A NEW UNIVERSAL DREAM

An entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist shares his personal story and vision for the future in this nonfiction book.

Farrell’s autobiography is not just one of rags to riches, which itself would make a decent tale, but also one of a man who, at the peak of his career, walked away to find spiritual fulfillment and promote a new sociocultural paradigm that challenged the very notion of the American dream. Divided into four parts, this memoir and self-help guidebook tells the story of Farrell’s midlife transformation and offers his vision for a better world. The first part tells the story of the author’s early life and business career through a series of vignettes. He writes that his father first gave him cannabis in 1970, when he was 15, and he recalls an early life that included experimentation with drugs and sex and was largely without “much supervision.” There were also signs of early business acumen, as he paid off the cost of his orthodontic braces at the age of 11 using pay from a paper route and other odd jobs. At 22, he left his home in Northern Virginia for San Francisco, where he saw an initial investment of $7,500 in America Online grow to more than $1 million and co-founded and led two tech companies—Enterprise Networking Systems and Netigy—that were featured in the “INC. 500” list of the fastest-growing companies in America. The book’s second and third parts describe the author’s alienation from corporate culture and his subsequent co-founding of nonprofit organization Humanity’s Team with Neale Donald Walsch, who wrote this book’s foreword and authored the bestselling Conversations With God series. Humanity’s Team promotes a “consciousness movement” to help people around the world “awaken to their deeper self and the interconnectedness and Oneness of everything in the universe.”

Over the course of this book, Farrell effectively blends the institutional history of Humanity’s Team’s founding with self-help tips on “taking control of our destiny and making wise choices about how we live with each other and Earth.” His advice is also inspired, in part, by Walsch’s writing as well as the “conscious evolution” movement, whose proponents include futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard. The book’s final section looks to the future, as it seeks to replace the idealized American dream with a “New Universal Dream” that deprioritizes individual wealth and centers on working toward solutions to global warming, disease, war, and political upheaval. To help achieve these lofty goals, Farrell offers readers straightforward advice on small actions they can take in their own lives to achieve fulfillment, including daily meditation, service to the Earth, conscientious spending, and an acknowledgment of multiple “forms of prosperity” that go beyond money. Overall, the author’s warm and friendly writing style makes for an engaging read, as do anecdotes from his intriguing life. It’s a deeply spiritual book, as well, and one that’s likely to appeal to readers of various faith traditions—including religious skeptics, as it often uses the terms God and the Universe interchangeably.

An absorbing and often convincing work with a futurist vision.