Those who do not know how to weep with their wholeheart don’t know how to laugh either. | ||
| --Golda Meir | ||
It’s like the Wizard of Oz. We’re looking for a wizard seeking a heart, a brain, courage, and the wizard says you already have these things. All you need to do is to use it. When you believe in your great indomitable self, then all things are possible. | ||
| --Marva Collins | ||
There are at least four good reasons (notice you always have good reasons) to feel sidetracked, intimidated, and diverted from building the life you want to create. Successful people told us that they’ve been given far fewer reasons to follow their dreams than reasons they should abandon them.
“Feels sometimes like you’re outnumbered and outgunned from the start!” sighed Ogilvy and Mather CEO, Shelly Lazarus, one of the world’s most powerful people in advertising. She insisted that if you talk with people anywhere in the world (she has operations in over 70 countries), you’ll witness the same litany about their rocky path. Almost every successful person has a story of internal torment, whether you’re from Beijing or Boston, Brussels or Bangalore.
Think of yourself as a “hero in your own miniseries,” said Lazarus. (Of course, we tend to do this anyway!) Whether you let the forces working against you get you down, or you choose instead to move boldly ahead with your plans, there will be suffering involved either way. But it’s worth the fight. “The good news is that when you finally go after what is meaningful to you,” she insisted, “you have happier endings.”
Happy endings come from listening to that little voice inside your head—some call it the whisper—about what matters to you. It is a voice that echoes through every cell in your body, straining to be heard like a silent scream. It’s a nagging, often irritating “need” craving a response.
The tragedy for most people is that there is a gaggle of other voices trying to drown out the whisper. Whether it’s the ranting of your own self-doubt or the concerns of loved ones and business partners, there are many forces vested in seeing you not change. These forces would be more comfortable if risky notions—like following your passion—were locked silent in the basement of your soul. Even when your dream is bound and gagged downstairs, you can still hear and feel that desperate, distant cry in the middle of the night. With loud, “rational” voices shouting upstairs, chances are slim that you’ll pay attention to the whispering voice of your spirit. This gag order on your dream, left in place, will make you miserable. Builders plow ahead despite self-doubt, delusional bosses, desperate spouses, and outlaw in-laws who have high control needs. And, of course, there are always those incoming hostiles—media messages proclaiming that without consuming the right stuff, you cannot be successful or happy.
There are at least four traps that undermine your ability to respond to the silent scream. You might think that enduringly successful people don’t have these problems. Builders claim to have had more than their share of each, and you’ll likely find them all too familiar.
Assertions that your ideas won’t make a worthy career are often a screen to hide worries (legitimate or otherwise) over security and scarcity. Enduringly successful people say this issue rarely comes up until you announce plans to do something just for the love of it. “For goodness sake, you can’t make money doing that,” the voices nag. “What were you thinking?” cries another. Builders rise above the noise.
As a child, Tom loved war toys and outer space, and developed a passion for naval history as a teen. Poor eyesight frustrated his hopes to serve in the military. After getting a degree in English, Tom got practical. He started working as an insurance broker, and then joined a brokerage firm owned by his wife’s grandfather. He ended up buying the firm. It was a “good living.” To leave this lucrative small business to become a novelist would have been lunacy.
For around a dozen years, Tom heard that silent scream as he tinkered around the edges of his dream. He devoured military literature in the name of research. Still, the only writing credits he accumulated were a letter to the editor and a brief article on the MX missile.[1]
Almost two decades passed before a novel emerged. In his early forties, Thomas Leo Clancy Jr.’s first book, The Hunt for Red October, was published.[2] Literary reviewers to this day still say his writing isn’t great, but his thrillers sell like hotcakes—as books, videogames, and motion pictures.
By his 50th birthday, he had a string of huge hits on the bestseller list and signed a book deal with Pearson Custom Publishing and Penguin Putnam, Inc. (both part of Pearson Education), which paid him $50 million for the world (English language only) rights for just two of his many books. He then signed another agreement ($25 million on this one) for a four-year book/multimedia deal. And Tom was just getting warmed up!
Granted, you won’t run across a Tom Clancy every day of the week. But here’s the deal: Enduringly successful people eventually answer the silent scream. Whether perceived by others as worthy or not—at some point in their journey, they embrace their dream for better or for worse. It is the only journey of lasting success.
If popular culture had its way, our lives would be dedicated to the relentless pursuit of things we are told we can’t live without—as if it was actually true that things go better with Coke, $200 sneakers, cool clothes, and personality dialysis, plus a new, different, and better wife, husband, lover, friend, and coworker.
