To Be or Not to Be

To Be or Not to Be

           I don’t know whether I want to work anymore.  That sounds funny when I read that back. Work is one of those funny words that can mean just about anything. I was not a privileged kid (not that I was “underprivileged” either), so I did my share of manual labor jobs as a kid.  Given a childhood interrupted by my mother going to graduate school for four years, I knew times of minimal discretionary money when an $8.95 Christmas gift was a treat.  Just those few years of lean times were enough to make me want to work by the time I was twelve.  When we moved to Maine in early 1965 and my mother was suddenly in the chips with a job that payed her 5X+ the fellowship that had supported the four of us for those four years, I found myself in a vacationland that offered a panoply of summer jobs for willing kids like me.  I begged to be allowed to caddy on the Poland Spring Golf Course at age 12 and due to my larger than normal size I was granted permission.  I’m not sure I had that much competition in those days between Poland Spring being a resort and it being a U.S. Government Women’s Job Corps Center.

           I was paid $3.50 per bag per “loop” (18 holes, which took 4+ hours).  The usual tip was $1.50, and usually I would double bag and get $10 for my trouble.  It was a frequent good-weather long day to do two loops with two bags for a grand total of $20.  That was a big deal to a twelve-year-old kid, but it wasn’t that easy.  To be allowed to do the work, I had to agree to be the locker room boy for old Saul Feldman, the owner.  Don’t get me wrong, he paid me $1.10 per hour, which was minimum wage, but the work was grimy.  Gathering up wet towels and mopping the floor was fine.  Cleaning the toilets in a transient public golf course men’s locker room was another story altogether.  Everyone should have a stint of toilet cleaning in their lives and I certainly had mine.

           I was an industrious kid who did all sorts of crazy jobs and started crazy businesses ranging from running a 9th Hole halfway house snack bar, to shagging golf balls for the pro (basically, giving the student something to aim at 150 yards out in the field), to trying to manage the pool concession while being the golf cart boy.  This prepared me for running my own snack and soda emporium on the sly in prep school.  During college it was one odd job after another, always treating the work like a means to some spending money and never as anything more experiential than that.  As anyone my age knows, internships were simply not a thing yet in the early ‘70’s.  Jobs were about money.  School was about learning.  My last year of school, technically my graduate year, I found the intersection of the two by getting a gig teaching hospitality economics in Cornell’s Hotel School to undergraduates that wanted less learning for enlightenment and more practical training to help them in their jobs.

           Imagine my surprise when I got my first real job and started at Bankers Trust Company at 280 Park Avenue in late June 1976.  Other than the commute, I thought it was all good fun.  Every day I learned something new and was able to connect dots with my economics education.  It was a grand game to me, and I loved every second of it that first summer.  There was a brief hiatus when I had to go into the training program for six months to go back to school for Advanced Accounting and Credit Training, but that went well enough and I was out on the line and back in the game again.  And here’s the thing I learned very quickly, not only did I love it and apply myself to it in extremis, but I got paid extra for being successful at it.  Incentive compensation was as new a phenomenon to banking as it was to me.  My timing was quite fortunate.  I got a bonus check for my work in 1978 (my second year on the line) and I never had a year for the next twenty-two years when I didn’t get a bigger and bigger bonus each year.  I was a model of success for the new incentive compensation approach of banking.  Strangely enough, it was less about the money and more about the success.  That was the four-year-old that had been left behind with his mother and two sisters by a father too busy chasing his own success to worry about my upbringing.  Luckily, my mother had enough gumption and parental conscience to fulfill both roles.

           When we sold Bankers Trust to Deutsche Bank In 1999, I was one of the few Management Committee members who did not get to flit off, but rather had to stay to integrate and run Asset Management.  A year later, with the integration complete, I exited, turning down multiple offers to stay and run other parts of the company.  Rather than take time off, my work ethic kicked in on behalf of my newly-formed venture capital company.  Three years later I moved right into another Wall Street gig, turning down two other leadership situations that inundated me by happenstance at the same time.  I won’t give you the full resume but suffice it to say that every time a retirement opportunity arose over the last twelve years, I have passed and just gotten to work on whatever was before me.  I was never smart or confident enough to take a block of time off to go walkabout, as the Aborigines say.

           Now I have seized the bull by the horns and set a date to move to San Diego.  I do not call it retirement yet because I may still work from San Diego.  I may just work remotely at what I am now doing, if that makes sense.  I may take on another opportunity (they seem to come out of nowhere at times…like the old expression, when the student is ready, the teacher will come).  I may return to teaching.  And for the first time since I was twelve, I may decide I don’t want to work anymore.  People who think they know me say that will never happen.  While I take that as a compliment that I still have value to add and that I had plenty of get-up-and-go, I am not so sure I agree with it any more.  I know I don’t want to be bored, but there are lots of ways to avoid boredom without going back to work.  I wish I knew why work gets such a bad rap, even with someone like me who has loved working for fifty-four years.  It sounds like work equates to obligation.  Being needed is good.  Being obligated, not do much. But work means commitment and that involves plenty of obligation and many times goes well beyond feeling needed.

           To be or not to be “employed”, that is the question that gives me pause. Maybe Hamlet said it best:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.