My Transformative Journey Through Entreprenology for My PHD.

Dr John Schindler, PHD Entreprenology, Director IUE

By Dr. John Robert Schindler October 11, 2025

Introduction

When I began my PHD journey with the International University of Entreprenology (IUE), I didn't fully understand what I was about to experience. I have spent decades developing and wrestling with ideas that to me feel both urgent and at the same time unwelcomed in our traditional academic and business circles. Ideas about the cannibalistic nature of modern consumption or how modern capitalism biomimics all of the major functions of cancer and passive wealth fortunes are created and preserved much like tumors in the body. My concern that we appear to literally be consuming our children's children’s future – all in the name of meeting the American measurement of “being a success.”  A more accurate measurement of success being not what we accumulate but what we regenerate and contribute for the seventh generation and beyond.

To me, these aren't just abstract philosophical musings - they are observations emerging from decades of working on commercial real estate, the entertainment industry, entrepreneurial consulting work, system and project design, all led to a growing alarm at the trajectory of our civilization. But my concept remained fragmented, underdeveloped, lacking the coherent framework needed to transform from critique into curriculum, from dissatisfaction into action.

IUE's PHD process gave me something I hadn't found anywhere else: a legitimate academic and experiential learning structure that welcome unconventional thinking, while demanding rigorous development of those ideas into practical, implementable systems and simultaneously growing the student’s ability to think independently and execute with skill and accumulated practical experience. Through this journey, vague intuitions became my articulated philosophy. Observations became a coherent framework. Personal conviction became teachable curriculum.

This document explores how IUE's unique approach to doctoral education - grounded in the principle of learning through doing - helped me transform uncomfortable truths about our economic system into regenerative alternatives, and how the Entreprenological framework provided the missing architecture for ideas that traditional academia couldn't accommodate.

The Core of the Problem I Couldn't Articulate

For years, when I carried this deep unease about conventional business and entrepreneurship, I felt something was fundamentally broken in a system where individual "success" required planetary destruction, where creating wealth for shareholders meant extracting resources from future generations, where "winning" meant someone else had to lose. Models built of the idea of Earthly values of win and lose, you have, I take, now I have it, you don’t. 

The American model of success - the one taught in every business school, celebrated in every entrepreneurship program, rewarded by every venture capital firm - felt like organized insanity – “A Mad Race to Nowhere”, a train rushing for an abyss. The craziness that we can measure progress by consumption rates. We celebrate billionaires who hoard more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. We call it "growth" when we extract resources faster, produce more disposable goods, create more landfill waste, pump more carbon into the atmosphere.

And we do all of this while knowing - knowing - that we're stealing from our children's children. We see the data on climate collapse, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem failure. We understand the mathematics of exponential growth on a finite planet. Yet we continue to teach the same business models, celebrate the same metrics, pursue the same definition of success.

Traditional business education couldn't help me articulate this dissonance - because traditional business education created or at least perpetuated this dissonance. The paradox being, could the system that produces the problem also produce the solution? How can institutions funded by extractive capitalism teach regenerative alternatives?

I tried to engage these questions within conventional frameworks and found only resistance. Mention "seven-generation thinking" in a business school and watch eyes glaze over. Talk about the soul's curriculum in material existence and feel the room go cold. Suggest that accumulation itself might be the disease and watch colleagues back away slowly.

The ideas felt urgent but remained inchoate - until I encountered Entreprenology.

Learning to Think vs. Learning to Repeat

The most transformative aspect of IUE's approach is deceptively simple: learning through doing produces fundamentally different results than learning through consuming and regurgitating pre-existing information.

Traditional education operates on a banking model: professors deposit information into students, who store it temporarily, withdraw it during examinations, and receive credentials based on accurate reproduction. This creates graduates that should be experts in their fields, who know vast amounts about their fields but often they cannot function effectively within them.

Consider the absurdity: business professors who've never run successful businesses teaching entrepreneurship. As an example, at twenty years old I was hired by the largest, top commercial real estate company in the world to work in their newly acquired New Orleans office. The very first person to fail among the new recruits was the former Head of Tulane Universities Business School. The two top producers were myself and Robert, the two youngest agents in the office.  Education theorists have never transformed struggling schools dictating pedagogy. Economists who can't predict or prevent financial collapse advising on monetary policy. Environmental scientists watching planetary systems collapse while academic journals debate if there is a problem or who should fix it. It is a great pretzel of conflicted interests wrestling for control.

The disconnect isn't accidental - it's structural. When education focuses on consuming and reproducing existing knowledge rather than teaching how to think for oneself, it produces consumers and reproducers. It doesn't produce creators, innovators, or transformers. It produces people who can explain why things are the way they are, but rarely people who can make things different than they are or even understand why they should try to change the system.

Entreprenology flips this entirely.

Instead of studying about entrepreneurship, you do entrepreneurship while simultaneously studying the consciousness and principles underlying what makes creation work. Instead of learning existing theories, you develop your own frameworks while testing them through implementation. Instead of writing about what others have discovered, you discover through doing and then articulate what you've learned.

