An Open Letter to Me

About four years ago, my daughter, in a fit of teen angst, handed me a small box. On the top of the box was angrily scrawled: Do not open until February 24, 2024.

I still have that box, unopened, and I am anxiously looking forward to that date.

I came across it the other day and that box reminded me of that popular trend about writing letters to your past self trying to impart some wisdom that you had gained that I suppose you wished you had been told earlier.

I am not sure I would have heeded any advice from my future self, but since today is my birthday, I am going to indulge myself a little with one of those letters.

Rules for Living Life, Part 8

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days studying the Battle of Gettysburg by walking around the battlefield with a military historian. The leadership training course I was taking centered on key individuals in the campaign and how their actions (or inactions) should guide me as a leader in my own organization.

Throughout the battle, leaders on both sides displayed a number of exemplary traits and we carefully examined the leadership trait they each personified.  As I step back to try and understand the entire battle, though, one overriding factor seemed to tie everything together. Serendipitously, it is my eighth Rule for Living Life: Be fearless and believe in your mission. David didn’t kill Goliath – his faith did.

If this is the first post in this series that you are reading, this is a series of blogs based on a set of rules for living my life that I developed by merging a set of secular rules together with my understanding of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. If you want to start at the beginning of this series, you can start here.

Without getting into the historical specifics, the concept of “mission” and the causal relationship between whether the mission was communicated and unquestioningly accepted and the leader’s success in the battle was tangible. For Robert E. Lee, the mission was to annihilate the Union Army: a mission that many of his staff could not support because their strategy in the War for Southern Independence was to defend their soil, drive the Northern Army from the Southern states, and secure a separated peace.  For General Meade, the mission was to defend his country from invasion, preserve the Union, and emancipate the southern slaves. His army supported him completely.

When pushed beyond physical and mental limits, it was their belief in the mission that gave the Union Army strength and resolve. Conversely, the lack of mission clarity and belief caused the Confederates to hesitate and stall. Their hesitation drove the desperation that ultimately resulted in defeat.

Examples of this causality are also evident in the lives of many other highly impactful people. When a person devotes themselves to a mission they believe in completely, the results they can achieve are awe-inspiring. Conversely, if you are dispassionate about something, it seems like the barriers expand exponentially and the energy reserves you have are never enough. Right?

But how do you know what your mission is?

I think the answer to that question is in the rule itself: be fearless. I believe that in each of our hearts we all have something we would do if truly fearless – something you would do if all obstacles were removed.

For me, that deep-seated desire is to be a writer.

In this series, we have discussed a few seminal moments in my life. One of the earliest was a radio commercial I heard when I was 13. In the commercial, a boy arrives at the gates of heaven after wrecking his car (it was a safe-driving public service message). The angel greets him and begins reassigning key aspects of his life to others due to his premature death.

“Okay, let’s see. Oh! You were going to be a famous author – you don’t see that one very often…” the angel says.

For some reason that resonated with me. And it still resonates with me.

Of course, as an engineer, I did nothing to learn how to become a famous author. I did not follow my path and I have never been fearless in pursuing that mission. But that voice has never left my head and that resonance has never left my heart.

Rule 8, like many of the other rules, relies on faith. The difference here is that the faith you have to have is faith in yourself.

Here again, the key is in the explanatory statement: David didn’t kill Goliath – his faith did. What this statement is intended to convey is the duality that you must have enough faith to step out of ranks to take on your mission and that you have the tools needed to face the challenge. It also subtly reminds me that failing to devote myself to a providential circumstance causes that opportunity to pass me by.

Tying this back to Rule 7, though, there is a dangerous corollary: just because you step up to face your mission, your idea of success is not guaranteed. Nowhere could provide a greater metaphor for this than the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. No one could articulate this better than Lincoln did when he gave his Gettysburg Address.

“It is rather for us to be here and take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”

Thousands of men confronted their Goliath on that battlefield and though they were not individually successful at staying alive, the campaign to end slavery progressed. And that was undoubtedly part of God’s plan. And today, their ghosts inspire new generations of leaders. That is immortality and maybe that was God’s plan, too.

Finally, there is a poster that always stuck with me. It is in the style of those inspirational posters but this one is a parody. On the poster is the image of a shipwreck with the saying: Mistakes; It could be that the meaning of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.

