What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20
Page 16
Sarah leaned over to admire the bouquet of peach-colored roses she had just bought. Her mind wandered fancifully from the flowers to the wonderful smell of fresh bread coming from the bakery next door. Standing to the side of the entrance was an amateur juggler. With his wildly colored costume, he attracted an audience of children who giggled each time he made a mistake. She watched a few minutes and found herself giggling too. He finished his performance with a foppish bow toward Sarah. She took a deep bow in return and handed him a rose.
* * *
Joe walked with his head down, protecting himself from the icy fog, as wind-whipped newspapers sailed through the air, slapping against the buildings before taking off again. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a line, break your mother’s spine.” These words kept running through Joe’s mind as he passed each crack that disrupted the rhythmic pattern of the sidewalk. The childhood taunt became a low drone in the back of his brain as he focused on the uneven path that stretched in front of him.
This was a valuable assignment not just for practicing my writing skills but for life in general, a poignant reminder that we choose how we view the world around us. The environment is filled with flaws and flowers, and we each decide which to embrace. Our perception becomes our reality.
I recently had a chance to attend the Modern Elder Academy in Baja, Mexico, run by Chip Conley.3 The goal of the program is to provide a framework for rethinking our roles in the world later in life. There was a recurring reference to the “liminal state,” meaning threshold, where you are moving between two roles, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. We were reminded that while in its cocoon, a caterpillar literally turns into soup, with only a few “imaginal discs” intact. The caterpillar essentially reinvents itself by recycling all the original material while keeping a core of what it was before.
The experiences over the week were designed to help each person shed the things that were no longer useful to them and to build upon those that are. By doing this as a group, in a concentrated time, we got to witness each person’s liminal state. It was both fascinating and instructive to watch all of the transitions, some of which were clearly very hard. I wish we had taken a before-and-after photo of the group because the internal changes were matched by dramatic physical transformations as each person unfolded into the person they wanted to be. While there, I wrote a number of poems to capture the experience. The one below was about how something as simple as sand can be viewed so differently depending upon one’s perspective.
Sand
Beaten, Battered, Broken
Seasoned, Salted, Spent
Trodden, Tainted, Tattered
Withered, Woken, Went
Grounded, Gentle, Guided
Settled, Sagely, Sweet
Reflective, Rhythms, Reset
Collective, Calm, Complete
* * *
We are deeply influenced by the stories others tell us and those we tell ourselves, and these stories shape the possibilities we see in our future. In fact, we aren’t only influenced by our own personal experiences but also by our ancestors’ experiences. There is evidence for transgenerational trauma carried by the descendants of Holocaust survivors, American Indians, and African Americans whose relatives were enslaved, as well as those who have been subjected to severe poverty or loss. Most of us are told stories about past generations, with clear lessons attached. And our parents’ and grandparents’ experiences change the way they treat their offspring. Sometimes the stories and lessons are of good fortune, and sometimes they transfer severe stress to the next generation.
In order to shape your own story, you need to understand who and where you are now, how you got here, your strengths and weaknesses, and where you want to go from here. You need to understand what holds you back, what pushes you forward, and what you’re bringing along with you on your journey. You need to interpret what others told you about your past and what you tell yourself about your future.
I was recently at an event where there were lots of young children, ranging from six months to six years of age. It was fascinating to see how different they were from one another. There were children who were quick to smile, those with pensive gazes, those who always looked sad, those who always jumped up to participate, and those who stood back, watching carefully from the sidelines. It was clear that from this early age they already had a story—verbal and nonverbal—about their place in the world. Their personal stories appeared to begin long before they were born.
Shirzad Chamine has done a lot of work unpacking the types of stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and how those stories help or hinder us. In his book Positive Intelligence, Shirzad describes ten different “saboteurs,” as well as a “sage,” that shape how we engage with the world. The saboteurs include the judge, stickler, pleaser, hyper-vigilant, restless, controller, avoider, hyper-achiever, victim, and hyper-rational.4 Understanding how these voices in our head influence how we view each situation provides some guidance on how to quiet them.
As a hyper-vigilant, I know that voice well. It is always telling me about the things that could go wrong and the dangers ahead. As Shirzad says, “The constant anxiety burns a great deal of vital energy that could otherwise be put to great use.” Although being vigilant is helpful in some situations, when it kicks into high gear, it is counterproductive and destructive.
This is true of all the other saboteurs Shirzad describes. For example, avoiders try to escape conflict by saying yes to things they shouldn’t and downplay real problems. Hyper-achievers are highly focused on how others see them, leading to “unsustainable workaholic tendencies.” And controllers need to feel in charge of a situation and often push others beyond their comfort zone.
