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CROSS YOUR RUBICON
Nothing resists a human will that stakes its very existence upon the achievement of its purpose.
—BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Once you’ve created your vision of the future, you seal the commitment by crossing your Rubicon. You are invading new territory—the territory of the future. You’re no longer going to be bound by the circumstances of the past.
REENGINEER YOUR LIFE
Many successful people have turned their backs on the past by embarking on the individual equivalent of “reengineering the corporation.” When corporate leaders decide to reengineer the corporation, they don’t set out merely to improve the present system. They set out to create an entirely new system.
When you set out to reengineer your life, you’re not just improving your present circumstances. You’re creating a whole new set of circumstances, in keeping with your vision of what life should be.
Creating a whole new set of circumstances is not the same thing as improving your present circumstances, any more than the emergence of a butterfly is an improvement on the caterpillar.
A butterfly is a completely different creature from a caterpillar. The caterpillar crawls, the butterfly flits; the caterpillar is fat and sluggish, the butterfly is light and lissome. Nobody mistakes a butterfly for a caterpillar. Becoming the butterfly you want to be means putting old circumstances in the past and concentrating all your resources on creating new ones.
This can be risky and scary. You’re leaving the comfort and security of the old cocoon and accepting the challenges and uncertainties of a free environment. It’s natural to want to leave the path open for a return to the old ways if the new ways don’t work out.
But if you leave the path open, you’re quite likely to retrace it. At the first sign of adversity, you’ll give up the adventure and return to your cocoon—the life you were trying to put behind.
A butterfly, of course, cannot return to its cocoon. The moment it makes its way to the outside and flutters its wings, it is committed to a new type of existence. Its life as a butterfly is not just a matter of what it does. It is also a matter of what it is.
TRANSFORMING YOURSELF
You can shut off the path to retreat by transforming yourself into something you never were before. The process of education can be transforming. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote that when a mind stretches to embrace a new idea, it “never shrinks back to its original dimensions.” There is a qualitative difference between an educated person and an uneducated person, just as there is a qualitative difference between a butterfly and a caterpillar. Acquire an education and you have crossed an important Rubicon.
Acquiring the mindset of a professional is another way of fording the Rubicon. As Bernard De Voto observed:
Between the amateur and the professional ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization.
You can choose to follow either a professional or a worker mentality. Being a professional involves far more than acquiring skill. It involves acquiring a whole new mind-set. The worker mentality sees a job as a necessary evil that has to be endured until quitting time sets you free to pursue your real life. Professionals see their careers as rewarding components of their real lives. They learn to integrate their careers and their personal lives so that one meshes with and supports the other.
Workers wait for someone to tell them what to do and how to do it, and they let others worry about whether the way they’re told to do it is the right way. They may concentrate on performing their assigned tasks well, but won’t worry about what happens outside their own areas.
Professionals take responsibility for their own success and for the success of the organizations to which they belong. They see themselves as partners in prosperity with the organization, and see the organization’s ups and downs as their own. They are constantly looking for things that they personally can do to contribute to organizational success.
Workers accept a ceiling on success in return for a steady income. They are not boat-rockers, and they believe in doing things the way they’ve always been done—which they perceive as the safe, cautious way. Professionals are willing to take intelligent risks, accepting the possibility of failure as a fair price for the opportunity to grow.
Workers concentrate on the means. They do their jobs without worrying about how their jobs contribute to the total picture. Professionals concentrate on the ends. They see their jobs in terms of how they contribute to the organization’s success.
Professionals are usually perceived as good because they go the extra mile to be good. They keep up with the latest developments in their field and share their knowledge with others. They communicate confidence, dressing and grooming themselves for success, conscious of the importance of image. To achieve this type of professionalism, you must set a high standard for yourself and never allow yourself to fall below that standard.
Acquiring manners, culture, and good taste also transforms. These qualities mark you as a cultured person, one whom successful people will respect and admire. Once you have acquired professional and cultural polish, you have become a different person, and you won’t go back to what you were before.
Manners, culture, and good taste often defy definition, but people recognize them when they see them. They involve more than knowing which fork to use with which course at the dinner table, the difference between a French impressionist and a cubist, and which color combinations work best in specific social settings.
Some people acquire them through upbringing. Others acquire them by choosing role models and emulating their actions and behavior. Reading books and articles on etiquette, manners, and art can give you basic knowledge, and visiting museums, attending performances, and listening to recordings can help you become conversant with the loftier forms of the arts.
