Building a Life - Howard H. Stevenson

I'm Howard Stevenson uh it's a pleasure to be with you uh I say this sincerely since I died once here and as I say we're going to talk about

building

life

I was telling Howard that I failed once in retirement three times in dying in 71 times like being in Forbes list, so I'm used to failure and now we'll move forward from here. What I'm going to talk about is how I stopped fundraising, which is, you know, pickpocketing and hooking up drunks, huh. I started to ask a question, my wife and I have seven children and 12 grandchildren and we are both married to idiots, so one year I had to pay tuition at Columbia, Yale, Harvard Williams and Bowdoin, I'm bragging and complaining, but I sat down. and I said, you know why people say it's so hard for successful people to have successful children and that's true in almost every culture, there's rice fields, rice fields, clogs, clogs, swamps, swamps, all these things, so we We suggested a friend, Laura Nash, to discover the answer to that question, you come to the first question: what do you mean by success?

So I want to talk about that. The second thing I want to talk about is that at the end there is a little book that just arrived. In October, when I died, one of the young men who worked with me said that you are so wise. Don't excuse me. I didn't listen to all the advice you gave me. Can I interview you? And I thought that's how it would be. Well, my children or grandchildren would do it. I literally died and went into unattended cardiac arrest here on the grass and that's about a one percent chance of surviving and, um, but I was very lucky, so we wrote this book that came out.

As a gift from Howard, I want to tell you a little bit about the lessons that I've tried to convey to children so that they know that the first question is what is success, because when we try to write the book, obviously the first question is what do you mean by this and that's been a dilemma dating back to aristotle herodotus herodotus said it's best not to tell that no man is successful until he dies uh i tried it and it didn't work uh there's a state of being because like As soon as you say I'm successful, you probably start to fail because it is a constant process.

You know there are some unique activities. If I ask people in this room where you're successful, I think almost everyone raises their hand, but there's no profile that would fit, so this is a unique combination of what we bring to the party where we come from, uh, everything kind of thing and there's also some success when now I always find it sad when people talk about being admitted to Harvard Business. school is the highlight of your

life

or is it even worse if they talk about getting admitted to Saint Paul's uh but it's a question of what do we mean, is it a score?

If so, did I love Anne's comment about money this morning? Success is really hard to measure who is the most successful person in the room. Well, it all depends on how you measure it. It is often uneven. I joke about divorce being a painful part of your life and dealing with that with kids. I never expected to be single. I ended up being a single parent, which led me to do some things that were quite different from what I had imagined, like I gave up a very enjoyable activity because someone had to take them to school and other things and I was my son. second, my youngest son was the second happiest person in the room when he got his driver's license, he's often quite shaky, you know things can be going well, then something happens and you can't freeze it, you're there, it's wonderful and you carry on forward.

One of the problems with success is both rational and emotional. Who do I compare myself to? If you look around the room, you know, I guess everyone tells Bill Gates that he's handsome, but if you really look in the mirror, well, anyway, you know, and a lot of the best-selling books are a little strange they tell you to think about all the angles you have to study it we look at malcolm gladwell talks about 10,000 hours if you're naturally strong I'm not going to be a basketball player it's It's pretty clear that I don't particularly jump now and that in a way you What you find on this path of life, sometimes you call it a velvet-lined routine and if you do it your whole life you will probably get better at it, so if you do it, that's what they tell you nothing can go wrong the problem is that sometimes things happen now we'll evoke sympathy with this one but the other thing I discovered about success is when you talk, I think particularly a lot of successful entrepreneurial parents, their view of success is that you fire the bullet and then you draw a circle around it which I did.

It was a success now you should be like me now this turns out to be reasonably difficult I think about my own career you know I started entrepreneurship when no one cared if my sons or daughters I tried to do it, it wouldn't work, there is a different path, it's a different time, you know, we started the first, the first hedge funds in the United States, which I participated in the startup and managed for 10 years, well, you know, now there are 2600. Hedge funds started every year and 2500 closed, It's a very different game and the other thing is that's not really the way it works because if you do it you often leave out some things like the family community and being one man. said in our interviews that now I'm retired it's time for me I just don't know who I am I've been so involved in doing what other people tell me to do so the reality of the afterlife is quite different the reality of life is about elections that we are at a crossroads and we don't know what is on the horizon.

