- 9 months ago
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00:00I'm Howard Stevenson.
00:05It's a pleasure to be with you.
00:08I mean that sincerely since I died once out here.
00:11And as I say, we're going to talk about building life.
00:15I was telling Howard I failed once at retirement,
00:18three times at dying, and 71 times at being on the Forbes list.
00:23So I'm used to failure.
00:24Now we'll go forward from here.
00:26What I'm going to talk about is as I aged out of fundraising,
00:33which is picking pockets and rolling drunks,
00:36I started to ask a question.
00:39My wife and I, between us, have seven kids and 12 grandchildren.
00:43And we're both married to jerks, so one year I got to pay tuition
00:47to Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Williams, and Bowdoin.
00:50I'm bragging and complaining.
00:53But I sat down and said, you know, why is it that people say
00:57it's so hard for successful people to have successful children?
01:00And that's true across almost every culture.
01:04It's rice patties to rice patties, clogs to clogs, bogs to bogs,
01:08all of these things.
01:09So I set out with a friend, Laura Nash, to figure out the answer
01:15to that question.
01:16The first question is, what do you mean by success?
01:19So I want to talk about that.
01:20The second thing I want to talk about at the end
01:23is a little book that just came out in October.
01:26When I died, one of the young people that had worked with me
01:31said, you make so many wise-ass...
01:34No, excuse me.
01:35I didn't listen to all the advice you gave me.
01:39Can I interview you?
01:40And I thought that'd be nice.
01:42My kids or grandkids would...
01:43This is...
01:44I literally did die.
01:45And I suffered unattended cardiac arrest out here on the lawn
01:50out here.
01:51And that's about 1% chance of survival.
01:54But I was extremely lucky.
01:58And so we wrote this book that came out as Howard's Gift.
02:01And I want to tell you a little bit about sort of the lessons
02:04I've tried to pass on to the kids.
02:06So, you know, the first question, though, as you get into is,
02:10what is success?
02:11Because when we tried to write the book,
02:13that's obviously the first question, what do you mean by it?
02:16And that's been a dilemma that goes back to Aristotle, Herodotus.
02:20Herodotus said it best, no man's successful till he dies.
02:25I tried that and it didn't work.
02:27But it's a state of being.
02:29Because as soon as you say, I'm successful,
02:31you probably start to fail.
02:33Because that's a constant process.
02:36You know, there's some unique activities.
02:38If I asked the people in this room, are you successful?
02:40I think almost everybody would raise your hand.
02:42Yet there's no one profile that would fit it.
02:45So this is some unique combination of what we bring to the party,
02:50where we come from, all sorts of things.
02:54And there's also sort of, I was successful when.
02:57Now, I always find it sad when people talk about it being admitted
03:02to Harvard Business School as the high point of their life.
03:04Or it's even worse if they talk about being admitted to St. Paul's.
03:09But it's a question of, well, what do we mean?
03:12Is it a score?
03:14If so, is it?
03:16I loved Ann's comment about money this morning.
03:21One thing about success, it's really hard to measure.
03:24Who is the most successful person in the room?
03:27Well, all depends on how you measure.
03:31It's often uneven.
03:33I joke about a divorce.
03:35That's a painful part of your life.
03:37And dealing with it with kids.
03:39I never expected to be a single parent.
03:41I wound up being a single parent.
03:43That caused me to do some things that were quite different
03:46than I'd imagined.
03:47Like I gave up a very nice activity.
03:51Because somebody had to drive to school and other things.
03:56And my youngest son was the second happiest person in the room
04:01when he got his driver's license.
04:05It's often quite unstable.
04:07You know, things can be going well, then something happens.
04:10And you can't freeze it.
04:12You're there.
04:13It's wonderful.
04:14And you move on.
04:16So one of the problems with success, it's both rational and emotional.
04:19Who do I compare myself to?
04:21If we look around the room, you know, I guess everybody's telling Bill Gates he's handsome.
04:28But if he really looks in the mirror, well, anyway.
04:33You know, and a lot of the success books are sort of weird.
04:38They tell you to think through all the angles.
04:40You've got to study it.
04:41You do.
04:42We look at Malcolm Gladwell.
04:44It talks about 10,000 hours.
04:46If you're naturally strong, I'm not going to be a basketball player.
04:50It's quite clear.
04:51I don't jump.
04:52Particularly now.
04:54And you sort of get on this life path.
04:58Sometimes call it a velvet-lined rut.
05:00And if you do it all your life, you're probably going to get better at it.
05:04So if you do that, that's what they tell you.
05:06Nothing can go wrong.
05:07The problem is sometimes things happen.
05:12Now, we'll evoke sympathy with this one.
05:15But the other thing I found about success is when you talk to, I think, particularly many successful
05:23entrepreneurial fathers, their view of success is you fire the bullet and then you draw the
05:29circle around it.
05:31What I did is success.
05:33Now, you should be just like me.
05:35Now, this turns out to be reasonably hard.
05:37I think about my own career.
05:39You know, I started the entrepreneurship when nobody cared.
05:42Well, if my sons or daughters tried to do it, it wouldn't work.
05:49There is a different path.
05:51It's a different time.
05:52You know, we started the first, one of the first hedge funds in the United States.
05:56I was involved in starting and managed for 10 years.
06:00Well, you know, now there are 2,600 hedge funds started each year and 2,500 going out of business.
06:06It's a very different game.
06:08And the other thing about it is it's really not the way that it works.
06:11Because if you do that, you often leave out a few things like family, community.
06:15And as one guy said in our interviews, I now retired.
06:19It's time for me.
06:20I just don't know who me is.
06:22I've been so involved in doing what other people tell me to do.
06:25So the other, life's reality is quite different.
06:28Life's reality is all about choices.
06:30We're standing at the crossroads and we don't know what's over the horizon.
06:34You know, I got tenure in 1978.
06:36That's something that people seek.
06:37And I resigned immediately.
06:39And people thought it was crazy.
06:40But I'd interviewed a whole bunch of tenured faculty and said, they're not happy.
06:44Why would I go down a path where many of the more, quote, successful people aren't happy?
06:48Let me try something different.