We want to impress colleagues and satisfy loved ones with achievements we think they’ll envy. At the same time, we seek escape from the pain of envy ourselves. Craving acceptance, we pack our driveways, resumes, and ring fingers with what we call BSOs—Bright Shiny Objects—fancy cars, club memberships, designer clothing, advanced degrees, high-priced real estate, or anything else that’s paraded as belonging to the lifestyles of the rich, smart, and famous.
This is not some high-minded, hypocritical pitch to abandon your material things or your education. (We’re rather fond of our own, and we met plenty of Builders who love the things that they have.) Too many experts who claim to be antimaterialist have their own secret stash, or are trading up to bigger BSOs—like more fame, power, or spiritual elitism, to feed the ever-hungry ego monster.
For the most part, we didn’t hear that anything was inherently bad about BSOs, but on the other hand, no Builder said that they expect these things to keep them happy.
Although there may be nothing intrinsically wrong with having stuff, too many of us get lost on a treadmill of acquisition, chasing whatever we believe things will go better with. The trouble is, you can never get enough of what you don’t really need to make you happy. No wonder folks become chronically depressed! As the Rolling Stones belted out, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” For satisfaction, you have to listen to what matters to you, not what is blaring from the mouths of friends, foes, and family.
It’s ironic that if you become wealthier, for example, and your appetite for having nicer material things increases, there is an increasing risk that very little that you run across in the world is good enough. The more you’re self-conscious of being judged by others for your higher standards of taste and material possessions, the world you may tolerate shrinks. Worse yet, the less of it you may actually enjoy. Instead of experiencing a greater diversity of pleasures with effortless ease, the stress and imagined obligation of showing up with style increases.
David Stern has had a front-row seat on the perils of superstardom and BSOs for 40 years. The commissioner of the National Basketball Association has a reputation for being tough—even controversial—on the job, but he’s one of the most down-to-earth, engaging people when you meet him. He told us that the athletes “who love the game for the challenge,” more than the “distracting goodies” that it can provide, seem not surprisingly to have better relationships, fewer problems, and “fun for the long haul,” he said.
Stern heard his own silent scream four decades ago when he graduated from Columbia Law School and started doing outside legal work for the NBA. He loved it even though the future of the fledgling NBA was somewhat uncertain at the time. He was recruited to join full time as an employee “for a two-year stint,” he said, to start the NBA’s internal legal department in 1978. He was elected commissioner in 1984, the same year that basketball legend Michael Jordan turned professional. Stern engineered a turnaround of the near-bankrupt NBA back then to an enormously successful, swiftly growing global brand over two decades.
“The role when I first stepped in was crisis manager. It was lawsuits between owners and leagues, lawsuits between players and leagues, and really spending so much time focusing on collective bargaining and just getting through the day—worrying about merging clubs, not meeting payroll, how do we do it, and actually, drug scandals. Early on, we had players who were found to have used drugs and we dealt with the issue of being the first league where those revelations were made. And so we had to deal with that,” he said. The NBA had no glamour or BSOs to sustain Stern’s commitment in those difficult times. It was his loyalty to personal meaning—the silent scream—his passion that kept him going.
“In the old days, we were the opposite of Groucho Marx. We’d be happy to go to any club that would have us. And when you’re struggling, that’s the way you are.” You’re better off when you remember to be grateful—when you never forget where you came from and what little you used to have, he said.
A simple way to look at whether BSOs own you—or whether you own them—is to ask yourself: Would you still want that stuff if people who mattered to you didn’t care one way or the other? How about if they hated it? The idea here is to see whose BSO this is. Ultimately, no form of acquisition (having) or activity (doing) can lastingly deliver what we long for—the authentic experience of being fully alive.
A popular exercise in leadership training is to have you write your eulogy. The problem here is participants tend to create a lofty list of things that sound impressive or heart-warming to the other people in the room—as if the exercise was a competition to be voted the most popular dead guy! (Move over, American Idol!) At your real funeral, your loved ones will spin a tale about you that makes them feel good. “If you want to know the truth,” said networking king Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, “go to the cocktail party afterwards and hear what that fellow was really all about.”
