When asked if that viewpoint included an awareness of when she started to have impact on the world, she admonished that it’s not healthy to think that way. “It’s best not to do that. The reward for the doing must be the doing.” When people tell her they love her work, she responds with only a simple, “Thank you.” And when called a “liar or hack or worse—I’ve been called all those things—I say, ‘Thank you.’” If she buys into the adulation, it would make her vulnerable to a focus on outside opinion—so when she hears harsh criticism, she would be vulnerable to that as well.

Neither the toxic nor the intoxicating influences of celebrity status are helpful in achieving your goals. Angelou feels they both threaten to distract from the creative work. “As the African proverb says, I don’t pick that up; I don’t lay that down. Because, if I were to pick up the one (the compliment), I have to pick up the other (the acrimony). And I still have my work to do!”^[4]

Success can be the worst thing that happens to you if you think it makes you right. “Being right can make you righteous,” Angelou said, and we often stop listening to how we can improve. Success as traditionally defined doesn’t mean we’re right; it just means that whatever happened turned out to be popular. You’re bound to suffer rather than enjoy life if you rely on the public to tell you how to feel.

Angelou carved out an extraordinary career and created a life that has great personal meaning to her, with or without good reviews. At the same time, she has had lasting impact in the world. But it has not all been an upward spiral. She has also been penalized for her audacity to define her own version of success. Now in her late 70s, she continues to be the target of both contention and admiration, yet she remains hugely popular.

How does Maya remain so prolific and make success last? She said it’s her portfolio of passions. Few people have excelled at so many different interests, but Angelou believes that if she didn’t indulge in many of them, she might have none of them. For Angelou, there is dance, singing, acting, writing, teaching, literature, sunsets, April showers, good food, great friends—and the list goes on without obvious synergies.

Although one passion usually dominates Builders’ lives and defines their successes in the eyes of the world, it’s a mistake to believe there is just one passion that must be pursued at the expense of all others.

In the movie City Slickers, Jack Pallance (Curly) told Billy Crystal (Mitch Robbins) the secret to life. Holding up one finger, he said as if speaking from the wisdom of the ages: “Just one thing.”

Audiences felt terrific leaving the theatre with an answer, but this was fast food. It’s just a fantasy that satisfies our compulsive need for a single magic pill for the happily ever after. But that kind of thinking is also the source of enormous frustration if you deny yourself everything else you’ve got going for you in life.

In organizations, it’s often necessary to focus on one core competency—the one thing that your team is better at than others. And, in your career, a central focus to which you are willing to deeply commit is also important, as we’ll explore later in this book. But, this focus should not be confused with a narrow life. Builders may look like race horses sprinting with blinders on, but most live large and complicated lives filled with many different personal and professional passions. The myth that there is only one thing to do with your life is not an idea that we could get many to endorse.

On the way to lasting success and a life that matters, Builders embrace more than one passion and sometimes their passion becomes to endow others with their own portfolios. As a tenth grader living in inner-city Pittsburg, Bill Strickland saw dreams shattered daily and he felt a deep need to do something to get and give hope where there was none.

One day, he was walking past a classroom and something caught his eye that stopped him in his tracks. To hear him tell it, “—time stopped. It was a Wednesday afternoon and I was minding my own business and the door of the art room happened to be open, and I happened to look in. And there was this teacher named Frank Ross making a great big old ceramic bowl. I just stood there transfixed.” It was like magic for him. Bill fell in love with ceramics, but the metaphor changed his life and tens of thousands of other at-risk kids and adults. As CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation and the Bidwell Training Center, he has created extensive training programs and facilities in a world-class architectural setting where his passion for art feeds his passion for building a stronger community.

“Mothers and fathers instinctively know that the arts are the basis of good mental health and good intellectual development. When children are born, the mothers and fathers have them doing rhyming, they have them doing clapping, they have them singing, and they have them using crayons. All these creative things, instinctively, we know are the basis for good human development. When kids are 5 years old we take it away from them and we wonder why the kids are nuts 20 years later. My theory is that we need the arts as a part of our mental health.”

Obviously, the arts are not the only passions you can use to enrich your life, but they have served as Strickland’s unique way to give those in poverty the opportunity to believe in themselves and trust their portfolios of passions.

“You don’t have to live a life of mediocrity; you don’t have to live a life that has no positive outcome.” If there is any such thing as balance, he said, art “is essential to the way that you create balance in life. The arts contribute to that part of the human vocabulary. And you take it away from people and it makes them sick.”

