Is your clock running?
This question is prompted by a speech that John W. Gardner, a noted educator, delivered to McKinsey and Co. in 1990. His audience was composed of highly successful people in the prime of their lives, (people just like those who read these posts), yet he felt compelled to deliver an urgent message about avoiding complacency and staleness.
Gardner said,
“We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits? A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.”
We all know people like this, people who have stopped learning and growing, who haven’t had an original thought since maybe their twenties, who are counting the diminishing number of years until they can retire and really stagnate. Some have checked out because they’re satisfied with where they are, or because they have learned their jobs so well they can basically do them in their sleep. Some less fortunate ones have simply learned to accept their dissatisfaction, defeated by apathy, bureaucracy or boredom. My Dad worked in the private sector all his life, and in retirement went to work for a county agency. After a week on the job his coworkers pulled him aside and told him to stop working so hard, because it made them look bad. He went with the flow at work, but his clock kept running and he kept his zeal for learning. The week he died, at 86, he had just attended a class to learn how to use yoga to improve his golf game.
The good news is that your clock does not have to stop, and even if it has, you can rewind it and start it again. As Gardner explains, life is not a mountain that has a summit, or a game with a final score.
“Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.”
The important thing is not to lose your zest for learning and growing. No matter how old or how young you are, it is never too late.
Although it’s an extreme example, a story that I read recently in the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel illustrates this well. As described in the article, Tom Galjour has Stage 4 metastatic small cell lung cancer. Two and a half years ago, he was told he had at most a few weeks to live. Soon thereafter, he was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors prescribed hospice and morphine. His friend Ted Owens called Galjour’s ex-wife and said, “You better come, too—it’s time”, at which point Tom said, “Time? Time for what? This is bull___!” as he ripped off the wires connecting him to monitors. He refused hospice and left to die at home. After suffering in bed for two weeks, he told Ted, “Hand me my guitar. Screw this, I’m not ready to go today.”
Tom managed to get out of bed and restart his life. He decided to supplement his medical care with his own approach, which included buying a $4,000 sniper rifle (hey, everybody has their own way of enjoying life) and lifting weights. At 64, weighing 150 pounds and hooked to an oxygen machine, he recently benched 240 pounds, and now is aiming for 260.
As the article says, medical research hasn’t found a correlation between “fighting spirit” and survival rates. Maybe Galjour would have survived this long even without this attitude – but would that life have contained the same level of zest and richness? He is one man who has refused to let his clock stop…
I’ve written before about one of my favorite books, Mindset by Carol Dweck. Dweck’s research has found that children grow up either with a fixed mindset and believe that intelligence and ability are innate and unchangeable, or a growth mindset which holds that we can improve and grow through effort. Her studies have shown that children with a fixed mindset, even those who are very bright, tend to protect their status as “smart” and are less likely to risk their self-image by trying difficult things; they also give up faster. In some small way, even at an early age they are at risk of letting their clocks run down.
Fortunately, a growth mindset can be taught to children at an early age; maybe it’s important to teach and reteach that lesson to adults as well. For starters, we can dispel the myth that entrepreneurship is for the young. Research has shown that there are twice as many entrepreneurs over 50 as there are under 25. In fact, adults who have a ton of life experiences under their belts may be better positioned to make wise choices about how and where to spend their energies.
I’m not referring to working harder; if you’ve gotten to the point where you can still be effective with less work, you’ve earned it. But you will do yourself a favor if you channel that extra time and energy into keeping your clock running, either through maintaining curiosity or increasing commitment to something that is important and is bigger than just you. A good example is John Spence, who recently wrote about his own effort, now that he has turned 50, to devote a part of his time over the next decade to learn how to paint.
Regardless of how successful you are, you have far more capacity in you than you have yet realized. I’ll let Gardner have the last word on this:
The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges –and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.
Keep the clock running: stay challenged, curious and committed.
Too bad everyone else already started
Come on, did you really think I would have a typo in my title?
People love to focus on high-level strategies for improving their lives, when often what they really need is a startegy. These are the people who are so fond of making plans, setting goals, conducting SWOT analyses, that they never get around to actually start anything.
I’m all for planning and goal setting, but so many times what we need is not more detail or greater sophistication, it’s more action.
As George Patton said, “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” You can’t always foresee the full road ahead, so you have to begin with that first step, which at least lets you see one step further ahead than you could before you started.
I have to confess that I’m writing this post for myself as much as for anyone else, because I often run into the problem when I have an idea for an article. I love to research, jot down key points, maybe even draw up an outline of what I want to say – and then there it sits. Nothing really happens until I start.
It’s especially helpful when you dread the task. When I was on the swim team, I always hated that first dive into cold water to begin practice, but then it was OK after that. At least back then I had a coach to “encourage” me to make the dive. Nowadays cold calling has replaced the cold pool, and I don’t have a coach supplying “encouragement”. At some point we all have to become our own coaches, and then it’s up to us to start.