You know, I got tenure in 1978, that's something that people look for and I resigned right away and people thought it was crazy, but I interviewed a bunch of tenured professors and I told them. They are not happy, why would I follow a path where many of the most successful people are not happy? Let me try something different, but I had no idea where it would take me. Now he was back here, but in a very different setting. of terms now success is a difficult problem external measures and internal measures are not always the same sometimes we are rewarded for things we are not proud of and sometimes we are proud of things we are not rewarded for I believe in secondly things change, like I said the world changes we have to deal with, we teach about people, opportunities, context and 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 is obvious is that sometimes the obvious route to success leads to failure because you go down that path and you end up yellow and you had no intention of being yellow I hope no one is yellow there is something else which I have observed that it often hurts when others experience success that could have been yours you know I'm last on bao post it's a pretty famous company I left it when the kids became a single parent I look at the Forbes list and I see the guy what it took For my part, yes, I cringe, but then I think, well, if I had stayed on that path, I couldn't have done the other things that I did, but I still went, so I have to admit that when I open Forbes and I see.

I wince, but that's okay, what we discovered is that there are different types of success and everyone's satisfaction is different and that's what I want to talk a little about now. I think for most of our Harvard Business School graduates, there are actually three big fears. in life one is i won't be a success two i will be a success it won't be enough this famous peggy lee song and i will be a success but i have to sell my soul but somehow to be successful on the world's terms i have to give something up which is really important to me now.

Everything I learned from my mother, I think came from the reader's summary, but this is one I will never forget. Success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get. One of the most important pieces of advice that I think I've given my children is to marry a happy person because you're not going to change someone who is unhappy for someone who is happy, so find 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 support having kids with big subsidies trying to be an actor or a writer in Hollywood or that kind of thing 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 when the parents die so the subsidy stops and it's really a problem, there's this emphasis on perfection, having it all.

They'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 that 24 hours a day doesn't allow me to do all those things all time and We'll come back and talk about it and how you handle it and there are some wonderful models of success that overlook the flaws. You know, if I think about Rupert Murdoch. John Corzine, can we imagine Lady Gaga? You know, Leanna Hunsley? We want? I would really like to be some of these people who have been described as great successes and worse yet, would you like your children to be them?

I can't imagine if one of my daughters said I really want to follow Lady Gaga, uh, both of them. who went to Harvard business school did well. The one who ended up being a family counselor. We interviewed about 150 people. They had great achievements in multiple areas. They seemed to care about others, which was probably one of our criteria. Your success. and life makes a difference for many others it wasn't just about me i didn't interview donald trump they seemed to keep going and growing and they were unique we interviewed everyone from investment bankers to a cleaning lady who probably hadn't originally come as a illegal immigrant and now has a company with about 50 people working and is really incredibly happy and all of our children are graduating from college, so it's a very fascinating group of people, but mostly what you see as people who They were quite satisfied with it, they felt good about themselves and their life, so 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 it was them.

They seized opportunities as they came, largely avoiding regrets. Now my co-author Lauren and I argued a lot about whether you can live a life without regrets and it was yes, we can, no, we can't, yes, a very clever argument, but what we discovered is that we were. talking about different things, she was talking about consequences and I was talking about a kind of process, you know things go wrong, but if you act honestly with yourself, if things go wrong, it's pretty hard to regret it, she said I acted according to the better information, I regret it.

When You Cheat, one of the titles in Howard's gift book is Don't Cheat in Solitaire. We also found people who really enjoyed the here and now, they didn't always procrastinate, you know, when we interviewed one of them, the ice cream arrived. in the office he stopped the interview and said you 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 picture of satisfaction if you ask people why they were successful. I'll give you the same bs, it's in Franklin, you know, it's in Covey, it's in a lot of these books, but what we did was we asked people to tell us about the successes in your life instead of telling us why you were successful and It was something very interesting.

Obviously we saw achievements, what have you done against goals that others are also striving for? That's money power, fame, there are many forms of achievements and by the way, you can't have them all. Many of my richest friends are not known as one. He said he would pay 250,000 to get off the Forbes list. I think Trump pays a lot to be there. He has importance. Have you had a positive impact on the people you care about? There is happiness. How do you feel about yourself and your life? you're happy and then there's a legacy, have you done something or is it based on something now?