06:50So, but I had no idea where it would lead.
06:53It led back here.
06:54Now, but on a very different set of terms.
06:59Now, success is a tough problem.
07:01The external measures and the internal measures aren't always the same.
07:05Sometimes we're rewarded for things we're not proud of.
07:08And sometimes we're proud of things we're not rewarded for.
07:11I think, secondly, things change.
07:13As I said, the world changes.
07:15We have to deal with it.
07:16We teach about people, opportunity, deal, and context.
07:19And the context really matters.
07:21You change.
07:22If you still want the same thing at 82 as you want it at 22, your name's Hugh Hefner.
07:27And what's obvious is sometimes the obvious route to success leads to failure.
07:39Because you get going down that path and you wind up in Amarillo.
07:42And you had no intention of being in Amarillo.
07:44I hope nobody's from Amarillo.
07:46There's another thing that I've observed, which often it hurts when others experience a success that could have been yours.
07:53You know, I'm the ST in Baupost.
07:56It's a fairly famous firm.
07:58I left it when the kids.
08:00I became a single parent.
08:02I look on the Forbes list and see the guy who took over from me.
08:07Yeah, I wince.
08:09But then I think, well, if I'd stayed in that path, I couldn't have done the other things I've done.
08:14But I still wince.
08:15I have to admit, when I open up Forbes and see it, I wince.
08:20But that's okay.
08:23What we discovered is there are different kinds of success.
08:26And the satisfactions of each are different.
08:28And that's what I want to talk about a bit.
08:30Now, I think for most of our graduates of Harvard Business School, there are really three great fears in life.
08:35One is I won't be a success.
08:37Two, I will be a success.
08:39Well, it won't be enough, this famous Peggy Lee song.
08:42And I'll be a success, but I have to sell my soul.
08:45That somehow, to be successful in the world's terms, I have to give up something that's really important to me.
08:51Now, everything I learned from my mother, I think, came from the Reader's Digest.
08:56But this is one that I'll never forget.
08:58Success is getting what you want, and happiness is wanting what you get.
09:02And one of the most important pieces of advice, I think, I've given my kids is marry a happy person.
09:07Because you're not going to change somebody who's unhappy into somebody who's happy.
09:11So figure out if they're happy or not.
09:14So there's a lot of bad advice out there.
09:17Simple rules.
09:19Follow your passion.
09:20Wonderful.
09:22I'm passionate about being an actor.
09:25Oh, okay.
09:26How many parents have kids on deep subsidy trying to be an actor?
09:32Or a writer in Hollywood, or those kind of things.
09:35And they get to about 50, and they say, I'm not really going to make it.
09:38Now what I'm going to do.
09:40And, by the way, that's about when the parents die, so the subsidy stops.
09:44And it's really a problem.
09:46There is this stress on perfection and having it all.
09:49You're supposed to be, you know, Dr. Ruth in the bedroom and Donald Trump in the boardroom.
09:54And, 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.
10:01And we'll come back and talk about that and how you manage it.
10:05And there are some wonderful success models that gloss over the flaws.
10:08You know, if I think of Rupert Murdoch, John Corzine, can we imagine Lady Gaga?
10:14You know, Liana Holmes.
10:16Would you really like to be some of these people that have been written up as great successes?
10:21And even worse, would you want your kids to be them?
10:23I can't imagine if one of my daughters said, I really want to model myself on Lady Gaga.
10:28The two that went to the Harvard Business School have done okay, but one has wound up being a family counselor.
10:34We interviewed about 150 people.
10:38They were high achievers in multiple arenas.
10:41They seemed to care about others, which was probably one of our criteria.
10:45Their success in life make a difference to many others.
10:49They weren't just about me.
10:51I didn't interview Donald Trump.
10:54They seemed to keep going and growing.
10:56And they were unique.
10:59We interviewed everybody from investment bankers to a cleaning woman that had come probably not originally as a legal immigrant.
11:07And now has a firm with about 50 people that work for her and is really amazingly happy.
11:12And all our kids are graduating from college.
11:14And so it's a very fascinating group of people.
11:17But mostly what you saw is people that were quite satisfied.
11:21That they felt good about themselves and good about their life.
11:24So, you know, I could criticize this as a sociological study.
11:29Because these are probably the criteria we chose for success, not something that was given to us by deep research.
11:36And what we saw in these people is they seized opportunities as presented.
11:41They largely avoided regrets.
11:44Now, my co-author, Laura, and I argued a lot about can you live a life without regrets.
11:49And it was, yes we can, no we can't, yes, a very intelligent argument.
11:53But what we discovered is we were talking about different things.
11:57She was talking about consequences and I was talking about sort of process.
12:01You know, things go wrong.
12:03But if you acted honest to yourself, if things go wrong, it's pretty hard to have a regret.
12:09He said, I acted on the best information.
12:11Regrets come when you kid yourself.
12:13One of the titles in the Howard's gift book is Don't Cheat at Solitaire.
12:20We also found the people that really enjoyed the here and now.
12:23They weren't always putting off.
12:25You know, when we interviewed one of them, ice cream arrived at the office.
12:30He stopped the interview and he says, you'll wait, the ice cream will melt.
12:33Let's have ice cream now.
12:35And that was a very important lesson for us.
12:38And what we discovered is a landscape of satisfaction.
12:41If you ask people why they succeeded, they give you the same BS.
12:44It's in Covey.
12:48It's in a whole bunch of these books.
12:50But what we did is we asked people, tell us about successes in your life rather than tell us why you succeeded.
12:57And it was a very interesting thing.
12:58We saw, obviously, achievement.
13:01What have you done against goals that others are also striving for?
13:04That's money, power, fame.
13:07There are lots of forms of achievement.
13:09And you can't have them all, by the way.
13:11Many of my richest friends are not known.
13:14As one said, he'd pay $250,000 to get off the Forbes list.
13:19I think that Trump pays a lot to get on it.
13:22There's significance.
13:24Have you had a positive impact on the people you care about?
13:27There's happiness.
13:30How do you feel about yourself in your life?
13:33Are you content?
13:34And then there's legacy.
13:36Have you done something there's a build upon?
