Recognizing patterns through doodling on clouds

a few will get the reference. others, please read through the end

As you look up at majestically blue skies and spot wisps of a cloud, look for familiar shapes. If you’re lucky, you might spot a cat, bunny, perhaps even God (however you imagine her-or maybe, him). I heard the pitch once for a product that would let you point an iPad at this imagined inspiration and doodle on the digital screen to save your memory for posterity. I was sold on the promise of its magic.

Entrepreneurship is a full contact sport; one played by introverted dreamers who evangelize dreams with manufactured hallucination. Some conjure up realities from these dreams, some burn up while trying to achieve escape velocity, and some persist to an end. Others find a path through, seeking victory yet finding enlightenment.

I share the guest post below, with permission of course, by a dreamer I’ve admired for a long time. A creator who transforms stories from wispy clouds, introspection through complex drawings, and histories with roots in childhood memories. I hope you read Matthew’s journey through the end, and I’ll see you at the bottom of the page.

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The Business Buffalo - by Matthew Smith

My life goes in chapters. One just ended.

Ten years ago, I walked out of my front door with a beard to my chest and hair to the middle of my back. It had been one year since the previous chapter had ended — a decade-long adventure in capitalism: selling insurance, running a real estate investment company, spending three years in a tech incubator building software to solve marketing problems. I even dipped my toe into live events (tuk-tuk racing) and ran a food truck called Powered by Fries.

But here’s what most people didn’t know about any of those businesses: I was on a spiritual journey. Business was just my ride.

My degree is in religious studies. For most of my young adult life, I had more questions than answers. Out of college, I wrestled with depression and a profound lack of purpose — which is exactly why I went into business. I was hoping to find my dream. A feeling of being alive again.

There’s something nobody tells you when you start dreaming. It’s not out there.

The language we use can send you on a wild goose chase — “chase,” “find,” “pursue.” But dreams aren’t out there. They’re in here. (taps heart)

I remember sitting in my twenties with a mastermind group called the Enlightened Millionaires — Mark Victor Hansen of Chicken Soup for the Soul and a real estate author named Robert Allen. It was, beneath all the inspiration, a sales call. They had us visualize: big house, pool, happy wife, happy life. Lock it in. Then they tied what they were selling to that locked-in dream.

It took me years to understand what had gone wrong. If you tie your heart to someone else’s dream, but your heart was never in it, you’ll spend your life dragging that deadweight around.

Here’s what took me almost fifty years to learn, and I learned it from a friend talking about his brother.

His brother was an eccentric who could do just about anything he put his mind to. One day he decided to take up sculpting. He spent weeks searching for the right stone — getting up close, studying the grain, the texture, the material — before he ever picked up a tool. Then, after about a month, he worked furiously until the most extraordinary thing appeared: a perfectly sculpted bison.

His brother asked him how he did it.

“The buffalo was always in there,” he said. “I just removed everything that was holding it back.”

It’s what Michelangelo said about his most famous work. He did not carve David. He simply removed what was not David.

That’s how dreams are revealed.

The rock that builds up around the buffalo happens over time. Eventually, you forget there’s a buffalo in there at all. When someone comes along and calls you by that name, it catches you off guard. You might even deny it. But something in you remember

That remembering shows up in strange ways. A friend of mine is a book doctor — but while she was working as a state investigator, she would always sneak humorous anecdotes into her official reports.

When I was restoring historic homes in Des Moines, I had more fun digging through the antiques and lost possessions of former owners — hunting for the hidden gem — than I did doing the actual restoration work. Joseph Campbell would call that following your bliss.

When I walked out of my house that day with the long hair and the beard, it was the end of a year in which God — the universe, whatever you want to call it — had taken a massive chisel to everything I thought I was.

Losing multiple businesses and starting over wasn’t the end. It was just the beginning of the next stage.

The next ten years would be the finishing work. Not the big chunks. The sanding and the polishing.

That’s how I ended up at Rocket Referrals.

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Sanding and polishing your life is tedious work. Everyone loves a restored Victorian fireplace. Nobody wants to spend hours with a toothbrush and dental tools removing those final stubborn layers of paint.

What that looks like spiritually is learning to lean into uncomfortable truths about yourself.

For example: I had convinced myself I was an entrepreneur — back when I dreamed with the Enlightened Millionaires, and certainly with a trail of businesses behind me. Turns out, I wasn’t. What I actually excel at is pattern recognition, predicting where things are heading, spotting overlooked details that turn out to be critical, a stubbornness that won’t accept easy answers, and the courage to go where others won’t.

What I found at Rocket Referrals was that I was a better first follower than a founder. I’m not the one who builds the rocket. I’m the booster system that helps it get off the ground. And once we land on Mars? I’m pretty good at exploring.

I also spent those ten years confronting a lie I’d swallowed whole: the myth of bootstrapping.