One of the things that is very clear is that they are not correlated. You can achieve it without being happy. He was never more than a postal assistant in a small town in Utah. He was a silver beaver scout, which is the highest award in scouting. He taught me a lot about conservation and love for the land. I think it was very important in many people's lives. him be happy without achieving just go to Aspen how many fathers told their kids I've worked so hard I want you to be happy they go out to Aspen to meet their kids and tell them what the hell are you doing and they said you told us to be dad happy, we're happy, what's your problem, you know, I'm a trustee, that's a great religion now, a legacy I was having trouble with until I thought of Karl Marx, he certainly wasn't known in his lifetime, he was bad and abusive with yours.

In my family, he was a drunk, which is usually accompanied by unhappiness and yet he left a great legacy, whether for better or worse, so all of these are not correlated and getting one does not mean the other and we'll come back to that and part of the reason they are very different, happiness is really about me and now you don't make others happyother people, you make yourself happy and you are happy and you don't say oh, I will be happy in the future, you say, am I happy now? whereas legacy, 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 a funny thing, who do I compare to? Myself, just so you know, I have a friend who doesn't feel very rich because Bill Gates has a thousand times more money. I point out that $65 million would satisfy a lot of people, but as long as he compares himself to Bill Gates, he can actually be pretty good. miserable and by the way, it has also led their children to think that unless they make a billion dollars they will not be a success, which has led to some very interesting behavior and the importance is another thing you have to say, yes, I want to help other people. but who do I want to help?

Bill Gates can only give ten dollars per person to everyone on Earth. He has to choose who to help and that is a very important choice. It is both an external choice and an internal choice. Who cares and what? I want to do for them now, when you think about them, they are really complicated achievements, there is a time dimension, is it about the past, is it about the present or the future, if you think about the impact, is it on me or on other people who you know, I could develop things that are achievements that are just about me or I can build a system that other people are involved in, they are emotional drivers, there are some very positive drivers, dominance, recognition, pride, but there is bill, there is donald trumps , envy, greed. and fear, both are drivers towards achievement, but if they are not positive, very often they are driven by looking outside and saying: I have to compete and you can always compete with someone who will make you feel bad and then there is the context , you know, it's Wayne Gretzky.

I have to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is now, so there's a little thing called values ​​here, you know, like one of our daughters said in one of my wife's round numbers. birthday mirror mirror on the wall I'm like my mother after all and she was a little upset saying it but we all can hear my father talking very often when I talk so all this is complicated now when you look at it you know that each one of these You have twins, right? you can think about contentment, satisfaction and happiness or laziness and gluttony, both can lead you to be a little happy. you can think of envy and greed that lead to achievement or you can think of recognition, pride and dominance.

Think about fairness, generosity and caring, which are external, or you may think that some of us have been on boards where power and personal aggrandizement lead people to be important on the outside and then even in legacy , there is altruism and generative desires or there is the fear of death. and need for control you know, I know someone who has written a thousand year trust because he really does it you know trust should be called distrust if you trusted your children you wouldn't put it in trust huh, but doing it for a thousand years I Cruelly pointed out that a William the Conqueror still has 50-odd years to go and I'm sure he's seen it all, but when you look at this, does the satisfaction of accomplishment help you achieve it?

You don't really know that certain neuroses help you achieve this. and affection helps you in the competitive battle, in reality it doesn't even help you to be happy, because when someone else is miserable, you are miserable if you think about altruism, those who leave room for other people's success, it is a absolute requirement to create a legacy. but it will also probably diminish your own achievements because you are allowing other people to be recognized where there are many people and you see it all the time in entrepreneurship where the need to be the boss prevents you from developing something that lasts.

So these are complex. Most human beings, except Donald Trump, have most of these emotions and because we have complex emotions, we are tired, we are torn, we are pulled in different directions, this helps me achieve in this dimension, but we all want them. . Because we want all of these types of success and this is part of the challenge that I think we all face. I don't know, a lot of people don't want to have some success in all these dimensions, so one thing is that You will find your passion, you know that somehow we will find something that, when achieved, we will find significant happiness and leave our legacy.

The only problem is that it doesn't work because an activity rarely has it all. If you find love in the office, you can find it yourself. sued and certainly there are different constituencies different judgments when someone says to their children I am working very hard I am doing it all for you my children what does the child generally think, dad, you are doing this for your own ego and yes, It's really good, I'm really glad that you're giving me some money, but you're not doing your job for me, it's for you, I mean, I can, it requires different skills if you're trying to be a CEO at home, the COO usually. has something.

