I spent the last few days listening to Sheryl Crow’s CD Detours.And meeting with a loving friend I haven’t seen for a few long years. I should say a friend I love.But more on that.And visiting a place I used to call home in another country. A place Adolph occupied. How did Hitler cruise the Champs Elysee?But more on that.Sheryl’s album is the best she has ever done. My iPod is fully loaded but I listened only to Detours. It starts off for the first half showing how wonderfully diverse and talented she is and then it nosedives into the real reason she wrote the opus.Lance left her.Pain and hunger are extraordinary drivers of creativity. She sings of having a paper heart thanks to the Lance damage. She sings of the emptiness of life without the guy on the bike. She sings about being drunk at the sight of Mr. Speed and being blind without him.She is deluding herself. But more on that later.

Hemmingway said he used to take a break from his writing to study Monet hanging in Parisian museums. But, but, but he would visit before he would eat lunch. He said he would learn so much more from the Impressionist strokes on an empty stomach. A form of Pain.

My dear friend and I hugged and it was like no time had ever passed. She knows joy and pain. And pain has made her more creative because she refused to cave. She chose to sing. Of her birth in Nigeria and her law university in the UK. And her devotion to her friends. A devotion I treasure.When the joy was over Ernest decided to take out a rifle in Idaho and end himself. He knew the heights he had climbed to. Paris was his city before it was the Fuhrer’s. Before I soaked it all in. Many say his last act was one of cowardice. They don’t know what it was to be Papa. He owned life. Why should he be a victim of it? Because the clergy, the frauds who hide behind costumes, say to?I don’t think so.Sheryl sings that she gets drunk with the thought of the speed king. Sentimental junk. We are all best off knowing how to be drunk on ourselves.That is pure. Independent. Liberation.Sheryl says her love hideaway was blown up because she asked for a diamond ring.Well, dear talented Sheryl, it should have been. You had no need for a ring. You wanted love. And love is great. But demonstrations of love composed only of metals and stones are just that: demonstrations.So much better to take yourself, Sheryl, and all of us, to the Whitney Museum by ourselves, just ourselves, be alone, and be surrounded by the art of life. By ideas. By all the wonders the girl on the subway and the guy on the bike can’t take from us.We are here to achieve. Not to mourn the loss of another paper heart.

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There is pain and when you face it down - it fights back, tries to make a stand and then recedes. It is part of life and life stands still for nothing. It all goes on. There is failure and with it mental and intellectual anguish and loss. But there is also gain if you choose to see it, leverage it and gain from the experience. The choice is yours. Regardless of your stance, your defiance, your Resistance, nothing stops the wave.

Einstein was wrong. It’s not relative. It matters not how fast you move. You cannot speed ahead of the curve. Not the curve of life. Respond as you will to whatever strikes you: it all goes on.

All you can do is roll with the punches and ride the crest of the victories. This is what the great ones know. It is what makes them different. It is what makes them great.

Facing a Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt placed a damn-it-all cigarette holder in his mouth and smiled a brave smile for a nation that wanted to put the brakes on life. Winston Churchill took to the streets of London and shook a thunderous finger at the Nazis: they could rain down a zillion bombs. The British people weren’t going to wish for a path backwards to a kinder, gentler day. Winston knew you cannot go back. You can only prevail.

It all goes on.

We experience the cycles and wonder why they have to exist. Careers begin with a joy that accompanies the new, the fresh, the unexplored and we are ecstatic. And then time takes it toll. People take their toll. Change takes its toll. If you allow it to, the exuberance morphs into a job and then in many cases into a trap. We want to go back to the champagne days but they are in the past and try as we might, we can’t live there. We are permanently barred. Yearn all you want. It is just a deception you play on yourself. You have to create a new yesterday, today.

It all goes on.

There is war and peace and discovery and scandal and thrill and disappointment and Grammy winners and American Idol and one-hit wonders and Nobel Laureates and Beatles and John Kennedys and Third Reichs and Camelots and we celebrate and disdain them. And then they roll into the next. Into the new frontier that itself will soon be memorabilia.

It all goes on.

We wonder why. But it is not for us to know. We are simply left with the fact that what is, is. And what is changes. And what changes causes exhilaration and grief.

The only choice is to keep looking back and question why or to look ahead and ask how. How can I affect change? How can I grow personally? How can I see what is now invisible to me?