When you take a timeout to shift your attention from the stressful stuff to something uplifting and apparently unrelated—particularly if it’s one of your passions—your state of mind improves. Enduringly successful people find they get many great insights when they’re playing at something else—or somehow not wrestling with problems directly. Don’t shortchange the subtle power that comes from purposely changing the subject of your attention in the middle of the week.

It’s like peripheral vision, enabling you to see more angles on an idea or new dimensions of an issue when you’re not looking directly at it. This may seem nonintuitive or odd, yet we all have these experiences—ideas that show up in the shower, or while we’re pushing a child on the swing, playing a favorite game, or daydreaming during a long drive. As long as there is a connection to your portfolio of passions rather than just a focus on obligations or an attempted escape in wishful thinking, you can take advantage of what we call, peripheral thinking. Peripheral thinking has the potential to connect you with a higher authority. Many people have creative breakthroughs (a.k.a. Aha! moments) in prayer, or meditation, or even playing basketball.

“I love the game,” said lanky, athletic-looking Richard Kovacevich, who takes this principle to heart in his life and work. He said he has always been at his best when he applies what he learned on the basketball court to his day job as president, chairman, and CEO of Wells Fargo & Company. Kovacevich is one of the most respected leaders in business at one of the most successful financial services companies in the world.

“I’ve made every mistake there is in life as a manager,” he said. “I was an engineer by background, although I got an MBA, but I have an MS in engineering. And as an engineer, I thought, just sit in a room with my slide rule and just run your linear program and the answer would pop out. Then just send the answer to the troops telling them what to do and it would get done. Well, in my first real job, I did all that and nothing happened,” he said. He tried that a few times. “And they nodded and said ‘Yes,’ and it still didn’t happen. And then I said, ‘Well gee, this is not working too well, is it?’ And so you learn. And what you really find out is it’s all about people. Although I was this geek, this engineer, I also spent four hours every day of my life for 21 years playing sports. You learn very quickly playing sports that it’s all about (the) team. It’s the best five players that win the basketball game, not the five best players. I learned more on the field of sports than I did in my calculus class. And you start applying those types of experiences, combined with business knowledge and you say, ‘Wow, this is what it’s all about.’”

Another potential payoff from experimenting with peripheral thinking is that it might unlock a passion that is your secret talent or even a new specialty you’ve been unable or unwilling to reveal until a collection of passions all came colliding together—giving you a peek at what you’d rather be doing when the world isn’t watching and not requiring you to pay bills. If at first you don’t pressure yourself to take them too seriously—but do them anyway—a portfolio of passions may give you a unique opportunity to look honestly at things that you care about without your harshest critic—yourself—judging or dismissing what matters to you.

It’s common knowledge that it requires focus to achieve a specific objective. But blind pursuit of just one thing is like searching for El Dorado. When you exclude all other things except a single focus for your life, there is a danger that you might find it impossible to locate the real treasure. Single-mindedness forces you to sideline passions that, with further development, could come together as your genius or eventually become your organization’s core greatness.

We are not suggesting that you abandon all plans, scatter your efforts to the four winds, and become a wandering philosopher. It’s just that being creative in your passions has a place in your life and work, with benefits that can’t be forced or predicted. Peripheral thinking has the potential to catalyze a chemical reaction waiting within you—a set of passions that could move the world we share in the direction of goodness. Honor that part of yourself. Carve out a little time each week, on the job or after work, to experiment in some way with one of your other passions.

Bill Nye’s career unfolded exactly that way. When we met him in his office near the Seattle Space Needle, it was hard to find a place to sit down among all the whiz-bang scientific toys. Bill’s eyes sparkled as he scooped up a bright, shiny ball and plopped it into the top of an elaborate towering maze, where it clanged and banged its way on a circuitous route to the bottom. “You could live without this, but why would you want to?” he quipped, an expression he used to describe each of his wild gadgets as if it was show-and-tell time in the classroom. These things embodied the eclectic combination of Nye’s three passions: education, science, and humor. Nye was the kind of kid fascinated with how things worked. Every week, you could find him pulling apart every bicycle he could find, and rumor has it he got most of them back together. He was also intrigued with the ways people learn. His mother had a Ph.D. in education, and he found himself tutoring other kids in school, spreading his love of math and science. He majored in mechanical engineering at Cornell University and took a job at Boeing International designing airplanes.