Shirzad came to our creativity class and ran an exercise with the students showing them how to recognize their own saboteurs and how to calm those voices by doing exercises that redirect their attention. Most important, the students were comforted to know that we all have these voices and to learn about their teammates’ saboteurs. It helped them interpret one another’s behavior and gave them tools for working together more effectively, including by identifying a saboteur when it shows up.
Essentially, what we achieve is influenced by where we have been and what we tell ourselves. For example, consider how each of the following four people—each of whom has nothing—would engage with the world around them given their different backgrounds:
Someone who never had anything
Someone who grew up in comfort and then lost it all
Someone who started with nothing, built a comfortable life, and then lost it
Someone who grew up with abundance, has nothing now, and knows it will be there later
Although today they are all in the same place—with nothing—they come to that place from very different experiences. As a result, they see and seize very different opportunities. Which one will be more comfortable taking risks? Which one will hold back for fear of failure? Which one will see possibilities that others don’t? And which one will be hungry to do something big? This clearly depends on the story they tell themselves about their current situation and their prospects for the future.
Your current position may look the same to the outside world. However, your past experiences color the possibilities you see in front of you. Last year I experienced this in a very powerful way. I took a group of fifteen Stanford students to South Africa for two weeks to learn about innovation in this developing economy. We spent very little time together before the trip, and we all arrived in Johannesburg on the same day. Although all were Stanford students, it was clear that their past experiences had a huge impact on how they experienced the country.
Some of the students had traveled extensively before, and others hadn’t. Some came from affluent families, and others came from homes of modest means. They also had grown up all over the world, from California to Jamaica to Lebanon. Therefore, they each saw South Africa—which is a complicated place wi
th a complicated history—with different eyes. Honestly, I was not prepared for this. I mistakenly thought we would have a shared experience, but each of us had an experience that was unique, based on our past experiences. After some tricky early misunderstandings, this ultimately led to some very informative discussions about how each of us experienced the country. This continues to remind me that being in the same position does not mean we are actually in the same place.
Your position is how the world sees you, and your place is how you see yourself in the world. These are rarely the same thing, and they tend to diverge as we get older since few people actually see all the things that influenced who you are today. For example, if you were to meet Peggy Burke today, you would see a successful entrepreneur who runs a high-profile branding firm. You’d see all she has accomplished, building the company over the past thirty years, and will likely make all sorts of assumptions about her path to this position. You wouldn’t know how much work went into building the business, the near-death experiences the firm faced over the years, and how Peggy’s early life was riddled with financial uncertainty when her father’s business failed, leaving her and her nine siblings in dire straits.
This story of losing everything when she was young is deeply embedded in Peggy’s story about herself and motivates her to work incredibly hard every single day. She never takes success for granted and is driven to make sure that her business is on strong footing. Nobody sees this story when they meet Peggy. They see a positive, confident, and generous leader. Her position in the world as seen by others is quite different from her place in the world as she sees herself. As this story reminds us, where you begin is certainly not an accurate predictor of where you will end up. There are those who begin life with everything and squander those resources. There are those who start with nothing who manage to make something from nothing.
* * *
I shared some of the stories from this book with my father, who then decided to take some time to reflect on his most important insights, looking back over the ninety-two years of his life. Despite his currently comfortable position, his path was far from preordained. He moved to the United States when he was eight years old. His family escaped from Germany in the 1930s, and they arrived with essentially nothing. My father spoke no English, and his parents didn’t have enough money to support their two children, so he lived with relatives, with whom he couldn’t communicate, until his parents could afford to bring him home. From these humble beginnings, my father built an impressive life and career, and retired as executive vice president and chief operating officer at a large multinational corporation.
Reflecting on his life, my father determined that his most important insight is that you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously or judge others too harshly. He wishes he had been more tolerant of mistakes he made and those made by others, and that he could have seen that failure is a normal part of the learning process. He realizes now that most of our errors are not earth-shattering, and he shared the story that brought this home for him. Working at RCA, a large US electronics company, early in his career, he and his team had a project that was going very badly. My father and his colleagues stayed up for days on end trying to fix the problems. Working to find a solution became their entire focus for weeks. Shortly after the project was successfully completed, the entire program was canceled. Even though the project was the center of their universe, to others it was expendable. He learned many times over that most things in life, especially our failures, aren’t as important as we think they are at the time.