That resonates with me as well. We do not get to choose our outcome but we do get to choose whether or not we participate.  

And remember: we’re all walking through a darkened city at night with a penlight. None of us are seeing more than a small piece of the landscape…

Rules for Living Life, A Secular Interlude

The challenge of writing a blog lies in balancing the hubris to think you should put your opinions out there and the humility to write what an audience will read, not simply what you want to say.

I suppose that is not completely true – I could simply continue to write what I feel like writing since this is not a source of income, but there is an inescapable reality that as I write from a more spiritual place rather than a secular place, the page-views and comments I receive dwindle.  

Not that I am writing this for validation, but those metrics are a mechanism to remain self-aware of what I am writing relative to what this audience would like to read.

While I remain committed to completing this series of blogs by outlining all ten of my Rules for Living Life, I do think it is time to take a quick break from the more spiritual side of the rules and let you know how these rules started.  

In case this is the first blog of this series you are reading, this post is part of a series of blogs discussing a set of rules I have I put together for living my life based on merging a set of business rules with my understanding of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.  If you missed the previous five blogs, you can start at the beginning of this series here.

As I mentioned in previous posts, these rules originated during a particularly frustrating work meeting that I was obligated to attend. Though the topic of the meeting has been lost to history, the feelings I had at the time are still strong: the meeting was about fixing problems, but there was no fix being generated. It was another out-of-control spiral of blame, deflection, recrimination, self-promotion, and inaction. Those with the answers sat quietly, fearing blame for the cause, while those most impacted flailed around to find someone to help them. And the loudest voices gave the least guidance.

Maybe you have been in meetings like that.

I had a few subordinates at the time, and I resolved that I needed to help them understand this was not how a business worked.  I wanted to find a solution to our internal culture and the ways that it impeded our growth. I opened up a new page of notes on my iPad and pecked out a title:

Solution Matrix

Invigorated, I quickly came up with a list of ten items that I felt would make up my “Solution Matrix”.

1. Be enthusiastic: Enthusiasm is contagious, so is despair.
2. Get your hands dirty: Fix problems, don’t find problems.
3. Build someone up: Assign credit, not blame.
4. Be accountable: Accountability is a key indicator of performance.
5. Communicate effectively: Communication is a drug, when used properly it can improve anything, but it is dangerous when it is abused.
6. Give immediate feedback: Timely feedback is gold, history is just a story.
7. Lead: Leaders must lead.
8. Help the team succeed: Personal success is the fastest way to cause a team to fail.
9. Focus: Focus on the objective and don’t be distracted by the obstacles.
10. Know your objective:  You will never achieve what you don’t set as a goal.

I played with the explanations, I tweaked the rules a little bit over the years. But every time that I did, I always put them back the way they were.  

At their heart, they are a good set of guidelines for conducting yourself in the business world, but I have trouble applying them outside of the office. In a way, I think that stems from how they originated. They were built to solve problems at work, and so they are focused on doing that. And two of them focus on focusing on what you are doing.  Funny how that worked…

But did they work? Candidly, I had very mixed results. I have coworkers who read this blog that can feel free to comment on their effectiveness, but I would say I have been fundamentally ineffective at changing the culture at my workplace.

It was this failure to effectively influence our culture that sent me back to the drawing board to reconsider the entire concept of the matrix. It was this failure that made me realize I was not gifted with all of the answers to the world’s problems, so I had better seek out someone with a better track record. Someone who did such a good job giving guidance on how to live, he literally became a definition of time.

So I went to my Bible and I read. And I went to the bookstore and I read. And I went to histories and I read. And I thought. And I prayed. And I prayed more. And after all that, I think I came up with a better list.  

But I will leave that for you to decide.

Thanks for reading and remember: we’re all walking through a darkened city at night with a penlight. None of us are seeing more than a small piece of the landscape…

Acta Non Verba

On Tuesdays, instead of going to my normal office, I make my way over to our manufacturing plant.  A couple of years ago, the management team decided to consolidate all corporate marketing and sales in one location, so my office was moved from the manufacturing plant to our headquarters.  I dutifully relocated, but I still like to take at least one day every week to work from the plant.

There is no obligation for me to do this, but I honestly like the guys at the manufacturing plant and it is good to have at least one day of the week close to the products and the engineering teams.  It always surprises me how productive these days and how often a dozen emails can be quickly resolved through a conversation over the coffee pot.

