Hello friends, Dr. Scott Mills here. Welcome back to Love and Other Survival Skills. I am so glad you’re here.
A few episodes ago, I told you a story. I told you that right before COVID shut down the world, I flew to Malaysia to film a course called Money EQ with Japan’s top-selling personal development author, Ken Honda. I told you that Mindvalley rolled out the red carpet, that the brainwork I’d been developing for years was the engine that drove the course, that almost 120,000 people took it and they’re still taking it today. And that I never made a dime.
I said it almost in passing. One beat in a larger story about how I got from Mindvalley to Mexico.
And then the emails and the messages and the phone calls all started coming.
People wanted to know more. What happened? Why didn’t you get paid? Why are you so calm about it? What aren’t you saying?
The truth is there was a lot I wasn’t saying.
I’d never told anyone outside of my closest circle of friends and family—five people—the story at all. And even then I’d been careful. Careful for years. Careful about names. Careful about specifics. Because some of these people were people I still, in some complicated way, held dear.
But I held the door closed mostly out of fear. Fear of burning bridges to a world I’d spent 20 years trying to belong to.
So today I’m going to open that door.
But before I do, I want to tell you something that might sound strange.
Because if you looked at my life from the outside back then, you’d have called it a success story. I ran companies for influential authors. I taught alongside icons—people whose names you know. My work reached people around the world. I got to travel, to connect with genuinely fascinating people, to offer them things that actually helped them. So on paper, I’d climbed pretty close to the top of the ladder.
Stephen Covey has this line I think about a lot. He talks about working your whole life to climb to the top of the ladder and then getting there and realizing it was leaning against the wrong wall all along.
That was me.
Because here’s what the outside didn’t show you. When I look at photographs of myself from those years—from the time I was working with Ken—I don’t recognize the person I’m looking at. I gained a tremendous amount of weight. I was anxious almost all the time. I was exhausted down to my bones.
And I was succeeding at something that was quietly killing me.
So when I tell you I left the personal development world, I want to be clear about what I left. I didn’t leave because I failed at it. I left because I got good at it. I looked around from up near the top, and I realized I didn’t want to be there at all.
And I’m not angry telling you this. I keep saying that and I keep meaning it.
I’m telling this story because it’s the one that explains everything else I’ve been teaching you. It’s rooted in the dissertation work I did years before coming into this world. It’s the story of a new world, of this in-between time that we’re transitioning through.
What I want you to know is I didn’t just leave that world. I carried the real work out with me. The transformation engine. The brain work. The thing that was actually helping people—all of that came to Mexico with me.
And the minute I got out from under the miasma of that personal development world—the one always whispering more, more, more—I was able to build something new with it. Something regenerative. Something that I’ve been calling doing business in the forest of humans. Something that actually fits who I want to be.
So this is the story of what I left, and underneath it the whole time, it’s the story of what I found.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
A lot of people ask me, “How does a person end up near the top of a ladder he never even meant to climb?”
Because that’s the strange part. I didn’t set out for any of this.
To understand why the Mindvalley experience landed on me the way it did, you have to understand what I was carrying before I ever walked through that door. I didn’t walk in empty. I walked in with a measuring stick.
By the time I entered the personal development world, I had spent my whole career on one question—even before I had the words for it: How do human beings actually form healthy community?
In 2007, I finished a doctoral dissertation trying to answer it. I called it In the Beginning, There Was Joy, a nod to theologian Matthew Fox and his beautiful work on Creation Spirituality.
My dissertation was about work—about how the modern world of work was producing people severed from themselves and from the living world. And in it, I named the lies the culture runs on: that you’re alone in the universe, that your worth is measured by what you own, that you stand above nature instead of inside it.
I wrote all that down years before I ever met anyone in this industry.
So when I tell you something felt hollow up near the top of the ladder, understand: I already knew what good work was supposed to look like. I’d done the homework. I had something to measure it against.
And it wasn’t just theory.
I had spent years in the hardest rooms there are.
I built a federal project for kids whose parents had AIDS. I started a theater company with teenagers who went out and taught other kids how to stay alive. I ran support groups for queer youth. I worked in churches, sat with people through grief and dying and the kinds of darkness that doesn’t make it into the brochures.
