21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges

by Charles Handy

  Life, it seems to me, is a like a long S curve, lying on its side. Like this:

  Your life, every life, even the life of a business or a school, or a political party or even a country, starts off by putting more in, by way of education, investment or experiment, before it gets going. The S curve goes down before it starts to go up. But go up, one hopes, it soon does, and goes on up, growing all the time. Nevertheless, it is an S curve and eventually the life or the organisation reaches the top and starts to go down. Well, that’s life, people say, nothing lasts forever. That may be true but there could be more than one life before the end. You could start a new S curve before the first one ended, and another one after that. You can and probably should if you want to prolong your success. But that new curve is also an S curve. It dips down at first. It needs new investment, education and experiment before it starts to grow. It would be best, therefore, if it got started and out of its initial dip before the first curve peaked, because it is hard to start something new when everything is going downhill. It should look like this:

  This is where the Davy’s Bar story becomes relevant. You have to find the next curve while you are still climbing and before you can see the end point of the first curve. Most people cannot summon up the will to change direction until they see the writing on the wall. But by then it is often too late. They are running out of energy and resources, can’t think of how to be different or how to change before they collapse. I have seen too many individuals and organisations – yes, and even countries – sitting in Davy’s Bar, at the end of their road, wondering how it all went wrong, why they didn’t change when times were good, why they missed the opportunity when everything was going so well and they thought it would last forever.

  Psychologically it is very hard to leave a party while it is still at its height and you are enjoying it. How do you know, anyway, when you are getting near the top? It’s a paradox. As I said above, the only time you can see that point on the first curve is when you are past it, like myself on my road to Avoca. The trouble is that in life you cannot do what I did: turn round and go back. That’s why you need help. It is easier for an outsider to sense the point where a new curve is needed. Every driver needs a navigator, but in this case there is no Satnav to do it for you. Only a human can do it.

  Alex Ferguson, the legendary manager of Manchester United football club, skilfully spotted the point when his key players were nearing their peak so was able to sell them on before their performances fell away. But he was less perceptive when it came to himself. He left the club at its peak, leaving his successor the unenviable task of managing the decline. Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, another legend in his time, did the same at Tesco. At a personal level, too many people have stayed in their jobs too long and then found it hard to start a new career. Many who are made redundant say that they wished they had gone voluntarily years before. In my own life, my friendly adviser was my wife. Twice she suggested to me that the time was ripe for a change. Each time I resisted. Each time she was right. Each time it took me at least two years to get up to speed in my new curve, but each time it was very much worth it in the end.

  Ideally, you should keep the first curve going while you begin the task of creating the next one. Organisations do it by setting up pilot projects with new and often younger people who are not so committed to the old ways. I often suggest to individuals that some form of sabbatical, a temporary break from their current work, is one way to at least explore new possibilities. But paid sabbaticals are still, unfortunately, too rare in organisations so you may have to create your own breaks as far as you can.

  If you do not have a friendly adviser there are some warning signs to watch out for. Complacency is the first. When you feel that you have everything under control and have no concerns about your ability to manage whatever comes up, then beware, you may be too sure of the future for your own good. To be confident is good; to have no doubt or anxiety is dangerous. The second warning sign is a lack of curiosity about anything outside your current occupation. When my wife told me that I had become the most boring man she knew because I had become so immersed in my work that I could think of nothing else, then I knew, deep down, that it was time to lift my head up and look around me or I might be missing my way to the future Davy’s Bar again.

  The next question, of course, is what that new road or new curve should be. At this point it is good, I found, to start dreaming. At one stage I listed all the things that mattered in my life: money, time, place, personal satisfaction, sense of contribution and, lastly, feasibility. I then came up with three possible scenarios that I rated against these criteria. It became an agenda for long discussions with my nearest and dearest as well as some friendly outsiders. The process also opened my eyes to new possibilities so that I was ready to jump when the opportunity occurred. As I used to tell my students, stuff happens in life, apples fall unexpectedly into your lap, but it helps if you are standing in the orchard. In short, if you know the sort of thing you want you should start frequenting that world in some way, meeting people, reading relevant literature, attending conferences or visiting internet sites.

  Remember too that the start of the new curve will cost more than it produces at first. In each of the three new curves that I started I had to face a big cut in pay for a few years. If, therefore, you have not been able to keep your first curve going while you explore the next, then you would be well advised to build up a reserve to see you through. The nine-month executive programme that I once instituted and ran for mid-career executives was a sabbatical experience that allowed them the time to reflect on their future along with education that might help. It was expensive but important enough to some that they were prepared to take out a loan to finance it. Others had savings. Some had persuaded their organisations to finance them as a form of leaving gratuity because it was clear that they would not be returning. This type of programmed sabbatical is not open to many but there is nothing to stop you arranging your own, provided you have saved up for it while the going was good.

