Building a Life: Howard H. Stevenson (Transcript)

I think about my own career. You know, I started the entrepreneurship when nobody cared. Well, if my sons or daughters tried to do it, it wouldn’t work. There is a different path. It’s a different time. You know, we started one of the first hedge funds in the United States. I was involved in starting and managed for 10 years.

Well, you know, now there are 2,600 hedge funds started each year and 2,500 going out of business. It’s a very different game. And the other thing about it is it’s really not the way that it works. Because if you do that, you often leave out a few things like family, community. And as one guy said in their interviews, I now retired. It’s time for me. I just don’t know who me is. I’ve been so involved in doing what other people tell me to do.

So the other — life’s reality is quite different. Life’s reality is all about choices. We’re standing at the crossroads and we don’t know what’s over the horizon. You know, I got tenure in 1978. That’s something that people seek. And I resigned immediately. And people thought it was crazy. But I’d interviewed a whole bunch of tenured faculty and said, they’re not happy. Why would I go down a path where many of the more, quote, successful people aren’t happy? Let me try something different.

But I had no idea where it would lead. It led back here. But on a very different set of terms. Now, success is a tough problem. The external measures and the internal measures aren’t always the same. Sometimes we’re rewarded for things we’re not proud of. And sometimes we’re proud of things we’re not rewarded for.

I think, secondly, things change. As I said, the world changes. We have to deal with it. We teach about people, opportunity, deal in context. And the context really matters. You change. If you still want the same thing at 82 as you wanted at 22, your name’s Hugh Hefner. And what’s obvious is sometimes the obvious route to success leads to failure. Because you get going down that path and you wind up in Amarillo and you had no intention of being in Amarillo. I hope nobody’s from Amarillo.

There’s another thing that I’ve observed, which often it hurts when others experience a success that could have been yours. You know, I’m the ST in Baupost. It’s a fairly famous firm. I left it when the kids, I became a single parent. I look on the Forbes list and see the guy who took over from me. Yeah, I wince. But then I think, well, if I’d stayed in that path, I couldn’t have done the other things I’ve done.

But I still wince. I have to admit, when I open up Forbes and see it, I wince. But that’s OK. What we discovered is there are different kinds of success. And the satisfactions of each are different. And that’s what I want to talk about a bit.

Three Great Fears In Life

Now, I think for most of our graduates of Harvard Business School, there are really three great fears in life. One is I won’t be a success. Two, I will be a success. Won’t be enough, this famous Peggy Lee song. And I’ll be a success, but I have to sell my soul. That somehow to be successful in the world’s terms, I have to give up something that’s really important to me.

Now, everything I learned from my mother, I think, came from the Reader’s Digest. But this is one that I’ll never forget. Success is getting what you want. And happiness is wanting what you get. And one of the most important pieces of advice I think I’ve given my kids is marry a happy person. Because you’re not going to change somebody who’s unhappy into somebody who’s happy. So figure out if they’re happy or not.

So there’s a lot of bad advice out there. Simple rules. Follow your passion. Wonderful. I’m passionate about being an actor. Oh, OK. How many parents have kids on deep subsidy trying to be an actor or a writer in Hollywood or those kind of things? And they get to about 50 and they say, I’m not really going to make it. Now what I’m going to do?

And by the way, that’s about when the parents die. So the subsidy stops. And it’s really a problem. There is this stress on perfection and having it all. You’re supposed to be Dr. Ruth in the bedroom and Donald Trump in the boardroom. Well, you know, I don’t know who you are, but I find 24 hours a day doesn’t let me do all those things all the time. And we’ll come back and talk about that and how you manage it.

And there are some wonderful success models that gloss over the flaws. You know, if I think of Rupert Murdoch, John Corzine, can we imagine Lady Gaga? You know, Leanna Hines. Do we want, would you really like to be some of these people that have been written up as great successes? And even worse, would you want your kids to be them? I can’t imagine if one of my daughters said, I really want to model myself on Lady Gaga. The two that went to the Harvard Business School have done OK, but one has wound up being a family counselor.

We interviewed about 150 people. They were high achievers in multiple arenas. They were, they seemed to care about others, which is probably one of our criteria. Their success in life make a difference to many others. They weren’t just about me. I didn’t interview Donald Trump. They seemed to keep going and growing. And they were unique. We interviewed everybody from investment bankers to a cleaning woman that had come, probably not originally as a legal immigrant, and now has a firm with about 50 people that work for and is really amazingly happy.

And all our kids are graduating from college. And so it’s a very fascinating group of people. But mostly what you saw is people that were quite satisfied, that they felt good about themselves and good about their life. So, you know, I could criticize this as a sociological study because these are probably the criteria we chose for success, not something that was given to us by deep research.