That’s the work I came up in: sitting with people in the dark and not looking away.
So when I found this world, I wanted them to be the good guys.
After all those years in the trenches, I walked into a program called New Ventures West—one of the oldest coaching programs in the country, Buddhist-based, presence-based, led by the phenomenal James Flaherty and many others—and I felt like I had come home.
There were people here talking about wholeness. About presence. About helping human beings remember who they are.
Being in that community, I got to teach people simple practices that brought down their anxiety, that helped them feel better about their lives. I got to help, and I thought: Finally. My people. The room I’ve been looking for my whole life.
I fell in love with it.
And looking back now, everything about who I was should have told me it would never last.
A pattern-seeking, systems-loving, deeply communal brain—the kind I’d eventually understand as ADHD, as a mind that sees connections most people don’t—walking into an industry built on selling individual fixes to individual people.
We were never going to fit.
But you know what they say about meeting your heroes. I had to learn that one the hard way. More than once.
Before I go any further, a little context.
By the time I started working with Ken, this was not new terrain for me. I’d already worked with New York Times bestsellers. I’d run companies for well-known figures. Taught alongside names you’d recognize. Spent years in close quarters with people who carry a lot of fame and a lot of followers.
And one of the things you learn doing work with celebrities is that sometimes it’s hard. There’s a particular dynamic that shows up, and after enough years you stop being surprised by it.
I’m telling you this so you understand: what I’m about to describe wasn’t my first time around this particular block. I knew the shape of it before I ever met Ken.
If you don’t know Ken: Ken is Japan’s top-selling personal development author. His whole thing is Happy Money. Millions of copies. Enormous in Japan. Well-known in Asia.
For about three years, he and I worked together as I brought his work into the western world. One of the avenues for that was partnering with Mindvalley.
And here’s the funny thing: Ken didn’t even want to do Mindvalley.
I think it didn’t feel American enough to him. He was leaning toward partnering with a much smaller, much less influential company here in the States—one I happened to have had a miserable experience with in the past.
And I said to him: Please. Please. Can we do this other project? I think it’s going to be much more useful for you. I think it’s going to spread the work much further.
The reality is we ended up deciding to do both. And the one I was in favor of has done phenomenally well. The one I wasn’t has barely scratched the surface.
I convinced him that Mindvalley was the smarter strategic move by a mile.
And then I went and I did the actual building.
I worked with the lawyers. Coordinated with all the teams. Architected the entire course from the ground up.
That last part, by the way, comes from a whole earlier life. I was a university professor and designed almost all the online courses back then. Building a curriculum that actually lands for people—sequencing it, structuring it, making the learning hold—that’s a craft, and it’s one I had already spent years getting good at.
So the plan was pretty straightforward: The course would be built on Ken’s book and his teachings. We’d take the meditations he did with people in Japan, get them translated, adapt them for a global audience, and I’d build everything around them.
So I asked for the meditations. And then I asked again. And again.
They never quite materialized.
If you’ve ever worked closely with a certain kind of person, you know this rhythm. The thing is promised. The thing doesn’t arrive. Somehow the gap becomes your problem to solve. You’re the one staying up late. You’re the one apologizing for a delay that was never yours.
And the clock was running hard. Malaysia was coming. We needed the heart of the course, and the heart wasn’t there.
So I finally offered him the thing I probably should have led with.
I said: Do you want me just to teach these pieces? Not adapt someone else’s meditations—bring in my own. My voice. My practices. The work I’d been developing for most of my adult life.
At that point, I was calling it the Human Evolution System.
And he lit up. “Oh my god. Yes. That would be amazing.”
The understanding between us—the handshake version—was that once the money started coming in, he’d take care of me fairly.
We never wrote anything down.
I want to stop here and be straight with you, because the easy version of this story makes me look like the innocent party and Ken the villain. The truth has more of me in it than that.
People ask me all the time: Why did you stay as long as you did?
When I’m honest with myself, there’s an older pattern in me that kept me in that seat. But the biggest reason was simpler, and I’m not ashamed of it.