Brazilian psychologist Tina de Souza recalled “I was talking to one client who said she hates to have someone touch her possessions. ‘Oh, don’t touch my car. Don’t open my armoire, or don’t do this or that because it’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine.’ The poor woman was so anguished. I told her, ‘Listen—imagine if right now you died. Okay? You’re gone. Now think about your stuff, your beautiful dresses in your armoire. Probably right now, the people who love you, your family, or your neighbor, they are going through organizing your treasures. Who wants this ugly thing? Who wants that? Why did she marry him?’” Everything you left behind will be handled, misunderstood, and second guessed, she said. Under those circumstances, what is still important to you?
When you visualize your possessions and relationships from the perspective of being dead, hopefully, you’ll find people and things that you actually do care about. This is kind of a brutal way to think about it, but it’s interesting to see what still matters when you actually do this. Does any of it really mean anything? Don’t assume that just because something is a thing, it shouldn’t really matter. Take an open and honest inventory without pre-judging what should be good or bad. When you use your imagination to shuffle through your stuff and your relationships post mortem, you can gain some priceless insight into where to invest more or less of your time and energy.
From our earliest moments, most of us are told to make something of ourselves. But chances are that the people who tell you what you should make of yourself have no good idea of what to make of themselves. It’s a mistake to make major choices about your career and your life based entirely on chasing a dream promoted by other people.
“Conventional wisdom has it that you should look to those who know you best,” says Herminia Ibarra in How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career.[3] “Friends and family—with whom you share a long history—can offer insight into your true nature, and they have your best interests at heart; professionals add a dose of pragmatism, keep you grounded in the realities of the marketplace. But when it comes to reinventing ourselves, the people who know best are the ones most likely to hinder rather than help us. They may wish to be supportive, but they tend to reinforce—or even desperately try to preserve—the old identities we are trying to shed.”
Beware of your natural tendency to rationalize what you should or ought to do as defined by other people. Humans are rationalization machines. One thing we often rationalize is working to become pretty good at a profession we don’t particularly like.
The difference between pretty good and great is huge; it’s the difference between a life that’s half full and success built to last. Let’s call it the Seduction of Competence (or the natural tendency we have to follow a False Profit.) If you’re like most people, you are perfectly capable of developing adequate skills for a career chosen under social or economic pressures—usually self-imposed, but often as a result of being seduced into doing something politically correct to please others by giving them what they expect. Perhaps you chose as you did because it gave you status—or because it was something you thought would be a “safe” choice. There are no safe choices when it comes to lasting success unless the selection is based on real meaning.
Do you care more about being loved than being what you love? Do you feel you have to choose between the people who matter to you and doing the things that matter to you?
In his book Talking to Ducks, James A. Kitchens explains there are two major types of joy: internal joy and external joy. Internal joy comes from within, but external joy comes and goes with whatever is happening in our environment. It is extrinsic because it arises from the outside. When the circumstances change in one direction, joy comes. When fortune reverses, joy vanishes.
People who have found success that lasts pursue their goals because they matter to them, often despite popularity or recognition. Most people do it the opposite way: They do things despite what matters to them and because of their need for popularity or recognition.
Yvon Chouinard never seemed to worry much about political correctness. He started climbing mountains in 1953 when he was 14 years old and has been an outspoken environmentalist for decades. Climbers of that day climbed by placing single-use soft iron pitons—the only kind avail-able—which were then left in the rock, defacing the environment. In 1957, he went to a junkyard and bought a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, some tongs, and hammers, and started teaching himself how to blacksmith.[4] Chouinard, who became a world-class rock climber in his early twenties, made his first reusable pitons from an old harvester blade and tried them out on ascents of the Lost Arrow Chimney and the North Face of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite. The word spread, and soon friends had to have Chouinard’s hardened steel reusable pitons. Before he knew it, he was in business—selling climbers the gear from the back of his car. He could forge two of his in an hour, and sold them for $1.50 each. He’d subsidize his income by collecting recyclable deposits on cans and bottles, thus serving the environment and allowing it to serve him.
As a staunch environmentalist, he claimed to be embarrassed about the idea of becoming a businessman. “I just really love the outdoors,” Yvon said, “but I wasn’t sure whether business was a worthy aspiration.” Now nearly 70, this New Age outdoorsman claims that even today, it is as difficult to call himself a businessman as it is for “someone to admit to being an alcoholic or even a lawyer.”
But he realized that he could use his company as a platform for many passions. In 1973, Chouinard led a group of surfers in Ventura, California, to found outdoor outfitter Patagonia, Inc., a private company with current sales of over a quarter billion dollars. The firm’s “mission statement is to use business to find solutions to the environmental crisis. I’m constantly pushing everyone in the company to realize that’s why we are in business,” he said. “That is the reason. We are not in the business to make a profit. We’re not in the business to make a product. We’re in the business to really change the way other companies operate.” Chouinard, who is also author of Let My People Go Surfing, was not seduced away from his dream by his extreme aversion for business and the compromises that he and his community of green friends imagined it might require. He came to the conclusion that if you’re going “to change the world and government,” you can do that “inside out” by changing the way business is done.
