LLM Book Knowledgebase

The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living

33 min read

The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living

Metadata

Highlights & Notes

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. —Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)

Business is tough. Tenacity and endurance are key to business success. But tenacity is seldom sustained simply by the drive for riches. Endurance most often wanes in the face of persistent obstacles if money is the overwhelming objective.

No matter how hard we work or how smart we are, our financial success is ultimately dependent on circumstances outside our control.

In order to find satisfaction in our work, therefore, we should train our attention on those things that we can influence and that matter to us personally.

The Monk encourages us to consider how we spend our time, not our money. Marrying our values and passions to the energy we invest in work, it suggests, increases the significance of each moment.

The Monk encourages us to make work pay, not just in cash, but in experience, satisfaction, and joy. These sources of contentment provide their own rewards and are durable in the face of adversity. We still have an opportunity to retune the balance between passion and drive—to express ourselves holistically in what we do, rather than to defer what is important until it is too late.

I am reminded that finding meaning and fulfillment in one’s work should not be an elitist notion.

the answer lies not in dollars and cents, but in who we are and what we believe.

I admire people who are willing to bet everything on a belief. Some of these risk takers, whether immigrants or entrepreneurs, have a profound impact on what happens in the world. They place bets on the future, often against fantastic odds. I see heroism in that.

VCs, I explained, want to know three basic things: Is it a big market? Can your product or service win over and defend a large share of that market? Can your team do the job?

But how would he react when reality swept over his PowerPoint slides?

in a Brave New World startup, where there’s no existing market, no incumbent competitors, and no economic model, you’re literally inventing the business as you go along. It was absurd, I told him, to hold the team to the original plan.

“Lenny,” I said, “I doubt your plan will take you all the way. There are too many unknowns. You’ll need people capable of navigating without street signs. The composition and experience of the team are something VCs will look at hard.” VCs invest first and foremost, I explained, in people. The team would have to be intelligent and tireless. They would need to be skilled in their functional areas, though not necessarily highly experienced. Moreover, they would need to be flexible and capable of learning quickly. Heaps of information about the market and the competition would be streaming in after they launched. They would have to course-correct, on the fly. Refine the strategy, maybe even radically. This team would have to be comfortable with uncertainty and change. That’s why VCs look for people with some startup experience, people who have proven they can thrive in chaos. It significantly reduces the risk of failure.

Venture capital firms have a great business—the investment business. They bring in money from limited partners, and it’s their job to give back to those limited partners a return that reflects the risk taken with that money and exceeds what they are likely to get from other investments. For that effort, the VC gets a fee and a carry, a percent of the deals gratis.

With frenetic energy and a natural penchant for risk taking, these armies of prospectors are smart, hardworking, and aggressive. They do bring connections and contacts to the aid of the companies they fund, in addition to money. Often stereotyped as “vulture” capitalists who drive expensive cars, drink pricey wines, collect extravagant toys, and wish they had the time to indulge in their expensive hobbies, they are reminiscent of Wall Street masters of the universe, or L.A. players—except for one thing: their bets build the future in remarkably tangible ways. While their N.Y. and L.A. counterparts feast on marbled steaks from the corner butcher, VCs birth, fatten, and butcher their own steers before the barbecue. Take them out of the picture, and the Valley and its financial boom collapse. A few of the venture capital firms are beginning to recognize the limitations of the current “stretched thin” situation, and there are, of course, some notable exceptions to the present trend. Regardless of the amount of attention they can spend on any single company, they are still some of the heroes of the new economy.

for a large valuation so he could raise his financing by selling the smallest percentage of the company possible, thus maximizing his ownership. The Valley calls that minimizing “dilution.”

I had to explain. Valuation is all about risk and reward. Sure, 5 million, 40 percent would mean that the post-money valuation, the value of the company plus the new money, would be more like 7.5 million pre-money valuation, the implied value of the business. Nowhere near the $25 million Lenny was suggesting. Everybody here brags about valuation, but Silicon Valley really operates on momentum. Many times I caution a company not to take the largest valuation they can in a financing, because it sets the wrong expectations and probably attracts the wrong investors. Peg the round at the highest reasonable price necessary to raise the desired amount from the right investors. The right investors bring credibility, experience, and networks. They support you with enthusiasm in later rounds. They raise your valuation merely by their presence in the deal.