It’s also helpful when you lack confidence that you can complete the task. Of course, the only sure way to know that you can’t do the task is not to start. That way, at least, you can preserve your fragile ego by telling yourself that you could have, if you only wanted to. Force yourself to start something risky, and you’ll be so busy making sure you get it right that you won’t have time to feel nervous.
What are some good startegies?
Start small. If you think of everything you need to get the job done, you can easily get intimidated. Need to start an exercise program? Go for a two minute walk; look up local gyms; buy some shoes—just start with something small. Or buy Robert Maurer’s book on personal kaizen: One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way
Use implementation intentions. Tell yourself, or better yet, write down, in specific detail what you will do and when. Heidi Grant Halvorson calls it, if-then planning: “If it is 2 p.m., then I will stop what I’m doing and start work on the report Bob asked for.”
Get some help. Enlist a friend or colleague to remind (nag) you. If you really want to make it interesting, make a bet with them that you will start by a certain time.
Use the Nothing Alternative. Since I learned about this one, it has had a tremendous impact on my writing discipline. Simply set aside time for the activity in your schedule, and even if you don’t feel the urge to start, it’s OK. You just can’t do anything else during that time.
So, what are you waiting for? Get started.
I’m preparing a speech that I’ll deliver next week to a group of aspiring entrepreneurs who are participating in a program that teaches them how to commercialize new technologies. My topic area is the venture pitch, and I’ve been asked to talk to them about public speaking.
There’s only one catch. I’ve been told that I’m not allowed to teach them anything.
Yes, you read that right. I’m not allowed to teach them anything. It’s a federally-funded program that follows a carefully defined curriculum, so technically anything that I say of an educational nature is a violation of some law!
But I specialize in finding creative ways to meet my clients’ needs, so I think I’ve come up with a solution we all can live with. I’m going to tell them stuff that’s so obvious, that any learning that takes place will surely be accidental. The worst that can happen is that I may be charged with involuntary education.
So here goes my first obvious point to them: You will probably lose. I haven’t told you anything that you don’t already know. Look around you, there are twenty teams here, so the odds are stacked against you. It’s a mathematical fact that you will probably lose. Sure, you may be thinking that you know that your team is better than everyone else’s, so the odds are much better for you. But everyone else here is probably thinking that, too, and you can’t all be right.
And it doesn’t get any easier when you leave the program. You actually have a much better chance of winning this competition than you have a chance of winning funding from a real investor with a real pitch. According to Chris Lipp, author of The Startup Pitch, a typical venture capitalist may hear 750 pitches a year and invest in only three.
So, yes, you will probably lose. And that’s the best part about the entire program.
- It’s good because the difficulty of winning drives the competition and pulls the best out of you.
- It’s good because it gives you a taste of the odds you will face in the real world.
- It’s good because losing can be a way better teacher than winning.
You will probably lose, but you will definitely win.
By being a part of this program, you’ve already won. By participating in the training, you’ve already won. By shaping everything you’re doing with your business idea into the discipline of an eight-minute presentation, you will continue to win. By facing the gauntlet of questions after your presentation, you will win by gaining the experience and confidence that will help you continue to win when you leave these walls and this program. By facing a high probability of losing – and moving forward anyway, you have already won.
By the way, dear reader, if you’ve learned anything from this post, please let me know what you learned, so I can take it out.
Although we consultants and bloggers like to make things more complicated than they are, sometimes success boils down to very simple things. One excellent example is writing thank-you notes.
I was discussing this idea with my friend, Rick Hertan, who is a recruiter and executive coach, and he told me a story about a candidate he once put in front of a major Midwest-based Fortune 500 company for an EVP position. The candidate was perfect for the job; he interviewed well on the first interview, and afterwards he and his girlfriend were flown out for more interviews as well as dinner with the outgoing EVP and his wife. Things went so well that he was offered the position with a generous compensation package. A week later, the company rescinded the offer, simply because the candidate did not send a thank you note!
Rick tried to rescue the deal, but he was told that they were a family-oriented company who took these types of values very seriously, and had decided that the candidate would not fit their culture. To this day, the candidate tells Rick that was the single costliest mistake he has ever made in his career.
I’m the furthest thing from an etiquette expert, so take the rest of this in that spirit. The first rule should be: write the damn note! I personally think email is fine for business dealings, although a handwritten note or letter is probably a much better idea for a social situation. Of course, it never hurts to pick up the phone and actually give thanks in person.
I’m also not an expert on how to write them. I envy people who seem to have a knack for finding just the right tone of appreciation between the extremes of gushing flattery and cold bland clichés. My best advice, judging from the ones I’ve received and really liked, are to be sincere and be specific. Let them know they are appreciated and tell them specifically how they helped you.
In this age of electronically-powered networking, it’s easy to forget the simple social graces and common courtesies, but they are so easy to do and can mean so much.
Thanks for the story, Rick!