By that point, I had brought a team on board. Good people. Working hard. Doing real work they believed in.
And Ken had a move he went back to again and again. He threatened to pull out of the U.S. entirely. Shut it all down. End the project.
I wasn’t frightened for myself. I’d have landed fine.
But every time he made that threat, it wasn’t my future on the line. It was theirs. People who’d trusted me enough to come work on this thing. People who did not deserve to have the rug yanked out from under them because a man on the other side of the world was in a mood.
So I stayed. I absorbed it. I kept the thing standing for them.
This is not how you negotiate from strength.
And there was something older in me too—that the threats hooked into. A part that was forever auditioning. Forever proving I deserved to be in the room. Some of you will know that experience.
Malaysia came, and I’ll tell you honestly: that part was genuinely beautiful.
Mindvalley rolled out the red carpet. The production was lush. We made something we were all proud of. I’m not going to flatten that because that was true.
We shot the course. It launched. Money EQ.
And then it did a beautiful thing. Something that a lot of personal development courses fail to do.
It actually changed people’s lives.
The reviews came in, and so many of them left me split open. Person after person writing about how deeply the work had moved them. How something had shifted that they didn’t have words for. How they felt different in their lives afterward in ways that lasted.
This was overwhelming for me personally. I had to breathe and remind myself to receive. Breathe and receive. That became a little mantra I would repeat to myself.
Because the work they were describing—the meditations, the practices, the inner work that moved them—that was me. My voice in their ears. My recordings. The Human Evolution System at work.
The thing that I’d been building out of that dissertation and those support groups and all those years in rooms full of grief and survival. People put in their earbuds and it was my voice walking them into change.
That’s what makes the next part land the way it did.
I have a whole folder of these messages. People saying that they felt safe in their own skin for the first time. That they finally understood what it means to belong. That something heavy had lifted. That their relationship with money had shifted.
120,000 of them have now taken that course.
And I’ve never seen a dime from it.
And these people knew my name. I opened every one of those recordings just like I do this podcast: Welcome, this is Scott W. Mills. They heard me say it. They spent hours with me in their ears. The students always knew exactly who I was.
But the record didn’t.
My name isn’t on the sales page. It isn’t in the credits. The company built around the course, the official story of the thing—I’m just not in it.
The students never erased me. But the machine did.
And in all those years since, Ken has never spoken to the substance of that work. Never named what it actually did or how. The most that ever came back to me was a warm, weightless: “Great work.”
Which is a kind thing to say. It’s just not the same as being seen.
And it took me years to understand why that actually hurt.
It wasn’t the money. The money is real. I’m not going to wave it off. 120,000 people and not a cent is genuinely a staggering thing—especially from someone who advocates for generosity and Happy Money.
But the money isn’t the wound.
The wound is not being seen.
To build the thing that helps people. To watch it move 100,000 lives. And to find yourself absent from the entire story of it. Told by a man whose whole public gift is Happy Money. Happiness. Generosity. An open and gentle relationship with wealth.
That distance—between what a person teaches and how they treat the one standing right beside them—that’s the whole story.
It was never really about one man. It’s about the operating system.
I want to be careful here because it would be easy to make this a story about one relationship. It isn’t.
If you’ve been listening, you already have a sense of what kind of person Ken was. I don’t need to label him. You can do the math yourself.
The thing I actually want to talk about is bigger than any one person.
It’s the machine.
Because what happened to me is what the machine does to all of us.
Here’s what I finally understood: I wasn’t just treated badly by someone. I was processed by a system. And that system runs on one thing: extraction.
It takes. It does not give back.
It took the money. 120,000 people, and the value flowed everywhere except back to the person whose voice was doing the work.
But here’s the part that took me the longest to see, and it’s the worst part.
The machine had also quietly redefined what a relationship even is.
In that world, a relationship is not a relationship. It’s a transaction.
Every person you meet becomes a lead. Every conversation becomes a chance to handle an objection. Every connection is measured by whether it converts.
They actually teach this. They teach you to see the human being in front of you as a series of resistances to overcome on the way to a sale. They have language for it. They run trainings on it.
