Feel-Good
I’ve had a few things wrap up in the last few days and with completion comes evaluation and feedback. When I was in the thick of my working career (actually the relatively early days since I was only just under ten years in), I ran a Division that had use of a company car that I would occasionally drive home for the night. We did not have a full-time parking space, but could keep the car in the building during the working day. Because of that, it was good for the business that I drive it home. The other senior manager that shared the same floor with my Division just happened to live in the same town I lived in on Long Island. So, since we were friendly, I used to offer him rides home as a passenger. I know very few commuters that won’t opt for a nice ride home in a private car as opposed to another commuter train ride where literally anything can happen from not getting a seat to getting stuck on a siding somewhere next to a drooling guy on one side or a Yackety-Yak on the other. One night on the way home, this guy, who was my senior by ten years and was a Vietnam Vet who had nearly lost the right side of his face to a hand grenade, felt the need to unload on me. He was your classic Outer-borough boot-stapped Irish-Catholic guy who had made good, working his way up through the city college network and into the ham-handed side of banking. He liked being outspoken and opinionated about lifestyle. He told me point blank that my problem was that I cared too much about what people thought. He accused me of being that four-year-old without a father, who desperately wanted a pat on the head of approval.
It’s important to listen to the criticisms of others, especially if it is offered up with honesty. I don’t know if that guy was trying to be helpful to me or if he just wanted to feel stronger than me (I was the Ivy Leaguer that he was not and I was the up-an-comer that he was not). In either case, I felt his comment to me was spot on and it was the equivalent of a kick in the pants that made me almost immediately stronger. I determined then and there that I would seek to please myself rather than others and do my damnedest to eschew external validation. It served me well for years because I kept myself focused on taking positions that pleased me rather than being mainstream or taken for purposes of climbing the ladder. Consequently, I was always in a position that I enjoyed enough to excel at and, naturally, that caused me to move my way up the ladder. I know for a fact that people always thought I was so “political” that I had figured out how to work the system to maximum advantage. The truth was that while I was not oblivious to or immune to the pride of accomplishment and promotion, my first priority was always to do the jobs I found most interesting. They led me to some fascinating assignments and a thirst for pleasing myself through accomplishment.
I also learned along the way that my appetite for accomplishment was not bounded by fear of failure, for better or for worse. The first time you put your head down and barrel forward and run into trouble you have a choice; you can adopt a cautious approach and respond as the duly chastened, or you can look into the abyss and realize that it does not scare you and the journey and end are all. I cannot explain the choice other than to elevate the value of accomplishment above all else. To me it has always felt good to strive, and the sunny optimism of success has always blocked out the shadow of failure.
That is perhaps the biggest challenge of retirement to me. The only thing that gets me up in the morning is the knowledge that I have something to achieve that day. That means that I must always feed my pipeline of activities to insure that there is sufficient grist for the accomplishment mill. This evening after watching a movie with Andy Garcia about a middle-aged love story, Prime fed me a “free” movie that I could not refuse. It was one of my favorites, Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It. This Norman Maclean story is about many things, but it is mostly about a man who fears nothing and seeks only to do as he pleases and in so doing accomplishes great things in the narrow confines that he chooses to pursue. He dies young and is remembered for the beauty and perfection that is represented by fearless achievement. Or at least that is my reading of the story and I am clearly biased by my own predilections.
Years later, that guy who set me straight in my youth was asked about a project I was leading. His comment about me was that I could parachute into a desert and in six months I could build a great city…but might well drive it into bankruptcy six months after that. When I read this very vivid comment I laughed, but once again found myself privately agreeing with his assessment of who I am. I have no idea if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it does seem to be my thing and it is what makes me feel good.
This week I finished an expert witness case with three hours of testimony at the end of sixty hours of hearings. I had put in 190 hours of work on this over several months, and then it was over (at least for me). Shortly thereafter I got a call from the lawyers I represented. They expressed very vigorous pleasure with my hearing performance. They were effusive to the point of saying they wanted to find other situations I could help them with. Let’s be clear, acting as an expert witness opens you to extreme and pointedly directed criticism and “impeachment” by the opposing attorneys. They look for anything in your past and career with which to hit you over the head. I offer plenty of those opportunities and they never disappoint me in testing the thickness of my skin. It comes with the territory and I can handle it.
This week I also finished my USD course, by reading, commenting, grading and returning the final exams to my students. My likelihood of being asked to continue to teach at USD, despite a decade of successful teaching at Cornell, hinges on the course evaluations of the fourteen students I put through fifteen hours of lectures over two weekends. Just as at Cornell, the USD professorial performance evaluation system hinges almost entirely on student course evaluations. I like that. It says to me that the end client is the arbiter of what it wants to pay for in course instruction. But it takes a brave soul to put one’s self and intellectual ego on the line for fourteen unknown people to judge. It is especially so when your case study (in this course the case was The New York Wheel project) is of a failed project that you led for six years. Yes, there are more lessons to be had from failure than success, but that alone does not make it any easier. Well, I finished and based on the preliminary comments from students (I have yet to see the official evaluations), they found the course very valuable and very engaging.
I don’t shoot rapids and get into barroom brawls like Paul Maclean, but I do like to walk point through life, even in retirement, because I have a hard time giving up the feel-good.