  Life is long. There is time for at least three different lives, maybe more. It would be a waste not to experience them. Remember only to give Davy’s Bar a miss. Arrive there and you have left it too late. All you can do is to drown your sorrows and wonder how it might have been.

  LETTER 14

  ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST

  It is an interesting question: Why do we work so hard if we don’t need to? In 1930 John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, suggested that for his grandchildren the economic problem would be solved, by which he meant that there would be no more scarcity. Technological and productivity advances would create an economic utopia in which nobody would have to work more than fifteen hours a week; we would all, if everything was fairly distributed, have enough. That worried him because, he said, we have been expressly evolved by nature – with all our impulses and deepest instincts – for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. We won’t, in other words, know what to do with ourselves if we no longer have to work all the hours in the week to support ourselves.

  Keynes was right, but only in theory. We should have solved the economic problem long ago, at least in the rich world that I live in. If we distributed things a bit more fairly no one in modern society should be in poverty or lack what they need for a decent life. As it is, the idea that enough is a good as a feast competes with the other slogan that you can never have enough of a good thing – and the latter often wins.

  When it comes to money the winners take all, leaving slim pickings for those at the rear. Currently, in Britain, over half the population receives some sort of benefit from the state. In many countries governments have been forced to pay in-work benefits to provide even those in work with enough to live on. To those recipients to talk of enough being as good as a feast would be an insult. Nor are the middle classes exempt. The children of my friends, only a few years ahead
of you, worry about the cost of housing, repaying their student debt, affording a pension, finding a decent job, and can only wish for enough, let alone more than enough. Keynes’s forecast has not yet come true. More people are working more hours than ever before even though they already probably have enough to lead a reasonably comfortable life. Why do we do it? Is it to buy more stuff, or to show how important we are? Or because our colleagues are getting more than us? Whatever the reason we do seem to have an insatiable appetite for more: more things, more money, more entertainment, more everything. When John D. Rockefeller, the billionaire philanthropist back in the last century, was asked what ‘enough’ was, he said ‘just one more’. Many of us seem to agree with him. There seems to be no limit to our appetites.

  Part of the reason, however, must surely be that we love work: not necessarily the actual work itself but everything that goes with it. Work gives many of us our identity. We are what we do. It provides the glue of society, brings people together, shapes our day and gives us a reason to get up in the morning.

  And yet, and yet. Our hunter ancestors did not have that urge. Research on the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert showed that the idea that our prehistoric ancestors had a hard life of unremitting toil was not true. They only worked when they had to, did not store food, had few wants, which were easily satisfied. They only had to take up their spears and go hunting when more was food was needed. As a result they worked only fifteen hours a week. There would have been no point in working more. Some have called them ‘the first affluent society’. The missing ingredient, however, was money. Money can be stored more easily than food and can be exchanged for a multiplicity of other things. Without money our ancestors saw no point in working longer than they had to. Had the Bushmen had money or other means of exchange their lives might have been less leisured. Perhaps the love of money really was the root of all evil.

  Until I was sixty the idea of having enough money was a distant dream. I used to carry a card around with me. It had two columns, ‘Money In’ and ‘Money Out’. It was my constant reminder that the ‘out’ must not exceed the ‘in’. Then, having turned sixty, the kids had left home, the mortgage was paid off, my books had started to sell and I had discovered that overpaid form of performance art: talking to business conferences. Suddenly, late in life, the in column was larger than the out. Dilemma! Should I enjoy the bonanza or practise what I preach and settle for enough?

  At one point I was interviewed by a journalist for Fortune magazine. She wondered why I restricted my big lectures to ten a year when these lectures were, at that period, earning me several thousand pounds a time. ‘Could you do more?’ she asked me. ‘Do you ever turn down invitations to speak?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Often. These lectures can involve too much travelling and take me away from my home and my writing, so why would I want to do more? As it is they provide me with quite enough money to support my family and meet my needs.’

  ‘But you could make so much more money, so aren’t you tempted?’

  ‘What would I do with that extra money, if I don’t need it?’

  She thought for a moment; then she said, ‘You could collect things.’

  It was an eye-opener. She was right. Rich people use their unnecessary wealth to collect things: houses, yachts, art, even friends and wives. These are their trophies, the visible signs of their success. Just as the emperors of Ancient Rome would herald their successful military campaigns with processions of captured chieftains and treasures in ceremonial marches through the capital, so our modern emperors have to have their own trophies to display.

  My wife and I, however, were not collectors. We tried from that point on to make the idea of ‘enough’ one of the rules of our life. Each year, during my working career, we would calculate how many money-making contracts to speak or teach or write I needed to undertake in order to make sure that we would have enough; enough, that is, to enable us to live relatively comfortable lives. We soon realised that the lower we set the bar for enough the more freedom we had to do all the other things. Blessed are the poor, you could say, provided always that you are poor by choice and not necessity.