And once you’ve been taught to see people that way, you can’t really love them anymore. You can only work them.
That’s the extraction I care about most. Not the money, though the money is real.
The thing that breaks my heart is what the machine does to love. It takes the most human thing we have—our ability to actually see each other—and it converts it into a sales funnel.
And look, I don’t think everyone in this industry is bad. In fact, I don’t even think most of the people in this industry are bad.
I think they have been co-opted by a very seductive machine that tells them the story that more is better, no matter what it does to other people.
Most of the people inside this machine started exactly where I started. They wanted to help. They wanted to do good work. Usually, they’d had some struggle in their own life that they found a solution to, and they wanted to share it with people.
I think about my friend Dr. Gary Salyer, an attachment expert I’m always learning from. He talks about how a whole culture can go avoidant.
That’s what I think happened here. A whole industry went avoidant.
It got so busy protecting itself—the brand, the list, the revenue—that it slowly lost the ability to be in real relationship with the people it was supposed to serve.
You can watch it happen. When the world outside is on fire and people are genuinely afraid, you’d think a world built on words like “love” and “courage” and “awakening” would have something to say.
And mostly, it goes quiet.
Because speaking might cost a piece of the audience. When the choice comes down to telling the truth or protecting the list, the list usually wins.
That’s not evil. It’s just extraction pretending to be care.
And here’s the part I said I’d come back to. The reason I stayed so long. The reason I kept auditioning. Kept proving myself. Kept absorbing the threats and the silences and telling myself it would get better.
The machine doesn’t just extract from you. It teaches you to extract from yourself.
It runs on people who give and give to earn a seat at the table. And I was very, very good at giving to earn my seat.
I’d learned somewhere early that love was something you earned by being useful. And the machine loves a person like that. We’re the ones who work the hardest. Forgive the most. Stay the longest.
We make perfect fuel.
So when I tell you I got extracted from, I have to tell you the rest of it too. For a while there, I was also extracting from myself. Handing over more and more of my own life to keep a seat in a room that was never going to see me.
That’s not something that was done to me. That’s something I participated in. And naming it is part of how I stopped it.
And one day, I looked around and realized I didn’t want to keep handing my life to a machine like that.
Not because I was angry. Because I finally understood what it was.
And you can’t unsee a thing once you’ve really seen it.
So if you can’t fix the machine, what do you do?
Here’s the thing a lot of people don’t know about me: I already knew what the other model looked like. I’d written it down 20 years ago.
That dissertation I mentioned—the one I finished in 2007—the heart of it was a chapter called “Good Work, Good Business, Good Economics.”
I was arguing, even then, that the extractive way of doing business was making us sick. It was severing us from each other. From the natural world. From ourselves.
And I laid out another way. A way of working built on relationships instead of extraction. On reciprocity instead of taking.
I leaned on Robert Putnam’s work—Bowling Alone—that great study of how American community quietly collapsed over a few decades. And I argued that work and business could be one of the places we rebuild it.
So I didn’t discover any of this in Mexico. I’ve been teaching alternative business for years.
The whole time I was inside the personal development machine, I was also walking around with a blueprint. Trying to implement it everywhere I could. That’s part of why being inside hurt the way it did.
I knew that it could be done differently. I’d done the work to prove it.
Here’s what’s new, though.
Lately, something different has been happening. Something is shifting out there.
For a long time, the extractive guru was the model. People like Tony Robbins standing on a stage. Big name. Big stage. Big funnel. Endless upsells.
And that model is starting to fail. People are tired of it. They can feel the extraction now. They’ve been burned enough times to recognize what it feels like.
And in the spaces where those gurus are starting to lose their grip, something smaller is rising. More honest businesses. More relational ones. People building modest, real things on their own terms in actual relationship with the people they serve.
Not trying to scale to the moon. Just trying to do good work and treat people like people.
That’s the thing I’m most interested in right now. The decline of the guru and the rise of the forest.
Because that’s the frame I keep coming back to.
My friend Dr. Wendy Peterman taught me something I haven’t been able to set down. She’s a soil scientist, and she said: A forest isn’t just a bunch of trees competing for light. It’s a system. The trees feed each other underground. They keep the sick ones alive through the network. A forest survives because it’s connected, not because it’s competitive.