And what we saw in these people is they seized opportunities as presented. They largely avoided regrets. Now, my co-author, Lauren, and I argued a lot about, can you live a life without regrets? And it was, yes, we can. No, we can’t. Yes, a very intelligent argument. But what we discovered is we were talking about different things. She was talking about consequences, and I was talking about sort of process.

You know, things go wrong. But if you acted honest to yourself, if things go wrong, it’s pretty hard to have a regret. She said, I acted on the best information. Regrets come when you kid yourself. One of the titles in the Howard’s Gift book is Don’t Cheat at Solitaire. We also found the people that really enjoyed the here and now. They weren’t always putting off. You know, when we interviewed one of them, ice cream arrived at the office. He stopped the interview and he says, you’ll wait. The ice cream will melt. Let’s have ice cream now.

And that was a very important lesson for us. And what we discovered is a landscape of satisfaction. If you ask people why they succeeded, they give you the same BS. It’s in Franklin, it’s in Covey, it’s in a whole bunch of these books. But what we did is we asked people, tell us about successes in your life rather than tell us why you succeeded. And it was a very interesting thing.

We saw, obviously, achievement. What have you done against goals that others are also striving for? That’s money, power, fame. There are lots of forms of achievement. And you can’t have them all, by the way. Many of my richest friends are not known. As one said, he’d pay $250,000 to get off the Forbes list.

I think that Trump pays a lot to get on it. There’s significance. Have you had a positive impact on the people you care about? There’s happiness. How do you feel about yourself and your life? Are you content? And then there’s legacy. Have you done something as a build-upon?

Now, one of the things that’s very clear is these are uncorrelated. You can achieve without being happy, right? Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway probably demonstrated that conclusively. Can you be significant without achievement? Well, my grandfather was never more than an assistant postmaster in a small town in Utah. He was a Silver Beaver Scout, which is the highest award in scouting. He taught me a lot about conservation and love for the land. I think he was very significant in many people’s lives.

Can you be happy without achievement? Just go to Aspen. How many parents told their kids, I’ve worked so hard, I want you to be happy? They go out to Aspen, meet their kids and say, what the hell are you doing? And they said, you told us to be happy, Dad. We’re happy. What’s your problem? You know, I’m a Trustafarian. That’s a great religion.

Now, legacy I was having trouble with until I thought about Karl Marx. He certainly wasn’t known in his lifetime. He is mean and abusive to his family. He was a drunkard, which generally somewhat goes with unhappiness. And yet he left a big legacy, whether for good or bad. So all these are uncorrelated. And getting one doesn’t get you the other. And we’ll come back to that.

And part of the reason they’re quite different. Happiness is really about me and now. You don’t make other people happy. You make yourself happy. And you are happy. And you don’t say, oh, I’ll be happy in the future. You say, am I happy now? Whereas legacy, I’m sorry, Bill Clinton, you don’t define your own legacy. Other people define your legacy. And it’s about your impact on the future.

Now, achievement is sort of funny. Who do I compare myself to? You know, I have a friend who feels not very wealthy because Bill Gates has a thousand times as much money. I point out that $65 million would satisfy many people. But as long as he compares himself to Bill Gates, he can make himself really quite miserable.

And by the way, it’s also led his children to think that unless they make a billion dollars, they’re not a success, which has led them to some very interesting behavior. And significance is another thing. You have to say, yeah, I want to help other people, but who do I want to help? Bill Gates can only give $10 a person to everyone on earth.

He has to choose who to help. And that’s a very important choice. It’s both an external choice and an internal choice. Who do I care about and what do I want to do for them? Now, when you think about them, they’re really complicated. Achievement is, there’s a time dimension to it, is about the past, is about the present or the future. If you think about the impact, is it on me or is it on other people? You know, I could develop things that are achievement that are about me alone, or I can build a system where other people are involved.

They’re emotional drivers. There’s some very positive drivers, mastery, recognition, pride. But there are Donald Trump’s, envy, greed and fear. These are both, these are all drivers towards achievement. But if they’re not positive, very often they’re driven by looking outside and say, I’ve got to compete and you can always compete with somebody who will make you feel bad.

And then there’s the context. You know, it’s the Wayne Gretzky, I got to skate to where the puck will be, not to where it is now. So it’s, there’s a little thing called values here. You know, as one of our daughters said at one of my wife’s round numbers, birthday, mirror, mirror on the wall, I’m like my mother after all. And she was somewhat upset at saying it, but we all, I can hear my father speaking very often when I’m talking. So all this stuff is complicated.

Now, when you look at it, you know, each of these have twins, right? You can think about contentment and fulfillment and happiness or laziness and gluttony. They both can lead you to somewhat be happy. You can think about envy and greed driving into achievement or you can think about recognition, pride and mastery. You can think about fairness, generosity and caring, which is external.