13:38Now, one of the things that's very clear is these are uncorrelated.
13:40You can achieve without being happy, right?
13:43Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway probably demonstrated that conclusively.
13:47Can you be significant without achievement?
13:50My grandfather was never more than an assistant postmaster in a small town in Utah.
13:56He was a silver beaver scout, which is the highest award in scouting.
13:59He taught me a lot about conservation and love for the land.
14:03I think he was very significant in many people's lives.
14:09Can you be happy without achieving?
14:12Just go to Aspen.
14:13How many parents told their kids, I have worked so hard, I want you to be happy?
14:17They go out to Aspen, meet their kids and say, what the hell are you doing?
14:20And they said, you told us to be happy, Dad.
14:22We're happy.
14:23What's your problem?
14:24You know, I'm a trustafarian.
14:26That's a great religion.
14:27Now, legacy I was having trouble with until I thought about Karl Marx.
14:36He certainly wasn't known in his lifetime.
14:39He was mean and abusive to his family.
14:41He was a drunkard, which generally somewhat goes with unhappiness.
14:44And yet he left a big legacy, whether for good or bad.
14:47So all these are uncorrelated.
14:50And getting one doesn't get you the other.
14:52And we'll come back to that.
14:54And part of the reason they're quite different.
14:56Happiness is really about me and now.
14:59You don't make other people happy.
15:01You make yourself happy.
15:02And you are happy.
15:03And you don't say, oh, I'll be happy in the future.
15:06You say, am I happy now?
15:07Whereas legacy, I'm sorry, Bill Clinton, you don't define your own legacy.
15:11Other people define your legacy.
15:13And it's about your impact on the future.
15:15Now, achievement is sort of funny.
15:18Who do I compare myself to?
15:21I have a friend who feels not very wealthy because Bill Gates has 1,000 times as much money.
15:27I point out that $65 million would satisfy many people.
15:30But as long as he compares himself to Bill Gates, he can make himself really quite miserable.
15:35And by the way, it's also led his children to think that unless they make a billion dollars,
15:40they're not a success, which has led them to some very interesting behavior.
15:44And significance is another thing.
15:46You have to say, yeah, I want to help other people, but who do I want to help?
15:50Bill Gates can only give $10 a person to everyone on Earth.
15:54He has to choose who to help.
15:57And that's a very important choice.
15:59It's both an external choice and an internal choice.
16:02Who do I care about and what do I want to do for them?
16:05Now, when you think about them, they're really complicated.
16:09Achievement is, there's a time dimension to it.
16:12Is it about the past?
16:13Is it about the present or the future?
16:15If you think about the impact, is it on me or is it on other people?
16:20You know, I could develop things that are achievement that are about me alone,
16:24or I can build a system where other people are involved.
16:28They're emotional drivers.
16:29There are some very positive drivers, mastery, recognition, pride.
16:33But there are Donald Trumps, envy, greed, and fear.
16:39These are all drivers toward achievement.
16:41But if they're not positive, very often they're driven by looking outside and saying,
16:46I've got to compete, and you can always compete with somebody who will make you feel bad.
16:51And then there's the context.
16:53You know, it's the Wayne Gretzky.
16:56I've got to skate to where the puck will be, not to where it is now.
17:00So, there's a little thing called values here.
17:04You know, as one of our daughters said at one of my wife's round numbers,
17:09birthday mirror mirror on the wall, I'm like my mother after all.
17:13And she was somewhat upset at saying it, but we all, I can hear my father speaking very often when I'm talking.
17:20So, all this stuff is complicated.
17:23Now, when you look at it, you know, each of these have twins, right?
17:30You can think about contentment and fulfillment and happiness, or laziness and gluttony.
17:34They both can lead you to somewhat be happy.
17:37You can think about envy and greed driving into achievement, or you can think about recognition, pride, and mastery.
17:42You can think about fairness, generosity, and caring, which is external.
17:46Or you can think, a few of us have been on boards where power and self-aggrandizement leads people to, quote, be significant outside.
17:55And then even in legacy, there's altruism and generative desires.
17:59Or there's the fear of death and need for control.
18:02You know, I know somebody that's written a thousand year trust.
18:05Because he really does, you know, trust should be named mistrust.
18:08If you trusted your kids, you wouldn't put it in trust.
18:11But to do it for a thousand years, I unkindly pointed out that William the Conqueror still has 50-something years to run.
18:19And I'm sure he's seen everything.
18:21But when you look at these, does contentment and fulfillment help you achieve?
18:26Not really.
18:27You know, certain neuroses help you to achieve.
18:29Does fairness, generosity, and caring help you in the competitive battle?
18:35It actually doesn't even help you be happy.
18:38Right?
18:39Because when somebody else is miserable, you're miserable.
18:42If you think about altruism, those who leave room for other people's success, it's an absolute requirement for creating legacy.
18:55But it also will probably diminish your own achievement because you're letting other people be recognized where there is.
19:00There 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.
19:09So these are complex.
19:12Most human beings, except for Donald Trump, have most of these emotions.
19:16And because we have complex emotions, we're tired.
19:20We're torn.
19:21We're tugged in different directions.
19:23This one helps me achieve on this dimension.
19:26But we all want them because we want all of these kinds of success.
19:30And this is part of the challenge I think we all face is I don't know very many people that don't want to have some measure of success on all of these dimensions.
19:40So one thing is a find your passion.
19:44You know, that we'll find somehow something that in achievement will find significant happiness and leave our legacy.
19:51The only problem doesn't work.
19:53Because one activity rarely has it all.
19:56If you find love at the office, you can get yourself sued.
20:00And there are certainly different constituencies with different judgments.
20:05When somebody says to their children, I'm working so hard.
20:08I'm doing it all for you, my children.
20:10And what does the kid generally think?
20:12Bullshit, Dad.
20:13You're doing this for your own ego.
20:16And, yeah, it's really nice.
20:17I'm really glad that you're giving me some money.
20:19But you're not doing your work for me.
20:22It's for you.
20:23I mean, I can, it requires different skills.
20:27If you try and be CEO at home, the chief operating officer generally has something to say about it.
20:36At least that's been my experience, very subtly.
