Chapter 22

Reflections and Second Thoughts

In the preceding pages, I’ve shared with you some of the mental habits and day-to-day practices that I believe have helped me succeed over the past six decades across four careers. These principles and practices grow out of a mind-set most people would regard as unreasonable. But to the extent you make this mind-set yours, you can achieve more than you ever thought possible. Demand the unreasonable of yourself and you will exceed everyone’s expectations, not least your own.

The unreasonable life is lived with confidence, decisiveness, and drive, but it does not guarantee happiness. Success cannot inoculate you against difficult times. Every life brings regret, tragedy, and crisis—the moments that test our ability to cope. My life, however rich in experience and material rewards it may outwardly appear, is no exception.

I take pride in my achievements but I recognize my mistakes. I know what I would like my legacy to be, but I also know I can’t control what others will make of it. At the very least, I hope that what I have done will survive me and continue improving the lives of others long after mine has ended.

My Parents’ Unintentional Gift

Looking back, I can see that my parents laid the foundation of my unreasonable life by giving me unusual independence at an early age. They both came from big families and, growing up in the Bronx, I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me on weekends. My closest friends were my cousin Rube, who lived near us, and—later—my pal Burt Binder, a high school classmate with whom I remained close until he passed away a few years ago.

But mostly, I was alone. I had no siblings. Between the ages of 7 and 14, I had no one I really could call a close friend. My parents both worked long hours. In the free time he had, my father usually hung out with friends. My mother worked late into the night keeping his books.

Being so solitary at a young age shaped me into the man I am today. I learned to think and make decisions independently long before most people do. I never had to seek anyone’s approval, so I didn’t develop the habit of wanting it. I learned to be comfortable with silence. I acquired the attitudes that many people would later find unreasonable—a thick skin and a laser focus. Many people would consider a solitary childhood sad, perhaps even a misfortune. But for me it became a school of opportunity—and I made the most of it.

My Sons and My Choice—On That Elusive Work-Life Balance

My father worked hard to give me the childhood I had, but he wasn’t often a part of it. He usually filled his leisure hours with friends. But he still tried to spend time with me when he could. He earned enough money to take us on vacations in the winter. He took me to political rallies. We were in the car together when we heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. And throughout my adult years, I knew he was deeply proud of me. He carried an early newspaper article about Kaufman and Broad in his wallet until his last day.

I tried to do more for my sons than my father could do for me. I had always wanted two children so that they would have each other’s company in addition to mine. Jeffrey and Gary were born in 1956 and 1959, respectively. I taught them how to ride bikes, fly kites, and play chess. I tried to help Jeffrey learn to read and overcome his dyslexia, a condition with which I had struggled as a kid. But it was Edye who spent long hours doing visual training exercises with him. I went to Gary’s baseball games when my hours allowed. He was an impressive athlete, something I never had been. I insisted on having dinner as a family in the evenings whenever I got off work. But I confess: I was serious, focused, demanding, and not much fun. I took the boys with me to tour subdivisions, and now I realize that’s not exactly how kids want to spend their weekends.

I missed too many moments, and I regret it. I know it from watching the way other parents are with their children. Jeffrey’s and Gary’s childhoods coincided with the years of expansion at Kaufman and Broad. We moved once to Arizona when they were very young and again to Los Angeles. I traveled twice a month to our other offices, particularly when we were opening and trying to master new markets, as we did throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Time with my sons was precious but unfortunately rare.

Lines from a poem by William Butler Yeats, “The Choice,” have always given me some small solace when I reflect on my family life:

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work.

By now, you know which I chose. Although I am proud of my accomplishments, I sometimes wonder whether I should have chosen differently.

But perhaps Yeats’s choice is too stark. If I could do it again, I would have tried to find perfection in a balance between the two, as I hope you will try to do. An unreasonable life can take you far in your career, but sometimes it can take you too far from home.

Don’t Let Others Define Your Failures or Your Successes

No matter the sort of life you choose to lead, you will wonder if you chose correctly. Whatever choices you make about life, work, or the balance between them, others will second-guess or even criticize you. My family and I, thankfully, have kept much of our privacy. But my work is public, and along with respect and accolades, I have faced much criticism.

As I have told you, I ignore criticism that is merely carping, but I do accept it when it makes sense. It’s important to understand the events you regard as failures—but never let other people decide what they are. I know when I fell short in my career. There were failed deals and negotiations and purchases. There were relationships that went dry. And there were what I consider the true missteps. As a young accountant, I was good at numbers but bad at being decorous with the higher-ups. As a homebuilder, I chose the wrong time to leave my company in someone else’s hands, and I also made perhaps the biggest mistake of my business life.

