One More Go
It’s Saturday night and we have nothing on. I drove son Thomas to the airport this morning for his return to NYC after a wonderful week with him here. I’m a little sad to see him go, but I am a big believer in the concept that birds gotta fly and at 26, Thomas is out of the nest and winging his way into his life. In fact, as I look at the clock, I see he landed safely eleven minutes ago. So, after finishing the basalt rock fountain today (mostly Brad, with my direction), doing a few runs to Home Depot for the finishing touches, and a nice long soak in the hot tub (a lot less fun without Thomas to talk to in there), I am sitting down to catch up on some TV watching. The first thing I see is a piece on Will Smith and how he celebrated his birthday by bungee jumping from a helicopter. I must admit, I had never considered the pros and cons of bungee jumping from a helicopter. I generally try to avoid activities that involve a lot of gravity and bungee jumping seems about 80% about gravity with the other 20% having something to do with material science of elastic. Just the calculation of elasticity is such that I’m not sure I would ever trust that the math had been done accurately enough to calculate exactly how close my head would be from the concrete. Think of the variables that go beyond weight and distance. There’s wind drift of the helicopter, temperature and humidity affect on elasticity (there must be some), daily weight variation, or like the old infamous Reebok pump sneaker ad…how tight or loose your shoes might be.
The point of the Will Smith piece was to allow him to tell his fans how ready he was to be a go-for-it guy. I’m sure his publicist thought that his chosen birthday activity provided just such an occasion. But how to tell the audience about how special that makes Will? What better way than to bring in his son (you know the one, he was the kid in The Pursuit of Happyness fifteen years ago)? He was apparently not available, since he is now 23 and has already acted in 59 films. Father Will has only done 91 films, and that would be a lot except in comparison to son Jaden. So, we are left with Will Smith telling us about how his son Jaden has reacted to his father celebrating his birthday by jumping out of a helicopter while relying on the thrill of uncertainty of having a bungee cord save him from smashing himself on the rocks below.
What Smith says is that Braden describes his Dad as that guy that never stops and always gives everything just one more go. The interviewer’s post-interview analysis was very deep. He said that we all need to live in the moment and that the way to have a fulfilling life like Will Smith’s is to never just stop when prudence tells you to and to always just grab for one more go. I actually think that what Will Smith did was not nearly as risky and reckless as what the interviewer did with his analysis.
I consider myself the king of the risk-takers. That is a bit of a grand overstatement because I am only a big risk-taker in the context of the sort of people with whom I have always hung around. Relativity is an important part of the equation even more than wind drift in helicopter bungee jumping. Compared to Navy Seals, I’m not really much of a risk-taker. Even compared to hedge fund traders, people who worked around me for many years, I am not much of a risk-taker.
I do ride a motorcycle and I have taken some outsized business risks, but I haven’t fallen on my motorcycle for fifty years and there is a very real reason for that. The activity is risky taken as a whole (as compared to driving a Volvo), but after fifty-three years of doing it, you learn a thing or two about avoiding many of the risks. You slow down when conditions (weather, road surface, state-of-mind) are not ideal. I’m no MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation) instructor, but I do pay attention and that cuts risk dramatically.
I have taken business risks that other bankers would never take, mostly career risks. I never met an experience or an opportunity that I did not embrace. I took a staff job when others thought anything other than line jobs were not cool. I went to the trading desk when others thought banking was where it was at. I left trading to go back to banking when trading was the bomb. I left mainstream developed markets banking to take on a big challenge in the less developed markets. I traveled to Santiago and Lagos when other were too busy going to London and Tokyo. I went from derivatives to asset operations. Hell, I took over Private Banking when that was considered walking the dog rather than the leading edge of alternative investing it became. I left the big Wall Street leagues to start a small venture capital company the month the NASDAQ died. I joined Bear Stearns when everyone knew that newcomers failed at Bear. I even took on a giant observation wheel on Staten Island when no one believed in Staten Island. Some of those moves were big successes and others not so much. My record of staying up on a motorcycle is far better than my business record of staying upright.
A reporter from Jared Kushner’s New York Observer said about me in a 2012 cover story that depicted me and a “fun-size” Mike Bloomberg in the stratosphere on a Ferris wheel, that I could do it, but would likely get bucked off the horse while doing it. I did get bucked off and while I believe I could have brought it home, it failed after I left….or maybe I was bucked off because it was destined to fail. That reporter told me later that he rode that story to The Daily News, to the Wall Street Journal and eventually to The New York Times. And the theme that so intrigued the readers of the Observer and all the newspapermen who hired him after that was the suggestion that I was the kinda guy who would never give up and was willing to take risks that others would avoid because of the risk of getting bucked off, a risk I seemed to that reporter to simply shrug off.
So, Will Smith, keep being a one more go kinda guy like your son Braden says you are (at least according to you and your publicist). What do you do to follow the act of bungee jumping out of a helicopter? I imagine you and your publicist are contemplating that right now. Me, I will keep riding motorcycles and slowing it down when it seems excessively risky since taking one more go is never a good idea on that particular road. As for my career, that’s pretty much over and all that’s left now is my reputation. I simply can’t take myself too seriously in that regard. Just to show you that my heart is in the right place, I am far more prone to take one more go at trashing my reputation before I hang up my spurs. Ride on.