How can I gain an entire new perspective only to know that I will need to grow out of that too and into another?

It all goes on.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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You emerge from the womb with no idea of how anything works and you look in their eyes for answers. Your parents.

How they respond in those early years is critical to how you view the world. I was taught by my father that it was dangerous. The world, that is.

I was taught I had to prove myself ever day. I was taught that I could never prove myself worthy two days in a row. I was taught that punching a five-year-old is sound, time-tested discipline.

I believed it. Now they call it the Stockholm Syndrome. But it was always just a pure form of ugly violence rarely rivaled by any other form of human malice.

But just when it looks perfectly clear, black and white venal, the grey area strikes. Which is actually where we all live.

My father took me on an amazing journey. My first bloody nose at five, my first epiphany about how life really works a year before. Both from him.

And then every year until I was 17 and he died at 40, it was a Journey.

He taught me so much. Where the brains were. Why Albert was important to the world. Shakespeare too. Why you can never quit at anything. Why you can never accept anything as fact. Where the enemies hide. Why you have to meet them on an open field, far from your home. Because once they’re in your home, it’s too late.

Why Beethoven is a miracle. Why life is God’s gift. Why I need to be free to re-think God and war and Presidents and religion and Jesus and everything my school teachers told me was FACT about them. And he said wasn’t.

He taught me to worship achievment and I do. And I search for it in myself every day. Every day. Every day.

My father taught me about life. I wrote a book that came out this year, God Is A Salesman. It could be retitled, What My Father Taught Me About Life.

He taught me the good and the bad. He treated me well and he mistreated me.

I always loved him. I still do. He was my hero. He still is.

A few years ago, I realized it made no sense for my father to be buried in a Holiday Inn, called a cemetery. He loved the outdoors. He loved people. He loved kids. He loved dogs. He loved laughter.

So I created a santuary for him at an Audobon Society preserve. On the morning of the dedication, in an apple orchid, with a bench marked with his name and that of my dear father-in-law, I held a dedication. My family, my friends, my sons, my wife- I forgot until that moment, none of them had ever met him. He died too young.

Or so I thought. I spoke about my father, about the Journey, and I expected that loving monologue to be the end. And then one after another - my sons, my dear sons, my wife, my sister, my cousins, my friends - all came forward to talk about the man they knew. They never met but knew.

They knew from my memories. From God. And they loved him. And it was a miracle.

Last week I was a guest on the television program Daystar. My father died more than 40 years ago. He was with me on the show. He made it possible.

My Journey from a one-bedroom apartment in Queens to Daystar, from what looked like one thing but was really something else, was my dad teaching me about life.

I am a very fortunate man. I had a father, a mentor, a teacher.

I have had the greatest life in the world. I relish every day.

Thanks Dad.

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The hardest thing about learning how to fly a plane is learning how to fly with instruments. And what makes that so challenging is that you have to abandon all of your instincts, forgo everything you have been taught to do to that point, and trust the invisible.

There you are flying through fog, through dense clouds, you can’t see up, down or straight ahead. Nothing but white out. And it feels, almost for certain, that the plane is tilted wrong, or pointed earthward or upside down. And you want to steer through it, to correct what feels wrong, to get back on course, but the rub is that the instruments say all is fine. You are flying right. All is well.

And although you can’t see a damn thing, you have to trust the instruments and stay the course even though its feels as if you are nosediving toward disaster.

People spend their entire lives seeking to avoid this sense of uncertainty. Of refusing to trust what they can’t see. Of staying planted on the ground, out of the skies, nowhere near the clouds. They believe the choice is simple: know precisely where you are at all times, that you are flying right, straight and true — or never let the wheels leave the ground.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be a more devastating deception they play on themselves.

The fact is, we are all pilots in fog at times. Some embrace this as part of the adventure of life. And as a state of adrenalin rush that is the difference between watching the evening weather report on TV and falling in love. Or starting a business with your own money. Or reinvesting in one that’s clawing its way through a rough patch.

Let’s take the romance part. Recently, I heard someone say that they didn’t want to fall in love because “It might not work out.” And then they said, “If I fall in love and it doesn’t work out, well that would be like a car accident. ”

The message was, stay out of the fog. Well, excuse me, that means stay out of one of the best things life can possibly offer us.

