It’s easy for us wizened veterans of the world of work to forget how important it used to be to get a promotion, a bigger-sounding title, a higher-than-average pay raise. We have the perspective of longer history and seeing many more patterns emerge over the years. We appreciate different aspects of life more highly than we used to when we were starting out. In the early years, there was an imperative for making progress.
When I was a few years into my first real jobs, I was working full time, attending a master’s program full time and had my first daughter. I formulated then what I called the Theory of Escape Velocity. My goal was to accelerate my career advancement to such a degree that I would reach a state of financial independence by the time I was 30 years old.
I’ll wait until you stop laughing.
In all seriousness, I pursued that theory with great vigor. I actually thought that it would be possible, through force of will, endless hours of work and taking the right risks, to achieve financial freedom by that young age. I took second jobs, worked on new ideas for business models, continually searched for better positions and went on many interviews.
Not being blessed with the brilliance of a Jobs or Gates, having none of the contacts of well-heeled families, relying solely on my work ethic, I was able to make decent advancement. But I gained nothing even remotely approaching the postulated “escape velocity”.
During those years, I routinely overestimated my capabilities and so would apply for positions a decade or two beyond my experience and skills. I celebrated the first time I carried a business card with the title “Manager” on it. I took initiative beyond my position description, thinking that I need only show what I could do to be automatically awarded the elevation in the hierarchy. I bristled when I saw others advancing who did none of the “extra” things that I perceived myself doing.
In 1989, after 15 years of such efforts, I was fired from a company I had hoped would translate to part of my fuel for reaching career orbit. Weary of putting my future in someone else’s hands, I decided then to become an entrepreneur. I promoted myself to CEO of my own company. While the title sounded impressive, and the company did grow profitably during the ensuing years, financial escape velocity continued to elude me. By this time, I was in my early forties.
One day, while meeting over lunch with a client at China Camp restaurant, my entire theory was destroyed, for which I will be eternally grateful. By that time, my company was comprised of about 20 employees, with 100 clients and as many active projects. I was working a great number of hours, but things were improving and there was reason for optimism about the future. But I was still fretting over financial independence. My kids were in junior high, the mortgage and bills were substantial, there was little savings for emergencies and my name was on a $500,000 personal guarantee for a five-year lease of office space. Escape velocity seemed no nearer than it ever had been.
At the end of lunch, the waiter brought the bill and two fortune cookies. I picked up one of them. China Camp had great fortune cookies, very fresh and tasty, with vanilla icing dipped on one end. I opened the cookie and took out the fortune.
It said, “Put your heart into it. You can’t miss.”
The skies parted and like Gautama’s enlightenment underneath the Bodhi tree, I was instantly awakened to the true nature of what it means to achieve, in anything. The cookie’s message to me was that it is only necessary to unreservedly devote our full passions, our total self into whatever we are doing, to attain freedom, to be “successful”. Because with that investment of authentic heartfelt self, our work is elevated beyond the title, the money, the office décor and the organization chart. With full heart, work is itself the achievement of freedom.
And it doesn’t matter so much what the work is. One can be a Nobel Prize-winning physicist or a window washer. Both could be clarifying our ability to see the world as it is.
Sure, we all need money to live, but we don’t need nearly as much as we think we do, and who defines how much is enough? It seems that once we measure our life by our bank account, we are always dissatisfied. Someone else always has more, and the work of dealing with one’s wealth can be as draining and meaningless as the old nursery rhymes about Kings in their counting houses.
Titles sound impressive, but are fleeting. I have seen many retired executives cling to semblances of their former working world, just to feel that bit of importance they used to feel when they sat behind the big desk and people worked daily to please them. One very successful and admirable CEO I know said to me that he went from “Who’s Who” to “Who’s He?” in a matter of months after retiring.
My heart goes out to all these young people who are trying to make their way in the world, to provide for their growing families, to feel like life is progressing and they are advancing along some trajectory. My advice to them is to open their fortune cookie and let the message sink in. Escape velocity and independence is only as far away as one’s ability to invest passionately in every thing we choose to do in life.