SAMOVAR TEA LOUNGE LAUNCHES NEW ENTREPRENEURIAL VIDEO SERIES
Samovar Owner Jesse Jacobs New Video Series
Featuring Discussions With Today’s Leading Entrepreneurs & Innovators
San Francisco, CA – September 20, 2010 – Jesse Jacobs, founder of San Francisco’s Samovar Tea Lounge, continues his new entrepreneurial video series “Tea With…” on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 with the latest installment focusing on “Zen & The Art of Life Management.” In the upcoming live video stream, today’s leading Zen thinkers including Susan O’Connell (VP, San Francisco Zen Center) and Leo Babauta (Author, The Power of Less, Zen Habits blog) team up with New York Times best-selling author Tim Ferriss (Author, The 4-Hour Workweek) for an inspiring and uplifting panel discussion with host Jesse Jacobs. The series is broadcast live online from Samovar’s Yerba Buena location (730 Howard Street) and will be viewable on Jesse Jacobs’s blog (www.realritual.com) and the Samovar homepage (www.samovartea.com). The ” Zen & The Art of Life Management ” event is $40 and begins at 5 pm.
With the ever-increasing presence of technology and overcast of distractions in our daily lives, life management has become an art. We are all faced with many of the same challenges, but the big question is, how do life experts find solutions to encounter a calm, fulfilled life? Never before has the ancient world of Zen Buddhism practices been so necessary as today. Much of the beauty of Zen is in its simplicity, and the average person can embrace a more balanced daily life through having time for contemplation. Join three of today’s foremost life management leaders as they discuss their own creative solutions for a more focused mind. Technology has led us to excessive multitasking, and the expectation that we always need to be digitally “connected.” Find out how these experts focus inward amid busy schedules and challenges in business to stay connected with themselves, family and friends.
Jesse Jacobs has had the rare opportunity to sit down and drink tea with some of today’s most inspiring entrepreneurs. His “Tea With…” video series features him in conversations with Tony Hsieh (Founder of Zappos), Tim Ferris (Author, 4-Hour Workweek), Kevin Rose, Craig Newmark (Founder of Craig’s List), Chip Conley (CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality), Graham Hill (Founder of Treehugger.com), Dean Karnazes (Ultra Marathon Man), Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Joshua Kaiser (Owner, Rishi Tea), Ahmed Rahim (Owner, Numi Tea) and others. Please view the trailer of the series here: http://tinyurl.com/SamovarTrailer-TeaWith .
Below is biographical information on each of the participants in the “Zen & The Art of Life Management” event:
About Jesse Jacobs (CEO of Samovar Tea Lounge)
Jesse Jacobs pursues his mission of creating peace through drinking tea, one soulful, savory cup at a time. Over the last eight years (2002 – 2010), Jacobs has developed a multi-million dollar business with three San Francisco locations and a robust online sales network. Since Jacobs’s infancy on the East Coast, his family always made time for tea with a constant flow of visitors from around the world visiting his home: business people, nuns, yogis, rabbis, FBI agents, chefs, massage therapists, writers, and musicians – his parents kept a house with open doors and community. English was the least spoken language with the deluge of Asian and European visitors. A spark was ignited early on for Jacobs to embrace a love of language and culture. Jacobs is now conversant in Spanish, Danish, Italian, and Japanese.
Inspired by the amazing characters who entered his life, Jacobs was motivated early on to make the most out of life. He shined shoes, performed as a magician, worked at countless diners and restaurants as a dishwasher and short order cook, and ended up as sous chef in a fine Italian restaurant in Boston’s Italian district, the North End. He painted houses, cooked at a Japanese restaurant in Belgium, taught English at a ceramics factory in Japan, and then again taught English to migrant workers in Ketchikan, Alaska.
Finally, Jacobs ended up in the Bay Area, getting deep into the technology world, during the dot com heyday. The bust came just after his passion for the corporate world waned. He wanted to get back to his roots of connecting with people, communicating, and experiencing cultures of the world. The vibrancy of tea was it. Jacobs left the corporate world and established Samovar Tea Lounge, a company delivering an experience rooted in tea: equanimity, community, vitality; all making up the timeless tradition of tea. As an alternative to the grunge-cafes in urban America and the bar scene, Samovar stands out as an urban oasis from life. Jacobs wanted it to be an affordable, exotic, and yet comfortably approachable experience.