The right amount to raise is a range with a minimum, but seldom a relevant maximum. In a fiery market like ours, raise enough for a year’s burn rate, or net loss, assuming the worst. Then add on enough for another six months, and take anything reasonably offered above that. I have never seen a company fail for having too much money. Dilution is nominal, but running out of money is terminal. Set reasonable expectations among your investors, don’t gouge them, and then out-perform expectations. Future rounds will be much easier if you are seen as having positive momentum.

SOME PEOPLE CALL ME AN ANGEL. In the world of startups, angels invest in seed or early-stage deals, and with their money they lend a bit of advice. They pay for the privilege of helping the company. But I’m no angel.

I explained to Lenny what I do: I incubate startups. To that end, I provide the scarcest commodity of all, leadership and experience. I help the people build their ideas into successful businesses. Neither an angel nor a consultant, I support entrepreneurs as a kind of junior partner, a full member of the team, an owner and a decision maker, not a hired hand. I invest my time, and, in return, I receive an equity stake in the business. With that stake, I think like a team member, and sink or swim with the founders. Some people call me a virtual CEO.

The title stuck. I started working with a handful of companies at a time. I generally devote myself to each for a year, perhaps two. In that period we should be able to raise money, develop the product or service, identify the market, create a business model, prove out its basic tenets, and hire an operating team. With that team in place, I retreat to an advisory capacity and give more hands-on attention to the next startup. My specific work in each of the companies depends on the backgrounds of the founders and the particulars of the business. My work is improvisational. Though involved in all the planning and major decision making, I don’t play any day-today operating role. On the org chart I’m a bubble around the management team. Startups require frenetic execution and relentless perseverance. My role is to keep my head out of the cyclone and provide insight, direction, and stability. I try to bring to each company the experience I’ve gained—raising money, setting strategy, building and leading teams, establishing strategic relationships, developing products and services and bringing them to market, doing deals. And I make available to the startup all my contacts in the industry. Good entrepreneurs are passionate visionaries, usually with one or more exceptional talents, but rarely have they actually built a company from scratch. I fill in the gaps in their experience. The actual CEO is ultimately responsible for all the company decisions. As a Virtual CEO, I simply provide the team with guidance and leadership when necessary. I can be very outspoken, if I fear that we don’t have room for a misstep. But the CEO is in charge; I’m there to make him or her successful.

“Not at all. I never tell anyone to quit,” I said. “I may not want to be involved, or I may think your idea is likely to break your heart and your bank account, but I never say quit.”

Fill each startup with rocket fuel as fast as possible and blast it into space. The ones that fly, fly, and if the rest of them blow up, c’est la vie.

You have to be able to survive mistakes in order to learn, and you have to learn in order to create sustainable success. Once the market is understood and the product is fully developed, then move fast and hard. If, on the other hand, we discover with this approach that there’s no market after all, we won’t have wasted truckloads of money.

business isn’t primarily a financial institution. It’s a creative institution. Like painting and sculpting, business can be a venue for personal expression and artistry, at its heart more like a canvas than a spreadsheet.

Business is one of the last remaining social institutions to help us manage and cope with change.

Business, however, has a tendency to become tainted with the greed and aggressiveness that at its best it channels into productivity. Left to its single-minded pseudo-Darwinian devices, it may never deliver the social benefits that the other fading institutions once promised. But, rather than give up on business, I look to it as a way, indirectly, of improving things for many, not just a lucky few. I accept its limitations and look for opportunities to use it positively. In the U.S., the rules of business are like the laws of physics, neither inherently good nor evil, to be applied as you may. You decide whether your business is constructive or destructive. I help people understand this and express themselves in what they do, trying to make a difference through business.

What looks like a cloud to one person is a chance to sell umbrellas to the next.

There’s no official name for it, but given his background in insurance, Lenny might call it the “Deferred Life Plan.” For the promise of full coverage under the plan, you must divide your life into two distinct parts: Step one: Do what you have to do. Then, eventually— Step two: Do what you want to do. We hear variations on this theme from childhood on: Walk before you run. No peas, no pie. Pay your dues. Or, perhaps in the case of Jack Dolan, as Lenny saw him, work, then retire —assuming you live long enough to retire — and then devote your time to your passion.

If, after careful consideration, he were to pursue a business he truly cared about—well, that would have been understandable—but reflexively hopping back on the carousel seemed like a waste. I could only hope that with a little more time, he would rethink things.

