Building an Empire
I have never cared that much about wealth, or at least that’s what I like to tell myself. I was raised by a mother who genuinely didn’t give the accumulation of wealth a second thought. She was born during WWI, spent her childhood in the 1920’s, came of age during the Great Depression, and spent her early adult years during WWII. Her life, as I really know it, began when she set aside worldly things and went off into the mountains of Venezuela to work for the Rockefeller Foundation. It was there that she forged her professional career, which was to be in international development, and where she met my father. Now he was a man who thought constantly about wealth accumulation and all that it could buy for him. While she went on to further educate herself and accomplish great things around the world focused on helping other people improve their lives, he spent his life making and losing his fortune over and over again. I am approaching the age when my father died but I am only 68% of the way through the lifetime my mother lived. Where he died with perhaps three deals on the hoof where he was trying to pull two ends of a rope together to make a few extra dollars, she died peacefully never once wondering about where her next dollar was coming from. They were both empire builders in their own ways with both of them members of The Greatest Generation.
The generational cohort patterns usually work out such that there is a cohort between parents and children, representing the years of maturing that the older generation must go through to prepare for childbearing. My sisters and I are all members of the Baby Boom Generation, the cohort that succeeded WWII and the proverbial “bulge” generation about which much is written and much is now sorting itself out as it comes to its end of days. The cohort between me and my parents was The Silent Generation and the cohort between me and my children is Generation X. All three of my children fit into the Millennials Generation and their children are in and presumably will be part of Generation Alpha although with the natural postponing of childbearing that is occurring, they may drift into whatever Generational Cohort follows Alpha (presumably Beta, but who knows who is responsible for the naming convention of such things).
When I reflect upon my life in terms of what I have done of relevance, I feel that I went about educating myself and taking full advantage of that opportunity afforded me. What I did not purposefully do was take advantage of the global upbringing that my mother endowed on me. I certainly travelled a great deal and did business on a global playing field, but I never really became a man of the world in the sense that I chose to live a life that my mother had, as a expat. My one foray into that realm as an adult came about against my will when I had to take a two-year stint in Toronto, the closest thing to an American city that exists outside the United States, given its location only a handful of miles from the New York and Michigan borders. And even though I chose not to follow in my mother’s footsteps in international development, something I did train in college to do, I also chose not to follow in my father’s footsteps of pursuing the shadier side of real estate development and attempted wealth accumulation.
In fact, while I chose investment banking, a profession designed to focus on wealth and its accumulation, I did so more because it was a profession undergoing profound change and that led to a great deal of creativity and innovation, which is what floated my boat. The best evidence that what I am saying is correct is that the most prosperous of bankers become specialists and spend their time maximizing their speciality and harvesting its rewards. I, on the other hand, was a generalist, who got far greater enjoyment out of moving about from one leading-edge arena to the next. For my forty-five years in banking I could be found on whatever frontier was most groundbreaking. If there is such a thing as being on the professional bleeding-edge, that is what I did. I used to say about myself that I was a pioneer in the traditional American sense in that I was the guy with arrows in his back that was laying by the side of trail when the wagons with all the settlers rolled into the new territory. That felt very noble, but it was also simply who I was.
I remember seeing a movie about Vietnam once (I used to think it was in Apocalypse Now, but I can’t find that segment in that movie). In the segment, an officer asks a black man in a front-line rifle platoon why he chooses to walk point. He wonders why he doesn’t allow that dangerous duty to get shared by other soldiers in the platoon. The man looks at him as though he doesn’t get it at all. He says, “I walk point, man, it’s what I do.” It is not said with pride or with ulterior motive, it is simply a statement of fact. Some people are just made to walk point and that is all there is to it. They have no choice in the matter. Well, in the banking business, I walked point. It is why I stayed in the banking business for so long. One of my best friends from banking is a Welshman named Michael who I hired thirty-five years ago. He is a rough and tumble man of great passion and great hidden intelligence. He is still in the game walking point. I think that tendency is what drew us to one another and made us become godfather to one of each of our children. He may be the best man suited to give my eulogy when I die because he seems to best understand what it is that made me tick.
I have other great friends from my banking days who I admire for different reasons. There is Bruce, who is the smartest corporate finance guy I have ever known. He is irreverent and brilliant, but we were good partners because we were so different, not because we were alike. Then there is Terry, who was always my spiritual guru. He had an inherent calm what I always envied. He is smart and hard-working too, but it is his calm that made me want to be his close friend. And in all fairness, I must add Steven to this list. He too was an employee of mine like Michael, but he was controller and businessman sort. My growing admiration for him has come from the goodness of his heart as I have seen him move into retirement and focus his energies on the right things of giving back and caring for others.
Where this is taking me is that there are many ways to build an empire if you are able to define empire in the broadest sense. You don’t have to be Alexander the Great to be an empire-builder. You can build an empire of your own design by creating a rubric which you choose to follow and then work at it over a lifetime. Some people create an empire of governance, which is all about megalomania and the accumulation of power. Others create an empire of commerce, which is about a different sort of power, the power to do what you want whenever you want. But there are some who create an empire of the soul or an empire of the mind. Your empire is what you will be known for when you leave this earth. It is the legacy that you leave behind. For what it’s worth, my mother’s legacy will live on for at least as long as I am alive. My friend Frank’s legacy will most likely live on as long as his grandchildren are alive, that being where he focused his attention. While I don’t care so much about being remembered for having my name on plaques and buildings, it is important that for at least one moment, which I will define as that moment of eulogy, I am recognized for the uniqueness of the legacy I am leaving, the fact that I spent my time building an empire of my design and choosing, and that I was true to it until the end. Part of that legacy will be in the form of all this digitized recorded thinking that I choose to write each and every day. Perhaps that is the most visible part of my empire.
As Norman McLean said so well, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.” I hope some day I can characterize my empire so well.