This approach doesn't just teach you different content - it develops different capacity. You learn to think rather than repeat. You learn to create rather than consume. You learn to question and navigate foundational assumptions rather than accept them because someone with higher level credentials said you should.

For me, the IUE process is revelatory! My unconventional ideas about regenerative business, seven-generation economics, and consciousness-based entrepreneurship couldn't survive in environments demanding conformity to existing paradigms. But in IUE's framework, those ideas became the foundation for original research, practical curriculum, and implementable systems.

The process forced me to move beyond complaint to contribution, beyond critique to creation, beyond "the system is broken" to "here's a better system I've built and tested."

The Crisis of Extractive Education

Traditional education didn't just fail to help me articulate alternatives to extractive capitalism - traditional education produced extractive capitalism.

Think about what we teach: What can a student do with their life to make the most money? How can they maximize shareholder value, optimize quarterly earnings, scale rapidly, capture market share, achieve competitive advantage, accumulate capital? Every principle, every metric, every definition of success assumes extraction, competition, and short-term gain.

We teach accounting that externalizes environmental costs. We teach economics that treats planetary systems as "resources" to be exploited. We teach marketing that manufactures desire for things people don't need. Create habits to ‘throw away’ and waste. We teach finance that prioritizes returns over impact. We teach strategy that frames business as warfare against competitors.

Then we graduate students to exploit a world already going up in flames - literally - and wonder why they perpetuate the same patterns.

The problem isn't that students aren't learning what the system teaches. The problem is that they're learning exactly what it teaches. Traditional business education produces people expert in extractive capitalism because that's what it teaches. It produces people who cannot imagine alternatives because alternatives were never presented as legitimate possibilities to consider.

This is what I mean by education is at the source of our crisis: the same institutions creating "experts" in resource exploitation, competitive advantage, and wealth accumulation are simultaneously creating the conditions for civilization’s collapse.

We've produced generations of highly educated people who know how to extract maximum value from every available resource while leaving nothing for those who come after. We call this "success" and wonder why successful people often report feeling empty, why rich societies have epidemic rates of depression, why having everything feels like having nothing.

Through my IUE journey, I began to see this pattern clearly: the educational system trains us to fill the hole in our souls with consumption - and then trains us to become experts at that consumption.

We learn to be sophisticated consumers of education itself, accumulating credentials like we accumulate possessions, hoping that one more degree will fill the emptiness. But it never does, because we're trying to solve a spiritual problem with material and outdated intellectual solutions, trying to quench infinite longing with finite objects.

This realization became central to my dissertation work: if education created extractive consciousness, then education transformation is prerequisite for economic transformation.

The Seven-Generation Standard: Redefining Success

Traditional business measures success by accumulation: revenue, profit, market share, assets, valuation. Bigger numbers mean greater success. This quarter better than last quarter. This year better than last year. Always more, never enough, infinite growth on a finite planet.

Through my Entreprenological processes, I have now developed an entirely different metric: the seven-generation test. Every decision, every business model, every definition of success must answer one question: Will my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren benefit or suffer from these choices I make today?

This isn't abstract philosophy - it's the most practical metric imaginable. It forces radical honesty about what we're actually doing versus what we tell ourselves we're doing.

Apply seven-generation thinking to conventional business and watch the entire edifice crumble:

• Fossil fuel extraction? Clearly stealing energy from the past while destroying habitability for the future. Fail.

• Planned obsolescence? Deliberately creating waste to generate profit. Fail.

• Resource depletion? Taking what cannot be replaced. Fail.

• Wealth hoarding? Accumulating resources beyond any conceivable need while others lack basics. Fail.

• Externalized costs? Profiting by pushing consequences onto future generations. Fail.

• Poisoned food & pharma production? Generates a profitable healthcare system. Fail.

Nearly every "successful" business model in modern capitalism fails the seven-generation test spectacularly. We're not creating prosperity - we're consuming the future to fund the present. We're not building wealth - we're stealing it from people not yet born who cannot defend themselves.

This realization was devastating and liberating simultaneously. 

Devastating because I had to acknowledge my own complicity in these systems. Liberating because I could finally name the problem clearly enough to design alternatives.

The seven-generation standard became the foundation of everything I developed through my PHD work: the Level 4 Co-Creator Curriculum, the Learn-Earn Regenerative Business Ecosystem, the "Art of Becoming NoThing and NoBody" framework. Every system asks: Does this serve future generations or steal from them?

This metric transforms everything:

• Accumulation becomes stewardship: You don't own resources; you temporarily manage what belongs to future generations

• Competition becomes collaboration: If we're all responsible for the seventh generation, we're on the same team

• Growth becomes regeneration: Success means leaving things better than you found them

• Profit becomes contribution: Your gain should produce gain for others, including those not yet born

IUE's framework gave me space and encouragement to develop this new standard rigorously, test it practically, and formalize it into teachable curriculum. Traditional academia would have dismissed it as "not rigorous" or "not business-focused." Entreprenology asked the only question that matters: Does it work? Does it produce regenerative outcomes?