Then, Nye decided to try his hand at a core competency that wasn’t acceptable in the office at that time—comedy. He entered a Steve Martin “look alike” contest and won even though he doesn’t look anything remotely like Martin. It was his deep scientific understanding of Martin’s sick humor that took the prize, Nye claimed. He also started doing stand-up at comedy clubs and moonlighting on a Seattle-based TV show called Almost Live.

In his spare time, he volunteered tutoring kids struggling with math and science and gave presentations to kids at the Pacific Science Center, teaching the basic principles of science—“like how to blow liquid nitrogen smoke out your nose,” he said. “Don’t try this at home!” he sagely advised. “You’ve got to put in the hours to pull this stunt off safely.”

For years, he had wanted to do a TV show that would combine his love for education, science, and silliness, but even his friends told him he was nuts. Even he admits that it was nuts—it had never been successfully done before—but he didn’t see why that should stop him from trying. Nye decided to reset the priority of his passions, “Or, dare I say it? Change the world,” he exclaimed with a laugh. He quit his day job and accepted a part-time role doing engineering that would help underwrite his new full-time position writing comedy. He got grants from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, and gathered a creative group of friends—the kind of pals he was so close to that they even share their most intimate toys, “like telescopes.” As a result, the TV show, Bill Nye The Science Guy, was born. It ended up becoming a 100-part TV series that won 28 Emmys, influenced thousands of children, and is still distributed by Disney today. Now that Nye has three passions compressed into one career, what would be his ultimate achievement? “If one of the kids who watched the show would find a cure for cancer,” Nye said, pausing a moment, “that would be pretty cool.”

Firms like Google actually encourage employees to spend 15–20% of their time in this kind of unfocused discovery, despite how messy it may seem. Rather than having people moonlight at home in stealth mode, where the idea may die from neglect or take root so well that they choose to leave to do a start-up, the 20% rule is a way to encourage and support breakthrough ideas. People can take ownership of something they’re inventing on one day a week or pool the days and take a few weeks.

The paid time underwrites employees as if they were entrepreneurial CEOs launching their own projects, like start-up companies, until the day it’s ripe enough to show to management. Krishna Barat, principal scientist at Google, came up with Google News just this way. His personal interest in the media and his memories of listening to the BBC with his grandfather, back in India, were galvanized on 9/11, when the scramble to find news about the events of the day made it particularly obvious how hard it was to find and difficult to sort. When CEO Eric Schmidt dropped by to give him the thumbs up, and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave their endorsement, Barat’s dream became a full-time endeavor.

Unfortunately, the perceived reality for most people is that you’ve got to keep your head down to the tasks of your job. As a practical matter, you may feel you don’t have the money, time, or energy to take a side trip to explore a potential passion, particularly if your company won’t offer support. If you are like most people, you have to work to pay for housing and care for loved ones, and you put other passions on the back burner until the day that other critical needs or goals are met. As you most likely already know, of course, those very same concerns and limitations were also real and threatening for the vast majority of entrepreneurs and enduringly successful people. They felt the fear and did it anyway. Few passions come conveniently prefinanced; you have to pay for them with sweat equity whenever you can squeeze them in.

“We must test our fantasies—otherwise, they remain just that,” said Herminia Ibarra. “Either the fantasy never finds a match in the real world, paycheck-producing job or,” she warned, you “remain emotionally attached to a fantasy career that you do not realize you have outgrown—while you wait for the flash of blinding insight, opportunities pass you by. To launch ourselves anew, we need to get out of our heads. We need to act. We learn who we have become—in practice, not in theory—by testing fantasy and reality, not by ‘looking inside.’ Knowing oneself is crucial, but it is usually the outcome of—and not a first input to—the reinvention process,” she said. “I discovered that most people create new working identities on the side at first, by getting involved in extracurricular ventures and weekend projects—the only way we figure out what we really want to do is by giving it a try.”^[5]

In Chittagong, Bangladesh, 14 children were born one after another to the owners of a small Muslim ornament store during the 1930s and ‘40s. As was common in this part of the world, five of the children perished before age 5.

As a young teen, Muhammad Yunus, the third of the remaining nine children, took a pilgrimage thousands of miles from Bangladesh, through India, to the First Pakistan National Boy Scout Jamboree. It changed the 13-year-old’s life, seeding (or more likely, revealing) three very different passions that at the time were strange bedfellows. They would define his life’s legacy: social work, education, and economics.