Or you can think, a few of us have been on boards where power and self-aggrandizement leads people to quote, be significant outside. And then even in legacy, there’s altruism and generative desires, or there’s the fear of death and need for control. You know, I know somebody that’s written a thousand year trust, because he really does, you know, trust should be named mistrust. If you trusted your kids, you wouldn’t put it in trust.

But to do it for a thousand years, I unkindly pointed out that William the Conqueror still has 50 something years to run. And I’m sure you’ve seen everything. But when you look at these, does contentment and fulfillment help you achieve? Not really.

You know, certain neuroses help you to achieve. Does fairness, generosity and caring help you in the competitive battle? It actually isn’t going to help you be happy, right? Because when somebody else is miserable, you’re miserable. If you think about altruism, those who leave room for other people’s success, it’s an absolute requirement for creating legacy.

But it also will probably diminish your own achievement, because you’re letting other people be recognized. There are many people, and you see it all the time in entrepreneurship, where the need to be the boss prevents you from actually developing something that will endure. So these are complex.

Most human beings, except for Donald Trump, have most of these emotions. And because we have complex emotions, we’re tired, we’re torn. We’re tugged in different directions. This one helps me achieve on this dimension. But we all want them, because we want all of these kinds of success. And this is part of the challenge I think we all face is, I don’t know, very many people don’t want to have some measure of success on all of these dimensions.

So one thing is, find your passion. That we’ll find somehow, something, that in achievement, we’ll find significant happiness and leave our legacy. The only problem is it doesn’t work. Because one activity rarely has it all. If you find love at the office, you can get yourself sued. And there’s certainly different constituencies, different judgments. When somebody says to their children, I’m working so hard, I’m doing it all for you, my children. What does the kid generally think? Bullshit, dad. You’re doing this for your own ego.

And yeah, it’s really nice. I’m really glad that you’re giving me some money. But you’re not doing your work for me. It’s for you. I mean, I can, it requires different skills. If you try and be CEO at home, the chief operating officer generally has something to say about it. At least that’s been my experience, very subtly. And there’s often collateral damage.

Because if you focus on only one thing, you’re highly likely to forget some other things. And this is a problem. So I just remind you of this poor guy. There’s another approach, which is sequential success. We’ll achieve, in achievement, after we achieve, we’ll find significance. After we find significance, we’ll find happiness. And then our legacy will be left when we die. That didn’t work either.

This is, there’s a lot of books, generally sold to YPO members, about from success to significance, halftime, I can go through the titles. They don’t work for a very simple reason. When is enough to move on? You know, if you say, when have I achieved enough? I never want, do you think any of us want to ever say I’ll never achieve again? I don’t know many, you know, people, even if they never played golf in their life, they retire and go to Ford, and they got to become a champion golfer. Unlikely to happen if you didn’t start it at 16. It’s like being a skier.

If you didn’t learn to ski before you develop common sense, you’ll never be a great skier. Because what’s enough for now, is certainly not enough for your life in most of these areas. So the notion I’ll do something and then at the next stage, I’ll pass on and I’ll focus. This is good for ADHD people, because since I’ll focus on one thing, and then I’ll achieve it, and then I can move on.

The only trouble is the decision to move on is really tough. And there’s also the problem is that you can always maximize. I was a mathematician when I was young, I don’t remember how to do a Riemann Stieltjes integral. But I do remember that there’s no largest integer, you can always want to add one to anything.

And if you’re successful at something, often you say, well, I just want a little more, you know, and it’s a very interesting problem of how do you not maximize. And we do have continuing emotional needs. As I say, I don’t think you can ever leave the need for achievement. When is it you want to say, I’ve done enough for everyone else, it’s now about me, I just want to be happy myself.

I mean, I find that it’s actually harder with kids. My youngest is 38, and my oldest is 53. And yeah, they’re as needy now as they were in the 17th. There’s just another zero in all the needs. Or two zeros or three zeros, depending on what’s going on in their life. And by the way, you’ll miss some opportunities if you try and do it sequentially. Because, you know, can you wait to be happy? I can’t imagine living life saying, I will finally be happy when I’ve got $100 million. That’s a little bit of a nonsense.

And by the way, your family will never wait. You know, they find ways to cope if you don’t deal with it now. So what we saw in these people is a very interesting phenomenon. They sort of looked at life and said, oh, achievement, significance, happiness. And they told stories about starting small. They’d tell stories of each of these things that happened to them when they’re young. They weren’t having a big impact, but they could talk about significance of what they did for people.