This doesn’t mean that you have to forsake your favorite forms of entertainment for the highbrow stuff. It simply means that you acquire enough knowledge of arts, culture, and manners to feel comfortable around those who value them.
Taking Action
Crossing your Rubicon involves action as well as being. Something has to happen that signals a dramatic break with the past. Caesar has to give the order to advance beyond the river. The butterfly has to crawl out of the cocoon. The uneducated person has to enroll in a course of study.
To commit yourself beyond turning back, you have to take decisive action. The moment you preclude the possibility of going back, you will invoke the inner powers that will enable you to forge success in your new life. “Be bold,” urges author H. Jackson Brown Jr. “Providence loves boldness, and will assist you in ways you wouldn’t imagine.”
William Murray, a member of a Scottish expedition that climbed Mount Everest, expressed a similar view. When you make a commitment, he said:
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have otherwise occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have ever dreamed would come his way.
The knowledge that the only path open is the one ahead focuses your energy and resources and multiplies your chances of success.
Commitment on the Volga
One of the great turning points in World War II was the Battle of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), when the Russian army staked everything on the defense of the city.
Had the German army been able to cross the Volga River at that point, the Russian heartland would have been open to the Nazi advance. The Russian army stood on the west side of the Volga and made its stand. The word went out to the soldiers: “There is no other side of the river.” That was commitment. The Russians fought as if there were no place to retreat. And the German tide was turned back.
Normandy versus the Bay of Pigs
For Dwight Eisenhower, the Rubicon was the English Channel. Had the weather turned against him, he would be remembered as one of history’s great losers. He could have hedged his bet by telling his aides, “Let’s send the boys on their way, but if it looks too blustery to land, they can turn around and come back.”
Such a halfhearted commitment almost certainly would have ended in disaster—the way it did at the Bay of Pigs. In that fiasco, President John Kennedy gave the go-ahead for anti-Castro Cubans to launch a liberating attack on the island, promising to provide them with air cover. At the last moment, the president decided that overt American participation was too risky, so he withdrew the air cover. The landing failed, and good men were sent to their deaths.
Later, Kennedy confronted Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev with his own Rubicon: Soviet ships would not be permitted to sail into Cuban waters with offensive missiles on board. Khrushchev decided to stay on his side of the river, much to the relief of the world.
You Can’t Be Tentative
It takes determination and confidence to cross the Rubicon and burn your bridges behind you. But until you take that step, everything you do has a tentative quality to it.
Successful parents know that they do their children no favors when they bail them out every time they get into financial difficulty. They know that children will never be able to achieve success on their own so long as they know the parents will rescue them from their mistakes. They have to strike out on their own, cutting themselves off from the security blanket of home and parents.
To learn to fly, a nestling has to get out of the nest and trust its wings to keep it from hitting the ground. To learn to swim, you eventually have to take your feet off the bottom and trust the water to hold you up.
MAKE A CLEAN BREAK
I’m not suggesting that you suddenly and impulsively quit your job, sell your assets, move across the continent, and start a new life from square one. That’s not boldness; it’s foolhardiness. But if you plan to follow your vision to success, you have to make a clean break with the past and set your face resolutely toward the future.
If you take a leave of absence from your steady job to take on a career in real-estate sales, you’re very likely to return to your job. You’ll fail as a real-estate salesperson because you won’t go the extra mile to cultivate the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed. Deep down, you’ll know you’ve got a familiar job waiting for you ifit doesn’t work out. You’ll keep your attention focused on the “other side of the river,” the familiar side that offers safety but little opportunity.
You’ll be going into real estate acknowledging the possibility of failure. Your subconscious will pick up on that idea and will cause you to act like a failure when you attempt to sell real estate. As William Feather put it, “Success is seldom achieved by people who contemplate the possibility of failure.”
Drop the Excuses
Crossing your Rubicon means cutting yourself loose from all your excuses for inaction: “I’d like to go into business for myself, but I hate to give up a secure job.” If your vision calls for opening your own business, be sure you have enough capital, information, and know-how to get it started, then resign your job and commit yourself to your new enterprise. You’ll never succeed until you’ve made up your mind to try.
“I’d like to learn computer science, but I don’t have time for night classes because I had to take on a second job to pay for my boat.” If taking that computer science course is necessary to fulfilling your vision, sell the boat and quit your second job. With your new job skills, you may be able to buy another boat later without holding down two jobs—and that will give you the leisure to use the boat.