No, I explain, my heart was in everything, in all of it together. My Providence was this: What started as a way to fill time and pay my way while I figured out what career to pursue turned into something unexpectedly rich and fulfilling. But it wasn’t any one single part of this life that excited me. It was the aggregate. All the pieces fitting together gave me satisfaction and energy. I was passionate about the whole: No one particular part attracted me to the exclusion of everything else. Each part excited me fully while I was doing it, for the moment I was doing it. My passion was for exploring everything. I was beginning to see how creativity could thrive in the context of earning a living.

never doubted Lenny’s drive. It was obvious from the very beginning, even in the armlock he laid on me at the door of the Konditorei. Drive, commitment—those weren’t my concern. I wanted to know what he really cared about. I wanted to know his passion. Lenny didn’t seem to understand the question. He was beginning to nettle me.

So why were they doing this? Why was it worth their time? I am always amazed that venture capitalists don’t ask that question.

It is too easy to get lost in the hype and swallowed up by the casino economics of it all. It bothered me to see talented young people give up, or defer, their ideals in the hope of a fast buck that was unlikely to ever arrive.

As he already pointed out, the one thing we can count on is change. But knowing what we require to be willing to do something lifelong provides invaluable self-knowledge.

It’s not, as I’ve learned from my own experience, that the deferred life is just a bad bet. Its very structure—first, step one, do what you must; then, step two, do what you want—implies that what we must do is necessarily different from what we want to do. Why is that the case? In the Deferred Life Plan, the second step, the life we defer, cannot exist, does not deserve to exist, without first doing something unsatisfying. We’ll get to the good stuff later. In the first step we earn, financially and psychologically, the second step. Don’t misunderstand my skepticism. Sacrifice and compromise are integral parts of any life, even a life well lived. But why not do hard work because it is meaningful, not simply to get it over with in order to move on to the next thing?

The Deferred Life Plan also dictates that we divorce who we are and what we care about from what we do in that first step. By distancing the real person from her actions, all manner of bad behavior is justified in the name of business. “Sure she’s an SOB at work, but that’s not who she really is. It’s only business, nothing personal.” Fueled by ambition, we hope that in the end we will be judged by our accomplishments, not by who we are. Silicon Valley is a place where many people excuse their own behavior as “just business.” I wasn’t holding my breath to see the “real” them.

Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can’t tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express your passion. But it isn’t just the desire to achieve some goal or payoff, and it’s not about quotas or bonuses or cashing out. It’s not about jumping through someone else’s hoops. That’s drive. In the Deferred Life Plan, drive pushes us through the first step. The second step, the deferred life itself, is the home of passion. We hope and suppose that when we get there, we will be able to resurrect our passions on our own terms. If we get there.

I had passion in Providence but didn’t appreciate it. I drove myself through law school and the practice of law, seeking and hoping and groping for passion but never finding it. Then in Silicon Valley—at Apple, Claris, GO, LucasArts—I discovered passion in my work. But I didn’t understand the crucial difference between drive and passion until I found them at war inside me.

My instincts, reinforced by my experience at LucasArts, said we should take a step backward and do this right: Cut back the sales side of the business, and retreat to the core of the company—the creative organization. Focus all our resources on developing a small number of high-quality games. Sell these games through outside publishers. Then, when we had a stable of successful titles, rebuild Crystal’s own sales organization, and recapture the control and margin given up to the distribution partners. We would likely wind up in the same place sought by the founders, but by a different route and with less risk at each step.

Crystal was not a place I could see myself working the rest of my life. That meant I needed to get out, now.

Don’t confuse drive and passion. Drive pushes you forward. It’s a duty, an obligation. Passion pulls you. It’s the sense of connection you feel when the work you do expresses who you are. Only passion will get you through the tough times.

it’s the romance, not the finance that makes business worth pursuing.

Good management must remind people constantly to ignore the jerking and lurching of the market and focus on the horizon. Stay.com.

The chance to work on a big idea is a powerful reason for people to be passionate and committed. The big idea is the glue that connects with their passion and binds them to the mission of an organization. For people to be great, to accomplish the impossible, they need inspiration more than financial incentive.

Impatience wasn’t Allison’s problem. Finding something in Funerals.com to care about was.

Sculley’s Apple subordinated the company’s big idea to the business model. That model was not the essence of Apple. It was simply that moment’s best means of realizing value from the big idea. The business model can and should change over time, as the world changes. Ultimately, when the big idea was lost, the market and Apple’s employees could no longer find a reason to support Apple’s business. Their fanaticism faded to ambivalence. I was curious about whether Lenny was following the example of Sculley’s Apple even before he’d been able to start the business. Was he selling the business model rather than the big idea—whatever it was—that had attracted Allison and him to Funerals.com in the beginning?

