Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Olivier Egli. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Olivier thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, let’s start with a hypothetical – what would you change about the educational system?

It is disheartening to see how little education cares about teaching principles that are based on natural concepts. Today’s classrooms prepare students for a world of hardship and fighting, where competitive behavior and unsustainable growth is normalized and leads to a distorted perspective on work, marketplaces and life itself.
Rather than promoting the idea that we are all a part of nature and that there are unbendable principles at work within any ecosystem which apply to us and our societies as well, education is going in the opposite direction, thereby fueling greed, unsustainable business practices, false growth methodologies and more.

It is my firm conviction that young people have to be prepared for an alternative work reality before entering their professional careers. That their eager minds must not be nurtured with the common ‘scarcity attitude’ but with one of ‘collaborative abundance.’ In my understanding education must shift towards redefining work as something that is the expression of oneself, not simply the application of one’s labor within a given industry. Such differentiation is at this point completely non-existent.

Olivier, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

After a career in advertising and marketing spanning a little over 2 decades and nearly burning out, I realized that something was off. That there seems to be a narrative all business professionals follow and which leads nowhere. Just like in the movie ‘The Matrix’ there appears to be an odd set of convictions, a toxic choice, holding us all hostage and in place, while we give our best years away feedings this system. After studying human behavior and the brain, it dawned on me that we as a population and as individuals have completely abandoned our connection to nature and lost our attachment to ‘natural doings.’ and replaced it with toxic, unnatural concepts: We misunderstand growth, we have a false definition of success, we believe in fight and struggle rather than in flow, we make our work about the paycheck rather than about our experience, we engage in transactions rather than transformation, we focus only on taking rather than giving and worst of all we fail at using our unique voice and rather imitate what already exists.

My main focus in my work is to debunk toxicity that has been sanitized and normalized in the workplace on a global scale and guide people back to a natural understanding of work so that they can stop trying to love what they do and instead do what they love. In short: I am here to guide people back to expressing their passion rather than copying what is already out there. My work turns people who compete in marketplaces into individuals that build their own marketplace. As employees as well as business owners. I call this ‘becoming like an apple tree.”

I do this by leading my people out of their societal mental programming that prevents them from accessing their unique potential down towards their their root where their purpose rests – and then back up into the light where they can apply their purpose as expression of who they truly are as ‘Happy Work’ and in ‘Happy Businesses.’

This process is intense, layered and fundamental and demands a great deal of dedication as it often must undo decades of mental conditioning, trauma and indoctrination. After I am done, my clients not only know
about their unique truth, their gifts and their purpose, they also dare to apply it in a job or in a business. They no longer ignore their nature or sabotage themselves by keeping themselves small and not choosing their own peace of mind.
I call this process ‘Why Story’ because it literally rewrites one’s ‘Why’: from working for money and safety to simply expressing who you are – and getting paid for it!

So far I have helped close to 1000 entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs reconnect with the fire inside of them and make what’s unique about them the driver of their actions. They have all reported a sense of clarity and confidence they never knew before. They are the first few of a new breed of working professionals who are not in it to win it, but to bring something beautiful into the world they were born to express. Over time I hope to see them connect like a giant forest of collaborative, interconnected trees that are not interested in greed but in sustaining the system for everyone to benefit. This is the way of nature – this should be our way too. We are a part of it, not apart from it.

I apply my conviction that nature is our greatest teacher also in the realm of the music industry with my record label and community called ‘Errorgrid.’ It was founded as a ‘safe space of boundless expression’ during the pandemic when many artists struggled mentally. Not being able to tour, the constant worry about a collapsing world as well as deep isolation spread faster than covid itself and led to many artists breaking down mentally. During such uncertain times it showed more than ever that the underserved music industry needed more platforms that allow exchange, collaboration and true connection. With Errorgrid I put on TedX like shows that bring together experimental electronic music and deep existential conversation and foster collective creativity. Just like with my main business I recognize that the music industry too has distanced itself massively from nature and introduced transactional concepts into a place that was supposed to be a playground for total freedom. I aim at bringing it back show by show, release by release, conversation by conversation. I know for a fact that there is more to be expressed via non mainstream music than Spotify yields: Entire universes of incredible sounds and sonic adventures await locked away inside of ingenious artists who right now are too afraid, self conscious and intimidated to let go and share them with us.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