To say the least, that has been my very subtle experience and often there is collateral damage because if you focus on one thing you are very likely to forget other things and this is a problem so I'm just reminding this poor guy that there is another approach which is sequential success you know we will achieve after we achieve we will find meaning after we find meaning we will find happiness and then our legacy will be left when we die that didn't work either this is what there are many books are usually sold to ypo members about from success to part-time importance I can brush up on degrees that don't work out for a very simple reason when is enough to move on, you know, if you say when I've accomplished enough, I'll never Do you think any of us mean I'll never make it again?

I don't know many people who know, even if they never play golf in their life, they retire and go to Ford and become golf champions. What would happen if you didn't start skiing at 16? It's like being a skier, if you didn't learn to ski before you developed common sense, you will never be a great skier because what is enough for now is certainly not enough for your wife. in most of these areas, then the idea that I will do something and then in the next stage I will move on and focus. This is good for people with ADHD because it says I will focus on one thing and then achieve it and then I can move on.

The only problem is that the decision to move forward is very difficult and there is also the problem that you can always max out. I was a mathematician when I was young. I don't remember how to make Riemann stilts. integral but I remember there is no bigger integer, you can always want to add one to anything and if you succeed at something you often say well I just want a little more, you know, and it's a very interesting problem of how not to maximize and we have ongoing emotional needs, like I say, I don't think you can ever give up the need for achievement, when do you want to say I've done enough for everyone else?

Now it's about me, I just want to be happy myself. I mean, I find it's actually harder with kids, the youngest is 38 and the oldest is 53 and, yes, they are just as needy now as they were at 17. There's just another zero in every need or two zeros. or three. zeros depending on what's going on in your life and by the way, you're going to miss some opportunities if you try to do it sequentially because you know, can you wait to be happy? I can't imagine living life saying I'll finally be happy when I have 100 million dollars, that's a little nonsense and by the way your family will never wait, they find ways to deal with it if you don't deal with it now, so what we saw In these people it was a very interesting phenomenon that they classified.

They looked at life and said oh achievement means happiness and they told stories about starting small they told stories about each of these things that happened to them when they were young they weren't having a big impact but they could talk about the meaning of what they did for people, they could talk about small achievements, I mean, we had stories of high school achievements from people who, actually, Peter Uberoff told us the story of his high school experience, he ran the Los Angeles Olympics and was very famous in many things, he was also the guy who helped restore Los Angeles after Watts, but his stories go back a long time, both in importance and achievements and, by the way, as they went through this, they told stories getting bigger and bigger and you know, the problem is that we don't know. when I was going to finish I was pretty healthy I was exercising in the morning I was walking around campus when I died happily it was January 3rd and it was a warm day and there were people around, but if I had arrived three minutes later I would have been I wouldn't be here because you would have been in my office and you had about four minutes to get help, but they also told stories of all the legacies that they derived and many of them couldn't.

They were much more interested in the legacies of Early in their life, whether it was something they did in high school or something they endured, something that someone they helped when they started their career, it was a very interesting set of stories about the way they kind of spun this through a spiral of life now. it's very easy to put things in the wrong domain we live in cambridge there's a school there where i swear the 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 father speaking if you say that I am never as happy as when I am in the office I think you have a problem I love my job I have had the best career in the world but In fact, there are other things that I also like: the trust of my children, the legacy What I'm leaving, I don't think so.

The invisible leadership of the charity is important. I have been chairman of the board of directors of npr and have been actively involved in many things. of charities and some of them you know you go in there and some of these elbows are just as sharp, let's say, in some of these charities as they are in any business that I've ever been involved in and one of the questions I always ask to people is where you put your tennis you know that I am 71 years old I play bad tennis but I enjoy it a lot but you know that is not going to be like that the other day I was with a friend who is 72 years old who pays Federer to warm him up is very good but you I know at 72 years old he can afford it so it's not a problem but a very important part of his identity is to be able to win in Chennai and his children, his children are starting to beat him and wow, it's that bad now that it happens your son. being on the tennis team of a major university, but he still thinks he should be able to beat his son, now he can play mind games with his son, so he wins quite often, but you know, if you think about it, I think the lesson. of the book was that most people seek the four satisfactions in all domains and seeking one of the predatory ones prevents you from pursuing the others.