The lucky ones who escape the garage and build a startup sometimes forget the mothers, the partners, the encouraging kids, the infrastructure of a country, the sheer luck of being born in a time and place where it was even possible. We tell ourselves we did it all by ourselves. It makes us feel superior. It makes a good story.

It took ten years of watching men in the insurance world take women for granted for me to see what I had been doing. Watching men delegate their executive function to more capable women — often paid a fraction of what they were worth. Sitting on calls where women were belittled and demeaned, only to watch the entire tone shift the moment I walked in. I’d heard people describe this. I hadn’t seen it, up close, until I had.

And I wasn’t innocent.

My wife should have left me years ago for the half-baked ideas and entrepreneurial risks I put her through. I knew that leaving wasn’t something she would do — not from the world we came from — and I took it for granted. I risked everything. Including her.

After a decade of being the face of all my businesses, I spent ten years in the background — helping build something, gaining perspective, learning consistency, watching the buffalo emerge.

In January, the Rocket Referrals chapter ended.

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There are a few things I know now that I didn’t before.

In business, it’s easy to confuse market value with self-worth. We talk about value in purely transactional terms — ROI, multiples, equity. But in spiritual terms, your worth is immeasurable. You are both the buffalo and the sculptor. The buffalo is the body you’ve been given for this lifetime. The sculptor is your soul. And that soul is connected to something so profoundly infinite that no spreadsheet will ever capture it.

I also learned the power of a well-built system. I worked alongside two extraordinary builders who showed me how quality products create consistent, predictable results. On a personal level, that translates to self-knowledge — because blooming a cactus and blooming a rose require completely different soil, weather, and humidity. You can’t build your most effective system until you stop lying to yourself about what you actually are.

So after all that carving away, what does my buffalo look like?

I love researching how things work, why they work that way, and how they’re shaping our lives. I love solving big problems in ways that make people’s lives better and reduce suffering. I love systems that are loose but tight — I need both freedom and structure. I love telling entertaining stories about big problems and the people solving them. I love traveling to interesting places and meeting people who don’t see the world the way I do.

As for what’s next — I’m uncertain. Which is different than unsure.

I’m sure there’s an intelligence in this universe that’s growing me, the same way it grows the cacti and the roses. Part of my job is to be a good gardener for my own life. To take what I’ve learned on this spiritual business trip and put it to work — so I can bloom and bear fruit for myself and others. That means living in the tension between making it happen and letting it happen. Between the gardener and nature.

I’ve also learned that on these journeys, history doesn’t repeat — it spirals. I’ve had the chance to help my son get started in a career in life insurance. I’ve spoken to a startup building a Tinder for Real Estate — which, as it happens, was the exact idea I was developing in that tech incubator a decade ago. The universe, it seems, has a long memory and a sense of humor.

Wherever I land, it will be with people solving problems that relieve suffering — people who create space where others are valued not just for what they contribute, but because they carry that same divine spark.

If that sounds like where you’re building, I’d love to talk.

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I met Matthew in early 2012 at StartupCity Des Moines, an initiative borne out of the community’s need for an entrepreneurial hub, an incubator to foster ideas in hands of entrepreneurs. Apple CEO Steve Jobs had called these entrepreneurs the crazy ones. We came to call the collective an island of misfit toys brought together by fate and a hunger for a shared experience.

Matthew pitched (and I saw) a reimagined idea for residential real estate. He was surrounded by others working hard to shift a marketplace governed by deeply rooted corporate interests and protected by one-sided regulation. He could spar with a fellow entrepreneur on her vision to disrupt predatory ticketing at music venues in one breath and shift to thinking about social discovery in the next. With an insatiable appetite for ideas, Matthew generated more ideas per day than anyone I have ever met.

I sought Matthew’s permission to share this piece because it exposes the mind of an entrepreneur. Regardless of society’s outward expressions that encourage and celebrate failure, we all know the encouragement and celebrations are bullshit. Risk takers are penalized and pilloried by employers, customers, investors and employees. Many are driven deeper into mental health challenges, and some choose suicide over seeking help. Vulnerability is easier spelled than accepted by society. Leaders among us choose to ignore early entrepreneurs “because most are going to fail anyway”.

Yet it is within the mind and hands of the dreamer, the entrepreneur, the creator, the writer, the preacher, the poet, the singer, the musician, the painter, the sculptor, the reader, the photographer, the lone protestor, the one who keeps getting up each time they’re knocked down that the world changes. Steve Jobs got it right when he said:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

―Steve Jobs

You can find Matthew at LinkedIn or better yet, at his website. While you’re there and ready to dig into some incredible history through his series on Substack, The Suriname Contra Affair and how he grew up next door to a dictator.

If you are lucky enough to know a creator in your life, find a way to support them-words, hugs, listening work wonders.

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I am honored to be amongst an esteemed group of creatives, the crazy ones who choose to share through notes, photographs, poems, articles, stories, books, songs, recipes, and music. The Iowa Writers Collaborative keeps me informed and educated daily through its incredible diversity of thought. Come check it out and consider paid subscriptions to those whose work moves you.