One morning, at the height of my corporate career, I found myself incapable of getting out of bed. Whatever I tried, I could barely move and it felt as if a giant rock was sitting on my chest. A panic attack started to roll over me and a millions thoughts started to attack me. I had it coming, but I ignored it for the longest time: My work had sucked me dry, there had been no joy for a while, and I dreaded everything about it, even though the job was technically great, pay was excellent and the perks stellar. I had started to hate myself for not changing anything. I had felt like a coward for putting up with all the horrible meetings and people and their petty schemes and goals. It almost felt as if I had lost all respect not just for them, but for myself as well.
And so I didn’t go to the office and missed a ‘very important’ client meeting at the agency. The phone rang berserk, but I threw it against the wall. Instead of going to work, I went to my favorite place: the forest. I walked and walked for hours until the sound of the city disappeared. I didn’t follow the marked path but went straight across the thicket. And I can remember how with every step the weight on my shoulders became lighter. I stopped in a part of the forest that was unknown to me and sat down on a tree stump. It was almost entirely silent, and I felt oddly protected. There was something primal and almost ancient about this place and it felt almost as if the tall firs around me were blocking off the noise and anxiety that had plagued me earlier. And now they stood there in silence and I felt safe and okay. I recall looking around me and taking in the peacefulness of nature. How everything was intertwined, collaborating, supporting and thriving. And I was wondering why we humans couldn’t be like that. Why wouldn’t we! And that’s when I realized that I had to let it all go. That I was not born to worry, to rush and hustle, to bend over backwards and toil towards retirement. It was here that I formed a new intention for my life: To reconnect with nature, and to reconnect with my nature, and should I manage to do it, to share this knowledge with as many people as I could. I came back out of the forest a changed man. The same week I quit, sold everything I had and moved away and never looked back.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A few years back I had to let go of the idea that success is something one must or can attain. For my entire career I was had been doing nothing else but running after success like a dog after a treat. I did the most impossible things in order to nurture the notion of being successful, to the point where it almost consumed me, my health and my mind. I achieved quite a few mundane things in my work, I rose the ladder, I grew a team, co-founded businesses and managed entire departments, traveled the world and developed large scale projects. I thought for the longest time that these things would define my success, and hence define me. But I came to realize that as soon as I had them, their validity vanished like sand running through my fingers. And then I looked back in shock, realizing that I had spent weeks, months or even years going after them.
This was what ultimately got my on my path of reuniting natural principles with work: In nature, nothing sees success as a future thing, because nothing has a notion of the future. Everything is always fully present and fully invested in the now. In our work this could mean to truly pay attention, listen to ourselves and doing the best possible job at building relevant value today. ‘Success’ as a word does not describe something in the distance at all, it only means ‘to succeed’ – to put one foot in front of the other, to keep going, to be on the way, not to reach the destination.

I used to always think that life is a game one has to win. And success was that moment when victory hits. But thankfully life is a game that cannot be won, but that must be played, where the attention should be given the fact that we want to stay in the game, not end the game in victory. This has made me resilient, patient and extremely rooted, anchored and focused. I still plan, and I still set goals, but I am not obsessed with their achievement and timelines, much rather I ask myself what can I do right now about them? How can they inspire today? To use the words of a Stoic: To be fully involved, yet detached. This, to me, is the recipe for ultimate success as every tree knows it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.BeLikeAnAppleTree.com / www.ErrorgridRec.com / www.errorgrid.bandcamp.com
• Instagram: @do_happywork
• Linkedin: Olivier Egli

Image Credits

Image courtesy of:

Alex Leonard
Vira Magallanes-Egli
Carlos Basurto