20:41And there's often collateral damage.
20:43Because if you focus on only one thing, you're highly likely to forget some other things.
20:49And this is a problem.
20:50So I just remind you of this poor guy.
20:54There's another approach, which is sequential success.
20:57You know, we'll achieve in achievement.
21:01After we achieve, we'll find significance.
21:03After we find significance, we'll find happiness.
21:05And then our legacy will be left when we die.
21:09That didn't work either.
21:10This is, there's a lot of books generally sold to YPO members about from success to significance,
21:19half-time.
21:20I can go through the titles.
21:22They don't work for a very simple reason.
21:26When is enough to move on?
21:30You know, if you say, when have I achieved enough?
21:33I never want, do you think any of us want to ever say, I'll never achieve again?
21:37I don't know when, you know, people, even if they never played golf in their life,
21:42they retire and go to Florida and they got to become a champion golfer.
21:45Unlikely to happen if you didn't start it at 16.
21:48It's like being a skier.
21:50If you didn't learn to ski before you developed common sense, you'll never be a great skier.
21:55Because what's enough for now is certainly not enough for your life in most of these areas.
22:01So the notion I'll do something and then at the next stage I'll pass on and I'll focus.
22:06This 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.
22:13The only trouble is the decision to move on is really tough.
22:16And there's also, the problem is that you can always maximize.
22:19I was a mathematician when I was young.
22:22I don't remember how to do a Riemann-Stilchus integral.
22:24But I do remember that there's no largest integer.
22:27You can always add one to anything.
22:29And if you're successful at something, often you say, well, I just want a little more.
22:34And it's a very interesting problem of how do you not maximize.
22:40And we do have continuing emotional needs.
22:42As I say, I don't think you can ever leave the need for achievement.
22:46When is it that you want to say, I've done enough for everyone else.
22:50It's now about me.
22:51I just want to be happy myself.
22:53I mean, I find that it's actually harder with kids.
22:56My youngest is 38 and my oldest is 53.
23:01And, yeah, they're as needy now as they were in the 17.
23:06There's just another zero in all the needs.
23:09Or two zeros or three zeros depending on what's going on in their life.
23:15And, by the way, you'll miss some opportunities if you try and do it sequentially
23:20because, you know, can you wait to be happy?
23:22I can't imagine living life saying, I will finally be happy when I've got $100 million.
23:27That's a little bit of a nonsense.
23:30And, by the way, your family will never wait.
23:33You know, they find ways to cope if you don't deal with it now.
23:38So what we saw in these people is a very interesting phenomenon.
23:41They sort of looked at life and said, oh, achievement, significance, happiness.
23:45And they told stories about starting small.
23:48They'd tell stories of each of these things that happened to them when they were younger.
23:51They weren't having a big impact.
23:53But they could talk about significance of what they did for people.
23:57They could talk about small achievements.
23:59I mean, we had stories of high school achievements from people that actually...
24:03Peter Ubaroff told us a story about his high school experience.
24:06He ran the Los Angeles Olympics and was very famous in a lot of things.
24:11He was also the guy that helped restore Los Angeles after Watts.
24:15But his stories went way back, both of significance and achievement.
24:19And, by the way, as they went through this, they told bigger and bigger stories.
24:23And, you know, the problem is we don't know when it's going to end.
24:27I was pretty healthy.
24:28I had exercise in the morning.
24:29I was walking across campus when I died.
24:31Happily, it was January 3rd and it was a warm day and people were around.
24:35But if I'd been three minutes later, I wouldn't be here because I would have been in my office
24:41and you had about four minutes to get help.
24:44But they also told stories of all the legacies they spun off.
24:47And many of them could not...
24:49They were much more interested in the legacies from early in their life,
24:53whether it was something they did in high school that has endured,
24:56somebody they helped when they first got in their career.
24:59So it was a very interesting set of stories about the way they sort of spun this through a spiral of life.
25:05Now, it's really easy to put things in the wrong domain.
25:09We live in Cambridge.
25:11There is a school there where I swear that kids are the achievement.
25:15You know, mine is the smartest kid in the room and if you don't believe it, I'm going to beat you up.
25:19This is the parent speaking.
25:21If you say, I'm never as happy as when I'm at the office, I think you've got a problem.
25:28I love my work.
25:31I've had the best career in the world.
25:33But actually, there's some other things I like too.
25:36Is my children's trust the legacy I'm leaving?
25:39I don't think so.
25:42Invisible leadership of charities is a significance.
25:45I've been the chairman of the board of NPR and actively involved in a lot of charities.
25:51And some of it's...
25:53You know, you get in there and some of the elbows are equally sharp, shall we say,
25:57in some of these charities as they are at any business that I've ever been involved in.
26:03And one of the questions I always ask people is where do you put your tennis?
26:06You know, I'm 71 years old.
26:08I play tennis badly.
26:10But I really enjoy it.
26:12But, you know, that's not going to...
26:14I was with a friend the other day who's 72 who pays Federer to warm him up.
26:21He's very good.
26:25But, you know, at 72, he can afford it.
26:32So it's not a problem.
26:33But that's a very important part of his self-identity is being able to win at tennis.
26:39And his sons are starting to beat him.
26:45And boy, is this bad.
26:47Now, his son happens to be on the tennis team at a major university.
26:51But he still thinks he should be able to beat his son.
26:54Now, he can play head games on his son, so he wins quite often.
26:58But...
26:59So, you know, if you think about it,
27:02I think the lesson of the book was most people seek all satisfactions in all domains.
27:09And seeking one hinders you pursuing the others.
27:14We only have 24 hours a day.
27:16The time you spend on achievement you don't spend on significance.
27:21That great satisfaction from one source can't make up for missing on the others.
27:28And I hate the word balance.
27:32I always think of it as a seal that has something sitting on his nose spinning around.
27:39I think, unfortunately, it's about juggling.
27:45Now, you know, juggling is really an art.
27:48If you think about juggling, you've got to keep your eye on all the balls.
27:53You know, if you only look at one ball, you're going to drop the others.
27:56So you've got to keep your eye on all the balls.
27:59When you touch something, you have to give it energy.