We only have 24 hours a day. The time you spend on achievements is not spent on the importance that great satisfaction from a single source can achieve. I don't compensate for missing others and I hate the word balance. I always think of her as a seal that has something sitting on its nose wandering around. I think it's a juggling act unfortunately. Now you know that juggling is really an art if you think about it. juggling you have to pay attention to all the balls, you know that if you only look at one ball, the others will fall, so you have to pay attention to all the balls, when you touch something, you have to give it energy you know that no one applauds you like juggler if you hold all the balls in your hand you can balance the balls but that is not a very interesting thing in juggling you catch it and throw it almost immediately but you have to give it energy. to give it direction and you have to get rid of it and you have to figure out if those of you that I love go to the cirque du soleil and you see them throwing these things and you catch them there, how do you get them to come down.

I don't understand what the right time is, but I think what it really means is practice, so when you think about those spirals, these people that we admire have often been practicing the skill of juggling their entire lives, what's the ball? more important? in juggling it is the ball that falls it is not the one on top it is not the one in your hand it is the one you are about to drop now in life I find that there are some rubber balls races tend to be quite rubbery they will make you bounce I know family is a little bit harder sometimes, if you let it fall 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 a lot about legacy, you know, I can think back to when I was 21 and 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 children's story, I can tell you why I wrote the Head Ski case or something like that.

Some of the things I did when I was very young turned out to be part of the legacy, but that was not the reason whythat I wrote it. I just thought Howard Head was great, you know, when you start your career, this is a moment. When you start to bond, like 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, it's amazing to me in my How many of the people that I really know well and 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 it in the moment when?

You are 30 years old, what makes you happy? Stop and ask yourself that question. I know what makes me happy. I love having lunch with friends or dinner with friends. It's something I look for because if I go a week without you hearing anything after the family. and if I don't talk to all my kids at least two or three times a week I feel bad, you know, and part of that is that they are busy, I'm busy, but somehow we find time to talk, but happiness, you have to know what it means and you have to say it. that's something I look for regularly, I'm not going to put it off and then, of course, the big red ball at the beginning of my career is the achievement, you know, very few people are Grandma Moisés, and you don't achieve it from the 83 years old. this is the initial dynamic of the race, in the middle of the race, we take a path, we know what makes us happy, we have decided who is important to us, unless there is a major change and we know where the achievement goes and then the legacy.

He starts to raise his head well, what do I really care about? Am I doing the things that matter to me? 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. 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 trust if i died and now i'm going to pick up his . pieces and by the way he wasn't well I had to find out where the pieces were first before I could pick them up uh it was a good lesson for me but then we hit these golden years I'm not going to make it one much more I have one more book I'm in working now, you know, a little bit of the 16 books that I've written, they're out there and like one time someone introduced me to, how would you write books once you put them out? you can't take them back down, but the achievement is what it is.

I found that with 12 grandchildren, seven children and many friends, you know that you have to work hard to maintain those relationships that you know now, happily in the online world and happily. In the world of email and other things, you can keep in touch in ways you never have before, but you still have to work at it and you have to ask yourself do I have enough time or am I allocating enough time to it and then the legacy is there . but at this point you know, if you're not happy, forget it, as they say, so you want to get back to the key problems that you can't achieve in all dimensions.

I will never be a great tennis player. I will never be a great. skier there are many things I will never be a singer I can go through all the things that 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 Myself in the competition The world, you know, one of the things I learned early in life. I worked with a guy and said he was one of the people who helped coin the word automation in his manufacturing course and went into the paper industry.

Joe said, why did you get into the paper industry? He said that John Deeb doesn'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 want to be a mathematician? They are very intelligent people who work hard and love mathematics. He wasn't one of them again. Things change. Things change. And you change. You know, I thought I'd end my golden years by traveling a lot. Well, it turns out I was out of breath. You easily know that I was on Mauna Kea two weeks ago at the Smithsonian Observatory.

Well, I was really glad they brought oxygen because I could go up the hill when I started walking a couple hundred feet to fourteen thousand feet. I said yes, thirteen. One thousand seven hundred and fifty-six to be precise uh, but I was excited to go to the observatory, but I recognize that I'm not going to climb many of those hills alone. This still exists. I still look around and see things I could have done. If I hadn't had it and I still cringe, there's a winning 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 said it was a choice I chose, I chose. was constantly aware and I don't regret 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 movement drivers, the third surprise for us was the Enough paper now.