Business conditions are forever changing. You need to reconsider your strategies and business models constantly and adjust them where necessary. But the big idea that your company pursues is the touchstone for these refinements. Ditching the big idea in order to deal with business exigencies leaves you without a compass. I always advise companies to define their business in terms of where it’s going, what it’s becoming, not simply where it is. Set the compass, then work hard to clear a path, knowing that you may meander as you stumble upon obstacles but will always keep heading toward the same coordinates.

“Al, I’m not saying we will never do what you want,” he offered finally, in what sounded like a closing. “I think we can do it eventually, but I don’t believe we can get funded by promoting a business aimed first and foremost at helping people. We have to focus on products, revenue, growth, profits. Your ideas are too squishy. You see this utopia, this company with no structure and a bunch of eager beavers who work for the love of it. What you want is unrealistic. If we win on the bottom line, then we can consider new ideas and directions. Hey, if we’re a big success we can even endow a foundation to deal with the virtuous, people aspect of death and dying.”

“Besides,” Allison continued, “I’m not interested in funding a service. I want to spend my time being involved. I want to work in an organization that cares about people in trouble, that”—she waved her arm—“that cares about people, period. This is a chance to change what we don’t like.” She paused for a moment. “And you’re right. I want to build a legacy company, a place we can be proud of, where people work hard, and care about what they do and respect each other. I want a place I can believe in, in every way—what it does, what it stands for, how it works. I don’t want to wait for my ship to come in before I can afford to start. Why wait when we can do it now?”

It was another instance in which, were I still Lenny’s age, I would have agreed with him. Sure, business was about money. That’s what makes it business. But first and foremost, to be successful, business is about people. It took me a while to learn that lesson.

And we did. What you noticed about Bill, after you worked with him a bit, was that he spent a lot of time talking about people. He ate, drank, and breathed people. You couldn’t talk about anything at Claris without the issue coming up. I found it irritating at first, a distraction. Whenever we sat down to make decisions, somebody always asked, How is this going to affect that individual, or this group of people? What are they going to say? To feel? Will they know why you made that decision or will they think you did it arbitrarily? When we talked about product support, it wasn’t evaluated as an expense line. It was a service—for people. The focus was always on the value you could deliver to your customers, employees, partners, and shareholders—and what they and others thought about it and about you. You might not hear it in the first session. You might not hear it in the second session. But, unless you were deaf, by the end of the first few months, you heard the theme loud and clear. Bill had an underlying faith that if we focused on the people issues, worked hard, and did a great job, the business would take care of itself. That was Campbell. In the beginning, despite my respect for him, I resisted Bill’s philosophy. I strongly believed in the notion of business as a manageable, predictable, and quantifiable process. I believed everything should be crisp, clear, and buttoned down. Managers made the trains run on time. Campbell’s approach seemed inefficient to me. Too many soft, murky, and complicated issues to grapple with. Let’s just focus on the stuff we can measure, I contended.

But I gradually began to internalize Campbell’s frame of mind, and some of my own personal values, long subordinated to the bottom line, began to resurface. I couldn’t argue with Bill’s results: What appeared to be a sometimes inefficient process was creating extraordinary success. Our customers liked us. They valued our products. Our partners respected and trusted us.

Why was I there late? Because I needed to finish my piece of a project, so I could hand it over to somebody else, so she could get on with what she needed to do, so the next person could do what he needed to do, so the company could achieve its objectives. There was an intense sense of loyalty, responsibility, and camaraderie; a locking of elbows with everybody around you.

Mark Twain quotes: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” Likewise, in a short time I had learned what wisdom Campbell carried; he could do things I couldn’t quantify. He had a highly intuitive sense of people. He could inspire them to be better than they already were and to work together as a whole to create something greater than the sum of the individual parts.

I started to pay attention. I made a break with my old legal habits. I began to apply Campbell’s thinking to doing deals. My job was to find intersections of interest between the negotiating parties—not differences, but commonalities—and to build them into a solid relationship and transaction. I started zeroing in immediately on those requirements of the other party that were consistent with my requirements, and I threw my energy into bringing them into the deal, instead of ignoring them or reactively opposing them in order to use them as bargaining chips later. My focus became less on just satisfying myself and my company and more on satisfying the other party as well. Sure, certain points were bound to be contentious, but negotiating became a creative opportunity for me to solve problems and build relationships, not to play poker.