28:02You know, nobody applauds you as a juggler if you hold all the balls in your hand.
28:06You can balance the balls, but that's not a very interesting thing.
28:08In juggling, you catch it and you throw it almost immediately.
28:12But you have to give it energy.
28:14You have to give it direction.
28:15And you have to get rid of it.
28:17And you have to calculate.
28:18For those of you who, I just love to go to Cirque du Soleil.
28:22You see them throwing these things and they catch them over there.
28:26How they get them to come down at the right time over there is absolutely beyond me.
28:30But I think what it amounts to is really practice, which is why when you think of those spirals,
28:36these people that we admire often have been practicing the skill of juggling all of their life.
28:42And what's the most important ball in juggling?
28:46It's the falling ball.
28:48It's not the one at the top.
28:49It's not the one in the hand.
28:50It's the one you're about to drop.
28:52Now, in life, I find that there are some rubber balls.
28:56Careers tend to be fairly rubber.
28:58They'll bounce.
29:00You know, family, that's a little harder.
29:04Sometimes if you drop that one, it shatters.
29:06So the falling ball is a tremendously important thing.
29:10Now, if you think about the dynamics of life, in the early stages, you don't think much about legacy.
29:17You know, I can think when I was 21, I didn't really think about what I was doing for legacy purposes.
29:24Although, 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 Head Ski Case or some of the things I did when I was very young turned out to be a part of the legacy.
29:36But that wasn't the reason I wrote it.
29:38I just thought Howard Head was cool.
29:40You know, as you get to be in early career, this is a time when you start to make the attachments.
29:46As Ann said, it's one of the important things about having some people to talk to.
29:52It may be a spouse.
29:53It may not be a spouse.
29:54But 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.
30:04That somehow the shared experience, the shared traumas, the shared things are so important to those relationships.
30:12And happiness, if you don't know by the time you're in your 30s what makes you happy, stop and ask yourself that question.
30:20I know what makes me happy.
30:22I love to have lunch with friends or dinner with friends.
30:25It's something I seek out.
30:27Because if I go for a week without having, you know, after family, and if I don't talk to all my kids at least two or three times a week, I feel badly.
30:38You know, some of it's they're busy, I'm busy, but somehow we find time to talk.
30:43But happiness, you've got to know what it means.
30:45And you've got to say that's something I seek out on a regular basis.
30:48I'm not going to postpone it.
30:50And then, of course, the big red ball in the earliest career is the achievement.
30:55You know, very few people are Grandma Moses.
30:58You don't achieve starting at 83.
31:00So this is the early career dynamics.
31:03In the mid-career, we sort of get on a path.
31:06We know what makes us happy.
31:08We've settled on who's significant to us unless there's a major change.
31:14And we sort of know where the achievement goes.
31:17And then legacy starts to raise its head.
31:20Well, what do I really care about?
31:22Am I doing the things that I care about?
31:24Will I be proud of my life at the end?
31:27You know, there's usually something when one of your 43-year-old friends dies of a heart attack,
31:32it's a wake-up call.
31:34I remember when Pat Lyles died.
31:35Some of you probably remember Pat.
31:37But when he died, you say, hmm.
31:41He was the runner.
31:42He was in good health.
31:43He was supposed to be my trustee if I died.
31:45And now I'm picking up his pieces.
31:48And by the way, he wasn't, well, I had to figure out where the pieces were first before I could pick them up.
31:55It was a good lesson to me.
31:58But then we get into this golden years.
32:00I'm not going to achieve a lot more.
32:03I've got one more book I'm working on now.
32:05I've gotten, you know, but of the 16 books I've written, they're there.
32:10And as one time somebody introduced me, Howard, you write books that once you put them down, you can't pick them up.
32:16But the achievement is what it is.
32:23I find that with 12 grandchildren, seven kids, and lots of friends, you know, you have to work hard at maintaining those relationships.
32:35You 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.
32:44But you still have to work at it.
32:46And you have to ask yourself, do I have enough time?
32:48Or am I allocating enough time to it?
32:50And then legacy's there.
32:52But at this point, you know, if you're not happy, forget about it, as they say.
32:57So you want to go back to the key problems.
33:00You can't achieve in all dimensions.
33:02I will never be a great tennis player.
33:04I'll never be a great skier.
33:05There are a lot of things.
33:06I will never be a singer.
33:08I can go through all the things I won't be.
33:10So I have to focus on what I want to be.
33:12What are my skills?
33:13Where do I feel good about myself in the competition in the world?
33:18You know, one of the things I learned early in life, I worked with a guy and I said he was one of the people that helped coin the word automation in his manufacturing course.
33:27And he went into the paper industry.
33:28I said, Joe, why did you go into the paper industry?
33:30He said, John Diebold liked to compete with smart people.
33:32I prefer to compete with dumb people.
33:34And it was a lesson I learned in life.
33:37Why would I ever want to be a mathematician?
33:39There were really smart people that work hard and love math.
33:42I wasn't one of them.
33:43Again, things change.
33:46Things change and you change.
33:49You know, I thought I would end my golden years with a lot of travel.
33:53Well, it turns out I run out of breath pretty easily.
33:56You know, I was up on Mauna Kea two weeks ago at the Smithsonian Observatory there.
34:02Well, I was really glad they brought oxygen because I could make it up the hill.
34:07When I started to walk a couple hundred feet at 14,000 feet, I said, yeah, 13,756 to be precise.
34:15But I was excited about going to the observatory.
34:19But I recognized that I'm not going to walk up a lot of those hills by myself.
34:24This still exists.
34:26I still look around and see things I could have had, I didn't have.
34:31And I still wince.
34:33And there is a wince factor.
34:34But if you don't get over it and say, I don't feel like I made the wrong decisions,
34:38I just wince and say that was a choice I chose.
34:41I chose it consciously and I have no regrets.
34:46If the first surprise was the complexity of success and the second surprise was the emotional drivers
34:54and how complex humans are because of the diversity of emotional drivers,
34:58the third surprise to us was the role of enough.
35:02Now, enough is a funny English word.
35:04It has a lower bound, have you done enough?
35:07And when you're yelling at your kids, that's enough.
