Manifesto for the Second Half

January 29, 2009
My dear Friend,

Thanks again for schlepping out at 6:30 on Sunday morning and speaking with me instead of being at home to welcome the day with your wife and kids.  Your care and nurture of our relationship – now 25 years – is remarkable. I don’t take it for granted.  I well remember our first encounters, how naturally we were attracted to each other, and the easy way we could communicate then, just as we do today.

My life is blessed with hundreds of friendships that are as truthful and authentic as ours, but there are very few I enjoy more.  That sounds, perhaps even is, a sentimental statement that distracts from the more fundamental message I want to convey to you now.  Indulge me, please.  Substance lies within.

One of the reasons I think we value our connection is that, besides many years of data and observation, the underlying integrity of our professional advice (Can some outrageous goal be accomplished?  Should I continue along my career trajectory?  How do we cajole agenda-driven individuals into “doing the right thing?”) is based on an unusual transparency into our personal lives.  One can’t plan this.  It just happens.

We have both been in the position where we’ve had to come to the other with bad news, or, more delicately, had to say, “do you remember when I told you about [fill in the blank]?  Well, it ends up that ranks with the stupidest things I’ve ever done or said, and it is wrong, and here’s why”.  And the other guy knows he was just told something important and true; we don’t waste time on credibility or recrimination, and can focus instead on the data, yes, even if the data proves to be wrong or inconsistent or disappointing.

Why do I begin a letter to you like this? Because our discussion at dawn about your next steps, and the large changes you are contemplating, touched upon the colossal issues of fairness and trust, and I feel – with all appropriate disclaimers – I may see something about you that you don’t see well yourself.  I am instinctively (and protectively) compelled to say something to you about it.

To wit:  your frustration and boredom with your professional duties, and your intuitive desire to find another way to contribute is overdue. I hope your next step will be a humongous leap.  There’s no spreadsheet model for that.

The first statement is clear as stands, but the second requires a little more explanation.

I am not advocating recklessness.  You have a special needs child whose support will require care and planning as you get older, and there are economic constraints that I understand in only the most superficial way.  Indeed, when I speak of impact and legacy, I don’t mean “how do we get you more money” or even the stability of that cash flow.  I mention it here in a clumsy but no less heartfelt way so that you know I know this, and am mindful of it.

The message – of my ambition and hope for you – transcends the household decisions we both make every day, and where I abstractly recognize that yours are more difficult than mine, at least when it comes to one of your children.  But given how far you’ve come, my unbending faith in your intellect, your clarity, and your potential, it is – as I said over coffee – perhaps not inappropriate to share a fresh perspective.

So much for the disclaimer.

I’ve heard you many times lament the inevitable inefficiencies of the large company you work for, the internecine battles and injustices, and, today, the billion dollar (my hands shake as I write this) bonfire of your company’s investment vanities.  Less qualified (thoughtful, honest, intelligent, creative, committed, loyal) individuals have seen their careers grow while yours – and I say this back to you, not because I know or even 100% believe it – has stagnated.  Okay, let’s explore that for a minute.

My reaction Sunday morning was, effectively, you don’t market yourself very well.  Here I am on more stable footing, because not only do I know you, I know a lot about your professional roots, the culture that nurtured us both, and the sometimes harsh conflict between the desire to be recognized and the humility and patience we need to wait for others to do so.  How, really, do we know if our achievements are even large enough to be worthy of the accolades we wish for, and, even if we convince ourselves they are, how can we promote and catalyze the outcome without sounding immodest or, worse, narcissistic?

No clue.  I just have an intuitive sense that you’re doing it poorly.  Absent the possibility of listening to your conversations with colleagues and superiors, the best I can offer in this letter is, maybe, a more constructive framework or context for you to have those dialogs, and a few words about ambition, dignity, and hope.

I strongly sense you’re hedging too much, and that your large and present need for stability and security (for all that does for any of us) may have influenced, even compromised, your similarly large and abstract need for “something else”.  Don’t look for something else. Look for something better.  Much better.