Spending one day a week at the plant is a great plan except I perpetually forget to bring my laptop home on Monday nights.  Ever since we shifted to a Google-based workspace, I use my personal computer when working at home, freeing me from reliance on my corporate laptop (unaffectionately nicknamed “The Albatross”).  When I forget to bring my laptop home, I have to stop at my headquarters office and pick up my Albatross before heading over to the plant.

A nesting Albatross

No big deal, right?  

Honestly, it is not that big of a deal since the plant is less than four miles from our corporate headquarters.  What is a bigger deal is that we have a certain unwritten rule in my group:  we never take the elevator.  And our offices are on the fifth floor.

So, to get my laptop, I have to drive to HQ, park my car, walk up five flights of stairs, get the laptop, then walk down five flights of stairs back to my car – all because I forgot my laptop.  And I am an American, so this seems like a lot of extra work.

Oh, sure, I could just take the elevator but that is not the point.  I should also mention that we have a security officer at the front desk who is a really squared away guy.  He knows our rule and he WILL notice that I am slacking off by using the elevator. There is definite accountability for my actions here.

This is a test of discipline: will I do the right thing even though it is harder and will take longer, or will I do the easy thing because I am not even supposed to be here today.

Discipline is a keystone habit of success, and like all keystone habits, it takes constant reinforcement.  Why is it that we can develop a habit to go through the McDonalds drive-through every morning or to pour a Scotch every night and never miss a day, but when we set a keystone habit like journaling or taking time to exercise as soon as we skip one time we almost immediately lose the habit?  It takes someone addicted to nicotine months or years to shake the habit, but the day after you substitute your routine, healthy salad with a hamburger at lunch,  you never want to eat another salad again.

I do not know the answer to these questions: maybe you do.  And I know that any habit takes reinforcement but it seems much easier to set destructive habits than constructive ones.  I may not know why that is, but I do know if I fail to take the stairs today it will be even easier to ride that elevator tomorrow.  

The same is true with writing.  If I get too busy to write something or I rationalize that I should be doing something else “more important” then I never get back to it.  This is true about all the constructive habits I have tried to develop over the years: exercise, practicing guitar, teaching practical skills to my children, getting my house and garden in order, etc., etc.  It takes so much effort to get a good habit started and so much effort to keep it going, that I usually fail to follow through and instead revert back to the easier habits: watching TV, eating ice cream, and surfing the internet for the next guitar that will “inspire” me to start practicing.

What are the keystone habits that you need to work on today?  What are the habits that you slip easily back into, distracting yourself from putting energy towards those constructive habits?  

Last Tuesday, I greeted my friend at his desk with a smile and headed for the north stairwell.  On that day, I reinforced a positive habit. It took a few more minutes, and I was breathing heavy when I got to the top, but real discipline is earned: one step at a time.  

Dear John – I mean Tim,

We have to talk.

We have had a lot of wonderful times together. You were my first – way back in 1985 when I was still in high school. Since then we have spent so much time together: so many late nights, early mornings, walks in the park, trips, moves, seasons of life, times spent crying over the spilled milk of life.  It is hard to see my life without you in it.

But you have changed.

When this started we were both young, naïve, and new to this world. When my friends were all PC, we were pounding out papers in MacWrite, using a mouse to draw in MacPaint, and playing games on those 3-1/2 inch discs that did not fit my friends’ computers.

Years later I put 10,000 songs in my pocket, sold my favorite guitar to buy a blueberry iMac, and bought a revolutionary device that was a phone in name only. When I started a business my first dollar was spent buying a MacBook Pro.

It was perfect. We understood each other and as I grew, you kept pace, blossoming with each new phase of our relationship. We had our troubles, but it was those troubles that formed our bonds.

But recently you have become distant and distracted. It started when you messed with my photos, then my documents, and now with my music. All you can talk about is “cloud” this and “family sharing” that, but instead of improving the situation each interlinked device keeps getting cut off and I can never access what I want where I want to.

All of this is supposed to free up memory and help make everything more accessible, but anything that I clear by paying for your services is still somehow blocked. And your operating systems keep bloating to absorb what little space I had to start with.

