4AM Again
In the early decade of my career, while living in Rockville Centre on the South Shore of Long Island, I was 36 scheduled minutes on the Long Island Railroad into Penn Station. Penn is at 7th Avenue and 33rd Street. My office in those days was at Park Avenue and 48th Street. Once I had tested the waters of New York commuting, I knew that I was not built for rush hour travel, so I started moving my start time earlier and earlier. At that time of day, every minute you can leave earlier nets you an added half minute because everything gets easier the more you get out ahead of the traffic. There are less cars on the local roads, there are closer parking spots available at the station, the trains are more likely to be on time, the crowds in Penn Station are lighter, and there are cabs available to whisk you to your office if you like. Everything works smoother. I kept backing up my departure more and more until I was getting up at 4am to catch the 5:14 train that arrived at Penn Station at 5:50. That would get me into my office by 6:15 most days. At one point my first wife asked that I not tell people how early I got up in the morning first fear that they might think me even stranger than they did already.
My early arrival at work each day became a thing of legend at my bank. A joke running around the senior ranks at the bank was that one particularly early riser among senior management used to say that he had only one goal left in his career and that was to beat me into the office one morning. My early morning commuting habits probably did more to advance my career than any piece of business I ever did. That first impression as a hard-charging go-getter stayed with me fir years and probably spurred me on to work even harder than I might I otherwise have done. My dislike of the commutation congestion and my tolerance for rising early served me very well.
I was watching a video by Torstein Hagen, the CEO and owner of Viking Cruises. He has put Viking at the top of the competitive cruise charts for ocean, river and exploration cruises in only 20 years. That is an impressive accomplishment by any standards. He explains in this video that what it takes for anyone to succeed in his view is to be kind, honest and hard-working. My liberal bias insists that I be a kind person. Like anyone, I’m sure I occasionally fall short, but I try very hard to always be respectful and kind to any and all people I encounter. Honesty is a critical character trait to me. I feel so strongly about this that I spent three years teaching business ethics. I have had my dishonest moments, but I am proud to say that they mostly came in my youth and were part of my learning process. I have become a big believer that it’s a critical human trait for a happy life…most notably about being happy with yourself. And as for the hard-working trait, that began by watching and learning from my role model mother. It made me seek employment from age 12 onward, it caused me to put strong effort into my schoolwork, and as my 4am anecdote shows, I was digging in right from the earliest days of my career. My personal concern has never been about whether I was working hard enough, but rather about whether I was working so hard as to lose sight of my other obligations, most notably my family life, in particular time with my children. Because of my own issues with paternal abandonment, I was always very focused on fulfilling my time committment with my kids, but the concern was more accurately about being truly present rather than present in body alone.
The good news about my early morning departure was that it came mostly at my own expense since most commuters of any sort cannot expect to be home for breakfast with the kids. I think my wife was fine with my early departure since that left the bath and dressing rooms free for her sole use to get ready and I was always very considerate not to wake her.
This all came to mind this morning since I had to catch a 6:35am flight from San Diego to JFK. Working backward, I determined that, given the early hour, I could make that work by having Uber pick me up at 4am. It’s only 35 minutes to the airport, so sure enough, I had plenty of time of time to go through TSA security and check-in. But no matter how you slice it, 4am is, as my brother-in-law Bennett likes to say, the butt-crack of dawn. As I rolled around trying to sleep for 6+ hours ( I went down at 9pm), and then finally got out of bed at Zero-Dark-Thirty, I was quite startled at how early it felt. It made me wonder how I did that every morning, 5 days a week, about 48 weeks a year for at least 15 years. Once I moved into Manhattan, my schedule became much more normal, even though I still beat most people in every morning.
I really felt like I was back in harness this morning. I showered and shaved, donned my suit (grey flannel), picked out my shirt (you can’t go wrong with crisp white), tied my tie (shinny blue micro-dot), slipped into my black Cole Hahn loafers (my regular travel shoes that are multi-functional)….and let’s not forget that I put on black mid-calf socks, something I rarely wear on a daily basis at any time of the year any more. It felt funny and yet familiar all at once. My short hair and white beard were not part of my business look, so that alone was different. I also no longer wear glasses, which always used to be part of my uniform. The suit fit like it always did. The tie hung like it always did. And my manner of operating in this sort of outfit was exactly like it always was.
When I got to the business dinner, which was the entire purpose of the visit, it was like old home week. The dinner was at a function room at the Pierre Hotel. Only the Waldorf would have been more like the good old days.The waiters were decked out in short white jackets and black slacks, carrying around Hors d’oeuvre trays with crab cakes, spinach spanakopita, tuna tartare and, (yeah!) pigs-in-blankets. The 300 or so guests milled around with all but a few decked out in traditional business armor. It may be de-rigueur to wear skinny suits and no tie in the office, but st functions like this, the most acceptable dress is traditional business wear either a dark single-breasted suit (blue or grey), a white or light blue shirt and a nice patterned tie. There may be hidden tattoo sleeves under those suits, but on the surface it all looks very old school. This is particularly so because this was a Cornell award function and the Ivy League mainstream is even more traditional than just the normal New York business mainstream….except that there are more Cornell red ties and Cornell red dresses on the women.
By the tine this evening function was finished, it all came crashing down on me. Despite the three hour time difference and a day spent sitting in an airline seat, the combination of the 4am Uber pick-up, two airports (especially the horror that is JFK Delta Terminal 4 [the biggest trekking airport I go through]) and a very long and slow Uber ride into Manhattan, has done me in and reminds men why I’m glad to be mostly retired.