Gregory V. Diehl in Armenia

Gregory V. Diehl: The American of Kalavan

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YEREVAN–KALAVAN, Gegharkunik region, Armenia — American writer Gregory V. Diehl (born 1988) calls himself a game-changer, caretaker, figure-outer, lecturer, listener, salesman and stalker. He was raised in California and left home as a teenager to travel extensively. By the age of 30, he had lived and worked in more than 50 countries. Based in Kalavan since 2019, Diehl draws from years of global cultural experience to lead the Kalavan Retreat Center — an educational NGO devoted to personal growth, critical thought and pursuit of intellectual freedom. The center has become an international hub for those seeking alternatives to traditional learning and societal conformity. Gregory is the author of the following books: Travel as Transformation (2016), Brand Identity Breakthrough (2016), The Influential Author (2018), The Heroic and Exceptional Minority (2021), Everyone Is an Entrepreneur (2022), Our Global Lingua Franca (2023), The Romantic Ideal—The Highest Standard of Romance for a Man (2024).

I wanted to interview Gregory after reading the Armenian translation of his book, Everyone Is an Entrepreneur (translated by Tatev Sahakyan).

Gregory, your book can be considered an example of educational-motivational literature. But we know that the authors of such books have often not achieved in real life the successes they write about. Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich: This Book Can Make You a Millionaire, was not a millionaire. Dale Carnegie, who wrote How to Win Friends, didn’t have friends. Paul Bragg, the advocate of healthy eating who wrote The Miracle of Fasting, died at 81 — an age many who don’t eat healthily have surpassed. And Leonard Orr, author of Stop Dying, passed away six years ago. So, are you a successful entrepreneur?

The answer to that question depends on what you mean by the words “successful” and “entrepreneur.” In my book, I talk about entrepreneurship as a universal way of seeing how people apply their knowledge, skills, tools, and other resources to pursue the things they value. And they get better and better at this as they learn more, technology advances, and the economy evolves in such a way that they have more freedom and opportunities to do this without restrictions or interference. We in the West are the beneficiaries of growing up in a culture that supports and encourages this way of thinking and acting, as opposed to here in the post-Soviet world that is largely still recovering from the communist paradigm. So to answer your question: Yes, I successfully use the economic principles of entrepreneurship to pursue what I value to a high degree of effectiveness, which includes but is not limited to making money. It’s what I am trying to help bright and ambitious Armenians do too.

In your book you present the stereotypes and fears that residents of post-Soviet Armenia have toward entrepreneurship. Among other things, there is the mindset that one is supposedly born an entrepreneur, that it has to be in a person’s blood. Through your book, you try to convince us that not only can everyone be an entrepreneur, but that everyone is an entrepreneur, and that entrepreneurship is not a calling but a worldview.

The only thing preventing Armenians from being as entrepreneurial as Americans and other Westerners is their restrictive, shame-based culture that makes it very difficult for them to think independently and try implementing new, original solutions to common problems. It feels like I’ve gone back in time to the 1950s here. The nature of entrepreneurship is to experiment with superior ways to get things done. Monetary profit is the reward for that. Under these repressive cultural conditions, you have to be exceptionally self-confident and outgoing to stand in opposition to the “go with the flow” mentality of 99 percent of Armenians who socially penalize individuality.

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Well, but it’s not only in the post-Soviet reality that a person who is solely engaged in intellectual or artistic activity becomes helpless, unable to sell their services or creative output. That’s why the institution of the manager or impresario exists—something that was absent in Soviet times.

Managers and investors play vital roles in entrepreneurship. They apply their knowledge, skills, and resources (one of which is financial capital) to solve problems and provide better value to humanity. Artists and intellectuals need these types of people because they provide complementary value for bringing new ideas to the world in a marketable and affordable fashion.

Gregory V. Diehl

And to develop an entrepreneurial worldview, isn’t it necessary to have a solid grasp of the fundamental principles of economic theory? Based on your book, it seems you yourself are quite well-versed in these.