They could talk about small achievements. I mean, we had stories of high school achievements from people that actually… Peter Ueberroth told us a story about his high school experience. He ran the Los Angeles Olympics and was very famous in a lot of things. He was also the guy that helped restore Los Angeles after Watts. But his stories went way back, both with significance and achievement. And by the way, as they went through this, they told bigger and bigger stories. And, you know, the problem is we don’t know when it’s going to end.

I was pretty healthy. I’d exercise in the morning. I was walking across campus when I died. Happily, it was January 3rd and it was a warm day and people were around. But if I’d been three minutes later, I would be… I wouldn’t be here because I would have been in my office and you had about four minutes to get help. But they also told stories, all the legacies they spun off. And many of them could not…

They were much more interested in the legacies from early in their life, whether it was something they did in high school that has endured something, somebody they helped when they first got in their career. So it was a very interesting set of stories about the way they sort of spun this through a spiral of life. Now, there’s… It’s really easy to put things in the wrong domain.

We live in Cambridge. There is a school there where I swear that kids are the achievement. You know, mine is the smartest kid in the room. And if you don’t believe it, I’m going to beat you up. This is the parent speaking. If you say I’m never as happy as when I’m at the office, I think you’ve got a problem. I love my work. I’ve had the best career in the world. But actually, there’s some other things I like, too.

Is my children’s trust the legacy I’m leaving? I don’t think so. Invisible leadership of charities is significant. I’ve been the chairman of the board of NPR and been actively involved in a lot of charities. And some of it’s, you know, you get in there and some of the elbows are equally sharp, shall we say, in some of these charities as they are at any business that I’ve ever been involved in. And one of the questions I always ask people is, where do you put your tennis? I’m 71 years old.

I play tennis badly, but I really enjoy it. But, you know, that’s not going to… I was with a friend the other day who’s 72, who pays Federer to warm him up. He’s very good. But, you know, at 72, he can afford it. So it’s not a problem. But that’s a very important part of his self-identity, being able to win at tennis. And his sons are starting to beat him.

And boy, is this bad. Now, his son happens to be on the tennis team at a major university. But he still thinks he should be able to beat his son. Now, he can play head games on his son, so he wins quite often. But, so, you know, if you think about it, I think the lesson of the book was most people seek satisfactions in all domains. And seeking one hinders you pursuing the others. We only have 24 hours a day. The time you spend on achievement, you don’t spend on significance.

That great satisfaction from one source can’t make up for missing on the others. And I hate the word balance. I always think of it as a seal that has something sitting on his nose spinning around. I think, unfortunately, it’s about juggling. Now, you know, juggling is really an art. If you think about juggling, you got to keep your eye on all the balls. You know, if you only look at one ball, you’re going to drop the others. So you got to keep your eye on all the balls.

When you touch something, you have to give it energy. You know, nobody applauds you as a juggler if you hold all the balls in your hand. You can balance the balls, but that’s not a very interesting thing. And in juggling, you catch it, and you throw it almost immediately. But you have to give it energy. You have to give it direction, and you have to get rid of it. And you have to calculate. If those of you who…

I just love to go to Cirque du Soleil. You see them throwing these things, and they catch them over there. How they get them to come down at the right time over there is absolutely beyond me. But I think what it amounts to is really practice, which is why when you think of those spirals, these people that we admire often have been practicing the skill of juggling all of their life.

And what’s the most important ball in juggling? It’s the falling ball. It’s not the one at the top. It’s not the one in the hand. It’s the one you’re about to drop. Now, in life, I find that there are some rubber balls. Careers tend to be fairly rubber. They’ll bounce. Family, that’s a little harder. Sometimes if you drop that one, it shatters. So the falling ball is a tremendously important thing.

Now, if you think about the dynamics of life, in the early stages, you don’t think much about legacy. I can think when I was 21, I didn’t really think about what I was doing for legacy purposes. Although, in fact, when I look back, and by the way, if I tell the story of the kids, I can tell them why writing the Howard, the head ski case or some of the things I did when I was very young turned out to be a part of the legacy. But that wasn’t the reason I wrote it. I just thought Howard Head was cool.

You know, as you get to be an early career, this is a time when you start to make the attachments. As Anne said, it’s one of the important things about having some people to talk to. It may be a spouse, it may not be a spouse. But if you don’t build your friends, and it’s amazing to me at my age, how many of the people I really know well and like, I would became friends with early in my life.

That somehow the shared experience, the shared traumas, the shared things are so important to those relationships. And the happiness. If you don’t know by the time you’re in your 30s, what makes you happy? Stop and ask yourself that question. I know what makes me happy. I love to have lunch with friends or dinner with friends. It’s something I seek out. Because if I go for a week without having, you know, after family, and if I don’t talk to all my kids, at least two or three times a week, I feel badly.