“I started out as a dull municipal beat reporter writing about dull municipal meetings in the 1970s, many of which are still apparently going on,” said humorist and bestselling author Dave Barry. “Then I became a dull writing coach vainly attempting to make dull business people become less dull. It was kind of a dull job. But everyone else thought it was a good idea. After all, it was a living,” he said.
“I was already middle-aged and had a mortgage and family to support when the Miami Herald called.” He had been moonlighting writing columns, and they invited him to take the plunge full time as a humor columnist. “It was scary [to leave a stable consulting job] but there was no other choice, in my view.” For Barry, humor was an itch he had to scratch. It was a “relentless irritation. And believe me, comics aren’t fun to be around when we’re relentlessly irritated.”
You may have noticed that some folks “hate happy people” just as much as they whine about unhappy people, Barry said. When you find something that you love that matters to you, chasing that dream has a tendency to make you gush about it in ways that annoy the working stiffs around you.
In 1988, Barry won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary and said that, not coincidentally, “I’m better at doing things that I’m good at, which tend to be things that I like doing.” He says he has many friends and colleagues who have opted for following their passion—the silent scream—over the better judgment of well-meaning loved ones. “When they made the choice to do what they love, some started making more money and some didn’t, but all are much better at what they do and they’re having a blast.”
“Some people do it for the attention,” Barry said about his choice to become a columnist. “But that’s a slippery slope. You never can predict what people will think of your work, and that changes day to day. If you crave adulation, then go work on stage. If you love to write, then write.”
Someone who knows about the perils of public recognition is Sally Field, a director and actress who still commands popularity after four decades in television and film.
Having played silly roles as a beach babe, bad-boy girlfriend, and a flying nun, Field’s early work never predicted her potential to be a serious actress or her Emmy- and Oscar-winning performances that followed.
“I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect,” she told the Academy upon acceptance of her second Oscar. “The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it, and I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!”[5] Most of us cringe when we think about this famously embarrassing admission. She has suffered lifelong parody for the remark.
But you don’t have to be in show business to have had that very same poignant worry about being loved in your heart. Now if you do—fess up (not in public, of course)—just admit it to yourself. We all know that not-so-silent scream demanding recognition. We may hate this part of us, yet our ego still clings to the craving, more or less. This egoistic need may never be entirely vanquished, but you must manage it if you want to enjoy lasting success. You can’t wait for a standing ovation to validate what matters to you.
Rob Reiner played Michael “Meathead” Stivic in the classic Emmy Award-winning series All in the Family, and has directed several movies, including When Harry Met Sally. There is a classic scene in that 1989 film where Billy Crystal sits blandly at Katz’s Deli with Meg Ryan, who fakes an orgasm to the stunned delight of those within earshot.
“I’ll have what she’s having!” a breathless diner exclaims, overhearing the performance. (Turns out the woman was Estelle Reiner, Rob’s mother, and Billy Crystal is credited with the legendary wisecrack.)
“But isn’t that what we all want out of life?” Reiner asked. We see someone else filled with extraordinary excitement—experiencing joy without relying on public acceptance or political correctness—wouldn’t you want that in your life without faking it? “Well, I think that’s what you want hopefully, to...feel that kind of freedom and that kind of happiness. We’d all like that.”
Sally Field thinks she has one practical way to do that.
“The only thing you have power over is to get good at what you do. That’s all there is; there ain’t no more!” Field ranted to us about how much better off she is in her life when she’s doing what she loves rather than “working on herself,” sitting around worrying about what other people think about what she should be doing. You’ll be hearing much more on how taking action beats navel gazing later in this book.
“It’s the ‘sitting and kvetching’ that drives you nuts.” If you do that, you’re at risk of being seduced back into doing politically correct things rather than doing what matters to you. “And the way you become a leader, a role model, or any such, you know, high-falutin’ terminology, is to have something to give back. The only way you have something to give back is to go do something; get off your rear end and go DO something! And that doesn’t mean I’m going to go, you know, build housing for the underprivileged—that’s good too, but go become a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian Chief. Go work your tail off and achieve something for yourself—some specific thing. Become excellent at something, at anything, you love.”