35:10It has an upper bound.
35:13And defining it, it's interesting, if you do a search, other than Bill McKibben's book on enough,
35:20there isn't much out there on enough.
35:22That's not a word that comes, we always want more.
35:25It's like Samuel Gompers, the great labor leader, went and asked what he wanted and the answer was more.
35:30Now, what we saw in these people was a reasoned sense of enough.
35:37And that was a very interesting insight to us because there's enough on two different dimensions.
35:45Two counts.
35:46One is the dimensionality.
35:47What's enough in this achievement?
35:50What's enough significance?
35:51What's enough happiness?
35:52You know, because if you don't define enough, you have to go for more.
35:59And the more crowds out something else.
36:02And figuring out where your achievements are.
36:07What are the sub-parts of achievement?
36:09What are the real dimensions of achievement that matter to you?
36:12Now, to me, ideas are important.
36:15So writing books has been something I like and work hard at.
36:19And then there's a question of time because what's enough for today?
36:24What's enough for this week?
36:26What's enough for this year?
36:28And what's enough for a lifetime?
36:30Those become particularly important in implementing a sense of enough.
36:34Now, I think there's some benchmarks for enough.
36:39Most of us need progress.
36:41You know, even if you have a lot of money, you don't feel good if you don't make more.
36:47Now, I developed a trick for myself.
36:50I try and keep a balance sheet that includes the money I've given away.
36:56Because for me, to die the richest person in the cemetery is not the goal.
37:03But on the other hand, I like, you know, I'm sort of a measurement type of guy.
37:07And so, sort of understanding how much I've given to charity over my lifetime.
37:12And keeping that in my balance sheet, how much I've given to my kids.
37:15Those kind of things actually help me just feel good about the total, even though I sort of set a number that I've stayed at for about ten years.
37:25And anything over that, I give away.
37:28But I want to keep track.
37:29I want to understand what's going on.
37:32I think one of the things about enough is you can put an activity down with satisfaction.
37:38If you say, what's my, and I enjoyed Ann's talk this morning, because having that list of things that I want to accomplish today means you can actually do it.
37:48If you don't have a list, you'll never finish it.
37:51If you have a list, you can actually sit down and say, oh, this is a good day.
37:55I got everything done.
37:56But you have to be realistic about what you're going to do today.
37:59My wife always has lists that are impossible.
38:02And she also starts with the hardest task.
38:05I 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.
38:13But in fact, that becomes very important.
38:17But also, by having sort of a sense of what you want to accomplish, you can see different benefits from another activity.
38:26So if you say, well, I got to talk to the kids today.
38:30Well, that's not in the achievement goal.
38:33But if I can say, well, I talked to three of them today.
38:36I had to listen to one more thing about how Hollywood is hard to work in.
38:40But I listen to that every day.
38:44I just want to turn on the tape and say, yeah, I told you I worked once with George C. Scott.
38:50I understand the business you're in.
38:53But the other thing about enough is if you start to do it, you can say, now, I had enough work for today.
39:00That doesn't mean I'm not going to work tomorrow.
39:03So I want to come back to it tomorrow.
39:05So part of it is lists, but part of it's a sense of what's enough.
39:10Because enough does some wonderful things.
39:13What are your values?
39:15Now, 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.
39:24What do you want to do for your kids?
39:31You know, I was with a person on one of my recent trips.
39:36And he said, well, I don't want to give my kids too much money.
39:39It will spoil them.
39:40You know, I came from a poor background.
39:43And if I give them money, they won't feel driven to achieve.
39:47And I was sitting there in a house, which the ceilings were at least 20 feet tall.
39:53The main spine of the house was 300 feet long.
39:58And at the end was a wine cellar, which had Eau Brion, Opus One, Harlan, visible to the guests, by the way.
40:06And you're saying, now, you want your kids to do exactly what you did.
40:10I think you're setting up for failure because, well, anyway.
40:15You actually said that to him?
40:17Yes.
40:19I'm getting to it.
40:20Well, my grandmother at 92 said, well, I'm old enough to say what I think.
40:23And I said, Bobby, you've always said that.
40:25So why worry about it?
40:28But one of the things is enough sets limits.
40:33You know, if you start to say, well, how much do I need to protect myself and my family?
40:38You can start to say, well, then the rest is excess.
40:42How do I want to use it?
40:45One of the things about enough, it allows the transitions.
40:48Because once you achieve something, you can say, now's time for the next thing.
40:53And I think one of the most important things I learned from these people is having a sense of enough both motivates you,
41:00because I want to get to there, but it rewards you once you've achieved it.
41:04And that becomes a very important part of life.
41:07So setting limits increases the dimensionality of success, which I think is sort of counterintuitive.
41:14But in fact, by setting the limits, it allows you to juggle.
41:18It allows you to say, I can throw that ball away now.
41:21What's the next ball I have to catch?
41:23Now, the bad news is this is a dynamic activity.
41:26The bad news is it requires a lot of energy.
41:29There's a lot of bad news in this, but that's okay.
41:32Because I think most of you are a little bit like sharks, as somebody described me.
41:37If I stop swimming, I die.
41:39That I can't imagine stopping.
41:42And so part of what you do is say, look, I can't do this.
41:45What can I do now that I want to do?
41:48So, you know, I think one of the things is what do you want in these four domains?
41:54What's your profile look like now?
41:57Again, being honest with yourself.
42:00Are you on your way to an ideal?
42:03Does your success reflect your core drivers?
42:07You know, most of us can't get very far away from what we're taught at home.
42:12I know I can't.
42:15I hope my kids can't.
42:17You know, it's interesting.
42:18I had a discussion with the kids about grandchildren.
42:21I said, you know, they have, well, minimum four grandparents, in some cases more,
42:27because there have been several divorces.
42:30And so I don't have a great influence on the values of my grandchildren.
42:34You know, everybody draws their tree.
42:37This is my family.
42:39But the kids all look up and say, no, I'm part of four, eight, 16, 32, 64 families.
42:45Which one am I supposed to be part of?
42:48And by the way, when they marry, they bring a whole different set of values into the equation.
42:54And you're not going to destroy that.
42:56What's the rule of life?