Yunus loved economics and received a Fulbright Scholarship to dive into it completely, and within the next few years, he earned a Ph.D. and became a professor in the United States.

At 32, he returned home to Bangladesh and landed a government job shortly after the country won its independence from Pakistan.^[6] He was bored to tears, but an epic tragedy would change his life again.

In 1974, devastating floods killed more than ten times the number of people as the 2004 tsunami—over 1.5 million people died in Bangladesh. During the time, this already poorest of poor nations struggled to recover, Yunus conceived the notion of “micro-lending”—the Grameen Bank Project—which defied traditional banking rules.

“Think about what it means to sit with a mother who, after toiling all day on making a bamboo stool, has enough only to starve with her children,” he said, sipping hot tea. Like her parents before her, she was forced to pay off local bullies and brokers like an indentured serf, leaving her just pennies per chair on which to subsist.

He sought out every person in the village of Jobra who lived like this, and met 42 families in “horrible suffering.” In 1976, he gave unsecured loans—with no collateral and no credit history—to each of them. Yunus loaned a total of $27—about 64 cents each was all it took to lift them from starvation to the first steps toward transformation. The small loans were enough to enable the villagers to start small businesses and sell their own special products.

By 2005, Grameen Bank had invested almost $5 billion in millions of families. Yunus’ now famous “dream was to turn begging bowls into cash boxes.” Yunus turned his many different passions into one compelling mission that has also spawned similar programs the world over, from Harlem to Sri Lanka.

No stranger to controversy, Paul Hewson built two of his passions into dual careers that have brought him fame and a sort of infamy.

First, we have to admit we didn’t recognize this Builder when we first met, nor did we know his music or his social activism when we ran into him accidentally in New York. We were standing there talking about our spouses at the World Economic Forum when this sort of short, shaggy Irish-sounding bloke burst into the conversation wearing see-through sunglasses that rock star wannabes often wear. He bragged that he had married his high school sweetheart, Alison “Ali” Stewart, with whom he was still married and had four children.

After a few moments, it was clear that the joke was on us. This was Bono, as Paul Hewson is affectionately known, erupting with infectious enthusiasm and playful banter that would steal the show, even though we were standing there chatting before a press conference he was about to have with Bill Gates. As it turned out, the new millennium’s odd couple of philanthropic activism, Gates and Bono, were there to announce their latest HIV initiative.

Three decades ago, Bono saw an ad to form a band that, after the usual artistic fits and starts, eventually boiled down to enormously popular U2. In his music and his social activism, Bono takes on the biggest of issues: love and hate, life and death, power and politics.

Today, he faces criticism about whether his main love, music, and his second passion, social activism, might both be losing their progressive edginess in favor of self-promotion or political correctness in deference to his growing circle of rich, famous, and powerful friends.

“Aren’t you sleeping with the enemy?” Some anonymous bystander took a cheap shot as we walked quickly down the hall, late for another meeting. The joust was in reference to Bono’s high-profile hobnobbing with the suits, crashing on Bill Gates’ couch or holding court with Presidents Bush and Clinton.

Bono ignored the provocation, and then attacked as if we had started the argument.

“Do you really want these ideas to die?” he snapped. “It’s an everyday holocaust.^[7] Twenty-five million Africans who are HIV-positive will leave behind 40 million AIDS orphans by the end of the decade.” He stopped for a moment in the hallway. His temperature dropped as he sighed, turning from adversary to recruiter. “It’s time we all got a bloody grip on this, don’t you think? It’s pathetic, gutless really. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can do something about this.”

Bono, along with his pals, Bill and Melinda Gates, were named Time Magazine’s 2005 Persons of the Year for their extraordinary alliance in rallying otherwise adversarial economic and political powers to have an actual impact on global social issues.

Wealthy people have been giving piles of money away to good causes for generations. Some of it makes a difference and some doesn’t. But it is obvious when you sit down with Gates and Bono that having impact has always been as big a passion as philanthropy has become for them. But whether they are sitting on the mud floor in a hut in Africa or sipping champagne with the rich and famous in Washington D.C., Gates and Bono know how to work the system in government and business.

“It’s an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation that really can end extreme poverty...[but] we let our own pathetic excuses about how it’s ‘difficult’ to [make social change really happen] to justify our own inaction,” Bono told the World Association of Reporters, entreating the media and public to get with the program. “Be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don’t have is the will, and that’s not a reason that history will accept.”^[8]

History will honor the many passions of physician and storyteller, Rachel Naomi Remen. “I was the only premed in preschool,” she said. Remen is one of the few people we met who was blessed with knowing what her profession would be early in life, but her ideas about medicine and healing were unconventional.

