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The Journey Toward True Freedom:
Interview with George Kinder
By Carin Chea
George Kinder is our modern-day Renaissance man. Known as the “Father of Life Planning,” Kinder has been at the forefront of the financial services industry for decades, spearheading a movement that centers the lives that clients long to live within their financial plans.
He is also a renowned meditation teacher and prolific poet and photographer. The Harvard-educated author has published over a dozen books spanning the realms of art and photography, finance, mindfulness and civilization.
Kinder’s latest book, The Three Domains of Freedom: Each Moment is Yours, Your Life is Yours, Civilization is Yours, is a fountain of wisdom for those looking to break burdensome shackles in order to live an authentic, mindful, and empowered life.
George Kinder is a revolutionary trailblazer who has mastered the art of leadership with his methods that combine the practical with the spiritual.
Where are you from?
I’m currently in Massachusetts. I live here a good portion of the year, and I spend several months in Hana, Maui as well as London. I live in pastoral areas of Massachusetts and Maui. London is a nice change from all that.
Recently, I’ve written a series of five books centered on the pond that I live on in Massachusetts called Reflections on Spectacle Pond.
Tell us about your journey toward becoming the “Father of the Life Planning Movement.” How did that come about?
I don’t know how else to say it, other than I just didn’t want to work for a living. Nobody would ever pay me for what I really wanted to do -- writing poems and meditations. I wanted to live an artistic life and a deep life.
I found out early on that I also happened to be good at mathematics. This led me to doing tax returns, and I built a business from it and became a financial planner.
Doing this I realized that it would be valuable to figure out my own life in order to live how I wanted. I learned how to use money to live a good life; that’s what life planning is all about.
The point is to figure out what you’re most passionate about, what you love the most, and then make your money take you there in the most efficient way possible.
These ideals are for everybody, people who are in poverty and people who are wealthy. No matter your circumstance, align your life with your passionate purpose, and you’ll be thrilled!
I couldn’t agree more.
When COVID first came out, I got hit with a terrible case of it. I developed long COVID, but I was able to manage it in a lovely way.
At first, it was devastating, and I suffered from huge fatigues, but it turned out to be a gift. I discovered that when I spent my mornings doing what I loved, I had a lot of energy in the afternoons.
I finished six books in those two and a half years! Five of them have been books I’d been working on for 30 years. It was a dream come true and a blessing in disguise. If you find a way to do what you really love, it gives you tremendous energy.
The five-book series is about living with mindfulness in nature on a pond here in Massachusetts, Spectacle Pond. I give away installments of these books for free through a subscription on my website GeorgeKinder.com.
There are over 900 photographs and poems of the pond, taken for every day of the season for over 30 years. I was determined to capture the very best moments that I could.
I encourage people, in their writing, to seize the best moment of every day. I did this for 30 years, and then I slimmed it all down. This is my legacy.
That’s amazing that you turned long COVID into something beautiful.
Thank you.
During that time, I said to myself, “I’m going to give my best time every day to what I love the most, and then the rest of the time I’m willing to be busy.”
I gave my best hours to photography, meditation and poetry, and then come noon I had to stop.
I was thrilled for the rest of the day knowing that, even though I wasn’t engaging in something I loved as much, it would be supporting that freedom I gave myself in the earlier part of the day.
I was one of the first people in America to get COVID. I was flying to Maui, and the person next to me coughed on me the whole flight. This was the era before masks.
Three days into my holiday, I got this terrible cough, which turned into pneumonia. Now they think I had one of the first cases of COVID.
So, what was happening before compiling these five books was that I felt like I had come to the end of my life-planning career. I had already trained thousands of advisors globally.
Then I realized, when the banking crisis happened, that there was something wrong in the world of money. I had been working in that world all these years, yet the world was still screwed up.
I went on a tour for my book, A Golden Civilization & The Map of Mindfulness, asking people all around the globe what would make a great civilization.
The third domain of freedom [from the book The Three Domains of Freedom] is civilization.
Surprising to me at the time, people said the same thing all around the world: They wanted more kindness, no corruption, media that they could trust, information that they could trust, government and corporations they could trust, adequate health care and creativity.
Every place I visited people wanted the same thing. When COVID hit and I had to put an end to this tour, it gave me time to think about how we could set things up to where we could have everything we wanted.
Tell us more about your most recent book The Three Domains of Freedom.
The very end of The Three Domains of Freedom has something called FIAT [Fiduciary in All Things] and it is a single sentence legislative proposal with this notion: We’ve had 250 years since the industrial revolution and enormous growth, and yet there’s still something wrong.
The planet is burning up and we don’t trust our information sources. If we had the very best system, wouldn’t the hierarchies of power that we created, I mean the very top of those hierarchies, wouldn’t they be kind and compassionate and full of wisdom?
My one-sentence legislative proposal would require every corporation and government to put the truth, the planet and democracy ahead of their self-interests. We deserve that.
[Silence] Is that even possible?
The three domains are about how we get there. It’s about experiencing freedom in every moment through mindfulness, experiencing personal freedom through life-planning, and celebrating the freedom that civilization has given us and using that joy inside of ourselves to make sure everyone else has access to it.
Practically speaking, though, how do you get there?
I have a community of thousands of financial advisors whom I’ve worked with all over the world. I’ve also developed a reputation amongst the fiduciary community.
The first thing is to spread the vision. Wouldn’t everyone like to live in a world where our institutions are trustworthy?
You make the vision really strong; that’s how life planning works. Then, you gather people together to brainstorm on how to creatively make that happen.
Not to sound like a broken record, but is that possible?
Regarding truth, we have standards for reporting. If you’re an investigative reporter, you’re required to have certain sources. Science has standards. Our courts of law have standards.
It’s different from what we’ve experienced, but yes, it can be done. We have the technology; we just don’t have the legislation.
The movement has to start first. My personal goal is to do it in a generation. If you put it out too far ahead people don’t think it’s going to happen. And now is the time: Look at the planet, all our wars, the state of our democracy.
Civilization is who we are. It is the culture that we’ve created. It’s time we as a species say, “Enough already! This isn’t what I want my kids to be.” We can’t have a civilization based on deviousness and falsehoods.
What is the central message of your book?
The main point is that we all were born to live in freedom. We know that. That’s the reason we fight for it. It’s where we thrive.
What I’ve done with The Three Domains of Freedom is describe how you can live in freedom in every moment of your life, and that’s based on mindfulness. It’s essentially a practice toward the mastery of the present moment. That’s the first domain of freedom.
The second is: Your life is yours. That means you have a vision of an authentic life that thrills you, and you’re going for it. Even though it may be a few years out, you know you’re going there and you feel free because of that.
The final piece is civilization. There are so many things that are so cool – electricity, driving, flying – and yet it’s so troubled. It’s time to finish that work. It’s time to make the world a world of freedom where wisdom and compassion are at the top of every hierarchy of power. It’s time to make civilization sustainable as a world of freedom.
To keep up to date on George Kinder’s books and other projects, please visit www.GeorgeKinder.com.
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