You know, some of it’s they’re busy, I’m busy, but somehow we find time to talk. But happiness, you got to know what it means. And you got to say that’s something I seek out on a regular basis, I’m not going to postpone it. And then of course, the big red ball in the earliest career is the achievement. You know, very few people are Grandma Moses, you don’t achieve starting at 83. So this is the early career dynamics.

In the mid career, we sort of get on a path. We know what makes us happy. We’ve settled on who’s significant to us, unless there’s a major change. And we’re sort of know where the achievement goes. And then legacy starts to raise its head. Well, what do I really care about? Am I doing the things that I care about? Will I be proud of my life at the end?

You know, there’s usually something when one of your 43 year old friends dies of a heart attack. It’s a wake up call. Remember when Pat Lyles died, some of you probably remember Pat. But when he died, he was the runner. He was in good health. He was supposed to be my trustee if I died. And now I’m picking up his pieces. And by the way, he wasn’t. Well, I had to figure out where the pieces were first before I could pick them up. It was a good lesson to me.

But then we get in this golden years. I’m not going to achieve a lot more. I’ve got one more book I’m working on now. I’ve gotten, you know, but of the 16 books I’ve written, they’re there. And as one time somebody introduced me, Howard, you write books that once you put them down, you can’t pick them up. But the achievement is what it is.

I find that with 12 grandchildren, seven kids and lots of friends, you know, you have to work hard at maintaining those relationships. You know, now happily in the world of the Internet and happily in the world of email and things you can keep in contact in ways that you just never did before. But you still have to work at it. And you have to ask yourself, do I have enough time or am I allocating enough time to it?

And then legacies there. But at this point, you know, if you’re not happy, forget about it, as they say. So you want to go back to the key problems. You can’t achieve in all dimensions. I will never be a great tennis player. I’ll never be a great skier. There are a lot of things. I will never be a singer. I can go through all the things I won’t be. So I have to focus on what I want to be.

What are my skills? What are my — where do I feel good about myself in the competition, the world? You know, one of the things I learned early in life, I worked with a guy and I said he was one of the people that helped coin the word automation in his manufacturing course. And he went into the paper industry and said, Joe, why did you go into paper industry?

So John Debo would like to compete with smart people. I prefer to compete with dumb people. And it was a lesson I learned in life. Why would I ever want to be a mathematician? They’re really smart people that work hard and love math. I wasn’t one of them. Again, things change. Things change and you change.

You know, I thought I would end my golden years with a lot of travel. Well, it turns out I run out of breath pretty easily. You know, I was up on Mauna Kea two weeks ago at the Smithsonian Observatory there. Well, I was really glad they brought oxygen because I could make it up the hill.

When I started to walk a couple hundred feet at 14,000 feet, I said, yeah, 13,756, to be precise. But I was excited about going to the observatory. But I recognized that I’m not going to walk up a lot of those hills by myself. This still exists.

I still look around and see things I could have had, I didn’t have. And I still wince. And there is a wince factor. But if you don’t get over it and say, I don’t feel like I made the wrong decisions, I just wince and say that was a choice I chose. I chose it consciously, and I have no regrets.

If the first surprise is the complexity of success, and the second surprise was the emotional drivers and how complex humans are because of the diversity of emotion drivers, the third surprise to us was the role of enough. Now, enough is a funny English word. It has a lower bound. Have you done enough? And when you’re yelling at your kids, that’s enough. It has an upper bound.

And defining it, it’s interesting, if you do a search, other than Bill McKibben’s book on enough, there isn’t much out there on enough. That’s not a word that comes, we always want more. It’s like Samuel Gompers, the great labor leader, when asked what he wanted, the answer was more.

Now, what we saw in these people was a reasoned sense of enough. And that was a very interesting insight to us, because there’s enough on two different dimensions, two counts. One is the dimensionality. What’s enough in this achievement? What’s enough significance? What’s enough happiness? You know, because if you don’t define enough, you have to go for more. And the more crowds out something else.

And figuring out where your achievements are, what are the subparts of achievement? What are the real dimensions of achievement that matter to you? Now, to me, ideas are important. So writing books has been something I like and work hard at. And then there’s a question of time, because what’s enough for today? What’s enough for this week? What’s enough for this year? And what’s enough for a lifetime? Those become particularly important in implementing a sense of enough.

Now, I think there’s some benchmarks for enough. Most of us need progress. You know, even if you have a lot of money, you don’t feel good if you don’t make more. Now, I developed a trick for myself. I try and keep a balance sheet that includes the money I’ve given away. Because for me, to die the richest person in the cemetery is not the goal.