My father also reminded me that success is sweet but transient. When you’re in a position of influence, authority, and power, the benefits are wonderful. But once the position is gone, the perks evaporate. Your “power” comes from the position you hold. When you’re no longer in that position, all that goes with it quickly fades away. Therefore, you should not define yourself by your current position or believe all your own press. Savor the spotlight when you have it, but be ready to yield center stage when it’s time to go. When you leave a job, the organization will go on without you, as you are not indispensable. Of course, you will leave a legacy of all you have accomplished, but that, too, fades with time.
Today, my father is also acutely aware of the joy of being alive. Several years ago he had a heart attack, and his implanted defibrillator is a constant reminder of his mortality. We all know intellectually that each day is precious, but as we grow older or deal with a life-threatening illness, this sentiment grows increasingly more palpable. My father works hard to make each opportunity stand out, to appreciate every moment, and to avoid squandering even a single day.
* * *
In looking for inspiration for this book, I literally and figuratively opened every drawer and looked into every closet of my life. In the process, I stumbled upon a canvas duffel bag I’ve been dragging around for forty years. The two-foot-long bag is filled with “treasures” that seemed important to me at the time. When I was twenty, this bag was one of my few possessions. I carried it with me from college to graduate school and everywhere I’ve lived since. Though I rarely open it, I always know where to find it. The bag and its contents are a tangible link to my past.
When I opened the bag, I found a small collection of unremarkable rocks and shells from far-off beaches, faded photo IDs dating back through my years of high school and college, a stack of old letters, and some of my early “inventions,” including prototype LED jewelry that I crafted out of modeling clay and watch batteries. I also found a small notebook of poetry, titled Experimental Artifacts.
When I wrote the poems in the notebook they represented the flip side of the organized scientific experiments I was performing in my neuroscience lab while in graduate school. One of the poems, called “Entropy,” jumped out at me. This poem was my attempt to find humor in all the uncertainty I was facing. I wrote the poem in September 1983. At that time the future was murky because I couldn’t see very far into it. At the risk of embarrassing myself, I will include the poem, since many people asked to see it after the release of the first edition of this book:
Entropy
Life is like a game called Entropy,
The goal of which is near insanity,
When things become a bit too predictable,
And life threatens to appear all too reasonable,
The player must make a strategic move,
Or the situation will tragically improve,
One may carefully distribute loose ends randomly,
Over which to trip and stumble haphazardly,
Or ask new players to join the game,
Whose rules are inevitably not the same,
But in the face of prolonged consistency,
When control and order emerge insistently,
One must make an all-out attack,
In order to survive and bring entropy back,
There is only one thing that is a sure defense,
Against reproducibility and significance,
That’s my secret and I guard it well,
And for no fortune can you make me tell,
Just watch my progress and you will see,
I will surely win the game of Entropy!
Thirty-five years later I now see the uncertainty as a gift. There are still days when I’m not sure which road to take and I’m overwhelmed by the choices unfolding in front of me. But I now know that uncertainty opens the door to possibilities.
The uncertainty we face when we leave school never evaporates. There is uncertainty at each turn in our lives—when we start a new job, launch a new company, begin a new relationship, have a child, or retire. Each of these decisions and actions opens the door to considerable uncertainty—and opportunity! Uncertainty is the essence of life, a fire that sparks innovation, and an engine that drives us forward.
Hopefully, the stories in this book underscore the idea that boundless possibilities result from extracting yourself from your comfort zone, being willing to fail, having a he
althy disregard for the impossible, and seizing every opportunity to be fabulous. Yes, these actions inject chaos into your life and keep you off-balance. But they also take you to places you couldn’t even have imagined and provide a lens through which to see problems as opportunities. Above all, they give you growing confidence that problems you face can be solved.
The poem I wrote thirty-five years ago is a poignant reminder of the uncertainty I experienced in my twenties when I looked ahead, not knowing what lay around the next curve. I wish someone had told me to embrace that uncertainty. As the stories in this book demonstrate, the most interesting things happen when you get off the predictable path, when you challenge assumptions, and when you give yourself permission to see the world as opportunity rich and full of possibility.
Author’s Letter
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this book. I hope that the words have been meaningful to you.
It all began with the seed of an idea fourteen years ago when my son, Josh, turned sixteen. It dawned on me that he would be heading to college in only two years, and I felt remiss. Although he had learned all the traditional things we teach young people in school, I realized there were many lessons that would have made my life so much less stressful and more fulfilling when I went off to college and started my career. So, I created a growing list of things I knew were critically important in making one’s place in the world. This document resided on my computer, and whenever I thought of another insight, I added it to the list.