“And if you say, I don’t have anything I love, well then there’s a real problem right there, and you have to sit down and say, ‘Why don’t I have anything that I love?’ What in me has walked away from every inclination that I had, that I had found something, something that sparked me, something that was for me, and I didn’t do it. You have to go back, you know, just recount every moment of your life, what was it, what was that one thing that I did that I loved?” said Field.
Many people wait for an epiphany—to be “hit by lightning” or hear an unambiguous answer delivered at the decibel level of a rock concert. It almost never goes down like this. The reality is that it usually takes years of hemming and hawing, or trial and tribulation, of trying and not quite getting it right, but feeling closer and closer, warmer and warmer, to the real thing. This is often a subtle connect-the-dots affair.
Sometimes, you’ll have one moment that seems to catalyze everything into clarity, but that discovery is usually an outcome of trying a lot of stuff to see what works (also an idea explored in Built to Last). Eventually, it all makes sense after much hand wringing and experimentation, but not always at the beginning.
One major source of guilt and confusion about the silent scream comes from the conundrum about whether to please you OR please others. Society counts on you for the latter. And you’re afraid it may be too damn self-serving to do the former.
But Builders think differently about that: Does it get you excited AND help others at the same time? Does it serve you and serve others? For enduringly successful people, life is rarely a matter of either/or. What you hear from high achievers is that when you see your work as doing good and doing well, you stick with it through thick and thin.
Leaders of “visionary” organizations think in terms of the “Genius of the AND rather than the Tyranny of the OR.”[6] For example, they don’t see making money AND making a difference as a contradiction. That’s also true for enduringly successful people. They don’t believe that the choice is between serving a cause OR serving themselves. They choose both. Moreover, for Builders, the genius of the AND is not a fifty-fifty deal; it’s a hundred-hundred deal. The passion that gets them up in the morning is just as much about what turns them on as it is about what it does for others. Enduringly successful people have concluded that their commitment to the service of others is also in their self-interest.
When it comes to their goals, they’re practical AND idealistic at the same time. They devote themselves to what they are trying to build over the long term AND focus on getting things done every day—and validation by the world is not their first concern.[7]
In fact, the genius of the AND is not just a matter of balancing the short term and long term—or accounting for your needs and those of outside stakeholders. It’s all that and more. There are actually three legs on this stool, or rather, three circles, as you saw in Chapter 1, “From Great to Lasting— Redefining Success.” It’s a matter of getting meaning AND thought AND action all in alignment to get things done.
Note that serving others is not the same as pleasing others. Most of us feel the need to “get our ticket punched”—external validation that our mission has meaning—to rationalize that indeed, what we do matters. In the process of consciously or unconsciously pursuing being loved, we inevitably undermine the creation of what we love.
“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work,” said Apple cofounder and CEO, Steve Jobs, in his now famous and intimate 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.[8] “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle,” he insisted.
Job’s unwed mother was struggling and decided to put him up for adoption and better his opportunities before he was born. When she learned that the family that was about to adopt him didn’t have college degrees, she panicked, refusing to sign the papers for months, until the new parents promised to give Steve access to a first-class education. To the working-class family, this was a challenging commitment.
“I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out (after just six months) and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made,” Jobs told the Stanford graduates.
“I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the nickel deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”
As a dropout, Jobs could take any “class” he wanted, and he was seduced by the beauty and grace of a novel (to him) art form: calligraphy. “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life,” he thought. But it was that passion for beautiful type that came back to him ten years later when he was designing the Mac. Had he not taken that class, “personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.”
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in the 1970s, they had a bold goal to put a computer in every home. The two Steves accurately predicted the future, except it was not their company that shipped all those PCs. Apple is hotter and hipper and growing faster today than it has in years, but it still has a relatively small market share after more than 30 years in business.
What may be more important is that Job’s early vision to create a beautiful and useful electronic canvas has defined computing for all time. This lasting impact on history will outlive the man and his company. Living your passion despite all odds may not make you the biggest or the richest player, but is this what matters? Try to imagine a world without Apple and Pixar, and you realize what it means to bring creativity and beauty to a technology that had neither before these companies provided both. Builders say a legacy like this is what makes life worth living.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs insisted. “Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice—and most important—have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
The lesson we take from highly accomplished people is to be mindful about what you wish for, but don’t let that stop you on your path to redefining success. Doing things despite, not because of, the political correctness of the path—whether it’s a small step in your life or a giant one in your career—is the price of admission to almost every enduring life of lasting impact.