LOVE.

Here’s what I see as the point: there is no point. Just life livers and life pretenders.

I wish the best for the latter but they bore me to tears. They leave the earth no better than when they inherited their space in it. They take up space. There are no medical centers named for them. They have never built an enterprise. They did not write Imagine. They don’t know how to collaborate on an opus like that. They may be sweet and kind and brush their teeth and iron their clothes and send Hallmark cards and be politically correct and pass the social litmus test invented by liars and hidden atheists, but. But. But.

They have never had a snowball fight in fog. They need order, and there is no order in that.

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As the only biographer of Carl Icahn, Mark Stevens has watched Icahn morph himself from a Greenmailer/Corporate Raider to a Shareholder Activist over the span of several years. But it is Mark Stevens who has had endless conversations with Icahn at dinner and on the tennis court and he warns people not to turn their backs on Carl. Never count him out - he’s the smartest guy that Stevens has ever met.

See what Mark Stevens said to Alexis Glick on the Fox Business Network, CNN International, Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg TV, the LA Times, San Jose Mercury, CNBC and MSNBC.

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I gave a speech today to a group of business people who dutifully took their seats and hoped against hope that I would tell them something that would actually inform them. And although it was a leap of faith too grand to admit to themselves, I could read it in their eyes, they wanted me to tell them something that would change their lives. Widen their vision. Give them new purpose. Make a real difference.

They were lovely, generous, educated, well-mannered people in search of something far bigger than the agenda of the day called for. I could feel it. When I speak to a group, I often do. There is a hunger. It has a silent roar. I want to respond to it.

I don’t know if I do. That’s for them to judge.

But there are some things I do know:

• There are jobs and careers and business events and it all folds into this far grander thing called life.
• Jobs and careers and business events are taught at Harvard Business School. Life is not. It is far too complex and mysterious to be boiled down to a curriculum. Even one blessed by the imprimatur of The Ivy League.
• Mankind wants the answers.
• Only God can provide them.
• We aren’t listening to Him.

So there I am giving a speech. Not like the kind you usually hear. Not because it was exceptional but because it was composed of a series of personal stories.

The audience wanted the mysteries of existence revealed and as I started to tell the stories, they thought they would hear them. Some thought they were hearing them. Some were convinced they were hearing them.

But it was nothing of the sort. It was simply a man, me, telling stories from my book, God Is A Salesman. That is a far cry from listening to God. And only that can happen if you, if we, if our children, if our friends, if everyone we know and love makes the time to listen to the mysteries, the miracles, the silent magic that flows from the winds and the trees and the tears and the laughter and the cries and the silences that are the universe.

We all know how to read the newspaper and listen to our iPods and stare at our computer screens and watch television and create Power Points that no one wants to see, but we don’t make the time to listen to life.

And we miss the most important sound in the world.
Mark Stevens

CEO

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I am reading a NY Times story that zooms in on a question that has been waltzing around in my mind for weeks.

How did Citigroup get caught up to its eyeballs in subprime junk when one of the true wise men of the financial community, Robert Rubin, was embedded atop its management hierarchy? The same Rubin who attained Wonder Boy status at Goldman Sachs only years out of Harvard and Yale. The same Rubin who went on to rule at Goldman and top that by serving as the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton. The same Rubin who has Mick Jagger status with government and financial leaders around the globe.

Well, the Times piece fudges on the issue at hand - why didn’t Rubin stop the bank from its collision course with stupidity - when his alma mater, Goldman Sachs, turned one of the worst fiscal disasters in US history into a gold mine for its partners and clients.

Rubin’s argument appears to be that because he didn’t have the official title of CEO (the fact is, he held even more power of influence at Citi than the CEO), it wasn’t his place to speak up.

Let’s put this in perspective. Years ago, someone once told me that there were thousands of people as smart as Einstein. They just didn’t voice their theories. They kept them to themselves. They didn’t speak up.

I felt then, as I do now, that there is no such thing as a silent genius.

Unless you have a novel idea and the skill, the guts, the determination to put it forward, to air it out, to toss it to the world and see what the world thinks of it, you are no Einstein. You are no smart person. You are no force. You are no change maker, catalyst, mover of the needle, raiser of the bar. You are a piston in the machine someone else built.

