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START YOUR
OWN DAMN CULT
A Founder’s Field Guide
A practical, elevated playbook for building culture, clarity, and momentum without losing your humanity.
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Used by founders & creative leaders
Built from real workshops + field-tested frameworks
Designed for clarity, courage, and compounding culture
For two decades, Gagan Levy and his award-winning creative agency, Guru, have helped catalyze and amplify some of the most alive movements and conscious companies of our time. From brands like Patagonia, Clif Bar, and Traditional Medicinals to purpose-led business, regenerative agriculture, psychedelic healing, NASA, and even the mighty MoveOn campaign during Obama ’08.
About the Author
Most founders chase growth. The great ones create gravity.
Organizations and movements scale because people believe in them. Belief creates gravity. Gravity builds movements. And movements, if we’re honest, start to look a lot like cults.
What a loaded word: cult. We’re taking it back. Not as a tool for control, hierarchy, or blind loyalty, but back to its root: devotion, care, shared meaning. Cult, if you look deep enough, is just culture with fewer syllables. The only difference is time and intention. Culture doesn’t happen by accident. It is designed, embodied, and led by leaders who refuse to separate what they believe from how they build.
This isn’t so much a business book as a wake-up call wrapped in a field guide. Audacious enough to challenge business as usual and clear enough to change it, created with equal parts bold imagination and unflinching moral clarity.
I didn’t set out to blend startups and spirituality; I was just looking for something sturdier than hustle culture.
Inside is a path toward liberated leadership a practical and actionable framework for building from coherence, holding power without unraveling, and winning without wrecking yourself, your team, or the planet.
Polish the mirror. Find the frequency. Catalyze the cult.
Start Your Own Damn Cult introduces the Cultiv8 codex: eight codes for founders who give a damn and desire a path to scaling their “cult” through more liberated leadership. A remix with reverence, it’s like yoga for business reimagined as bold, actionable practices for modern leaders. Not as spiritual decoration, but as a practical operating system.
The 8 you have here are good and definitely found throughout the book, but not organized correctly as I have the 8 codes in book:
The Cultiv8 Codex
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08
Congrats, You’re Fired
Liberated leaders build movements that don’t depend on constant control. Systems strengthen. Culture self-corrects. Power decentralizes.
Can the mission move without you?
Movement Impact:
The ultimate amplification strategy is shared ownership. When the mission belongs to everyone, growth becomes exponential.
07
In The Zone
This is where leadership shifts from effort to flow. You stop forcing momentum and start catching wind. Decisions feel cleaner. Communication feels lighter. The movement begins to move with you instead of because of you.
Can you trust the wind once it rises?
Movement Impact:
When you find flow, your message travels further. Alignment creates lift. Culture becomes self-propelling.
06
Fierce Focus
Focused leadership turns intention into traction. Energy consolidates. Priorities sharpen. Progress compounds. This is where shiny objects go to die.
Can you protect what matters from distraction?
Movement Impact:
Consistency builds brand gravity. Repetition builds recognition. Recognition builds momentum.
05
Tune Out to Tune In
Discerning leaders separate signal from noise. They create space for insight instead of reacting to every notification. Silence becomes strategic.
Can you hear what matters most?
Movement Impact:
Protecting signal integrity makes your message more resonant and your marketing more precise.
04
Breathe Before You Broadcast
Regulated leaders hold pressure without exporting it. When you don’t leak stress, your organization doesn’t absorb it. Calm creates clarity.
Can you stay resourced under stress?
Movement Impact:
Psychological safety accelerates execution. Teams move faster when they aren’t bracing for impact.
03
Take Your Damn Seat
Grounded leadership means claiming your perspective without apology. When you’re clear on where you stand, your positioning sharpens and your message cuts through. No more borrowing someone else’s CEO voice.
Can others feel where you stand?
Movement Impact:
Bold positioning creates magnetic differentiation. When you take your seat, your movement knows exactly what it stands for and what it’s not.
02
Tending The Temple
Reflective leaders see their own patterns before those patterns sabotage the mission. Self-awareness creates choice. Choice creates evolution. Movements stall when leaders don’t.
Movement Impact:
The clearer you are, the less noise your team and brand have to filter. Clarity sharpens signal.
Can you learn from yourself in real time?
01
Call Your Own Bullsh*t
Foundational leadership starts with accountability. When your values and actions align, trust compounds and trust is the only currency that scales. Without it, your movement fractures under pressure.
Movement Impact:
Trust is what turns your team & customers into believers and believers into evangelists.
Can you be trusted with influence?
“Having taken 7 years off as an entrepreneur, I am now using this handbook as my guide in building the WE ARE ENOUGH movement. It could not have come out at a better time for me and for all entrepreneurs out there who want to change the world.”
-Blake Mycoskie (Founder of TOMS Shoes & Lover of Life)
Cult Building Work playshops
An innovation lab accelerating innovators, founders, and brands who need rapid clarity, creative ignition and movement amplification.
For Early Stage
Think of it as a greenhouse for brands still in formation where strategy, culture, and creative root systems are established.
Crystalize the soul of your brand
Codify values into behaviors
Build rituals that reinforce what matters
Creative prototyping and light identity formation
Dream into amplification activations
Explore Start Your Own Damn Cult
“Start Your Own Damn Cult”
For Scaling Movements
Think of it as an innovative, high-voltage immersive designed for brands with a strong core community who are ready to scale without losing their soul.
Realign your mission, leadership and
teams into a flow state
Systems and rituals that preserve what matters
Culture centered design for scale
Empower the evangelists
Amplification activations into the mainstream
Explore How to Scale Cult
“How to Scale Cult”
This is not hustle culture.
It’s liberated leadership applied to business.
A structured, immersive training for founders and executives who want to build belief, sharpen positioning, and scale movements without losing themselves in the process.
Practical. Repeatable. Scalable.
A Leadership Operating System for Building Movements
The Cultiv8 Codex
What You’ll Build
I
Foundations: You Are the Instrument
Build the internal coherence that creates trust and signal strength.
II
Culture as a Strategic Advantage
Design culture as an amplifier - not an HR afterthought.
III
Decision-Making with Signal Clarity
Cut through noise. Position boldly. Move with conviction.
IV
Rituals, Systems, and Brand Gravity
Turn principles into practices. Practices into culture. Culture into momentum.
V
Integration: The Codex in the Wild
Apply the framework to your company, your positioning, and your movement in real time.
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Coming This Summer
"It takes talent and experience to create a book that spells out a path to a successful business strategy but quite another to infuse that path with heart, generosity and a wise perspective. This is the Gagan I know and love"
-Raghu Markus (Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation & Be Here Now Network)
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