It's a funny word in English, it has a lower limit, have you done enough? and when you yell at your kids, enough is enough, it has an upper limit and in defining it, it's interesting if you do a search other than bill mckibben's book on enough. There's not much out there about enough, that's not a word that comes around, we always want more, it's like Samuel Gompers, the great union leader, when he was asked what he wanted. The answer was more. Now what we saw in these people was a sense reason for enough and that was a very interesting internal test because there is enough in two different dimensions one two counts one is the dimensionality what is enough in this achievement what is enough meaning what is enough happiness You know because if you don't define enough you have to go through more and more scrolls and find out where your achievements are, what are the subparts of the achievement, what are the real dimensions of the achievement that matter to you now, for me ideas are important, so writing books has been something that I like and work hard at, and then there's the 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 life become particularly important in implementing a sense of enough now I think there are 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 earn more now I developed a trick for me I try to keep a balance that includes the money that I have given away uh because for me dying the richest person Being in the cemetery is not the goal, but on the other hand, I like, you know, I'm kind of person who measures and therefore understand how much I have donated to charities throughout my life and keep it on my balance sheet.

I've given my kids those kinds of things it actually helped me feel good about the total, although I set a number that I'll stay at for about 10 years and anything above that I give away, but I want to keep track I want to understand what's going on I think one of the things about enough is that you do an activity with satisfaction if you say what's my and I enjoyed Anne's talk this morning because I have that list of things that I want to achieve today means you can actually do it if you don't you have a list you will never finish it if you have a list you can sit back and say oh, this is a good day, I did it all and, but you have to do it.

Be realistic about what you are going to do today. My wife always has lists of impossible things and she also starts with the most difficult task. I tend to start with those things that I can tick off the quickest, so I can do 15 things that feel good even if there's one damn thing left over, but actually that becomes very important, but also by having some sort of idea of ​​what you want achieve, you can see different benefits from another activity, so if you say well, I have to talk. to today's children, well, that is not in the achievement goal, but if I can say well, today I spoke with three of them.

I had to hear one more thing about how hard it is to work in Hollywood, but I hear it every day. I just want to turn on the tape and say yes, I told you I once worked with George C Scott, I understand the business you're in, but the other thing about enough is that if you start doing it, you can now say yes, that's it. I had enough work for today. That doesn't mean I'm not going to work tomorrow so I want to come back tomorrow, so part of it is lists, but part of it is a sense of what is enough because enough does some wonderful things, what are your values ​​now, for example? in money, you see if one of my values ​​is to give it away, you have to find a way to measure that in your life, what do you want to do for your children?

You know, I was with a person on one of my recent trips and he said, well, I don't want to give my kids too much money, that will ruin them, so they know I come from a poor background and if I give them money, they won't be motivated to achieve it and I'm sitting. there, in a house whose ceilings are at least 20 feet high, the main column of the house was 300 feet long, at the end there was a cellar that had oats breon opus 1 harwan visible to the guest, by the way, and you are saying Now you want your children to do exactly what you did.

I think you're setting yourself up for failure because well, you actually told him that anyway. Yes, I'm getting better. My 92 year old grandmother said Well, I'm old enough to say it. What I think and said, Bobby, you've always said that, so why worry? But one thing is enough. Set limits. You know, if you start saying, how much do I need to protect myself. My family?. You can start saying it. Well then the rest is excess, how do I want to use it? One thing is enough. Allow for transitions because once you accomplish something and say, now it's time for the next thing and I think that's one of the most important things I learned from these people.

Having a sense of both motivates you because I want to get there, but rewards you once you've gotten there and that becomes a very important part of life, so setting boundaries increases the dimensionality of success, which I think It is something contradictory. but in fact, by setting the limits, it allows you to juggle, it allows you to say: I can throw that ball now, what's the next ball I have to catch now? The bad news is that this is a dynamic activity. The bad news is that it requires a lot. energy there's a lot of bad news in this but that's okay because I think most of you are a bit like sharks, as someone described to me, if I stop swimming I die and I can't imagine stopping so part of what you do is Say, look, I can't do this, what can I do now that I want to do?