But it was a Pyrrhic victory. With our spouses, we all gathered at the home of one of the founders to celebrate our good fortune. Together we drank the celebration into a wake. We were proud of the price we’d gotten from Apple—there was reason to celebrate—but when we looked around the room at each other, the deal’s downside hit us: it was unlikely we would ever work together again. The exhilarating experience of the Claris startup made few of us eager to return to the larger Apple fold. Our checks were in the bank, but we were morose. What the heck was that, I wondered?

Claris gave us, as a team and as individuals, a platform for growing and a chance to build a legacy and a culture that would contain our DNA in its values for decades to come. You couldn’t put a price on it, and I didn’t realize that until our company was dead and buried.

BUSINESS, I told Lenny and Allison, is about nothing if not people. First, the people you serve, your market. Then the team you build, your employees. Finally, your many business partners and associates. Sever the chain of values between leadership and the people translating strategy into products and services for your customers, and you will destroy your foundation for long-term success. The culture you create and principles you express are the only connection you will have with each other and your many constituencies. It may not be Allison’s utopia, but it was a far cry from Lenny’s soulless machine.

Silicon Valley veterans share a tacit understanding that what a startup needs isn’t one CEO, but three—each at successive stages of the startup’s development. Given my deep regard for man’s best friend, I tend to think of each in terms of best of breed. The first CEO is “the Retriever.” From the muck she must assemble the core team, the product or service, and the market direction—all around a coherent vision. She must also raise the money and secure crucial early customers and partners. She is prized for her tenacity and inventiveness. The second CEO is “the Bloodhound.” He must sniff out a trail—find the market and prove the business. He needs to build an operating team and establish a market beachhead. He is prized for his keen sense of direction and company-building skills. The third CEO is “the Husky.” She must lead the team, pulling an operating company that grows heavier by the day with people and public company responsibilities. She is prized for her constancy and scalability. None of these, to me, is top dog. All are equal in importance, just different in skills and temperaments.

But this was a startup. It would take an inspirational leader to rally a team and supporters to build something worthwhile. So far, Lenny had failed to inspire any of us.

Management is a methodical process; its purpose is to produce the desired results on time and on budget. It complements and supports but cannot do without leadership, in which character and vision combine to empower someone to venture into uncertainty. Leaders must suspend the disbelief of their constituents and move ahead even with very incomplete information.

  • Importante

Like Lenny, I had, early in my career, failed to appreciate the crucial distinction between leadership and management. Luckily I had the good fortune to work with Bill Campbell long enough to learn the difference.

I wanted a role full of creativity, where inspiration was more valued than perspiration.

I was a wise, old hand when it came to solving tactical issues. That had always been my job as a manager. Now I was being asked to lead and motivate, to create a vision that could attract and inspire talent and partners. Managing—vigorously driving execution—is a rare skill, Debbie told me, but rarer still is the ability to lead, inspire, and motivate people.

If Steve had ceded his visionary leadership to an operating manager early on, Microsoft probably would never have bought WebTV. Limiting ourselves to the Internet television business would have shortchanged Steve’s larger vision, and WebTV would have had to struggle with building a much smaller and just as risky business on its own.

For me, the moral of the story of Steve Perlman and WebTV is the need to emphasize visionary leadership over management acumen in the formative stage of a startup. If you turn a visionary startup into an operating company too early, you throw out its birthright. It will never be as big, as grand, or as influential as it might otherwise be. It will be much harder, perhaps impossible, to expand the vision later, when performance is being measured quarter to quarter against operating plans, because then there’s too much at stake. Steve was the right leader, the only leader, to take WebTV through its formative years.

  • Importante

In the Deferred Life Plan, by definition, you postpone risking what matters most to you; that happens later, if it happens at all.

The question he seemed to have answered was not, How can I make a difference? but, What’s the least risky path to financial success? Ironically, he had assumed the biggest risk of all in Silicon Valley, the risk of mediocrity. He had dug his own grave.

Lenny didn’t understand how the Valley thinks about business risk and failure. Instead of managing business risk to minimize or avoid failure, the focus here is on maximizing success. The Valley recognizes that failure is an unavoidable part of the search for success.

Silicon Valley does not punish business failure. It punishes stupidity, laziness, and dishonesty. Failure is inevitable if you are trying to invent the future.

Reducing your downside risk will not warm the cockles of their hearts. Business failures are unfortunate but necessary steps in the search for those few huge successes.