42:57You either gain a daughter or lose a son.
43:00And you better remember that.
43:02And then the question that's really deep is, are my drivers positive or are they negative?
43:08My friend who's comparing himself to Bill Gates, I think, has some pretty negative envy drivers in it.
43:14My friend who writes the 1,000 Year Trust.
43:17You know, why do you really want to control your kids?
43:22There are a number of funny stories of people.
43:28I mean, this one guy I talked to, quite wealthy, were talking about how they manage their money and what they should be doing.
43:36And he said, well, I'm never going to get the in-laws in.
43:39It's all about my children.
43:41And I thought the money came from his wife's father.
43:46You know, well, anyway.
43:49I did point that out to him, too.
43:52I don't think it had any impact, but I felt like...
43:54But you felt honest.
43:56Yeah.
43:57So when we think about it, I think these things apply in our professional career as well.
44:06Achievements about innovation, getting results.
44:09We've got to do that or we don't succeed.
44:11That significance is about developing people, focusing on the customer and our other stakeholders.
44:17Frank Batten.
44:18How many of you know the name Frank Batten?
44:21I'm trying to remember one of them.
44:24Batten Hall.
44:25Batten Hall is one reason.
44:30Frank developed a company called Landmark Communications, the Weather Channel and things like that.
44:35He is the guy that said he'd pay $250,000 to get off the Forbes list.
44:39But he said, my purpose with my business is serving my customers at a profit.
44:45It's not about maximizing shareholder wealth.
44:47Profit is a constraint, not my goal.
44:50I want to serve the customers.
44:51If I don't make enough money, I go out of business.
44:54If I make too much money, it says I'm probably not reinvesting enough in my people, my community,
44:59and my product.
45:01And that was always something.
45:02I served on his board for 21 years.
45:05He's also somebody who taught me a lot about fundraising.
45:08Because I went in to ask him for a lot of money.
45:12And I think, I'm going to get in a fight.
45:16Because I'm going to tell him how important Harvard Business School is.
45:19And he's going to tell me how important the University of Virginia is.
45:22And then he's going to tell me how important Old Dominion University is, where his wife is the chairman of the board.
45:27Then he's going to tell me about how he was going to be a juvenile delinquent and he went to military school, Culver Academy, and it saved him.
45:35And I knew the conversation.
45:38So I walked in and said, Frank, it's really important.
45:41We've got this need to liberate the parking lot from the university.
45:45And we need help.
45:47Can I be number five on your list?
45:49And he looked at me and said, that's about right.
45:52And he gave us $35 million.
45:54And we were number five.
45:56But he gave it in less than six weeks.
45:59And I was just thinking, but Frank was a guy that had a tremendous influence on my wife and somebody who really epitomized that.
46:07Legacy is ethical contact and strategic leadership.
46:10You know, that old notion, if you don't, only the lead sled dog has a change of view.
46:15And happiness, satisfaction.
46:18Now, I want to give you a few of the lessons that we got in the Howard's Gift.
46:23One is I think you've got to start at the end.
46:25What is what's going to be said about me when I die?
46:29What are my kids going to remember?
46:31Nobody publishes your balance sheet and your obituary.
46:34So what do I want said?
46:36I think the second one is we all got to Harvard Business School by getting an A in every class.
46:42We're not going to get an A-plus in everything in life.
46:45And that's a pretty important thing to remember.
46:48What is it that we can let go?
46:50Because we're not going to be great golf players unless we practice every day.
46:54I think the other thing is a thing that Eric, who is the guy that actually wrote the book, said,
47:01everybody's outside looks better than my inside.
47:04We know our inside and we're seeing other people's outsides.
47:07And I think the more we know people, the more we see their pain and their struggles,
47:14the better it is to remember that we're not alone in the struggles about feeling occasionally that we're not up to.
47:21And then the last thing is everything about the future is a bet.
47:25Even the future, is there going to be a future is a bet.
47:29Now, we probably all ought to act as though there's going to be a future.
47:33And I'm sort of sad to see American savings rates where they are because it acts as though there is no future
47:38or somebody else will take care of us.
47:41Now, these are the truths I learned.
47:43Some of the questions asked, are we at an inflection point?
47:48I think back in my career, an inflection point, for those of you who weren't math majors, is where there is no tangent.
47:54There's no direction.
47:56And we all run into inflection points.
48:00My wife leaving was an important inflection point in my life.
48:04The decision to give up tenure was an important inflection point.
48:08Some of them are very visible.
48:10But I think so many people pass inflection points where they're out ever stopping and saying,
48:14is this free me to make a change in direction?
48:17And I think of inflection points, whether they're negative or positive, as gifts.
48:23Because if you stop and recognize them, you can say, what do I want to do?
48:27The second question is, is the juice worth the squeeze?
48:31By that I mean, if you want a glass of orange juice, don't squeeze grapefruits.
48:35And yet, how many people, you know, I would say the thing about Harvard Business Graduates is,
48:41they're so competitive, they have to be first at the dump on Saturday morning.
48:44If the gun sounds, they want to run the race.
48:47Now, the question is, are we going in the direction we want to go?
48:50Am I cheating at Solitaire?
48:52You know, again, one of the things in my own life is, I was pretty good at math.
48:57I won the state math contest.
48:58I didn't, I got to Stanford, and I discovered there are really smart people who love math,
49:03who worked hard at it, and were willing to sacrifice things to it.
49:06I said, I'm not one of those people.
49:08You know, I love math, I love quantitative, but I'm not going to compete with those guys.
49:14And thank God I didn't.
49:15I went to the Harvard Business School.
49:18Am I explicit about the bets I'm making?
49:21You know, I think one of the things about being explicit about the bets is you can say there are three states of nature.
49:26I won, I lost, or I still don't know.
49:31How many people make a bet and have lost but are unwilling to admit it?
49:35They sort of wiggle around, well, the world is changing, I'll make it up next time.
49:40And one of the questions we ask in the book is the culture question.
49:45Am I in the right place?
49:46There are places that are toxic.
49:48There are places that are good for other people, bad for us.
49:51How do you evaluate the culture in which you're embedded?
