Teaching and Preaching
I am an outrageous guy. What makes me particularly outrageous is that I am prepared to tell everyone about my outrageous behavior and turn it into a life lesson for others. For ten years I was a Clinical Professor of Management at Cornell. That gave me the platform to tell over 2,000 students all about the lessons from my forty years on Wall Street and the lessons learned. I reveled in the teaching. I guess I like an audience.
The most impactful moment for me was when I used a phrase, “You can’t build your walls high enough” referring to the attempt by people to insulate themselves about the coming global pension crisis. I had declared it the most pervasive mega-trend to face Millennials. I said it would color their lives and careers more than any other single factor and they had a choice to either familiarize themselves with the looming crisis or get crushed by it. The next day, back in my office in New York City, a guy on the other side of the floor came over to me and said, “You can’t build your walls high enough.”
That guy had a son who was in my class at the Johnson Graduate School at Cornell. His son had called him after my lecture and mentioned that phrase to his dad. Imagine that. Something I taught a student had sunk in, had gotten repeated and then gotten back to me within eighteen hours. If you ever want to think your words have impact, that is the lesson to remember. I have no idea whether those 2,000 students have gone forth and remembered anything I taught them, much less adjusted their lives or careers to take my words into account. I’m not sure I want to know. It is enough to just know that some students were listening when I spoke.
I am not so outrageous to think my thoughts are so radical or my words so important that they need to be memorialized. But every man wants to think that he has thoughts that are worth preserving. I guess my way of dealing with all that is to write books and stories like this and lecture when given the opportunity. Some will say that they teach because they want to give back. Sure, I want that. But in all honesty, I am like anyone else, I just like being heard. It represents man’s search for meaning in the cosmos. That’s it. Better to tell stories than to howl at the moon.
I am going up to Cornell tomorrow to give a guest lecture to 110 students for two hours. I get asked because of my ten years of teaching and because someone has a slot they need filled in their curriculum. I do not get told what to speak about. I am allowed to formulate my own lecture so long as it is about finance in some way shape or form. That’s easy since everything and anything can get connected to finance if you want it to. It needn’t interfere with the message you want to get across.
This year’s message from me is about passion and honesty. I am using my current activity, the company I am leading, as a case study in the balancing act between passion and honesty that everyone must strike in their work. To begin with, if you have no passion for the mission, you have no business in the job. Unless you have passion for what you are doing, you just have a job. You are nothing more than a journeyman. We all must do that at times in life, but to have meaning in your work, you must have passion for what you do. As for honesty, it is the sine qua non of life. If you do not live life honestly, you are living a lie. Any time you deceive someone (purposefully or unintentionally) you are eroding your soul. And you only have so much soul. I can’t prove that, but it seems logical. Something so precious cannot be limitless.
What do I mean by balancing passion and honesty? Why are they in conflict? Well, they are not really in conflict, but if you have excessive passion you are likely to exaggerate the potential of your mission. Exaggeration is a first cousin to lying. There is a difference, but the slope is very slippery. And if you approach every mission with nothing but honesty and a sense of total reality, there is no potential, no future towards which to aspire. You are too firmly rooted in the here and now and what you can see, hear, touch and totally prove. No one ever made progress if they were 100% stuck in the reality of the moment.
So, balancing passion and honesty is the challenge we all must embrace. I think it is important that we all be self-aware enough to know where we each lie on that spectrum. What is our tendency? For instance, I know I lean towards passion in my work. That means I must emphasize honesty, or I risk letting passion get the better of me and the mission. The world tends to tell you directly where you are on the spectrum. In the kindest form, excess passion gets characterized as cheerleading. In the kindest form, excessive honesty gets you labeled Chicken Little with the sky falling around you.
How do you find the balance? You think about the juxtaposition, you lecture about the juxtaposition, you write about the juxtaposition. At least that’s how I keep my balance. Awareness is the threshold for understanding and extreme awareness is the best policy. Know thyself, said Socrates. How funny that at my home in Ithaca, where I will travel to tomorrow, I have a life-sized stone statue of a reclining Socrates in the back garden. He is posed like he is teaching or preaching to his students. I hadn’t thought of it until now, but perhaps that was my subtle way to remind myself to keep teaching and preaching and that that exercise would force me to always strike the balance of passion and honesty in my work and in my life. I think I will preach passion and teach honesty.