We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Daniel Levin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Daniel, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I have been blessed by the opportunity to live a life that is not like that of everyone else. I didn’t always see this as a blessing, in fact growing up I didn’t like it because it made me feel different than others. But over time, as the world started to value innovation, people somehow found me interesting and they invited me into their businesses to sit with their teams and help them innovate by seeing life from a different perspective. The conversations that emerged from these meetings were fabulous and I wanted to see if I could find a way to initiate these conversations in the minds and hearts of people without having to be physically present. i.e. a book.

I could never have imagined the experiences I had writing The Mosaic. The characters in the book came alive to me and created all sorts of shenanigans in my writing process. This simple book of 200 or so pages took me three years to write. it never should’ve taken that long. but what happened is i would sit down and over the course of a few days, i would write a chapter and save it only to find the next morning the chapter was nowhere to be found.. so i would sit down and rewrite the chapter trying to capture the same feeling or better than the one i had just tried to save. It took time to recreate the chapter I had already written, but finally I felt good about what I had written. I saved it and when I looked for it the next morning once again, the chapter was gone.

I know how to save a file, but when I rewrote it the next time I asked my wife to save it for me and to my amazement, this time it was saved. . i was so happy that I just kept writing and writing and my wife was saving and saving and I was so close to having the book written when . . . . .

My computer crashed and I lost everything. I took it to my computer guru and he was able to recover all of my files, except for my book files. all that time spent with nothing to show for it. You can only imagine my frustration. Clearly someone was trying to tell me something. So I contacted all of my characters, real and imaginary and asked them to have a zoom call with me in my mind’s eye.

I asked them what in the heck was going on? Why were they not allowing me to write this book. they told me they didn’t like the way I was portraying them and they really didn’t like the things I was writing for them to say, so they couldn’t let it happen.

I said, with all due respect, you are my character, I created you and I should be able to write what I want you to say. They agreed but told me if I continued to do what I was doing, they I would have to continue to do what they were doing. so realising that this was not the answer, i asked them what they wanted me to do. Everyone of them without hesitation said to me, listen to what we are saying to you and if you do that the book will be done in 30 days. I did and it was.

It was the first time the characters in a book ever spoke to me. i thought i was crazy until a friend of mine told me, when Dickens wrote, he would invite his made up characters to his house and sit and have tea with them so he could learn from them who they were and how they would respond to life-like situations. This for some reason made me feel better. At least there were two of us who were crazy.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have lived a million lifetimes this lifetime. I have sat at the dinner table with the richest of the rich and been on street corners with the poorest of the poor.

I walked away from running a billion dollar company to find happiness and inner peace.
I lived as a monk in a monastery for 10 years and then led a hay house from 3million to 100million a year in sales.

I helped people become bestselling authors and I am also the author of THE MOSAIC (to purchase The Mosaic in hardcover, kindle or audio, please go to amazon: http://a.co/dvgsgG3).

I am a mystic and a businessman.
I am a visionary that sees what others do not see and a listener who listens to those no one listens to.

I lost my parents as a boy 2 years apart on the same day. Studied 5 years in a seminary and left 1 day before being ordained and lived as a monk in a monastery for 10 years.

I am a storyteller. a disrupter and an innovator.
I hold the space for people and companies to let go of what is no longer needed and innovate.
I help you find that which unites your company and build a story around that.

In a world where everyone exaggerates our differences, I highlight what we all want and find ways to bring you and your company/family/team together by creating horizontal relationships of cooperation rather than vertical relations of dominance.

I help you focus on what you want and help you write the stories to achieve that end. I am a consultant, a coach and a mentor who still believes the walrus is John (a song from the Beatles).

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

This story from my book The Mosaic captures my story of resilience. In fact, we believe this story is so in touch with humanity we are creating an NFT from it. I truly believe this story is the story of humanity.

All of us have felt that moment when what we seek seems to be just within our reach, and then when that moment slips away or something happens to break our dream, the pain is unbearable. i hope you enjoy this story:

Every year for hundreds of years, the people of the region entered their top artisan into the most prestigious competition in the land, but every year the taste of victory eluded them.

This year, they invited the people and the artisans to sit together as the artists listened to the people, they saw the frustration of never winning had made them believe they were not good enough to win. The artists needed to do something to bring hope back to the people they committed then and there to win this competition.

When the piece was finished, it was even more beautiful than they imagined but as they passed it from one to another, the unthinkable happened. it slipped and fell. At that moment, the dreams of the region shattered on the floor with the broken pieces of the bowl.

While the people lamented, the women gathered the broken pieces together and wondered what could be done to put the bowl back together.

When they remembered the special glue of 24 karat gold they smiled, it was the perfect solution. The effect it created was magnificent the brokenness of the pieces rather than distracting from the bowl now made the bowl even more beautiful.

As time passed, they realized they could not finish gluing it together on their own, so they went to where the people were gathered and asked for their help. together the people did what was not possible to do alone and when the finished piece was presented, it won the competition.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

When I was in seminary, my teacher taught me how to be able to walk into a perfect room and find 10 things wrong with the room in 30 seconds. His thought was that we can not fix something until we know what is wrong with it. I got so good at it that companies would bring me in to assess what was wrong with their approach, or the team and hired me to come in and fix it.

But over time, I realized that it was not my job to fix people and people in general, do not need to be fixed. I found that rather than seeing what is wrong with something and separating us from others it was much more powerful to see something that unifies us and to see past those small things that separate us.

When I did this, I realized that people all wanted the same three things. they wanted to be:
1. loved and accepted.
2. listened to and heard.
3. seen and acknowledged.

And when I realised I could easily do this, I decided that this is what I would dedicate my life to doing. What I didn’t realise is how powerful this practice was when people felt loved and accepted, listened and heard; and seen and acknowledged, they felt safe. When they felt safe they let down their walls and when they let down the walls of their defensiveness, they were flooded with miracles, real miracles. All of these blessings were waiting for them on the other side of the walls they put up to protect themselves.

New opportunities came to them, both business and personal and I would have never predicted that would happen.

Contact Info:

• Website: DanielBruceLevin.com TheMosaicOnline.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themosaic_/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/danny.levin.735
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-levin-themosaic/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannylevin
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVQAe3mbYOT0AFY6Zr-xskg

Image Credits
Ana Laura Levin Margit Boyesen