i'm howard stevenson uh it's a pleasure to be with you uh i mean that sincerely since i died once
out here and as i say we're gonna talk about building life i
was telling howard i failed once at retirement three times at dying in 71 times as being on the forbes list
so i'm used to failure and now we'll go forward from here what i'm going to talk about is
as i aged out of fundraising which is you know picking pockets and rolling
drunks uh i started to ask a question my wife and i between us have seven kids and 12
grandchildren and we're both married to jerks so one year i got to pay tuition at columbia
yale harvard williams and bowdoin i'm bragging and complaining
but i sat down and said you know why is it that people say it's so hard for successful people to have successful
children and that's a that's true across every almost every culture there's rice paddies rice paddies clogs
clogs bogs to bogs all of these things so we i set out with a friend laura nash to
figure out the answer that question you come to some first question is what do you mean by success so i want to talk about that
the second thing i want to talk about is at the end is a little book that just came out in october
when i died one of the young people who worked with me said you you make so many wise ass no excuse me
um i didn't listen to all the advice you gave me can i interview you
and i thought that'd be nice my kids or grandkids would this is i literally did die and
i suffered unattended cardiac arrest out here on the lawn out here and that's about one
percent chance of survival and um but i was extremely lucky
um and so we wrote this book that came out as howard's gift i want to tell you a little bit about sort of the lessons
i've tried to pass on to the kids so you know the first question though is you get into is
what is success because when we tried to write the book that's obviously the first question what do you mean by it
and that's been a dilemma that goes back to aristotle herodotus herodotus said it
best no count no man's successful until he dies uh i tried that and didn't work uh
there's a state of being because as soon as you say i'm successful you probably start to fail
because that's a constant process you know there's some unique activities if i ask the people in this room where
you're successful i think almost everybody raise your hand yet there's no one profile that would fit it
so this is some unique combination of what we bring to the party where we come from
uh all sorts of things and there's also sort of i was successful when
now i always find it sad when people talk about it being admitted to harvard business school is the high point of
their life or it's even worse if they talk about being admitted to saint paul's uh
but it's a question of what do we mean is it a score
if so is it i i loved anne's comment about
money this morning one thing about success is really hard to measure who is the most successful person in the
room well all depends on how you measure
it's often uneven i joke about a divorce that's a painful part of your life
and dealing with it with kids i never expected to be a single parent i wound up being a single parent
that caused me to do some things that were quite different than i'd imagined like i gave up a very nice
activity because somebody had to drive them to school and other things
and i was my son was the second my youngest son was the second happiest person in the room when he got his driver's
license it's often quite unstable you know things can be going well then
something happens and you can't freeze it you're there it's wonderful
and you move on so one of the problems with success it's both rational emotional who do i compare
myself to uh if we look around the room you know
i guess everybody's telling bill gates he's handsome but if he really looks in the mirror
well anyway you know and a lot of the success books are sort of
weird they tell you to think through all the angles you got to study it you do we look at malcolm gladwell it talks about
10 000 hours if you're naturally strong i'm not going to be a basketball player it's quite
clear i don't jump particularly now and you sort of get on this life path
sometimes call it a velvet-lined rut and if you do it all your life you're probably gonna get better at it
so if you do that that's what they tell you nothing can go wrong the problem is sometimes things happen
now we'll evoke sympathy with this one but
the other thing i found about success is when you talk to i think particularly many successful
entrepreneurial fathers their view of success is you fire the bullet and then you draw the circle around it
what i did is success now you should be just like me now this turns out to be reasonably hard
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 the first
one the first hedge funds in the united states i was involved in starting and managed for 10 years
well you know now there are 2600 hedge funds started each year and 2500 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 our 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 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 so but i had no idea where it would lead it
was back here now 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 we teach about people
opportunity deal and context and the context really matters you change
if you still want the same thing at 82 as you want it at 22 your name is hugh hefner um
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 an 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 s t in bao post 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 went so i have to admit when i open up forbes and
see it i wince but that's okay
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 now i think for most of our graduates of harvard business school they're 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 success but i have to sell my soul but somehow to be successful in
the world's terms i have to give up something that's really important to me now my 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 uh
i'm passionate about being an actor oh okay how many parents
are supporting 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 having it all you're supposed to be you know dr ruth in the bedroom and
donald trump in the boardroom and 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 hunsley do we want would
you really like to be some of these people who 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 uh the two that went
to the harvard business school have done okay about well the one who's 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 was probably one of our criteria their success and 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 an illegal immigrant and that's 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 as 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 was 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 he 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 you know 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 uh many of my richest friends are not known
uh 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 or is it
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 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 uh i think he was very significant in many people's lives
can he be happy without achieving just go to aspen how many parents told their kids i have 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 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 was 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 dollars 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 ten dollars 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 bill there are donald
trumps envy greed and fear these are both these are all drivers toward achievement but if they're not
positive very often they're driven by looking outside and saying i've got to compete and you can always compete with
somebody who'll 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 in 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 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 uh
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 he's seen everything but when you look at these
does contentment of fulfillment help you achieve not really you know certain neuroses
help you to achieve um does fairness generosity and caring help
you in the competitive battle it actually doesn't even 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
the creating legacy but it also will probably diminish your
own achievement because you're letting other people be recognized where there is 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 i'll find your passion you know that we'll find somehow
something that in achievement will find significant happiness and leave our legacy the only problem 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 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 you know 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 half time 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 i don't know many you know people
even if they never play 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 wife 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 it says 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 i was a mathematician when i was young
i don't remember how to do a riemann stilts 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 uh yeah they're as needy now as they were
in the 17. they just 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 dollars
that's a little bit of a nonsense and by the way your family will never wait
they find ways to cope if you don't deal with it now so what we saw in these people was a
very interesting phenomena 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 uberoff told us the 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 of 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 is 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 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 uh invisible leadership
of charity is a significance 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
these elbows are equally sharp shall we say in some of these charities as they are
at any business that ever been involved in and one of the questions i always ask people is where do you put your tennis
you know i'm 71 years old i play tennis badly but i really enjoy it
but you know that's not gonna 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 it's that's a very important part of his self-identity is being able to win
