Csaba Lucas, 50: Connecting on a Human Level

We are humans; we are physical, emotional and spiritual beings, and without attention to each of these parts of ourselves, we will become unbalanced. Csaba believes that if we are in tune with our bodies, with nature, and with the changing of seasons, so many of the issues we may associate with aging either won’t happen or will be dramatically delayed. It certainly works for him. As he told me, an image of him with his shirt off at 50 looks remarkably similar to him at 16, just with a different hair color. 

Csaba’s life is complex and multifaceted: father, husband, coach, entrepreneur, athlete, author, actor, and probably another 10 descriptors. The connecting red thread is his focus on aligning himself with the basics: his physical being, the rhythm of nature, and a certain essence of humanity. And if we can deal with each other from a base-level human perspective, rather than the cultural one that wraps our day-to-day existence, we have a much better opportunity to connect. 

Below are edited extracts from our conversations.

You’re 50 today.
I am turning 50 very shortly. It’s crazy, right? I never cared about age. It doesn’t seem to matter to me. 

Where are you from?
I was born in Hungary, lived there for the first 19 years of my life, and then eventually I won a scholarship to teach children art and health-related subjects in Canada. And that’s how I left Hungary originally.

I understand that you’re married.
Yes! Married with five kids and I am very proud of every single one of them. I have a big spread of them. I have a 20-, 18-, 7-, 5-, and almost 2-year-old, and we’re still thinking about having maybe one more. 

They’re a very important part of my life. The only book that I actually published was one I wrote to my kids. I was trying to think: “Okay, what would be the best thing I could leave for them and their kids?”

Kind of like a tool: how to be well in life. I’m realistic; I wanted to leave some words that were easy to digest regardless of who you are, since I don’t know who my grandchildren or great grandchildren will be, right? I want this book to hold information that will be applicable even for them one day.

The book for my kids is about “barefoot existence.” And I really believe if you dig into what it means to be barefoot, it boils down to a connection to Mother Earth. But I digress… Kids are very important in my life.

“If you dig into what it means to be barefoot, it boils down to a connection to Mother Earth”

Give me the top five things that you told your kids. I want to know a bit more about what you wrote in this book.
Top five things — interesting! A lot of the book is really all about how I don’t think we will ever get to a place as human beings where we can forget about where we come from. It’s very easy to “forget” today because it’s inconvenient. It’s inconvenient to remember that the only reason you have legs is because you are designed to move them, right? The only reason you have the most joints in your foot is because all of those joints are meant to move separately. When you put a cast on it — i.e. your shoe — you are dismissing this fact. And you can get away with it. But there is a reason why, let’s say, 85% of people who run regularly have running-related injuries. Is that because running is bad for you, or is that because the way we run is the problem? 

I have worked with some of the world’s best athletes. Think LA Lakers, world karate champions, bodybuilders, figure skaters, and more. That’s how I spent the first ten years of my career — trying to figure out ways to support athletes. We wanted to know how they could become the best of the best. 

This started with considering the movement patterns that we’ve been indoctrinated with and asking: “How is the body really meant to be?” 

“Everything moves differently based on how your foot lands”

A human being is not born with a pair of shoes. That’s important for your body. Now, of course, we live in a Western world where shoes are inevitable, but it doesn’t mean that’s the best way. One needs to find adequate amounts of time to expose their feet to movements that will allow their entire body to be healthy. Happy feet lead to healthy gait, meaning your knees, your hips, your lower back, your mid-back, your neck, your jaw. Everything moves differently based on how your foot lands. You cannot get away from it as long as you have this three-dimensional body.

I had the good fortune to immerse myself into artistry a fair bit and even went to Juilliard. At school, I was the main character in dozens of plays. I had my own Off-Broadway show in New York so I had a good stab at this artistic way of looking at existence. The only thing I can tell you is this: any artist that forgets about their physicality really limits themselves. You need to know your body. 

Why do you focus so much on physicality if you have this artistic background?
Well, the artistic background was very secret for me in the beginning of my life. I was at the age of eight when I started taking performance art classes secretly because back then anyone who was an artist was smoking and wore black, and I hated both of those things. So I did it in secret because I was an athlete, predominantly, as a young man.

“I spent the first 10 years of my career working with all of these big athletes”

I did win the Hungarian National Championship in canoeing when I was 12 or 13. After that, I became a competition champion in javelin, shot put, discus throw, and the 800 meter. I also competed in airplane pulling in Canada. That is who can pull an airplane the fastest for a hundred yards. I ran barefoot marathons every week for about three months out of the year. So, I really had an incredible physical background as a human being. Then, in ‘94, I met the advising coach for the Chicago Bulls. At this time, Jordan and all of those guys were killing it. He helped me to realize that my visceral capabilities can be transformed into a coaching ability. 

I spent the first 10 years of my career working with all of these big athletes. But by the end of my 20s, I got pretty close to the top of that field, and I realized that my financial development was pretty limited there.

That’s why I ended up moving to New York and opening up a facility off of Wall Street. And, I wish it was by design but, serendipitously, I always had the most successful people walk through my door. They wanted to spend some time with me and talk about problems and figure out solutions that were different from the norm. 

My main role was to connect with and advise these people on a human level. Eventually, I found myself sitting in a room with one of the heads of the biggest banks in the world, the head of a big Fortune 500 company, and another big, powerful individual, and the four of us were trying to figure out how to solve a $27 billion business problem.