But on the other hand, I like, you know, I am sort of a measurement type of guy. And so sort of understanding how much I’ve given to charity over my lifetime, and keeping that in my balance sheet, how much I’ve given to my kids, those kinds of things, actually helped me just feel good about the total, even though I sort of set a number that I’m going to, I’ve stayed at for about 10 years and anything over that I give away. But I want to keep track, I want to understand what’s going on.

I think one of the things about enough is you can put an activity down with satisfaction. If you say, what’s my, and I enjoyed Anne’s talk this morning, because having that list of things that I want to accomplish today, means you can actually do it. If you don’t have a list, you’ll never finish it. If you have a list, you can actually sit down and say, Oh, this is a good day, I got everything done.

And but you have to be realistic about what you’re going to do. My wife always has lists that are impossible. And she also starts with the hardest task, I tend to start with those things that I can check off the quickest. So I can get 15 things done that I feel good about, even if there’s one damn thing is left over.

But in fact, that becomes very important. But also, by having sort of a sense of what you want to accomplish, you can see different benefits from another activity. So if you say, well, I got to talk to the kids today. Well, that’s not in the achievement goal. But if I can say, well, I talked to three of them today, I had to listen to one more thing about how Hollywood is hard to work in. But I listen to that every day, I just want to turn on the tape and say, yeah, I told you I worked once with George C. Scott, I understand the business you’re in.

But the other thing about enough is if you start to do it, you can say, now, I did, I had enough work for today. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to work tomorrow. So I want to come back to it tomorrow. So part of it is lists. But part of it’s a sense of what’s enough, because enough does some wonderful things.

What are your values? Now, for example, in money, you see, if one of my values is giving it away, you have to figure out a way to, in fact, measure that in your life. What do you want to do for your kids? You know, I was with a person on one of my recent trips, and he said, well, I don’t want to give my kids too much money. It will spoil them. You know, I came from a poor background. And if I give them money, they won’t feel driven to achieve.

And I was sitting there in a house, which the ceilings were at least 20 feet tall. The the main spine of the house was 300 feet long. At the end was a wine cellar, which had O’Brien, Opus One, Harlan, visible to the guests, by the way. And you’re saying that now you want your kids to do exactly what you did. I think you’re setting up for failure because a well, you actually said that.

Yes. I’m getting my grandmother at 92 said, well, I’m old enough to say what I think. And I said, Bobby, you’ve always said that. So why worry about it? But one of the things is enough sets limits. You know, if you start to say, well, how much do I need to protect myself and my family? You can start to say, well, then the rest is excess. How do I want to use it?

One of the things about enough, it allows the transitions, because once you achieve something, you can say, now it’s time for the next thing. Now it’s time for the next thing. And I think one of the most important things I learned from these people is having a sense of enough both motivates you because I want to get to there, but it rewards you once you’ve achieved it. And that becomes a very important part of life.

So setting limits increases the dimensionality of success, which I think is sort of counterintuitive. But in fact, by setting limits, it allows you to juggle. It allows you to say, I can throw that ball away now. What’s the next ball I have to catch?

Now, the bad news is this is a dynamic activity. The bad news is it requires a lot of energy. There’s a lot of bad news in this, but that’s OK, because I think most of you are a little bit like sharks. As somebody described me, if I stop swimming, I die that I can’t imagine stopping. And so part of what you do is say, look, I can’t do this. What can I do now that I want to do?

So, you know, I think one of the things is what do you want in these four domains? What’s your profile look like now? Again, being honest with yourself, are you on your way to an ideal? Does your success reflect your core drivers? You know, most of us can’t get very far away from what we’re taught at home. I know I can’t.

I hope my kids can’t. You know, it’s interesting. I had a discussion with the kids about grandchildren. I said, you know, they have, well, minimum four grandparents, in some cases more, because there have been several divorces. And so I don’t have a great influence on the values of my grandchildren. You know, everybody draws their tree. This is my family. But the kids all look up and say, no, I’m part of four, eight, 16, 32, 64 families. Which one am I supposed to be part of?

And by the way, when they marry, they bring a whole different set of values into the equation. And you’re not going to destroy that. What’s the rule of life? You either gain a daughter or lose a son. And you better remember that.

And then the question that’s really deep is, are my drivers positive or are they negative? My friend who’s comparing himself to Bill Gates, I think, has some pretty negative envy drivers in it. My friend who writes the Thousand Year Trust, you know, why do you really want to control your kids? There are a number of funny stories of people. I mean, this one guy I talked to, quite wealthy, we’re talking about how they manage their money and what they should be doing. And he said, well, I’m never going to get the in-laws in. It’s all about my children.

And I thought the money came from his wife’s father. You know, well, anyway, I did point that out to him, too. I don’t think it had any impact, but I felt like, yeah.