Samovar directly partners with tea experts and suppliers from small family farms all around the globe, and is home to over 50 of the world’s finest teas (i.e. many of which are organic and fair trade certified) served alongside funky-fine internationally traditional food pairings.
About Tim Ferriss (Author, The 4-Hour Workweek)
Timothy Ferriss, nominated as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People of 2007,” is an angel investor (StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, etc.) and author of the #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been sold into 35 languages. His blog is one of Inc. Magazine’s “19 Blogs You Should Bookmark Right Now“, and it has been ranked #1 on the Top 150 Management and Leadership Blogs list, based on Google PageRank, Alexa traffic ranking, Bing results, Technorati authority, Feedburner subscribers, and PostRank. Tim has been featured by more than 100 media outlets–including The New York Times, The Economist, TIME, Forbes, Fortune, CNN, and CBS–and has been a popular guest lecturer at Princeton University since 2003, where he presents entrepreneurship as a tool for ideal lifestyle design and world change.
Ferriss is also an active education reformer and has architected experimental social media campaigns such as LitLiberation to out-fundraise traditional media figures like Stephen Colbert 3-to-1 at zero cost, building schools overseas and financing more than 25,000 US students in the process. He is on the advisory board of DonorsChoose.org, an educational non-profit and winner at Fast Company’s 2008 Social Capitalist Awards. Tim received his BA from Princeton University in 2000, where he studied in the Neuroscience and East Asian Studies departments. He developed his nonfiction writing with Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee and formed his life philosophies under Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe. He is 32 years old, and The 4-Hour Workweek is his first book.
About Leo Babauta (Author, The Power of Less, Zen Habits blog)
Leo Babauta is the creator and writer of the Zen Habits blog. Zen Habits is about finding simplicity in the daily chaos of our lives. It’s about clearing the clutter so we can focus on what’s important, create something amazing, and find happiness. It also happens to be one of the Top 25 blogs in the world, with about 200K readers, is uncopyrighted, and goes well with anything chocolate. Zen Habits features three powerful articles a week on: simplicity, health & fitness, motivation and inspiration, frugality, family life, happiness, goals, getting great things done, and living in the moment. And it’s all ad-free, with no cookies, Flash or spam.
Leo Babauta is married with six kids, and is currently living in San Francisco. He is a writer and a runner and a vegan. He also created mnmlist.com (on minimalism) and Write To Done (for writers and bloggers). He’s the author of a new best-selling book, The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential, in Business and in Life. He has also published the following books: Zen To Done, The Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life, and Handbook for Life.
About the San Francisco Zen Center
San Francisco Zen Center was established in 1962 by Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi and his American students. Suzuki-Roshi is known to countless readers as the author of the modern spiritual classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The purpose of San Francisco Zen Center is to make accessible and embody the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha as expressed in the Soto Zen tradition established by Dogen Zenji in 13th-century Japan and conveyed to us by Suzuki Roshi and other Buddhist teachers. The Zen Center’s practice flows from the insight that all beings are Buddha, and that sitting in meditation is itself the realization of Buddha nature, or enlightenment.
Today, San Francisco Zen Center is one of the largest Buddhist sanghas outside Asia. It has three practice places: City Center, in the vibrant heart of San Francisco; Green Gulch Farm, whose organic fields meet the ocean in Marin County; and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center – the first Zen training monastery in the West – in the Ventana Wilderness inland from Big Sur. These three complementary practice centers offer daily meditation, regular monastic retreats and practice periods, classes, lectures, and workshops. Zen Center is a practice place for a diverse population of students, visitors, lay people, priests, and monks guided by teachers who follow in Suzuki Roshi’s style of warm hand and heart to warm hand and heart. Zen Center programs also reach out to the community, helping prisoners, the homeless, and those in recovery; protecting the environment; and working for peace. Suzuki Roshi’s disciples and students of his disciples now lead dharma groups around the country.
In the spirit of Beginner’s Mind, Zen Center has long been a quiet force of cultural dynamism and change, with a dedicated history of reconsidering conventional wisdom and pushing the boundaries of cultural traditions and modes of thinking.
For more information, please visit www.samovartea.com.
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