflessness, self-knowledge and authenticity

August Turak is an award-winning author, speaker, consultant and contributor for Forbes.com and the BBC. He is also the founder of the spiritual and educational nonprofit the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation (SKSF). A super successful entrepreneur and corporate executive, Turak attributes much of his success to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey since 1996. As a frequent monastic guest, he learned firsthand from the monks as they grew an incredibly successful portfolio of businesses. When he is not praying and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey, he works with his nonprofit and lives on a seventy-five-acre farm near Raleigh, North Carolina.

Here's an overview of August's amazing book - Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks!

Service and selflessness are at the heart of the 1,500-year-old monastic tradition's remarkable business success. It is an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining vivid case studies from his thirty-year business career with intimate portraits of the monks at work, Turak shows how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. He demonstrates that monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. Turak also introduces other "transformational organizations" that share the crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success.