“Because of my own experience with chronic illness, I knew that there was more to the healing of disease than the curing of the body. That there might be a relationship between the mind and the body, and this was seen as absurd.” In 1972, as a young doctor at Stanford Medical School, Remen had studied at Esalen on the California coast—a center of the emerging Human Potential movement—where many of these ideas became woven into her thinking about illness.

Dr. Remen’s course, The Healer’s Art, is now taught by more than 200 faculty in 46 medical schools. Her books are widely read by health professionals and the public and have been translated into 13 languages. She is an internationally recognized teacher, physician, and counselor to physicians and the cancer patients they treat. Her work was featured in the ground-breaking Bill Moyer’s PBS television series, Healing and the Mind. Her books, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal and My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging, are enduring bestsellers. Many thousands of people have been guided in their healing and their healing work by her writings and her example.

But, decades ago, she was ridiculed for her insights about medicine. “The first time I presented at Grand Rounds, I talked about a healthy way to have a disease and the possibility that you can lead a good life even though it wasn’t an easy life. I presented the case histories of patients who through the experience of suffering had become deeper, larger, wiser human beings and suggested that this might become a part of our goal as physicians. There were 400 doctors in the room. By the time I had finished talking, three-quarters of them had left.”

How did she feel about the rejection?

“In a funny way, it didn’t matter,” she mused. “What mattered is that a quarter of the doctors were still in the room. You know, vision is never established by a majority vote.”

Remen is one of the cofounders of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, one of the first residential support retreats for people with cancer. “I think one of the most important lessons that I have learned from working with people with cancer is that people are able to use some of the most difficult experiences in life in order to learn how to live better and help the people around them to live better.”

Often, leaders do not recognize their potential for leadership, especially when they are young, Remen said. They may have a portfolio of passions that don’t neatly fit together. “Their experience is an experience of difference—that they don’t belong, that somehow or other they’re a square peg in a round hole or they don’t fit in, and this can be very painful and lonely. Occasionally, a medical student will tell me that they don’t fit in, that they feel so out of place in today’s medicine that they are considering dropping out. I encourage them to stop trying to fit in because the medicine that they will fit into has not happened yet. It is part of the future. They will never find the medicine that fits for them, they will have to build it. And when they build it for themselves they will build it for all the rest of us, too.

“Many of the world’s great leaders were considered neither great, nor even leaders in their day. Passion is what enables leaders to hold to their integrity despite social pressures,” said Remen. “Real leaders were born to do what they are doing. They may have not known that when they were young, but there is an inner guidance system that makes them perfect for their time and the unmet needs of their culture.

“Leaders are people who don’t compromise their values to gain approval, who live up to their own inner sense of things. And for this reason, leadership is often different than success. Success is culturally defined. When you give the culture what it expects, the culture will reward that. But, a leader is someone who gives the culture what it needs, not what it expects,” Remen contended. “A real leader heals the wounds of their culture,” she said.

“Many of the world’s leaders, in their own time, were not respected, were not seen as successful people, and in retrospect, they served us all.” Builders like Remen, Gates, and Bono have been relentless at sticking with what has mattered to them in their lives, and they’ve always found it particularly appetizing if the issue they’re pursuing had something to do with messing with conventional wisdom about how things have been done for millennia.

That kind of conviction magnetizes support in amazing ways. The world’s second richest person, Warren Buffett, handed over his fortune to the world’s richest couple to get something done that he had hoped his late wife would do had she survived: make a difference with their billions and make a statement doing it. For Buffett, being an investor “is so much fun that I’ll never retire,” but he also insists that his legacy serve social causes rather than make his kids crazy. He is convinced that Melinda and Bill Gates will get the job done. Is it any surprise that Bill Gates and Bono have grown in their effectiveness as social activists when their personal portfolios of passions include Melinda Gates and Ali Stewart? These women are steadfast philanthropists rather than self-absorbed royalty and, in critically important ways, have shown their spouses the path. For many Builders, their portfolio of passions launched them like juggernauts on historic missions that are a far cry from their beginnings—missions to get things done in parts of the world where things haven’t gotten better for generations. For Builders, there is not just one thing to do with their life. Every passion counts.