From Wetiko to Wellness: Diagnosing the Consumption Disease

One of the most unconventional elements of my dissertation explores wetiko - the indigenous concept of cannibalistic consumption as a spiritual disease, much like America’s capitalism’s biomimicry of Stage 4 cancer. Traditional business education has no framework for this kind of analysis. Spiritual disease? Cannibalistic consumption? These concepts don't fit within materialist, rationalist academic paradigms.

But they precisely describe what we're doing. We are literally consuming our children's future. Not metaphorically - literally. Every barrel of oil we burn is energy they won't have. Every species we extinct is biodiversity they'll never experience.  The loss of topsoil and the microorganisms that are the very foundation of biologic health and planetary abundance. Every degree of warming is habitability we've stolen. Every ton of plastic is toxicity they'll inherit as microplastics in their blood stream and the ocean.

This is Success? Consuming the flesh of your own kind’s future to gorge yourself now?

We do this because we're infected with false ego - the confusion of identifying as the body-mind apparatus rather than the eternal consciousness temporarily using that apparatus. When you believe you are the body, death becomes existential terror. When you believe you are your possessions, losing them becomes total loss. When you believe you are your achievements, failure becomes annihilation.

This false identification creates the insatiable hunger at the heart of consumer capitalism. You try to fill infinite longing (the soul's homesickness for Source) with finite objects (possessions, achievements, recognition). But it's categorically impossible - like trying to quench thirst by collecting pictures of water.

So you consume more desperately. You accumulate more frantically. You hoard more anxiously. The hole never fills because you're using the wrong category of solution. And in your desperation, you begin consuming even what belongs to future generations.

Traditional business education not only fails to diagnose this disease - it celebrates it as success. 

The most infected individuals (billionaires frantically pursuing immortality through wrong mechanisms, corporations extracting maximum value regardless of consequence) are held up as exemplars. We study their methods, adopt their mindsets, pursue their outcomes.

Through my IUE work, I was able to explore this spiritual diagnosis seriously, develop it rigorously, and integrate it into practical curriculum for healing the disease at individual and systemic levels.

The Level 4 Co-Creator Curriculum directly addresses false ego identification, guides people through the process of recognizing themselves as eternal consciousness temporarily using bodies as creative instruments, and helps them restructure their business models around soul purpose rather than ego accumulation.

This work couldn't have happened in traditional academia. But Entreprenology measures outcomes over orthodoxy, practicality over ideology. If the framework produces people who build regenerative businesses, if it heals the consumption disease, if it generates seven-generation thinking - then it's valid regardless of whether it fits materialist assumptions.

The Learn-Earn Integration: Education as Transformation

The IUE/Learn-Earn ecosystem represents the practical embodiment of everything I've described. It doesn't just teach about regenerative entrepreneurship - it creates regenerative entrepreneurs through a fundamentally different educational architecture.

Traditional Model:

1. Consume information (courses)

2. Prove comprehension (exams)

3. Receive credential (degree)

4. Practice application (job/business)

5. Discover gap between theory and practice

6. Struggle to function in real world

7. Either abandon ideals or abandon system

IUE/ Learn-Earn Model:

1. Identify your soul-purpose, the core Soul-Seed of your destiny

2. Design and begin building a business aligned with that purpose

3. Learn principles of good practices while implementing them

4. Create curriculum content through business development

5. Earn credentials while building actual enterprise

6. Test theories through real-world outcomes

7. Refine understanding based on results

8. Contribute to field through documented innovation

The integration is profound.

You're not learning then doing - you're learning through doing. You're not studying about entrepreneurship - you're studying while being an Entreprenologist. You're not earning credentials instead of building business - you're earning credentials by building ethical and values-driven business. This eliminates the devastating gap that destroys most new graduates: the discovery that academic knowledge doesn't prepare you for practical reality. In the IUE/ Learn-Earn model, there is no gap. Your education is your business development. Your coursework is your business planning. Your dissertation is your implemented system.

For me, this integration was transformative. 

My unconventional ideas about consciousness-based business, seven-generation economics, and regenerative entrepreneurship moved from theoretical to practical through this process. Each concept had to prove itself through implementation. Each framework had to produce measurable outcomes. Each principle had to generate actual businesses serving actual people while benefiting future generations.

The curriculum I developed - the Level 4 Co-Creator materials, in one book, "Art of Becoming NoThing", the framework,  seven-generation business models - all emerged through this Learn-Earn integration. I couldn't have created them through pure theory or pure practice alone. The integration of both, simultaneously, produced something neither could achieve independently.

This is Entreprenology's genius: refusing the artificial separation between conscience, consciousness and commerce, between spiritual development and business development, between learning about and learning through expressing and creating.

Dr. John R. Schindler PHD https://johnrschindler.netlify.app/