In 1966 Kaufman and Broad formed Nation Wide Cablevision. This early entry into the cable industry represented a very shrewd move on our part—almost. In 1972 our three main businesses—homebuilding, life insurance, and cable—all demanded a great deal of capital, so we sold Nation Wide to Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) for a 15 percent share of TCI, which we immediately cashed in for $23.5 million. It felt like a coup at the time because we had shed a business that we knew couldn’t grow without heavy spending on technology and infrastructure. TCI, however, went on to become the country’s largest cable provider. It was later acquired by AT&T and then sold to Comcast. Comcast today is worth $73 billion—something utterly unimaginable when we got out of the cable business. I should have sold the homebuilding company and kept cable.

Then there are the moments that are disappointments rather than clear failures. One of the most difficult periods in my business career, in fact, occurred through no fault of my own. At SunAmerica, we protected our customers’ savings by refusing to bet the farm on junk bonds and other risky investments. But a lot of other insurers did not take the same precautions. Our company fell under regulatory scrutiny simply because we were in the same business. Trying to assure regulators that our books were clean of high-risk investments was one of the more stressful experiences of my life. We managed to convince them after a series of meetings and after promising to adopt stricter regulations for ourselves.

Finally, in philanthropy, no matter how proud I am of our foundations’ work in education, I am overwhelmed by how much remains to be done. We can’t possibly restore America’s public schools to greatness without a unified call from the public. Everyone has to work together to fix the system so that teachers and students have the support they need to succeed.

My Proudest Moments—They May Not Be What You Think

Just as it is important to know your failures, it’s critical to be clear about what you consider your successes. I’m proud of making life better for people by building affordable homes for families, creating secure futures for retirees, generating high-performing returns for shareholders and employees, boosting the education of American children, improving the health of people around the globe, and broadening the perspective of museum-goers with the chance to appreciate the art of their own time.

I’ve always been driven to build, to create, to challenge the status quo. But I don’t define myself by my bank account. That’s why I’m particularly proud that the companies I created were known as places that treated employees, customers, vendors, and competitors fairly and conducted their business with integrity under my watch.

I’m even prouder of the early acquisitions and decisions that created SunAmerica than the billions we made merging it with AIG. If you’re an entrepreneur, you have to value the rush you get from the building, not the paycheck—otherwise, the work is just too hard and the sacrifices too great.

I’m proud that in 1954 I became the youngest certified public accountant in Michigan. If you’ve ever read a long journalistic profile of me, you’ll probably recall that fact. That’s because I keep mentioning it to reporters. After being a fairly mediocre student my whole life, I was glad to learn, at age 20, that I actually could excel at something. I’m happy to note, though, that in 2010, that distinction passed to Bradley Brennan, a University of Michigan–Dearborn graduate who beat my record by four months.

I could choose to take pride in Kaufman and Broad’s 100,000th house in 1977—and I am proud of that—but I’m more pleased with having gone public in 1961 on the American Stock Exchange and then becoming the first homebuilder listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1969. I was only 28 at the time of the first listing, and young entrepreneurs were not quite the hot investment prospects they would become in the era of Silicon Valley.

Even more than creating a publicly traded company, I am proud simply of having started a business that got off the ground. In the end, nothing else matters more. If you’ve ever pulled it off, be proud of yourself. If you’re trying to do it, set your goals high but take pride in the most essential success of simply beginning. As you go, always define success for yourself, not by someone else’s criteria. Don’t judge yourself on awards and bank balances or strive for some magical number of fans, friends, or followers, thinking your work is done if you just “make it.” As long as you’re around, your work—whether that’s your job, your family, your philanthropy, or your pursuit of knowledge—is never done.

I Hope My Greatest Achievement Is Yet to Come

I take to heart the idea that my work is never done. That’s why I’m most proud of my fourth career: philanthropy. People often assume that the wealthy engage in philanthropy out of guilt. That might have been true for Andrew Carnegie, whose career in business involved some deplorable incidents. But for most of this generation of philanthropists, it is a matter of applying skills learned from what we’ve done best—running a business—to the most pressing problems of our time. It’s not about guilt. It’s about obligation—the duties of decency and solidarity that each of us owes this country.

I’m also proud of my work on behalf of Los Angeles. Critics have predicted the demise of Los Angeles since it was a dusty pueblo alongside an unreliable river, but my favorite city survives and thrives. To anyone who fears for its future, I reply that Los Angeles has become one of four major cultural capitals of the world, and Hollywood movies still enchant and enthrall the world more than any other artistic product from anywhere. Downtown L.A. has a vibrancy that rivals many other American cities and that will only increase with development on Grand Avenue. Industries that are key to the future of our country, like technology, biotech, and energy, are expanding in Los Angeles. However difficult the recession is, I have confidence in the long-term future of our city and country.