In the history of the world, there has been but one Einstein. He was a beautiful anomaly. So I am not talking about making ourselves heard at Albert’s level. I mean in everyday life. In our jobs, our friendships, our arts, our passions whatever they may be and wherever they may emerge, unless we have epiphanies and then share them with our worlds, we are silent figures moving aimlessly on a stage someone else erected for a show someone else wrote.

It is possible to hide in life. To lurk in the shadows and say not a word of true value. To glide from birthday to birthday without causing a ripple. To say that you care immensely about world peace, the environment, the cinema, the underprivileged, business success. And to be the silent genius who says not a single original thing about any of it.

But you are a legend in your own mind. The fact is, wise people are dummies when there mouths are shut. All Rubin had to do was say “No,” and Citi would have been spared the loss of its prestige and its treasury. All we have to do is to take the ideas we have had for moments or for years - the time of gestation is immaterial - and act on them. Bring them to light and let the chips fall where they may.

It is said that all great people stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them. One of the true super novas, Isaac Newton, acknowledged that. The same is true for all of us mere mortals. A chain of thought, aired by others before us no matter what we do or where we live, provides a platform for our own thinking and the action that brings that thinking to life.

But I think the chain is more than a platform. I view it as an obligation.

As long as we are blessed with brains and the ability to express what floats around inside of them, we are obligated to make our own voices heard.

Mark Stevens

CEO

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I am watching this special man, this scholarly Pope, this Holy Father in snow white silk, bless the people of New York.These people of New York are the most skeptical in the world. Whatever story you have, they’ve heard it a thousand times before. And they will tell you so. And they don’t want to hear it again. I know. I am one of them. Have been so all of my life.And yet this quiet, introspective Pope has us all charmed. Under his spell. Exhilerated to have him amongst us.We feel that we are in the presence of God. There is a certainty to it. And a calm that prevails because of it.

This is the polar opposite of every day life where there is absolute uncertainty. We know not much of how our universe functions. Why we live and die. How long we will be on earth. Why there are great tragedies: wars, AIDS, starvation, suicide bombers. Why there are magical beauties : lilacs, fireflies, kisses, rainbows.

Yes we live in a world that seems so smart now because we can shop on line and talk on cell phones and Google Abe Lincoln’s favorite food. But every generation believes it is the epitome of genius, of stunning scientific achievement–and although there may be some truth to that, we must be humbled by the fact that we still haven’t a clue as to the why’s or the wherefores of the tragedies and the beauties.

The Pope’s presence appears to provide a glimpse into the truth. Just what it is we cannot be certain. But it gives us reason to pause and to remember that throughout history, the great people, those who have advanced the human race, committed a single common act:

They asked “Why?”

This is where all progress begins, both on the global and personal levels. By questioning what we do, what we believe, what is accepted as fact and what is ridiculed as fiction. Why we associate with people we no longer like. Why we cannot harness the power of the sun for all of our energy needs. Now. This year. Why we accept the “fact” that a small business person cannot start a new automobile company.

The fact is, once we stop asking “Why?” we begin to die. To shrivel up. To lose our energy. To accept everything around us as etched in concrete, as permanent, as inquestionable because that’s the way it is.

Just think of the wonder of a child asking the proverbial, “Why’s the sky blue, mommy?.” At that delicious moment, the young mind is reaching beyond the “it is because it is” roadblock and seeking to explore. To soar. To understand something that until that very moment was far too daunting to approach.

For a few, the probing never stops. For fewer still it leads to true exploration and discovery. For most it is a passing phase, dismissed as childish curiousity, that rapidly diminishes with every year of life that races by.

In one vital aspect of our lives, faith, we have certainty. But our knowledge is crude and our curiosity wanes. And we live, like our forefathers, in the dark lit only by the light of “Why?”

Mark Stevens

CEO

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I hear it every day of my life.

“I am afraid.”

People tell me they are afraid of losing money. Of getting sick. Of being misunderstood. Of shooting too high. Of being misunderstood. Of shooting too low. Of breaking some kind of social code someone at Harvard invented. Of being disliked. Of taking a risk. Of doing what society frowns at.

What they are really saying in so many words is that they are afraid of life. And once this fear is allowed to fester, once it is left unchecked, once it qualifies for all manner of justification, it sucks its victims into a black hole.

