A Secret Failure
They say that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. I’m going to guess that nobody who is reading this story has ever bothered to figure out who first uttered that phrase. It is one of those pithy credos that gets made into posters and etched into rocks that are sold to people to hold down papers on their desk with all the other kitschy things they’ve accumulated over their lives. As it turns out, it was first used and attributed to the son-in-law of Benito Mussolini, so not really someone you like to think that you are quoting. But luckily, the expression (or a slight variation thereof) was used by John Fitzgerald Kennedy to take responsibility for the disaster known as the Bay of Pigs. Of course, that was back in the Arthurian days when men of honor took responsibility for their gaffs with the confidence that their successes would speak more loudly by themselves than their failures would drag them through the mud.
I actually really like the sentiment and can say that I have watched people throughout my career falling all over themselves to attach their names to anything that might be perceived as success. On Wall Street, the year is all centered around the first few weeks of December (the timing varies a bit from firm to firm depending on the fiscal year they use). The process starts in early October and it begins with producers (that would pretty much be everyone, at least in their own minds) putting together their puff sheets, which list all the things they wish to claim responsibility for that occurred during the year. The greatest thing about these puff sheets is that everyone in management recognized that the sum total of everyone’s claims to fame added up to about 10X the revenue of the firm…or actually, more like 10X the production of all of Wall Street. That was standard operating procedure and it was certainly a good example of success having many fathers. In hockey they record offensive production by recording who’s stick last touched the puck before a goal goes in the net, and then anyone who helped in the process of advancing the puck towards the goal (I’m making this up, but it’s how I imagine it) gets recorded with an assist. Hockey production, I presume, is the total of all goals and all assists. I’m not sure what the goal to assist ratio is thought to be by the hockey cognoscenti, but there is likely a point of view that exists.
At bonus time, there was clearly some value attributed for the assist and there was also some fee-splitting where complex deals were the result of real team efforts, but Wall Street is the ultimate winner-take-all economic model. You will remember that in Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin makes it very clear that the winner in the sales contest gets an Eldorado, second place gets a set of steak knives, and let’s not forget that third place gets fired. That’s a tad too harsh because the most often poached people on the Street are the mid-level players who can be bought cheap enough, but have still caught the money-culture bug and want to get what their mentors have taught them to hunt. In other words, they get more than steak knives for their assists. But the rain-makers are all well-known for who they are (they are the biological fathers) and the game that gets played with all the puff sheets is just about the rank ordering of expectations in the ranks. The rain-maker game is about how much you have to pay them so they feel good about where they are working enough to put in another year of making rain for your firm.
The failure part of the equation is something I have talked about and written about a great deal, even as recently as this past week. I don’t think I am overly obsessed with failure, but it is something I feel its important to acknowledge and occasionally embrace. Now that I know that a fabled resident of Camelot admitted to fathering a failure and that his words (albeit shared with Mussolini’s son-in-law) are memorialized as the essence of humility and accountability, I am more comfortable owning that end of the equation in addition to whatever successes I can put in my own personal lifelong puff sheet.
I am long-ago out of the money culture of Wall Street. Actually, to be more accurate, once infected, it is unclear that anyone can ever rid themselves of that intestinal parasite, but I feel I can say that I have isolated and contained it and it no longer governs my day-to-day existence. My current estimations of success and failure tend to be occasionally directed toward expert witness work or teaching, but the measure of achievement these days tends much more towards what goes on around this hilltop. Right now I am proud as a peacock about my newest rock garden stretching across the norther side of my back hillside. That rocky slope was a barren wasteland with no irrigation and less prospect for anything but a very hardy agave or two. And then I was informed that I had something called snout weevils in several of those big old agaves. It turns out that these nasty little hook-nosed beetles love to live in and eat the hearts out of great big agaves, with a preference for the blue agaves that inhabit my back hillside. This discovery coincided with my decision to attack that northern rock pile and make it more attractive. I only have two and a half acres and I am slowly but surely attacking every inch of it. My back hillside is my last frontier. I have just finished planting about fifty drought-tolerant and indigenous Californian plants, about half succulents and the other half just plain old feisty. I’m extremely please with how it has come out. Were it not for the missing agave’s that I now have to find plants to replace, I would probably be declaring the project a success.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my biggest success in 2020 was the installation and successful deployment (including a full understanding of how to troubleshoot the system) of my energy system that incorporates a 9.6 Kw solar system with two 12.7 Kw Tesla batteries that help defray my electric costs by a substantial amount. The truth is that my solar/battery system works so well that I don’t even bother looking at my Tesla app too often since it always works tickety-boo. The last time I had to shake down the emergency process was a year ago during a heat wave. I think that helped me get the final bugs out and declare the system a full success.
Today at 8am, while working in the office, I realized, thanks to the electric clock on the desk, that we had lost power. I figure it to be a momentary electric hiccup since everything was working again quickly. However, my WhatsApp conference call with my European partners kept getting lost due to loss of WiFi, which I figured was just a modem reset issue (no ISP neophyte am I). Then Kim told me the TV’s were acting funny and I figured it was more of the same, but I had no time for several hours and decided I could carry on my meetings using the cellular network since this hilltop gets decent reception. Then, later in the day, I finally got my Tesla App working (it too had gone out and I had no time to explore it further). It told me that we had actually lost power on the hilltop for 6 hours and 16 minutes. And here’s the thing, it was all a big secret. Everything worked as it was supposed to. Even the internet and TV’s are working. I guess there are worse things in life than a secret failure. I guess I have something new to put on my household puff sheet.