Just so you know, I think one of the things is what do you want in these four domains, what does your profile look like now, again, being honest with yourself, are you in? Your path to the ideal Does your success reflect your main drivers? You know most of us can't stray too far from what we're taught at home. I know I can't, I hope my children can't. You know it's interesting. I had a discussion with the kids about grandchildren, uh, I said, you know, they have a minimum of four grandparents, in some cases more because there have been several divorces, uh, so I don't have a big influence on my grandchildren's values, You know, everyone draws. your tree, this is my family, but all the kids look up and say no, I'm part of 4 8 16 32 64 families, which one am I supposed to be a part of, and by the way, when they get married, they bring a completely different set. of values ​​in the equation and you're not going to destroy what the rule of life is: you either gain a daughter or you lose a son, uh, and you better remember that and then the really deep question is are my drivers positive, are they negative? friend who compares himself to bill gates i think he has some pretty negative envy drivers my friend who writes the thousand year trust book do you know why you really want to control your children uh there are a number of funny stories from people i mean At this a guy was talking to some pretty rich people, we were talking about how they manage their money and what they should do and he said, well I'm never going to involve my in-laws, it's all about my kids and I thought the money came from the father of his wife, you know him well anyway, I pointed it 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 career too professional. achievements about innovation getting results we have to do that or we won't achieve that importance is 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 of the reasons frank developed a company?

He called Landmark Communications The Weather Channel and things like that. He's the guy who said he'd pay 250,000 to get off the Forbes list, but he said my purpose with my business is to serve my clients at a profit, it's not about maximizing shareholder wealth. It's a limitation, it's not my goal I want to serve customers if I don't make enough money I'm going to close the business if I make too much money it says I'm probably not reinvesting enough in my people, my community and myproduct, and that was always something I served on their board of directors for 21 years.

He's also someone who taught me a lot about fundraising because I went to ask him for a lot of money and I think I'm going to 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 the old dominion university is where his wife is the president of the board of trustees and then he's going to tell me how important He's going to talk about how he was going to be a juvenile delinquent and he went to Culver Military Academy and that saved him and I knew the conversation so I went into Frank, it's really important, we have this need to free up the university parking lot and we need Help, can I be number five on your list and he looked at me?

That's right and he gave us 35 million dollars and we were number five. But he gave it in less than six weeks. I was thinking, but Frank was a guy who had a tremendous influence on my wife and someone who really embodied that legacy is ethical contact and strategic leadership. You know that old notion, if you don't do it, only the leading sled dog has a change of vision and satisfaction of happiness. Now I want to give you some. One of the lessons we learned in Howard's gift is that I believe you have to start at the end.

What will be said about me when he dies? What will my children remember? Nobody publishes your balance sheet in your obituary. And? I mean I think the second thing is that we all came to Harvard Business School getting an A in every class, we're not going to get a bus and everything in life and that's a very important thing to remember what we can let go of because We are not going to be great golfers unless we practice every day. I think the other thing is that Eric, who's the guy who actually wrote the book, said that everyone's outside looks better than my inside.

We know our interior and we are seeing others. the outside of people and I think the more we get to know people, the more we see their pain and their struggles, the better it is to remember that we are not alone in the struggles to occasionally feel like we are doing and then the last thing is everyone. everything about the future is bad you know even the future there will be a bad future now we should probably all act like there is a future and it makes me sad to see American savings rates where they are because act like there is no future or someone else would take care of us now these are the truths that I learned some of the questions asked we are at a turning point I think in my career a turning point for those of you who were not mathematics students is where there is no tangent, there is no direction and We all encounter turning points.

My wife's departure was a major turning point in my life. The decision to relinquish ownership was a major turning point. Some of them are very visible. but I think a lot of people pass turning points without even stopping and saying, "this frees me up to make a change in direction," and I think of turning points, whether negative or positive, as gifts because if you stop and acknowledge them, can you say what I want to ask the second question? Is the juice worth the squeeze? I mean, if you want a glass of orange juice, don't squeeze the grapefruits, and yet, how many people do you know?

I always say the same thing about Harvard graduate business graduates. Are they so competitive that they have to be the first at the dump on Saturday morning? If the gun rings, they want to run the race. Now the question is: are we going in the direction we want? Am I cheating in solitaire now again? things in my life is that I was pretty good at math, I won the state math contest, I didn't. I came to Stanford and found out that they are really smart people who love math, who worked hard at it and were willing to sacrifice things to say I'm not one of those people, 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 Harvard Business School, am I explicit about the betting I'm making, I think one of the things about being explicit about betting is that you can say there are three states of nature: I won, I lost, or not yet. I know how many people make a bet and have lost but are not willing to admit it, they move well, the world is changing, I will make it up next time and one of the questions we ask in the book is the cultural question: am I in the correct place? There are places that are toxic there.