49:55I know for me, Harvard Business School has been a great benefit in my life.
50:00I was embedded in a place that gave me freedom to do what I wanted to do.
50:04It gave me insight and access.
50:08But there are a lot of places that I think I would have failed.
50:11So I had to choose the right culture.
50:13So, some important rules.
50:16And I want to end, I think we're supposed to end at 10.30.
50:19Live life forward.
50:22You know, I, after almost 72 years of life, I find many people living life backwards.
50:29You know, the divorce.
50:31How many people are trying to change the past?
50:34You know, you can't change the past.
50:38You can learn from the past, but you can't change the past.
50:41So, figuring out how you sort of say, that's behind me.
50:44What have I learned?
50:45Now let me move forward, is so critical.
50:48I was once in Ireland, and I was the guest to the government, and it was one of the prizes.
50:56I was meeting with three ministers for dinner, and we'd all had a few drinks.
51:01And I turned to one and I said, that's an unusual Irish name.
51:05And he says, I'm not Irish, I'm Danish.
51:08I said, that's unusual that you'd be a minister of state in this country.
51:13When did your, when did you arrive?
51:16He says, they came over 1,100 years ago.
51:18And I thought, hmm, this is a different, interesting way of calculating.
51:22I mean, 1,100 years ago, that's 50 generations.
51:25What percentage of his blood is really Danish?
51:27But he identified as being Danish.
51:29I turned to the minister of reconciliation.
51:33I said, why is there a problem between you and England?
51:37He said, they stole our land.
51:39And I said, when did they steal your land?
51:42It was 16 something or other.
51:44And you sort of say, well, but we've been watching it.
51:49I said, boy, that's an old man that's been watching it.
51:51He says, no, generations have been watching it, and it's ours.
51:54And I thought, and this is this guy in charge of reconciliation.
52:01And I found the same thing in Slovenia, where people were telling me about the evils that
52:05had occurred in either 1,400 or 400, depending on whether you were fighting between the Orthodox
52:10and the Eastern Right, Western Right, or between the Muslims, which is about 1,100 they were fighting.
52:16And they kept telling me these stories.
52:17And I think, live life forward.
52:19It's a lot easier.
52:21I think a second lesson, I actually don't particularly like the word mentor.
52:27I enjoyed Ann's comments on mentorship.
52:30But I think part of the problem is, I'm not even quite sure what it means.
52:37Because I know nobody that I want their advice on all parts of my life.
52:42So I think of it much more as trying to form an individual board of directors,
52:47where you're trying to find people whose advice you value on certain aspects of your life.
52:52That means, I mean, we looked at the Harvard Business School.
52:58I asked one of the jobs I had.
53:00I asked people to tell us as part of the resource allocation process who are their mentors.
53:10And we divided them up into teaching, research, and course development.
53:14And it was interesting.
53:16Nobody received more than 17 mentions, even though everybody could name three names.
53:20Because mentoring is hard work.
53:22Secondly, very few people were mentioned in all three categories.
53:26And thirdly, some of the people who thought they were mentors were never mentioned by anybody.
53:31Which I thought was also interesting.
53:33They were perfectly willing to give advice.
53:36It just wasn't listened to.
53:38But I think what you discover, or at least what I've discovered is,
53:42there are people I go to to say, here's what I'm thinking about in certain areas.
53:47And some of them I wouldn't ask anything about personal life.
53:50Because I don't particularly admire their personal life.
53:52But I do admire.
53:54And one of the things it does is ask you, what are these persons, what's this person's particular skill?
54:01Where do I value their advice?
54:03Because then you can start to say, well, if I can get six or seven people that I can talk to,
54:08and you can't manage more than six or seven of those, it's an important problem.
54:14You know, I guess another thing I like to say to people is, life is risky.
54:21And some things are uncontrollable.
54:23Now, I'm on the board of some health organizations.
54:32I'm amazed how many people don't take their medicine.
54:37That's a controllable risk.
54:39You know, you can't take furosemide if you're going to give a speech.
54:42You have to wait until after the speech is over.
54:44But, in fact, figuring out what the risks are.
54:48And say, there's some I can control and some I can't control.
54:51You know, it's almost the Reinhold Niebuhr prayer of,
54:54Lord grant me the strength to change those things which can be changed.
54:58The patience to accept those which can't.
55:00And the wisdom to know which is which.
55:02But I think that what you start to say is, let me make sure that I understand this is not a risky career.
55:09These are the aspects of the career that make it risky.
55:13Which ones can I control, which ones I can't.
55:15And if you can't control any of it, you probably ought to get out of the way.
55:20And then the last sort of piece of advice I'd give is plan for the ripple, not the splash.
55:26I think one of the interesting things is we're in a culture that's interested in the splash.
55:31But, in fact, most of us are in a place where we throw some stones and they're big ripples.
55:36And one of the most satisfying things in my life is the ripples.
55:40The things that you really didn't know you had any impact on.
55:43And people come up and say, oh, you helped me.
55:46You said something to me.
55:47You helped me choose a career.
55:49I mean, those are the things that really, at the end of, you know, 43 years of teaching and 72 years of life, really make a difference.
55:58So, I'm going to give you your test.
56:00First question is, who are you?
56:03What are the values?
56:04What do you want at the end to be able to say?
56:08If in that last second of life, I didn't get a chance to do that.
56:12I just went down.
56:14I smelled neither sulfur nor did I see a white light, so I don't know what happened.
56:18But maybe they got me too fast.
56:21But who are you?
56:22What are the values that you're bringing to your life?
56:24Which satisfactions, if any, are you on the way to missing?
56:28Now, again, it's the juggling metaphor.
56:30Catch the falling ball.
56:32Who's important to you and are you helping them to succeed?
56:36I think that when Ann said, nothing wrong with money, but the richness of your life won't be measured by it, is incredibly important.
56:48And the people you've helped are probably as important a measure of life as anything else.
56:53And then, what's your time frame for action and being an old hippie?
56:58The time for taking this test is the rest of your life.
57:01Otherwise known as today is the first day of the rest of your life.
57:04So, that's my story and I think I almost ended it on time.
57:07So, thank you very much.
57:09Thank you so much.