For some of us, Silicon Valley’s forgiving attitude toward failure rests on a more profound realization: Change is certain, and in a world of constant change we actually control very little. When there are important factors outside your control, the risk of failure always looms, no matter how smart or industrious you are. We delude ourselves if we believe that much of life and its key events fall under our control.

When you experience the vagaries of success and failure firsthand, it is as hard to accept credit for success as it is to accept blame for failure.

there is only one element in life under our control—our own excellence.

If you’re brilliant, 15 to 20 percent of the risk is removed. If you work twenty-four hours a day, another 15 to 20 percent of the risk is removed. The remaining 60 to 70 percent of business risk will be completely out of your control.

If you’re excellent at what you do and the stars are in alignment, you will win. Of course, you may run out of time first, but, if you’re excellent every day, you will have furthered your chances of beating the house as much as they ever can be. That should be your primary measure of success — excellence — not simply the spoils that come with good fortune. You don’t want to entrust your satisfaction and sense of fulfillment to circumstances outside your control. Instead, base them on the quality of what you do and who you are, not the success of your business per se. Unless you understand what is truly outside your control, you are likely to make serious mistakes, misallocate resources, and waste time.

I ENCOURAGE PEOPLE to think about all the risks involved —personal risks as well as business risks. When I talk to candidates as part of recruiting outside management talent to the Valley, the issue of risk often comes up. Prospective managers usually fear that the venture won’t be a blockbuster or, worse, that it will be forced to close its doors. Some recruits fixate on that business risk to the point of indecision. They strain to research all the facts, but at some point no additional information or assurances will offer them any further clues into the business’s ultimate success or failure. Uncertain, they freeze and stay with the status quo, no matter how unsatisfying it is. After all, it’s what they know.

And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

probability of failure multiplied by the cost of failure. Sure, this turns out to be a subjective analysis, but in the process your own attitudes toward financial risk and reward are revealed. By contrast, personal risk usually defies quantification. It’s a matter of values and priorities, an expression of who you are. “Playing it safe” may simply mean you do not weigh heavily the compromises inherent in the status quo. The financial rewards of the moment may fully compensate you for the loss of time and fulfillment. Or maybe you just don’t think about it. On the other hand, if time and satisfaction are precious, truly priceless, you will find that the cost of business failure, so long as it does not put in peril the well-being of you or your family, pales in comparison with the personal risks of not trying to live the life you want today.

Work hard, work passionately, but apply your most precious asset—time—to what is most meaningful to you. What are you willing to do for the rest of your life? does not mean, literally, what will you do for the rest of your life? That question would be absurd, given the inevitability of change. No, what the question really asks is, if your life were to end suddenly and unexpectedly tomorrow, would you be able to say you’ve been doing what you truly care about today? What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life? What would it take to do it right now?

Now I work with inventors, entrepreneurs, and others highly skilled in their own right but not necessarily capable of bringing their ideas to the commercial light of day or achieving the impact their ideas could and should have. This is the creative edge of business — startups, working with a blank canvas to challenge the status quo and make change happen. I work with brilliant entrepreneurs who have a vision for how things can be better and who can’t resist doing the next great thing. I am their consigliere.

I looked through the plan. They had made assumption after assumption about the services offered, sources of revenue, their ability to enter alliances with traditional brick-and-mortar businesses and organizations to form the crucial referral networks, the potential fees and charges. Lenny must have been uncomfortable with those leaps of faith, but the plan also laid out a timetable that identified both the crucial steps and what they hoped and expected to learn at each stage. They were candid and detailed about what they didn’t and couldn’t know at this point, and they identified how they would refine and reshape the plan as they continued to educate themselves about the market. The plan was a reliable compass, as it should be, not a road map.

Less tidy and tightly wrapped than the Funerals.com presentation, this plan was a bit raw. All in all, though, not a bad job for ten days’ work. Most important, the plan communicated a stronger vision, an idea with a wider horizon focused on meeting a critical need. For all its loose ends, it had real potential.

The web of life. The forces of technology pull us apart, and yet that same technology provides the means of staying together.

WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE, the journey is the reward. There is nothing else. Reaching the end is, well, the end. If the egg must fall three feet without a crack, simply extend the trip to four.

With four to five months away from the habits and routines that I had chained myself to at home, this was precious time. What was the sense of rushing down a beaten path with a map I had cribbed from others? This was my trip, my life, and I needed my own journey. I decided to throw away the itinerary and see where this might lead.

Amsterdam from there and that Freddie Laker would honor my ticket to New York. I had never been to Amsterdam. Why not extend my journey another foot? No time to waste.

Backlinks