There are places that are good for other people and bad for us. How do you evaluate the culture in which you are embedded? I know that 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 gave me information and access, but there are a lot of places where 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 are supposed to end. at 10 30 is that he lives life forward, you know, after almost 72 years of life, I find many people who live life backwards, you know divorce, how many people are trying to change the past, you know you can't change the past, from which you can learn. the past, but you can't change the past, so figuring out how you say that's behind me, what have I learned now, let me move on?

It's very important. I was once in Ireland and I was a guest of the government and I was one of the prizes I was meeting three ministers for dinner and we had all had drinks and I turned to one and said it's an unusual Irish name. He says I'm not Irish, I'm Danish. I told him it's unusual that you. He would be a minister of state in this country. He asked me when he arrived. He said they arrived more than 100 years ago. I thought this is a different and surprising way to calculate. I mean, 100 years ago, that's 50 generations, what percentage of your blood is that really?

Danish but he identified himself as Danish I turned to the minister of reconciliation I told him why there is a problem between you and England he said they stole our land and I told him when they stole your land it was 16 something like that and you more or less Well, but We've been watching it, I said boy, it's an old man who's been watching it, he says there are no generations that have been watching it and that it's ours and I thought, and this guy in charge of reconciliation I found the same thing in Slovenia, where the people They were telling me about the evils that happened in 1400 or 400 depending on whether you were fighting between the Orthodox right and the Western right or between the Muslims, which is around 100, they were fighting and they kept telling me these stories and I think move. life ahead is a lot easier i think a second lesson i actually don't particularly like the word mentor i enjoyed ann's comments about mentoring but i think part of the problem is that i'm not even really sure what it means because i don't know anyone and I want their advice in all aspects of my life, so I think of it much more like trying to form an individual board of directors where you try to find people whose advice you value in certain aspects of your life, which means that I mean, We looked at Harvard Business School, I asked one of the jobs he had.

I asked people to tell us, as part of the resource allocation process, who their mentors were, and we divided them into teaching, research, and course development. It was interesting that no one received more than 17 mentions even though everyone could name three names because mentoring is hard work, secondly, very few people were mentioned in the three categories and thirdly, some of the people who They thought they were mentors were never mentioned by anyone, which I also found interesting. 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 that there are people that I go to and say this is what I'm thinking in certain areas and some of them I wouldn't ask. nothing about personal life because I don't particularly admire his personal life, but I do admire it and one of the things it does is ask you who these people are, what this person's particular skill is, where I value their advice. because then you can start saying well, if I can get six or seven people that I can talk to and you can't handle more than six or seven of them, that's a big problem, you know, I guess another thing I like to say To people , life is risky and some things are uncontrollable.

No. I am on the board of directors of some health organizations. It surprises me how many people don't take their medications. It is a controllable risk. You know, you can't take furosemide if you're going to give a speech, you have to wait until the speech is over, but actually, finding out what the risks are and saying there are some that I can control and some that I can't control, you know, it's almost reinhold nebra's prayer of word concessions. It gives me the strength to change the things that can be changed, the patience to accept the things that can't be changed, and the wisdom to know which is which, but I think what you're starting to say is: let me make sure I understand that this is not it's a risk. race these are the aspects of the race that make it risky which ones I can control which I can't and if you can't control any of that you should probably get out of the way and then the last kind of piece The advice I would give is to plan for the ripple effect, no for the splash.

I think one of the interesting things is that we are in a culture that is interested in splashing, but in fact most of us are in a place where we throw some stones and they are great waves and one of the most satisfying things in my life It's the ripples, the things that you didn't really know you had any impact on and people come up and say oh, you helped me, you told me something, you helped me choose. a career, I mean, those are the things that really, in the end, you know, 43 years of teaching and 72 years of being a wife really make a difference, so I'm going to give you a test.

The first question is who you are, what are the values. What do you want to be able to say at the end? uh, if in that last second of life I didn't have the opportunity to do that, I just fell, uh people, I wouldn't smell sulfur or see a white light. So I don't know what happened, but maybe they caught me too quickly, but who are you? What are the values ​​you are bringing to your wife? What satisfactions, if any, are you on the path to missing out on? You know it again, it's the juggling metaphor.

Catch the falling ball, uh, who's important to you and are you helping them be successful? I think when Anne said there's nothing wrong with money, but the richest people in your life won't be measured by it, it's incredibly important and the people you've helped are. probably as important a measure of life as anything else and then what is your time frame for action? And being an old hippie, the time to take this test is the rest of your life, aka today is the first day of the rest of your life, so That's my story and I think I almost finished it in time, so thank you so much.