And then there is my kids. You addict them with your Siren-screen while stubbornly refusing to give me the tools to manage their access. Oh, sure, I can disable my Apple Watch if someone steals it, but I cannot set a time limit on my kids iPhones, or iPods? And yes, I do blame you that there is not a good app available that handles this.

Everything in this digital world looks amazing on television, but it breaks down – usually literally – when I try to use it in real life. I mean, it is wonderful that Siri has a pre-programmed funny joke when I ask her to divide by zero, but when I am driving and I want to call someone, she can barely retrieve half of my contacts, she can never quite tell me what time the shop I am heading to is closing, and her ability to read and take dictation is abysmal.

When I brought you into a meeting, I was a rebel. When I dragged you around the world, we were inseparable. When you carried me through my EMBA we were cohorts. You used to make my life more seamless but now if feels like we are growing apart.

I really should tell you: there is someone else.

They are not you, but they are getting closer. They are harmonizing my devices the way you used to. They are making my life easier the way you used to. They are anticipating my needs the way you used to. I know I am abnegating my privacy to gain convenience, but at least they deliver that convenience.

You have always been special to me.   It was your cute little flaws that made you enticing. It was always different with you which made it both exciting and frustrating, but never dull. These days you just seem bored and stiff, going through the motions.

When you have finally been caught doing what we always knew you did it makes it hard to overlook everything else. I feel betrayed because you want to be everyone’s favorite. In doing so, you are making too many sacrifices.

I finally gave in to your demands and upgraded both my iOS and Mac OS. The upgrade upended my iPhone and hard-crashed my Air. I did not need any new features, and now that I have recovered I can report no difference from before, except neither device works as well. I was just trying to make you happy so you would stop begging me to “upgrade.”

If you are listening, stop chasing everyone else and remember that you are the one in the lead. Be better. Get back to integrating and striving for the next thing rather than the next dollar.

Henry Ford once said, “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits.  They will be embarrassingly large.” Henry Ford never set out to make cars. Instead, he set out to provide a service by making transportation affordable. You need to find your way back to identifying what service you provide.

 

Living With Addiction

Hello.  My name is Mark, and I’m an addict.

For those of you used to my posts on Ballast Water Treatment, I can assure you that this post is different.  If after this post you are curious about what I’ve written before, then you can find that here. But this article is different.  This post is a public statement of my own private addiction, an addiction that has consumed significant parts of my life and one that I am working to put behind me.

Addictions come in all kinds of flavors: alcohol, drugs, pornography, food, money, sex – mostly things that society identifies as morally deficit.  Addictions are powerful forces, each destructive in their own way.  But these are not the addictions that I have.  I have been blessed because I am not impacted by these addictions.  I know I am blessed because true addiction is something that is outside the ability of willpower alone to overcome.  Addiction is a serious illness and one that you need help, combined with willpower, to overcome.  That is why the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous focus on a Higher Power and using God to help in both overcoming addictions and living your life beyond your addiction.

The addiction I have is insidious.  Why?  Because the addiction I have is literally the goal of my society.  The addiction that afflicts me, guides my life and my decisions, and occupies the majority of my thoughts is the core tenet of capitalism.  And no, my addiction is not money.

I am addicted to success.

“Um, Mark,” you are thinking, “you can’t be addicted to success.   Success is a good thing.  You clearly misunderstand what an ‘addiction’ is.”

But do I?  I recently read about a signed note Nobel-prize-winning scientist Albert Einstein gave to a messenger in lieu of a tip.  The note read “A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”  This note is from the same Albert Einstein who famously penned his own formula for success and was clearly one of the most successful scientists in modern time.

This simple note sent me into an intellectual tailspin, struggling to unravel what seems to be two discordant facts:  Einstein was clearly successful according to his own definition of success, but in the note he seems to promote the concept that a modest life brings more happiness than one engaged in the pursuit of success.  In other words, he appears to be telling the “modest” messenger that success by Einstein’s own definition, which at that exact moment was being affirmed by his notification that he had received a Nobel Prize, may not be the key to happiness.  

You may argue that I am missing how the statement links of the pursuit of success with constant restlessness.  It could be argued that you could read Einstein’s sentence to imply that the pursuit of success without constant restlessness may be superior to the modest life, but how can you separate these two states?  Success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose – so it is necessarily fleeting.  Success is a momentary achievement that leads to a steep high, but immediately after the achievement, where is success?  It is in the past, and I feel the letdown.