The fear mushrooms and the life diminishes. It is a miserable syndrome. It is paralyzing. It leaves its marks frozen in a compromised place, hostage to what everyone else wants but detached from the experiences, the journey, they really want to take.

Fear makes millions, billions, their own worst enemy. Their heart says fly me away to this beautiful vision that stands before me. Let me take it by its outstretched hand and soar to a place I know will be exhilarating, magnificent, rewarding, challenging, intoxicating, delicious. The hand is honest and pure and true and loving and willing to reach out over and over again, but the coupling never occurs.

Fear strikes. Fear stops. Fear freezes the momentum in its tracks. The person who needs to be safe, to pass the acid test of acceptability imposed by anonymous crowds, to walk the beaten path, to do the traditional thing, to insure against failure, says “No” to the dangerous liaison, the high risk project, the change in direction, the road the priests of false morality seek to bar from passage (for all but themselves.)

Paradoxically, fear prevails when in truth there is nothing in life to fear. There is nothing in death to fear. Fear is the enemy of life. If one has faith, if one simply identifies the few genuine truths and passions in their lives and pursues them with zest and courage, well that is the definition of a life well lived.

The universal aspiration should be to replace fear with faith. There are so many rich things you can do with your life that have zero guarantee of success but which you must jump into like a child cannon balling into a summer pond.

Your career.
Your romance.
Your friendships.
Your time alone.
Your time with many.

All must be conducted with a determination to do it your way, to fully cultivate the gift of life, to take the chances, to embrace the risks, to put the standard setters, the paper prophets, back in their boxes and to busy themselves with others.

You will not fear. You will pick your goals, decide when to act, walk the high wire, care nothing at all when the fear mongers chasten you. You will go to that special place where people achieve and experience the exceptional.
You will never again look back and say I let it get away out of fear.

You will not fear. You see the black hole. It is not for you.

There is too much life to live.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Every day, millions awake, brush their teeth, get dressed, drive to work, tackle the emails in the inbox, attend meetings, drive home, have dinner, watch politicians lie on television, go to sleep and then wake up the next day to play it all out again.

 

 

This is what they call “living.”

 

 

Here is what they don’t do while they are busy “living:”

* Drive to the beach on just one day they are supposed to go to work.

* Ask themselves if they really like the treadmill they are on and if not, what they plan to do about it.

* Instead of tackling the emails, think of an entirely new way of doing things at the company and then send it off in the form of an idea to the people in position to effect change.

* Don’t drive home one night. Turn the car in a different direction and see where it takes you.

* Do something your friends would consider inappropriate. Who are they to decide the rules of the road?

* Surprise someone you love with an unexpected gift. Not flowers. Not a dinner out. Perhaps a song you wrote about them. Or tickets to Capri.

* Spend five hours alone doing nothing but thinking. These “do nothing” sessions give birth to the epiphanies you miss out on while you are engaged in the mindless pursuit of pursuits.

It is so easy to go through life on autopilot. But the idea is not to “go through life.” It is to treat it as a magic carpet ride. Some of which you can control and much of which is controlled by the winds and the magic that you abandon yourself to.

 

I have witnessed people in the throes of unexpected joy, of a love that came out of left field and grabbed them by the heart, of an idea that ignited their passion and pointed them toward a work, a project, an invention, they never saw coming–stop themselves in mid course because it wasn’t on the agenda. Because it was a surprise. Because it required reckless abandon.

And then I have witnessed them turn back to the checklist of “living” and I have wondered. Just wondered.

How does the instinct to survive overwhelm the need to thrive? To paint. To be reckless. To break new ground. To take risk. To throw out the calendar.To go on television and tell the world to keep their ideas about how you should “live” to themselves.

I see people in cubicles busy doing nothing for organizations whose only goal is to keep the doors open so that employees can have a place to drive to after they brush their teeth. A place to hide. A place to engage in the mindless pursuit of pursuits.

I ask them how long they have been there and they say forever. I ask them what they do there and they mumble something. I ask them if they are happy and they answer, “Can’t complain.” I ask them if they are fulfilled and they look at me as if I am speaking a strange language.

At one wonderful point in my young life I believed in Santa Claus. At one time in theirs, they must have known what fulfilled means. No more. But who needs it.

They are extremely busy with the mindless pursuit of pursuits.

And life goes by. And you can’t get a second back.

Mark Stevens

CEO

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