Forgiveness
One of my favorite movies that I happened on scanning Netflix tonight is the 2011 movie Warrior with Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton and Nick Nolte. The reason I am scanning Netflix is because Kim is off rehearsing with her Encore choral group for an early June concert, her first with Encore. Last night we watched three of the four second installments of the AppleTV series called WeCrashed about Adam and Rebekah Neumann, the founders of the broken unicorn called WeWork. It got too late to watch the fourth and last episode and Kim was bemoaning the fact that I would watch it tonight without her. So I told her I would not do that and find something else to watch.
While the basic theme of WeCrashed is the “Fake it til you make it” excess exuberance that WeWork hyped as the unicorn to beat all unicorns, the underlying dynamic is clearly the mutually enabling relationship between Adam and Rivka. Adam is a megalomaniac who impresses everyone, especially people like Benchmark’s Bruce Dunlevie, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan and, ultimately, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank with Svengali-like charisma. Meanwhile, his wife Rivka, a vegetarian turning vegan who wants to raise the consciousness of the entire world while trying to get her share of the WeWork glory, first as an actress, then as the company’s brand manager, and finally as CEO of WeGrow, her cockamamie holistic alternative school built in WeWork excess fashion. While Adam and Rivka wrestle with each other’s misguided egos, the company propels itself forward towards an ultimate IPO attempt in the Fall of 2019 as J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley bid up the IPO to a value of $63 billion only to have Adam complain to his partner (mockingly) that he thinks they could have gotten $64 billion. Meanwhile, Adam has leveraged his massively valued restricted private stock position in WeWork to over $1 billion in borrowings from J.P. Morgan, approved and handled personally by Jamie Dimon to support the over-energized spending by he and Rivka in private homes and every other extravagance including name-brand artwork. But, like always, there is trouble in paradise for these two.
Growth at all costs strategies always have a cost, even if you try your best to convince yourself and everyone else that buying market share is the path to glory. Yes, it has worked for some Silicon Valley tech moguls and yes, still others have crashed and burned famously and infamously. For every Jeff Bezos there are dozens of Adam Neumanns or Elizabeth Holmes. And for every Mackenzie Bezos (now worth $34 billion post-divorce), there is a Rebekah Neumann and a Sunny Balwani (Elizabeth Holmes love interest during her rise).
One of the interesting themes of the WeCrashed series is that even though Adam Neumann was very good at handling the high stress levels associated with building a unicorn and wearing his “Fake it til you make it” cloak, the stress eventually got to him. That pretense was that a sub tenant that leased properties long-term and rented space to “members” short-term had a good strategy that added tons of value by virtue of the environment being created in the WeWork spaces. This was jazzed with hype and a cult-like obsession with the concept of elevated consciousness, while running a summer camp environment…literally. The idea sprang from Adam’s life experience of living on a kibbutz in Israel and his partner, Miguel McKevney’s experience of being raised in a commune in Oregon or some such place. He turned happy childhood memories into a vision of how every working millennial could achieve happiness. When the money men zeroed in on the profitability flaws of his business model, he cracked. In a tense exchange with his wife Rivka, a person who seemed to have a pretty big hand in crafting the hype that Neumann spun into this unicorn, he came down hard on her for whining about her relevance. He said that when she wanted to be an actress, he bought her a theater, when she wanted to be a company executive, he gave her the Chief Branding Officer title, and when she wanted to start a school, he funded WeGrow for her to start. He then leveled her by telling her she had contributed nothing to the company, but had rather taken everything from him and the company. He regretted his outburst and realized that those words could not go back into the can from whence they sprung.
Rivka stays mad at him for a long time and finally he levels her by saying to her, how can you preach enlightenment and elevated consciousness when you are unable to achieve the most import element of that elevation, an ability to forgive. Indeed, Alexander Pope said in his 1711 essay that “to err is human, to forgive is divine.” That phrase has attained proverb status and is still part of our lexicon. It relies heavily on the redemptive qualities of the Judeo-Christian philosophy and the fact that they believe that God had made a plan for man’s salvation long before he even created man, knowing, in effect, that man would be imperfect. We are all driven to sin, it is said, and we spend our lives trying to stay away from the mortal sins and limit ourselves to the venial sins and thereby remain within reach of individual states of grace. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We learn it early in life and it is drilled into us. It is why we are taught to stay humble since we are none of us far from sin. That means that forgiveness is critical to our well-being because we can not all waste our lives wallowing in unforgiven guilt…not even the Catholics. This all hits Rivka like a ton of bricks and you can almost see Adam’s castigation (said ever so lovingly) cutting right into her central philosophy. Forgiveness is an imperative.
The problem for many in this life is that to achieve a worthiness for forgiveness requires acceptance of fault and a willingness to apologize, something that is very hard for some people, especially those trained to deny at all costs. I have always said that an apology is one of the easiest and most cleansing things one has in one’s arsenal in life. Adam Neumann appeared to have no problem apologizing and eventually, Rivka relented and forgave him. That must have been made a bit easier with $1.5B in the bank.
As for the Warrior brothers forgiveness came much harder. They shared a mutual anger towards their father (Nolte) who had been a UFC trainer and a nasty drunk. They had both, in their own way walled him off from their lives and dealt with their personal issues by themselves. One had financial issue from an ill child and the other had fealty issues from desertion from the Marine Corps in Iraq after the death of his closes pal (a death caused by accidental and random friendly fire). The root cause of his pain was in the separation of his parents and the absence of his father as a UFC fighter trainer. Both brothers go on for their own reasons to UFC cage fighting prominence and find each other matched in an all-important prize fight for $5 million, something they both badly need to assuage their pain. In the final scene it takes physical pain to cleanse the emotional pain and anger and when they are both spent and at their rawest, there is finally forgiveness, both for each other and for their father.
This is a dramatic human story, told beautifully. What makes it so special is that it shows us that forgiveness is, indeed divine and all-important.