My family came to America from a country that ultimately would murder its Jews. Here they found more than safety. They found work and opportunity and the security to participate in politics and to speak their beloved Yiddish to one another in their home. I was educated in free public schools and in a great university whose costs were modest enough that even a son of lower-middle-class parents could easily meet them.

In Los Angeles I found perhaps the world’s greatest meritocracy—a city that apportions success according to your own efforts and not according to family, background, or class. In my working lifetime here, I’ve happily watched as even this city’s old barriers built on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation have continued to fall away.

Obviously, you want to give back to a place like that. I’m very proud of my role in establishing the Museum of Contemporary Art and in helping raise the money to build Disney Hall. I’m honored to have launched well-planned rather than piecemeal development downtown, secured funding for a park on Grand Avenue, and seeded medical research at Caltech, USC, UCLA, and UC San Francisco. I also expect that The Broad will one day be a respected contemporary art museum, patronized as faithfully as the Frick, the Morgan Library, and the Norton Simon.

The philanthropic work of our foundations, although based in Los Angeles, reaches far beyond the city’s boundaries. In education—certainly the most difficult of our philanthropic efforts—we have invested across the country in smart people and institutions that will keep challenging the status quo. We have no choice but to radically transform our schools or else be surpassed by other countries not only in educational achievement but also in economic growth and innovation. The solutions to the serious problems that face our world—a recessionary economic environment, unsustainable energy consumption, skyrocketing health care costs—start with education. Moreover, we have no more right to starve our children of knowledge and the ability to apply it than we do to starve them of food.

In medicine, I know we are laying the foundation for groundbreaking understanding of disease, treatment, and hopefully prevention. Of all we have done over the past six decades, the effort I am most proud of is the creation of The Broad Institute. It is already first in the world in genomics. We have a brilliant leader in Eric Lander, large federal grants, and institutional support from two of the best universities in the world, Harvard and MIT. We have 1,900 gifted young scientists and a board that includes the presidents of Harvard and MIT, Genentech Chairman Art Levinson, and Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM. The biomedical investments of The Broad Foundations will improve the lives of many more people than my businesses could ever reach and for many more years.

Medicine was something I knew nothing about. But when Edye and I visited Eric Lander’s lab in Cambridge, we got a feel for it and we saw the raw talent in the room. As usual, I was focused on the practical—what could we do and how much it would cost. Edye, though, has a quicker and just as astute instinct when it comes to people. She caught on fast to Eric, who is an accomplished communicator. We weren’t even back in Los Angeles before she started to say, “We should give him all our money.”

The Best Move I Ever Made

I began this book by telling you that the one constant throughout my career has been the paperweight Edye gave me with the quote from George Bernard Shaw. But the real constant in my life is, of course, Edye.

We have been married for almost 58 years. She realized early to how unreasonable I am, and although she doesn’t always like it, she loves and understands me. She brings me back down to earth when I need it and pulls me out of the weeds when I wander. She listens to me and advises me. She teaches me about the best things in life: art, companionship, and family. I am fond of saying that, while a lot of people don’t love me, everyone loves Edye. It’s true. Everyone does, me most of all.

We had to learn, sometimes, to live around each other. I agreed to forgo mortgages, to stay in the same Los Angeles neighborhood for decades, and to not let my mind wander too far during certain family gatherings. She gives me a pass on operas and symphonies, which I’ve rarely attended, but I encourage her to go with her friends. Mostly she allows me to be as I am—always working, always restless, but always anchored.

We have not always had an easy road and have had our rough patches. Our most difficult trial was decades ago. Edye had a serious medical crisis when she was only 20 years old. No matter that it grows more distant with each passing day, no matter that she and I are healthy in our late 70s, thinking about that time still tears me apart. I spent the months when she was sick trying my hardest and often nearly failing simply to live through each day.

I am grateful for every day we’ve had together since, for those dark days that taught me what really matters, and for the days before, when I was just barely hanging on to my job, when I was only an artlessly unreasonable nobody Edye loved.

Back then, when I first began talking about starting a business, I remember her joking that I had to do it and I had to be good at it because she didn’t know how to cook. We ate out all the time or at our parents’ houses. One of the first meals we ate in our own place—a tiny rented home—was not your usual dinner. Edye had managed to make a Pillsbury chocolate cake by following the recipe on the box. I came home from my job at a small accounting firm, Goldman and Golman, to the wonderful smell of baking. We split the cake down the middle, and we each ate half. It remains one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

I have made poor choices, in business, in my personal life, and in the way I balanced those two. But I made one brilliant choice that outshines everything else I’ve done: I asked Edye to marry me. Who you spend your life with—much more so than how you choose to spend it—is the most important decision you can make. Do it right. That’s the best advice I can give you.