The Surrender Experiment

While working toward a doctorate in economics in Florida, Michael A. Singer had a deep spiritual awakening. It led him to a radical decision: he would stop acting on his personal fears and desires and let life decide what came next. The Surrender Experiment is his account of what happened when he kept to that decision for decades. The path he describes was far from what a doctoral student might expect. He spent his early years living alone in the woods, in pursuit of solitude. Later he founded a spiritual community in Florida, and later still he became CEO of a medical software company worth a billion dollars. Through success and through crises, he says, going along with events rather than resisting them gave him a steady inner peace. Singer presents his life as a long experiment in surrender. He argues that much of our unhappiness comes from trying to bend the world to our preferences and to control every outcome. His own unlikely experiences are meant to challenge those habits and to show what trusting life's course can look like in practice, in work, in community and in private. This tenth anniversary edition adds an afterword and a bonus chapter in which Singer looks back on the ten years since the book first appeared, with further examples of surrender and service changing a life.