  Keynes believed that mankind was bred to work and would be lost without the financial need to do so. That, however, is to take a very narrow view of work. Along with many others, I have found that the work I do for free is much more satisfying that the work I do or did for money to support my family. By work for free I include not only work for charities or good causes, but also the work I do at home: cooking, entertaining, caring for children – including you – fixing things that go wrong. I love cooking but after a day at the chopping board I know that it is work as well as pleasure. We also ran an informal counselling service in which we invited anyone who wanted to talk about their life or work to come to breakfast in our London apartment for free. We hoped it helped those who came. We enjoyed it, but it was work, with all the effort and time we put into it, but we also appreciated the satisfaction that work can bring. Keynes was too pessimistic. There will always be good things for idle hands and minds to do, as Keynes must have known, for his own life was full of unpaid but worthwhile work. I might even say that of this sort of work there can never be enough.

  The idea of enough is not confined to money and work. It works in every part of life. Food and drink, most obviously, where enough is literally as good as a feast. There is also the temptation to concentrate on some subject or activity to the exclusion of anything else. That runs the risk of what economists call opportunity cost, when you miss out on the opportunity of developing an alternative interest or activity. One year, when I was totally absorbed in my work, my wife told me that I had become the most boring man she knew. By ignoring the rule of enough I had narrowed my life and might have ruined my marriage.

  LETTER 15

  IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID

  This was the phrase that James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, insisted was the key message of the 1992 election campaign. He was concerned about the loss of jobs and the plight of low-level workers at that time in America, about the dollars in their pockets or the lack of them. It is a reminder to me that economics is both important and too little discussed, in schools or in homes, when you are young. Don’t worry – this is not going to be a discourse on the future of the British economy or a lecture on Maynard Keynes, Britain’s most illustrious economist, although he is well worth studying. No, I am concerned with your personal economy, your money. I agree that this is getting a bit more basic than the more philosophical tone of my other letters but money matters. It matters most when you don’t have it and it can matter too much when you have more of it. What follows is what I have learnt from my own experience.

  I grew up, as I have told you, in a vicarage in Ireland. Money was never mentioned at home even though there was never much of it. This was because of the way my father, and his profession, thought about the problem of financing his calling. The Church of Ireland, his employer, did not want him to see money as in any way a reward for his work. That would have meant measuring his success or failure, and how do you measure his ‘care of souls’ as it was called? So they gave him accommodation and a stipend. The stipend was designed to be enough to live on but not to get rich on. It was barely enough but it was sufficient, given that it was accompanied by a free house and large garden. This arrangement meant that money was never the measure of anything my father did. He was free to dedicate himself to his work without worrying about his pay because that was fixed, take it or leave it. Moderate income was the norm of the profession. You did not join it to get rich. More professions might usefully adopt the stipendiary principle. Or you might think of applying it yourself in your own life.

  The real truth is that when you are doing something that you really care about, the money, or lack of it, does not matter that much. Painters will live in an attic if they have to. In my own career I moved from oil executive to academic to freelance author, in each case looking for more enjoyment an
d fulfilment in my work but having to accept a downward curve in my finances. As long as there was enough, my wife and I were content. I am not suggesting that you aim to follow such a downward financial spiral as I did, but I am stressing that it is more important that you enjoy what you are doing than what you are earning. To do that you may have to adjust your living standards to your income rather than the other way round. Not easy, if your friends have higher standards than you, but worthwhile in the end. Fighting for money is soul-destroying.

  My wife had a strange but very important philosophy about money. She distinguished between investments and expenditure. If something was an investment she went for the best and would borrow if need be to achieve it. I remember discussing her plans for a ping-pong shed in our garden. I overheard the builder asking, ‘Do you want it in ply or oak?’ My heart sank as I heard her say, ‘Oak, of course.’ But she was right in the end because it now also serves as a very useful spare bedroom. Cameras, of course, for her as a photographer, were always an investment, no matter how ludicrously expensive. ‘You could buy a car for that,’ I said once, to which she just replied, ‘I don’t need a car, I need a camera.’ When it came to expenditure it was a different matter. She hated spending money if she did not have to. Eating in restaurants was ridiculously expensive compared with cooking the same meal at home, and much more noisy. Taxis were out when buses for we oldies were free. Good clothes, however, were an investment, provided that they would last for years.

  I was the reverse. Having grown up in the culture of enough, where make do and mend was the motto as opposed to throw away and start anew, I hankered after the chance to indulge myself in spending on experiences rather than things: eating out, theatres, travel and so on, things where there would be nothing to show for the money. Fortunately I was married to someone who thought exactly the opposite. All this is to underline how wise, in retrospect, I thought my wife was, although it took many years for some of her investments to bear fruit. I can now recommend her philosophy as a good way to live with enough. It is also the best way to run the national economy too. Borrow only for investment; spend within your income. My wife would have made a good Chancellor of the Exchequer.