Over the years, but especially recently, I’ve listened to your thoughtful analysis – the corporate force diagram if you will – of what is wrong with your current environment and what you would do to fix it.  Dissembling colleagues, selfish teammates, thoughtless strategies well implemented, creative strategies botched in practice.  But you have also enjoyed the excitement of living near border of your institutional domain, which is anyway were all the interesting stuff happens.  Don’t underestimate the privilege or the value of that. You’ve harvested the sweet fruits of a truly diversified portfolio, in both the literal sense (the holdings you’ve created) and figurative sense (the number of people  who admire you and new ideas you’ve been exposed to).

To a certain extent, my strong advocacy that you join me is selfish – I think you would turbo-charge my team – but also risky, because you would be narrowing your attention to one thing instead of many.  Essentially, your economic reward will be proportional to where you land on the diversification curve.  It is certainly capped (not to say uncomfortable) where you are now.  If you become a credentialed expert in financial services, you’ll make even more money, along a parallel but similarly shaped arc.

My point is that your impact will still be limited, and that is the diluted outcome I want (both of us) to avoid.  I don’t believe in it, not because it is undignified, but because tremendous success in that world optimizes only income, is largely stochastic, and all this at the not-small cost of meager creative contribution.  The safer road leads to safer places; choosing it is prudent, and potentially lucrative, assuming that the capital markets are someday restored to health.  But transport yourself forward twenty, or even thirty years from now.  What, really, do you want the second half of your career to look like?  What do you want it to mean?

As you well know, the odds against newly formed start-ups are steep, and I have never once worked for a company that actually turned a large profit, though many of them were astonishingly successful in other ways.  But I keep on trying, well satisfied in the knowledge that the battle is worth the ferocious fight, and that the daunting setbacks are there – as Randy Pausch so aptly put it – to deter the other guys.  If the apocryphal ratio of ten tries for every hit is true, then the trick becomes to live long enough, or at least manage well enough, to take ten swings.  History is replete with examples of brave men and women who simply never gave up, and whose track record measured against any reasonable standard was, diplomatically, undistinguished . . . right up until the minute they changed everything.  My Friend, this is the essential knowledge I cling to with vice-grips.

One of the best features of American culture is that it celebrates the storied attempt, and, in contrast to most other places, expects defeated warriors to stand up, clean up, and get back into the battle.  As tempting as it sometimes is to marginalize people who didn’t “make it” –  projecting as we do the shame and weakness of our own insecurities, our own vulnerabilities, and our own failures – reality is that persistence and durability matter more than intellect and status.  Life on earth evolved to avoid and ruthlessly punish unnecessary risk, protect itself against mutations, and ostracize the troublemakers.  You can see where survival leads to a certain set of assumptions, conclusions, and behaviors.  But look at what happens when society plays to the imbalance: at any scale, (ephemeral) surety trumps progress. Better the devil you know, I suppose.  But the costs of such punctuated equilibria are much higher than most people realize.

By now you see where I am heading:  assuming a bare minimum threshold of analytic ability, creativity, and perspective, the difference between living to break even (however you define it) and living to optimize adventure and impact (however you define it) is never giving up, learning from past mistakes, and impenetrable armor against the parochial expectations to conform and blend in.  Again, I am not advocating recklessness.  I am advocating large, vivid, life-changing ambition.

Look, life has generally worked out for both of us so far.  Even with our collective zoo of dragons and demons, we two are still among the most fortunate people I know, if only for the weapons we have to fight the monsters.  Things could be much, much worse.

I am delighted that you are thinking about new ways to confront them.  My primary intention here is to remind you of the arsenal at your disposal, acknowledge that the fight is bloody and painful, and encourage you to not resort to an appeasing diplomatic compromise that only postpones the inevitable or settles for the familiar but unsatisfying status quo.  There’s a time and place for discussion and debate.  I know it is almost always better to use soft force.

But some situations call for deeper, less nuanced expressions of power.  Yes, even in the New Age of Obama, I think this is one.

Your friend,

Peter

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