Which brings me to both the nature of my addiction and the reason I do not think that the pursuit of success is a universally positive thing: I am perpetually restless for my next success and my past successes never leave me fulfilled.

Does that sound familiar?   

I am always looking ahead towards my next success, the next big deal, the next promotion, the next opportunity, and the next challenge.  Regardless of what I have achieved, the world surrounds me with images of those who have achieved bigger, faster, prettier, more exotic things than what I have achieved.  While intuitively I know there are many that look at me and aspire to achieve what I have done, that does not help salve my mind.  I also intuitively suspect that many of the people I look up at are looking up at someone else with the same restless envy that I have, but again, that does nothing to satisfy my thirst for the next rung on the ladder.

But how is this ultimately destructive?  Why is this not ultimately the fuel that builds society and ultimately makes everything better for everyone?  For that, I have to look in the mirror, follow Step Four, and make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of myself:

• When I get on an airplane and fly around the world to speak at a conference or close a deal, my children get older and my wife raises them alone.
• Before I go to sleep at night, I send my last email and shut down my phone so I can creep into bed and not wake my wife who went to bed an hour ago.
• When I wake up and check my phone to see what came in overnight, my wife checks on the kids to make sure they are getting ready for school.
• When I had a dream job managing six high performing teams in a home that my family loved and in a place where my wife had community, I quit and uprooted my family so I could take a job solving a global problem that no one seems to want solved.  Making less money.
• When I dream about work, I dream about my desires – whether I like to admit that or not.

And the reason that I know I am an addict is because I can make that list, and I can own that list, but I cannot stop doing the things on that list.  I claim to do it for money, but the money never quite covers the gaps that form.  I claim to do it for my career, but that just gets me more opportunities to be busy chasing successes.  I claim to do it for my family, but is this what they really want from me?  The real reason I do it is not any of those.  I do it for me.  I do it to feed my addiction.

I am not writing this post so you can feel bad for me.  I am writing this because Step 12 is having a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps and carrying the message to other addicts as well as practicing these principles in all of my affairs.  For me, Einstein’s reflection that a calm and modest life may bring more happiness was the catalyst for that awakening.  I am therefore writing this piece because we do not recognize the relentless pursuit of success as an addiction despite the evidence to the contrary.  I am writing this piece because I am not afraid it will be poorly received.  I am writing this to validate that feeling in your chest that you may also be an addict.

When I look around my world, all I see is stress.  I see stress in youth sports, where games that used to be fun are treated like professional sports.  I see stress on the roads as drivers speed and drive recklessly as they strive to get to their destination faster.  I see stress in the workplace where people do whatever it takes to get ahead, even at the cost of their own friends.  I see stress in homes as the relentless pursuit of more destroys marriages and makes parents lose touch with their children.  There is real stress, I do not want to ignore that, but most of the stress in my life is the byproduct of my addiction to success.  If your basic needs are being met and you feel stress because someone else’s needs are being met more fully than your own, then you might be like me: an addict.  

When I look back on my life, my successes are a tapestry of images, not feelings.  Each success was a moment of satisfaction, followed by the immediate drive towards the next thing.  This has dulled my joy and left each success feeling paper thin.  The enduring events of my life have always been the successes of those around me.  The accomplishments of my kids, the joy in my wife’s eyes when we unplug and get away together, a promotion earned by one of my employees, these are the experiences and the memories that form the vibrant hall of my memories.  Ask me about graduating the U.S. Army’s Airborne School and I have an image.  Ask me about my daughter on stage, or my son playing hockey, or my youngest son building a Lego set, and I have a story.  Those are the investments that I need to make to ensure true, lasting value in my life.  That is what brings me happiness.

There are no easy answers to overcoming addiction.  There are no band-aids, no quick-fix solutions designed to get you back on track.  There are also no organizations that I know of that are designed to help with this type of addiction.  When you are literally addicted to American society your world bombards you with the seeds of your addiction.  Every time a brand new Mercedes Benz pulls up next to my seven-year-old pickup truck, I feel the tug of my addiction.  In those moments I have to go back to my steps and remember that I’m heading home to be with my kids.

And that is what really matters.