Yes, certainly. And growing up in the West, we take for granted that fundamental economic knowledge as an unspoken part of our culture. I’ve often said that living here in Armenia sometimes feels like living in a society that never invented the wheel and doesn’t understand why such a simple machine might be valuable to them. Basic concepts like supply and demand can be understood by any moderately intelligent person. But if the knowledge isn’t proliferating in the culture, only a few individuals who go out of their way to study and apply it on their own will receive the benefits of it. One of the primary purposes of Everyone Is an Entrepreneur is to help spread that fundamental knowledge where it’s needed here. It’s also why I had the book translated into Armenian.

I agree that “Many modern Armenians consider their national mentality to be depressive, with a psychology of victimhood and failure. Yet I have never been to a country with so many intelligent and active people who, nonetheless, refuse to set ambitions for themselves and to apply their knowledge and skills toward innovation.” So how can we get rid of this “post-Soviet self-defeatist syndrome” (your definition) as quickly as possible?

Culture always changes slowly because it is an amalgamation of the thoughts and habits enforced by the general populace. Armenians have a very nasty trait of shaming and punishing people who violate their traditional and outdated cultural norms, even when those norms are clearly causing problems in their lives and preventing them from enjoying the benefits of the modern world. I’ve learned it’s much easier and more effective just to provide a living demonstration of the principles you espouse than to try to sit and educate them against their will. I can sit here all day and explain in a perfectly rational and comprehensive manner how economics and entrepreneurship work to make life better for everyone, but you’re not going to pay attention unless you can see it happening in your life and the lives of the people you identify with in a way that is undeniable. Then people will start to believe in their ability to direct their own lives again.

Topics: Books

You write that there are “various guidebooks to entrepreneurship, but they don’t serve their purpose, because the real prerequisites for entrepreneurial activity are missing — especially ideals.” But your book seems to have fulfilled its purpose at least once: after reading it, one of the residents of Kalavan opened the village’s first store. Are there other such positive examples?

Beyond teaching Armenians themselves to act more entrepreneurially, I wanted to teach other Westerners like me who think they already understand these principles how lacking they are in the rest of the world and how to convey them to the people who would benefit most from them. I’ve had many Western readers who even studied economics and entrepreneurship in university tell me they learned more practical knowledge from my book than they did from four or more years of school. It helps explain the scope and cause of the problem of global poverty and economic restrictions that anyone can start to act on in virtually any culture or environment.

You write that it was thanks to your Armenian grandmother — who found refuge in California during the First World War — that you initially decided to study Armenian history, to visit the country, to obtain citizenship in your ancestral homeland and finally to settle here. Could you please tell us more about your grandmother and the Armenian traditions present in your family?

My grandmother was Mariam Goekjian, who was from Cilicia and fled as a young girl during the genocide. I actually didn’t really grow up with a strong sense of Armenian identity, and I think that allows me to be much more objective in my assessment of Armenia’s cultural strengths and shortcomings. Even my half-Armenian mother has never been to Armenia, but we did occasionally cook Armenian food at home or visit Little Armenia in Los Angeles. I care more about helping humanity than about helping any particular nation or culture. I identify with virtue, intellect, ambition, and curiosity, no matter what country the people who have them come from or how they dress or eat.

In your book, you mention that you wouldn’t want to spend the remaining decades of your life publishing books on the same topic. What kind of topics would you like to write about in the future? Perhaps move into fiction?

I’ve taken a somewhat uncommon route as an author by writing on a variety of topics instead of nicheing into just one area. But there are common themes and threads among all my work, such as enabling self-expression and self-actualization. I’m working on three new books currently. One is about solving suicidal ideation that results from ideological sources, such as feeling out of place with the state of the world. One is about Star Wars and what it has to say about how good people become bad (i.e., “turn to the dark side”). And the third is my first fiction work, which will be a science fictional novel discussing the Fermi Paradox and the realistic nature of highly advanced life and sentience throughout the universe.

Thank you for your answers, Gregory! I hope Kalavan and other communities will flourish thanks to individuals like you. And I wish that your example will be an inspiration for the millions of Armenians who love Armenia from afar!

Thank you. I’m always looking to work with other people in Armenia who share my values.

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