“I’d like to go into business on the West Coast, but I own a home here in the East, and I can’t keep up two residences.” Sell your house in the East and move to the West Coast. They have houses for sale out there too. With no home to return to, you’ll be more likely to stick it out on the West Coast until your new business is a going concern.
“That new outfit would look great on me if I lost fifteen pounds, but I’m afraid I’d never stick to my diet.” Buy the outfit. It’ll provide you with an extra incentive to lose the weight.
Crossing the Rubicon involves risk, but risk taking is an important ingredient in success. “Security is mostly a superstition,” said Helen Keller. “It does not exist in nature. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Successful people don’t avoid risks. They learn to manage them. They don’t dive off cliffs into unexplored waters. They learn how deep the water is and make sure there are no hidden obstacles. Then they plunge in.
The process of risk analysis is not that complicated. Before taking the plunge, examine the venture and answer these questions:
- What is the best thing that could happen as a result of this action?
- What is the worst that could happen as a result of this action?
- What is the most likely result of this action?
If the most likely result would take you toward your vision, and you’re willing to deal with the worst possible result in exchange for a shot at the best possible result, go ahead and cross.
From Hair Coloring to Pizza
The business world is full of examples of people who took a look at where they were and where they wanted to be, then crossed their Rubicons.
Michael K. Lorelli started out in the marketing department at Clairol after earning his master’s degree in business administration at New York University. Within two years he became product manager, and he proved his mettle by leading the fight against the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to ban certain ingredients in Clairol’s hair-coloring products. Lorelli’s team demonstrated that the ingredients posed no credible health risks, and the FDA backed off. His future with Clairol seemed assured. But Lorelli’s vision beckoned him beyond his marketing niche and toward upper management.
Playtex International approached him with an offer. The company wanted to go global, and it needed someone to spearhead the effort. Lorelli, then thirty-six, was told, in effect, “If you can develop a strategy that excites us, we’ll put you in charge of the new business; if you fail, you may not have a future with us.”1
Lorelli crossed his Rubicon. He left Clairol and joined Playtex. He had to stretch beyond his marketing experience and skills to build manufacturing plants, set up a distribution network, find sources for raw materials, and form joint ventures and licensing agreements with other companies. Within a few years, his division was generating $100 million in revenue in ten countries.
Lorelli found other Rubicons to cross. He left Playtex for Pepsico, where he went from senior vice-president for marketing of Pepsi-Cola to head of Pepsi-Cola’s eastern division in the United States. Then he moved to Pizza Hut, another Pepsico enterprise, which had twenty-five hundred outlets in eighty-four countries, with the challenge of doubling the number of outlets by 1996.
Lorelli didn’t dive blindly into strange waters. He estimated the risks, estimated his own capacity to grow, consulted his personal vision, and waded in.
Taking a Risk for a Congenial Role
Herbert Korthoff also found success on the other side of his Rubicon. As a child, he spent nine years in an orphanage, where he learned that “you have to take control of your own life, or someone will do it for you.”
Korthoff graduated from Syracuse University and went to work for American Home Products. During a decade with the company, he took night classes and earned a master’s in business administration. He became head of purchasing and manufacturing and was confident that he could become a division vice-president by the time he retired.
But his career at American Home Products was not a congenial role for Korthoff. He considered himself a maverick and didn’t feel comfortable with the company’s hierarchical management structure. When he was thirty-five, he had an opportunity to join U.S. Surgical, a company that provided physicians with easy-to-use surgical staples. According to Fortune magazine, six executives had crashed trying to make U.S. Surgical’s manufacturing operations efficient.
Korthoff accepted the challenge, and adopted a strategy that he called the “three R’s of management”—respect, recognition, and remuneration. Within a few years he had the factories running smoothly and moved on to new challenges.2
Swapping a Home for an Education
Lew Richfield had a successful career as assistant to the chairman of a $140-million company. But he regretted the fact that he had never gone to college, and he felt something was missing from his life.
At the age of forty-five, he volunteered to serve part-time at a suicide-prevention center and discovered that he had a talent for working with people.
At the age of forty-six, both he and his wife, Gloria, entered college. They sealed their commitment by selling their home to pay their way. Both earned Ph.D. degrees and became full-time family therapists. He has since written two books on aging and relationships.3
It takes courage to barter your security for a dream, but unless you overcome the fear of failure, the dream can never become a reality. So when your heart says “go for it,” and all you’re lacking is the courage to try, listen to your heart. It will guide you to sources of power you never knew existed, and will make you a winner.