And she put it in a way that just stopped me: We are a forest of humans.
That’s the model. A business that runs like a forest instead of like a machine. Regenerative instead of extractive. Something that gives back more than it takes.
And it’s the same thing I wrote about at 29. Just with better language and 20 more years of watching it be true.
And I’m not just thinking about this quietly. I’ve been gathering people into rooms. Hosting conversations. Writing about it. Pulling together the people who want to build this way.
Because I don’t think it’s a solo idea. I think it’s something we work out together in the actual doing of it.
Maybe you’re one of the people who want to be in that conversation. If you are, reach out. Send me an email or text.
Those are my people. The ones building the forest while the machine gets louder about how it’s the only thing that ever existed.
It took me 20 years and a move to another country to fully live inside the thing I’d written down at the start.
But here I am. Doing the work I always knew was possible.
So why am I finally telling you all this?
Not to settle the score. I promise you, I don’t lie awake thinking about Ken. I wish him well. That’s not me being saintly. I’ve just watched what carrying that kind of thing does to people, and I’m not willing to pay that price.
I’m telling you this story for two reasons.
The first is because it’s an opportunity for me to reclaim my own narrative.
People have been making assumptions about me for years: that I’m sitting on piles and piles of money from the Money EQ work I did. That they’ve helped me build a business. That Ken has been a good friend in that capacity.
None of that is true. None of that has come to me.
And that’s okay. I’ve done fine.
But it’s interesting when people say to me: Oh my gosh, I had no idea. I thought X, Y, and Z.
So this was a way for me to claim the story that is true. The story that is mine.
And it’s also a way to show you that the story itself is the proof.
What happened to me is proof of everything I teach. Not because the people in the story are bad, but because the system is broken.
The system is broken. The people may make bad choices. The people sometimes aren’t kind. But the fundamental flaw is in the system itself.
And until we start to fix that, not much is going to change.
I’m telling you this story because it demonstrates what’s at the core of what I teach.
First: I teach that you are already whole. And I had to live my way out of an industry that makes its money telling you you’re broken.
Second: I teach that your worth was never the number in your bank account. And I had to build the thing that proved it. Watch it earn a fortune for someone else. And find out that I was still okay. Still whole. Still me.
The money got taken. The thing that actually mattered couldn’t be.
That’s not a theory for me. That’s something I lived.
And here’s what I want you to take from it.
If you’ve been inside that world—if you’ve taken the courses, done the programs, and felt that quiet sense that something was off, even while everybody around you was nodding and applauding—I want you to hear me.
You’re not crazy. You’re not ungrateful. You’re not failing at the work. You’re not resisting.
You are picking up a real signal. Trust it.
That signal is your own wholeness refusing to be sold something it doesn’t need.
And if you’re someone building something real—quietly, on your own terms, without the giant list and the funnel and the noise—and you’ve wondered if you’re doing it wrong because it doesn’t look like the success they sell from the stage:
I want you to hear this too.
You might be doing it exactly right.
The world doesn’t need more instruments of the machine. It needs the people building what comes next.
That’s who this is for. The story weavers. The brilliant outsiders. The ones who think in patterns and waves. The ones who’ve always suspected that the way we’re being told to live isn’t quite right.
Because it isn’t.
I left the personal development world. But I didn’t leave you.
I just had to walk out of a building that was never going to hold what I actually wanted to give you.
And now I get to give it to you on my own terms.
So stay with me in the coming episodes. I’ll be showing you how to actually build that business model for yourself. How to build a business that knows how to do the right thing. How to speak truth when it needs to. How to protect those who are vulnerable and still be profitable.
I hope you’ll be part of this conversation.
And if you’re one of the 120,000 people who came through the course all those years—if any of this is still simmering in you—reach out. I’d love to hear from you.
That door I’m holding open, I’m holding it open on purpose.
I’m Dr. Scott W. Mills. This is Love and Other Survival Skills.
I am so glad you’re here.
I’ll see you next time.
Until then, be well.
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