Welcome to Being Is the New Doing After-Launch Party 🎉
The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about.
So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations.
Being Is the New Doing is built around an acronym — FLUIDE — six dimensions that together describe what an aligned life and business actually look and feel like: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. The “U” — Unicity — is the one that carries the question of personal ecology: how you live in your body, how you organize your energy, how you find and protect your own rhythm so that who you are doesn’t get consumed by what you do.
I invited Daniel P. Hirschi because it was obvious because he is, in his entire life, what Being Is the New Doing is about. A man who stopped doing in order to finally be — and rebuilt everything from that place, with his hands in the soil of Transylvania and his feet on a piece of land that was dead before he arrived, 20 years ago.
If you’ve read the book, you’ll recognize the embodiement of doing from your Complete Self, If you haven’t, this conversation is a good reason to start.
[00:04:07]
It was two o’clock in the morning in Transylvania when Daniel’s wife broke every traffic rule to drive him to the hospital. His main coronary artery was completely blocked. The cardiologist told him later that in cases like his, people have roughly 40 minutes to survive. His wife made it in 20. He was lucky, he was lucky in his misfortune.
That night in August 2018 was the culmination of something that had been building for years: a successful landscaping company with 12 employees, a heavily overweight body, chronic stress, and a life built entirely around output.
A life, as Daniel puts it, that violated every principle of nature he had spent decades studying.
Even if this may sounds dramatic (and it is), I invited Daniel for the After-Launch Party of Being Is the New Doing because of what he did with it.
He is very conscious of his second chance in life. At one point, he said something that stuck with me all afternoon until I wrote this article:
I’m very, very lucky because I can afford meditation
and
I am a very lucky guy to be here still.
Yes, it seems it wasn’t his time yet. And also…
…that luck is a choice he made. Every single day, for the seven years since his heart attack, he has committed to living differently. Period.
This is what that looks like.
These are the main points we discussed during our conversation.
The thing about holistic management
[00:09:04 — 00:13:47]
Daniel is a permaculture designer and professional gardener. So when he had weeks of enforced stillness after his heart attack, he reached for the books he knew, including Alan Savory’s Holistic Management*, and did something most of us don’t do when our lives fall apart:
he applied his professional framework to his own existence. He made a list of every natural principle he’d spent his career working with, then he looked at his life and realized he was violating most of them.
What followed was the FARMISH Blueprint — seven life segments he identified as non-negotiable: Freedom, Authenticity, Relationships, Money, Inspiration, Sustainability, and Health.
The insight is in what he noticed underneath it: when any one segment dominates for too long, everything starts to break down.
The founding of a company might justify two years of imbalance, but five years of it? That’s a whole part of life and not only a phase.
The homestead as a mirror
[00:18:22 — 00:21:00]
Before we can understand what Daniel did with his body and his business, we need to understand where he lives.
Twenty years ago, he and his wife bought a piece of land in Transylvania that was, in his words, completely degraded — thirty years of monoculture corn had stripped it of almost everything. They introduced tons of compost, rotational gardening, a food forest.
Today that same land holds more than 350 species.
Birds and insects that don’t exist on neighboring plots have found their way there, drawn by flowers and trees that simply aren’t available anywhere else nearby.
Daniel tells this story as the conceptual spine of everything else he does.
A compost pile, he says, contains thousands of species of microbes, worms, insects, all working together and the heat it generates comes entirely from their combined, invisible activity.
20 years ago, the land was dead. He created the conditions to get it back to life and the rest happened.
That is precisely the logic he applied to himself after 2018.
His body was the degraded land: his main focus was how to create the conditions for it to recover. On depleted soil, performance isn’t the main issue.
He made decisions that supported his new way of life.
…. and he says it himself: he had to be selfish; it was a matter of survival, because after the first attack, the second one is just around the corner if you don’t change anything. And that was obviously not an option.
[00:16:14 — 00:17:33]
The first structural decision Daniel made was to reduce his company from 12 employees to one. He rethought the business model entirely — cut costs, redirected what was freed up into digital and online marketing, and rebuilt the whole operation around a simpler, leaner architecture.
He used the word “selfish.” And then he defined it precisely:
When we are talking about our health, we have to be selfish. The damage is in your body, not in everybody else’s.
This is the part that tends to get glossed over in wellness culture, which is often more comfortable with the concept of self-care than with the actual disruption it requires.
Real change is inconvenient for the people around you, at least initially.
Reducing your team, changing your revenue model, restructuring your entire way of generating income — these are not small decisions.
They were the preconditions for everything else.
He couldn’t hear himself clearly while carrying 12 people’s livelihoods on a heart that had just stopped working. So he changed the weight he was carrying. The result was space. And space, as he discovered, is where your body finally gets to tell you what it needs.
Food as the first conversation with your body
[00:23:58 — 00:28:05]
When I asked Daniel how he rebuilt his capacity to feel — to actually listen to his body — he didn’t start with meditation or journaling or breathwork.
He started with food 🎉
His argument follows the same logic he applies to his land:
No wild animal in nature is overweight, because every species eats according to its DNA. The ant, the lion, the elephant — they don’t need a nutritionist. They eat what they’re wired for. He shifted to mostly animal protein, eliminated snacking entirely, moved his first meal to early afternoon.