So what do we think about it? I think these things apply in our professional career as well. Achievements about innovation, getting results. We’ve got to do that or we don’t succeed. That significance is about developing people, focusing on the customer and our other stakeholders. Frank Batten, how many of you know the name Frank Batten? Batten Hall is one reason. Frank developed a company called Landmark Communications, the Weather Channel and things like that. He is the guy that said he’d pay $250,000 to get off the Forbes list.

But he said, my purpose with my business is serving my customers at a profit. It’s not about maximizing shareholder wealth. Profit is a constraint, not my goal. I want to serve the customers. If I don’t make enough money, I go out of business. If I make too much money, it says I’m probably not reinvesting enough in my people, my community and my product. And that was always something I served on his board for 21 years. He’s also somebody who taught me a lot about fundraising.

Because I went in to ask him for a lot of money and think, I’m going to get in a fight. Because I’m going to tell him how important Harvard Business School is. And he’s going to tell me how important the University of Virginia is. And then he’s going to tell me how important Old Dominion University is, where his wife is the chairman of the board.

Then he’s going to tell me about how he was going to be a juvenile delinquent and he went to a military school, Culver Academy, and it saved him. I knew the conversation. So I walked in to Frank. It’s really important. We’ve got this need to liberate the parking lot from the university. And we need help. Can I be number five on your list? And he looked at me, that’s about right. And he gave us $35 million and we were number five.

But he gave it in less than six weeks. But Frank was a guy that had a tremendous influence on my life and somebody who really epitomized that. Legacy is ethical conduct and strategic leadership. That old notion, if you don’t, only the lead sled dog has a change of view. And happiness, satisfaction.

Now, I want to give you a few of the lessons that we got in the Howard’s Gift. One is I think you got to start at the end. What is, what’s going to be said about me when I die? What are my kids going to remember? Nobody publishes your balance sheet in your obituary. So what do I want said?

I think the second one is we all got to Harvard Business School by getting an A in every class. We’re not going to get an A plus in everything in life. And that’s a pretty important thing to remember. What is it that we can let go? Because we’re not going to be great golf players unless we practice every day.

I think the other thing is a thing that Eric, who is the guy that actually wrote the book, says everybody’s outside looks better than my inside. We know our inside and we’re seeing other people’s outsides. And I think the more we know people, the more we see their pain and their struggles, the better it is to remember that we’re not alone in the struggles about feeling occasionally that we’re not.

And then the last thing is everybody, everything about the future is a bet. You know, even the future. Is there going to be a future as a bet? Now, we probably all ought to act as though there’s going to be a future. And I’m sort of sad to see American savings rates where they’re so low. And I’m sad to see where they are because it acts as though there is no future. Or somebody else will take care of us.

Now, these are the truths I learned. Some of the questions asked, are we at an inflection point? I think back in my career, an inflection point, for those of you who weren’t math majors, is where there is no tangent. There’s no direction. And we all run into inflection points.

My wife leaving was an important inflection point in my life. The decision to give up tenure was an important inflection point. Some of them are very visible. But I think so many people pass inflection points without ever stopping and saying, is this free me to make a change in direction? And I think of inflection points, whether they’re negative or positive, as gifts. Because if you stop and recognize them, you can say, what do I want to do?

The second question is, is the juice worth the squeeze? By that, I mean, if you want a glass of orange juice, don’t squeeze the grapefruits. And yet, how many people… I always say the thing about Harvard business graduates is they’re so competitive, they have to be first at the dump on Saturday morning. If the gun sounds, they want to run the race. Now, the question is, are we going in the direction we want to go?

Am I cheating at solitaire? Again, one of the things in my own life is, I was pretty good at math. I won the state math contest. I got to Stanford, and I discovered there are really smart people who love math, who worked hard at it, and were willing to sacrifice things to it. I said, I’m not one of those people. I love math. I love quantitative. But I’m not going to compete with those guys. And thank God I didn’t. I went to the Harvard Business School.

Am I explicit about the bets I’m making? I think one of the things about being explicit about the bets is you can say there are three states of nature. I won, I lost, or I still don’t know. How many people make a bet and have lost but are unwilling to admit it? They sort of wiggle around. Well, the world is changing. I’ll make it up next time.

And one of the questions we ask in the book is a culture question. Am I in the right place? There are places that are toxic. There are places that are good for other people, bad for us. How do you evaluate the culture in which you’re embedded? I know for me, Harvard Business School has been a great benefit in my life. I was embedded in a place that gave me freedom to do what I wanted to do. It gave me insight and access. But there are a lot of places that I think I would have failed. So I had to choose the right culture.