“And I was sitting there like, how did this happen? It happened because I was curious”

And I was sitting there like, how did this happen? It happened because I was curious. I was curious about how to pull airplanes really fast. Curious about how to describe the human existence through art. 

Somehow I’m sitting at this table and people believe I have something that I can add to the situation, and it worked. Now, 25 years later, my entrepreneurial world kind of landed in my life. It wasn’t ever a goal. When I talk to people about my life — and I don’t do that too often — I like to talk in a very open, human way. Let’s see who we are first before we get to business. I like to do it right.

But there’s another aspect of my life which I haven’t touched on yet, perhaps the most important. I was always very curious about different cultures. Growing up in socialism leads to a very different way of knowing. I remember, I read this interesting study where some Westerner was trying to understand happiness. He went to Eastern Europe before the regime change and asked Eastern European housewives how happy they were. 100% of them gave the same answer: “I never thought about it.” Like, what? You never thought about happiness? What the heck?

“I was always very curious about different cultures”

It’s in our frigging constitution, right? And that made me think that if cultures hold such different values, let’s put the focus on how that is possible. How does that work? From there, I decided to immerse myself in the most ancient culture in the world that we know of that is unbroken. It turned out to be a group in sub-saharan Africa.

First, I studied the heck out of them. I knew everything about this group that a human being could possibly know from books and everything. Then, I had the good fortune to go there and stay with them for a month at a time, and then again several times a month at a time on-and-off. It allowed me to see: How do they view how to be a human? What is their modality around humanity? What do they value? And then, eventually, I did the same thing with a group in the Amazon jungle and the Siberian Chukchi tribe. Then, I was very fortunate to be given the opportunity to study the Native North American way of being as well as the Aboriginal ways.

I started to realize that there are two things that define one’s life. There’s a cultural aspect of our lives, and there’s the human aspect of our lives. And the problem is, if you spend your life in one culture, you can’t tell them apart.

What is culture? What is human? Based on my experiences, problems arise when you focus on culture versus what’s human. The human connects us all. The cultural separates us. So, I’m not telling you culture is bad, but I want to bring clarity to every situation, every conversation, every business, about what is human in what we do and what is cultural.

It’s hard to be a specialist and lead a happy life. If it’s not leading to wellness, you might need to just be brave enough to dig yourself into a lot of different things. And when you do that, somehow, in a mysterious way, it kind of fuels everything you do. 

“I strive to run my life based on my highest wisdom”

What are the challenges in the life of Csaba today?
The challenge is to keep a balance. When you have a lot of opportunities in life, the hardest thing is to show up as a father, show up as a spouse, show up as a friend, show up as a son, show up as a good citizen through planet Earth, and not just act based on the pattern that was gifted to me earlier in my life. I strive to run my life based on my highest wisdom. 

So many people know what they do is bad. Throwing out plastic, over consumerism, right? It is very hard to live your life with your best wisdom. My biggest challenge is to stay true to everything that I try to stand for.

Tell me about your day-to-day. When you wake up, what do you do?
I learned a fair bit from hunter gatherer tribes in my life. And one of the important learnings is that human beings are wired to exist with anything but a schedule. You cannot plan when you are living together symbiotically with the environment. You can have a clear intention, and then you get rolling with that intention, but you cannot single-mindedly think: “I need this thing, my schedule.”

One of the most surprising things I learned is that as people become successful and have freedom in that moment to completely control their schedule, that’s the moment when people become prisoners to themselves. Schedules are something that’s non-human. It’s a very cultural thing.

“Schedules are something that’s non-human. It’s a very cultural thing”

Again, a human being is really meant to adjust things seasonally. You need to know how to go with the flow. And it’s hard to do in a world where everything is scheduled. You can kind of be an idealist and just go with that. But, if you ask me about my daily schedule, I have a lot of flow going on. I wake up and I try to spend some time alone. I try to connect with good intentions and try to wrap my mind around how I want to show up, to set my intentions clear. Spending sufficient time with my loved ones is very important to me. Then, I need to take good care in connecting to nature and my physicality. I have many different sports that I do within a year, and it changes based on what season it is and what my circumstances are.

Back to my day: Every morning, as I said, I start with excitement, inspiration. Just like when you look at the sun rising in the east there’s a sense of joy, I can start to think about how I am going to spend my day. That’s the orientation energy.

When the sun is high up in the sky, that’s when people work. I try to make sure that’s when I work. I try to follow these natural cycles. It’s eight stages every day, and I align my schedule and my way of being to that. So I can’t tell you a typical day.

What are the three non-negotiables in Csaba’s life?
Attention and spousal relationship, practicing what you preach, and taking care of self. I think these are the three things.

We’ve talked a lot about leaning into our “human,” and not getting stuck in “culture.” So, what do humans need to know?
Teach themselves how to always do 100% of their best in any given moment, in whatever they do while they’re doing it; and then when they’re done with it, let it go and completely surrender and let it live on its own. It doesn’t matter what you do, you will be pretty darn good all the time. It might not deliver the goodies right away, but you will have a good life that’s worth living and is enjoyable.

Learning to be masterful at surrendering is just as important as knowing how to work hard. I learned that early on. As an athlete, a hard-ass workout is good, but only if you’re really good at resting.

So, paying attention to being able to push as hard as possible and then stop immediately, let go, and recuperate and make sure there is no lingering rumination.

That’s all I got.

Connect with Csaba:
Website
Instagram

Images by Claudia Goetzelmann.