The morning brain fog he’d lived with for years disappeared almost immediately. His heart scars healed at the rate of someone 30 years younger than he was.
The parallel with the homestead is exact.
A degraded soil can’t support biodiversity because it’s been stripped of what it needs. A body perpetually occupied with processing inputs it wasn’t designed for has no bandwidth left to signal.
Sensitivity requires space. You can’t hear yourself if the noise never stops and processed food, he says, is one of the loudest forms of noise there is.
The radical act of boredom
[00:28:44 — 00:32:16]
Daniel told me something that stopped me mid-conversation:
I can handle boredom. People can’t handle boredom anymore.
He can stand in his garden for half an hour, doing nothing visible, just observing. A new bird that wasn’t there last week. A bug he’s never seen before. His wife, he says with affection, finds this mildly incomprehensible. But this capacity for stillness is not a personality trait he was born with — it’s something he built, deliberately, by removing the inputs that made it impossible.
He doesn’t call what he does meditation, because he finds the word too structured. It’s closer to what permaculture calls “observe and interact” — make a halt, step back, notice what you’re actually seeing before you do anything about it. Sometimes it becomes an idea for an article. Sometimes it’s nothing. Both are fine.
His phone has designated windows of availability, not rigid ones, he adjusts based on the flow of his work. When he’s writing and it’s going well, his phone is completely off (not on silent - OFF) and in seven years of this practice, he says, he has never missed anything that mattered.
The second half of life as a design project
[00:33:09 — 00:37:32]
Daniel and I both circled around something during our conversation that I think is worth naming directly: there’s a particular kind of freedom that comes in the second half of life, and it’s only available to people who stop performing.
He put it plainly as relief:
I am not playing around anymore. I’m not acting for absolutely nobody. I don’t care what people think about me.
The energy that used to go toward managing others’ perceptions now goes toward actually living.
What made this possible, he’s clear, was not the heart attack itself but the years of accumulated experience that preceded it. The mental breakdown at 25, the medication, the company with 12 employees that was slowly dismantling him — those weren’t detours.
They were the soil (that’s what I call our Inner Capital, in my F-Foundations chapter).
Without them, he wouldn’t have had the roots to know, with certainty, what he was choosing when he finally chose differently.
You can’t return to yourself without first knowing what it cost you to leave.
His program is called “The Return” — and he’s careful to define it.
Not a return to some medieval lifestyle, not a rejection of modernity, a return to your natural path. An awareness that somewhere along the way, most of us drifted further from ourselves than was necessary.
On the morning Starbucks (and what it actually signals)
[00:44:06 — 00:51:09]
Daniel went on a small, sharp tangent about the morning Starbucks queue that I found clarifying. He’s not opposed to coffee. He’s opposed to the architecture of the ritual — the manufactured stress of a queue, a product designed to taste like comfort while containing almost nothing your body recognizes, and the way people then wonder why they crash at two in the afternoon.
The broader point: we’ve built a daily life that has almost no overlap with what our nervous systems were designed for. From the notification that greets you before you’re fully awake, to the last thought about work before sleep. The morning routine borrowed from a guru who is nothing like you, the commute, the Starbucks, the day structured down to the last Netflix episode — none of it has anything to do with your DNA. It’s a life designed by default, not by intention. (I say this as a former digital marketing consultant who spent years teaching companies to capture exactly that attention. I know what the machine is built to do.)
Daniel is radical about this in his own life. But he’s also honest that he can afford to be — not because he’s wealthy, but because he made the structural decisions, years ago, to build a life where this kind of intentionality was possible. The homestead, the restructured business, the FARMISH audit — all of it created the conditions. The behavior followed.
That’s the part worth sitting with. Not the advice itself — that’s widely available. The question underneath it: what would you need to change structurally, not just behaviorally, to give yourself access to a different quality of life?
What stays with me
[00:59:17 — 01:01:09]
Daniel ended our conversation by asking our audience to hold space for him — he had eye surgery scheduled the following morning, a late consequence of his heart attack.
He said it the way someone says something true: simply, without performance, without asking for anything back. “I paid the price. Others don’t have to pay the same price.”
That’s what drives everything he’s built — the Midlife Regeneration Substack, the FARMISH framework, The Return program, and a book in progress called The DNA Cheat Code, as a kind of obligation to the version of himself that almost didn’t make it.
He says he is lucky. He means it. And what I want you to hear underneath that statement is the thing he’s too humble to say directly:
Luck, in this context, is the name we give to a choice that was made so consistently, and at such a cost, that it eventually looks inevitable from the outside.
It was a decision, made in a l bed in the first two weeks when it took him fifteen minutes to reach his own bedroom and then it was that decision again, every day after.
So here’s what I’m leaving you with:
If you had to be honest about one area of your life where you know that you’ve drifted further than is good for you, and you’ve been waiting for the right moment to return: what would the smallest, most structural change look like?
You can find Daniel at Midlife Regeneration on Substack, and his programs (including The Return) on Gumroad.
Being Is the New Doing is available on Amazon.
Make the most of every minute of your life, they're precious 💚Namasté,
Val.
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