So some important rules. I think we’re supposed to end at 10.30. Live life forward. After almost 72 years of life, I find many people living life backwards. The divorce. How many people are trying to change the past? You can’t change the past. You can learn from the past, but you can’t change the past. So figuring out how you sort of say, that’s behind me. What have I learned? Now let me move forward. It’s so critical.

I was once in Ireland. I was a guest to the government. It was one of the prizes. I was meeting with three ministers for dinner. We’d all had a few drinks. I turned to one and I said, that’s an unusual Irish name. He says, I’m not Irish, I’m Danish. I said, that’s unusual that you’d be a minister of state in this country. When did you arrive? He says, they came over 1,100 years ago.

I thought, this is an interesting way of calculating. 1,100 years ago, that’s 50 generations. What percentage of his blood is really Danish? But he identified as being Danish. I turned to the minister of reconciliation. I said, why is there a problem between you and England? He said, they stole our land. I said, when did they steal your land? It was 16 something or other. And you sort of say, well, but we’ve been watching it. I said, boy, that’s an old man that’s been watching it.

He says, no, generations have been watching it and it’s ours. And this is a guy in charge of reconciliation. I found the same thing in Slovenia, where people were telling me about the evils that occurred in either 1,400 or 400, depending on whether you were fighting between the Orthodox and the eastern right, western right, or between the Muslims, which is about 1,100 they were fighting. And they kept telling me these stories.

And I’m thinking, live life forward. It’s a lot easier. I think a second question. I actually don’t particularly like the word mentor. I enjoyed Anne’s comments on mentorship. But I think part of the problem is, I’m not even quite sure what it means. Because I know nobody that I want their advice on all parts of my life. So I think of it much more as trying to form an individual board of directors, where you’re trying to find people whose advice you value on certain aspects of your life.

That means, I mean, we looked at the Harvard Business School. I asked one of the jobs I had, I asked people to tell us, as part of the resource allocation process, who are their mentors. And we divided them up into teaching, research, and course development. And it was interesting.

Nobody received more than 17 mentions, even though everybody could name three names. Because mentoring is hard work. Secondly, very few people were mentioned in all three categories. And thirdly, some of the people who thought they were mentors were never mentioned by anybody, which I thought was also interesting.

They were perfectly willing to give advice. It just wasn’t listened to. But I think what you discover, or at least what I’ve discovered, is there are people I go to to say, here’s what I’m thinking about in certain areas. And some of them I wouldn’t ask anything about personal life, because I don’t particularly admire their personal life.

But I do admire. And one of the things it does is ask you, what are these persons, what’s this person’s particular skill? Where do I value their advice? Because then you can start to say, well, if I can get six or seven people that I can talk to, and you can’t manage more than six or seven of those, it’s an important problem.

You know, I guess another thing I like to say to people is, life is risky. And some things are uncontrollable. Now, I’m on the board of some health organizations. I’m amazed how many people don’t take their medicine. That’s a controllable risk. You know, you can’t take ferocimide if you’re going to give a speech. You have to wait until after the speech is over. But, in fact, figuring out what the risks are, and say, there’s some I can control and some I can’t control.

It’s almost the Reinhold Niebuhr prayer of, the Lord grants me the strength to change those things which can’t be changed. The patience to accept those which can’t. And the wisdom to know which is which. But I think that what you start to say is, let me make sure that I understand, this is not a risky career. These are the aspects of the career that make it risky. Which ones can I control? Which ones I can’t.

And if you can’t control any of it, you probably ought to get out of the way. And then the last sort of piece of advice I’d give is plan for the ripple, not the splash. I think one of the interesting things is, we’re in a culture that’s interested in the splash. But, in fact, most of us are in a place where we throw some stones, and there are big ripples.

And one of the most satisfying things in my life is the ripples. The things that you really didn’t know you had any impact on, and people come up and say, oh, you helped me. You said something to me. You helped me choose a career. I mean, those are the things that really, at the end of 43 years of teaching and 72 years of life, really make a difference.

So I’m going to give you a test. First question is, who are you? What are the values? What do you want at the end to be able to say? If in that last second of life, I didn’t get a chance to do that, I just went down. I smelled neither sulfur nor did I see a white light, so I don’t know what happened, but maybe they got me too fast. But who are you?

What are the values that you’re bringing to your life? Which satisfactions, if any, are you on the way to missing? Again, it’s the juggling metaphor. Catch the falling ball. Who’s important to you, and are you helping them to succeed? I think that when Ann said, nothing wrong with money, but the riches of your life won’t be measured by it, is incredibly important. And the people you’ve helped are probably as important a measure of life as anything else. And then, what’s your time frame for action?

Being an old hippie, the time for taking this test is the rest of your life. Otherwise known as today is the first day of the rest of your life. So that’s my story, and I think I almost ended it on time. Thank you very much.

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