at chennai's and his sons
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 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 all four satisfactions in
all domains and seeking one predators 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 um 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've 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 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 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 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 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 you know 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 you know i can think when i was 21 i 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 how 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
ann 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 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 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 betw after family and if i don't talk to all my kids at least two or three times a week i feel badly
um you know and 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've 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 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 i remember when pat lyles died some of
you probably remember pat but when he died hmm
he was the runner he was in good health he was supposed to be in my trusty 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
uh 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 a bit of the 16
books have i written they're there and as one time somebody introduced me
how would you write books 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 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 legacy's 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 key problems you can't achieve in all dimensions i will never be a great tennis player i'll
never be a great skier they're a lot of thing 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 the his manufacturing course and he went into the paper industry i
said joe why did you go in the paper industry he said john deeb won't 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 fourteen thousand feet i said yeah thirteen thousand seven hundred fifty six to be precise uh but
i was excited about going to the observatory but i recognize 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 there is a wins factor but if you don't get over it and say i don't feel like i made the wrong
decisions i just went and say that was a choice i chose i chose it constantly consciously and i
have no regrets this was if the first surprise was the complexity of success and the second
surprise was the emotional drivers and how complex humans are because of the
diversity of motion drivers the third surprise to us was the role of enough now enough's 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 reason sense of enough
and that was a very interesting inside test because there's enough on two different
dimensions one 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 uh 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
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 kind 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 what's going on i think one of the things about enough
is you put an activity down with satisfaction if you say what's my and i 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 today 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 that's 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 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
um what do you want to do for your kids
you know i 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 i that will spoil then they you know i came from a poor background and if i
give them money they won't feel driven to achieve and i'm sitting there in a house
which the ceilings are 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 oat breon opus 1 harwan
visible to the guest by the way and you're saying now you want your kids to do exactly what you did i think
you're setting up for failure because a well anyway you actually said that to
him yes i'm getting to well 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 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 and say now'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 motivate 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 the 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 okay 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 the 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 uh
i said you know they have well minimum four grandparents in some cases
more because there have been several divorces uh 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 4 8 16 32 64
families which one am i supposed to be part of and i 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 uh and you better remember that
and then the question that's really deep is are my drivers positive 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
uh i there are a number of funny stories of
people i mean this one guy 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 i well anyway i did point that out to him too
i don't think it had any impact but i felt like you felt honest yeah so
when we think about it i think these things apply in our
professional career as well achievements about innovation getting results we 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
baton 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 i think
i'm getting 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 uh military school culver academy and it saved him and i i knew the conversation
so i walked into 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 dollars and we
were number five uh but he gave it in less than six weeks i
was just thinking but frank was a guy that had a tremendous influence on my wife and somebody who
really epitomized that legacy is ethical contact and strategic leadership you know 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 getting an a-bus and 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 said 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 up to and then the last thing is everybody
everything about the future is a bad you know even the future is there going to be a future as a bad
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 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 weren't math
majors is where there is no tangent there 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 freeing 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
juice worth the squeeze by that i mean if you want a glass of orange juice don't squeeze grapefruits
and yet how many people you know i always say the thing about harvard business gradual 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
now again one of the things in my own life is i was pretty good at math i won the state math contest i didn't
i got to stanford and i discovered they're really smart people who love math who worked hard at it and willing to sacrifice things to it i said i'm not
one of those people uh you know 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 you know 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 the 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 and i want to end i think we're supposed to end at 10 30 is that
live life forward you know i after almost 72 years of life i find many
people living life backwards you know the divorce how many people are trying to change the
past you know 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 is so critical i i was once in ireland and
i was the guest to the government and was one of the prizes i was meeting with three ministers for dinner
and we'd all had a few drinks and 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
i wondered your when did you arrive he said they came over 100 years ago
i thought um this is a different arresting way of calculating i mean 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
and 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 i thought and this guy in charge of
reconciliation i found the same thing in slovenia where
people were telling me about the evils that occurred in either 1400 or 400 depending on whether you were fighting
between the orthodox and the eastern right western right or between the muslims which is about 100 they were
fighting and they kept telling me these stories and i think move life forward it's a lot easier
i think a second lesson i actually don't particularly like the word mentor
i enjoyed ann's comments on mentorship but i think part of the problem is
they're 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 uh
tell us as part of the resource allocation process who were their mentors
and we divided them up into teaching research and course development 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 are the 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 will i can
talk to and you can't manage more than six or seven of those it's an important problem
you know i i guess another thing i like to say to people is
life is risky and some things are uncontrollable no i 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 furosemide if you're gonna give a speech you have to wait till 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 you know it's almost the reinhold nebra prayer of word grants me the strength to
change those things which can 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 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 they're 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 you know 43 years of teaching and 72
years of wife really make a difference so i'm going to give you a test
uh first question is who are you what are the values what what do you want at the end to be able to say
uh if in that last second of life i didn't get a chance to do that i just went down
uh people i'd smell neither sulfur nor did i see a white light so i don't know what happened but uh
maybe they got me too fast but who are you what are the values that you're bringing to your wife
which satisfactions if any are you on the way to missing you know again it's the juggling metaphor catch the falling ball
uh who's important to you and are you helping them to succeed
i think that when anne said nothing wrong with money but the richest
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 and 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 so thank you very much
