No one writes letters any more. Considering the options, they are cumbersome and reach the other party with glacial speed. So why bother. Zip off an email and move on to your iPod. Next.

Well, not so fast. And not so simple. We don’t write letters, in part, because they impart a sense of permanence, of legitimacy, of the genuine article, of here today and here tomorrow. Of the heart.

We have begun to accept the fact that this Teflon approach is ok because here today and here tomorrow is somehow scary. All the what ifs cloud the thinking. What if I can’t do it for long? What if the passion melts? What if I get hurt? What if, what if. What if you tell a lover of your love and the love disappears? Better off not saying it at all. Not in a letter.

And that’s the real reason people don’t write letters anymore. Because the letters have a feel of permanence. Because there is no delete button. Because once you send it, you have exposed yourself. And today, our culture says, only fools do that. The wise believe they are in the self-protection business. But are they really? Aren’t they protecting themselves from the passions, the vagaries, and the mysteries that make life so majestic?

We don’t want to write a letter to a lover because we don’t want to write a letter to ourselves. Spilling out passion about another is as much about you as it is about them, and that means exposure and fear and why not just send a cute, sly, meaningless text message.

Writing to yourself has to do with your success, or lack of it, in business and in love. Yes in both. For years I promised myself that I would make a radical change in my company’s business model and for years I did nothing of the sort. I sat on the sidelines and watched myself think. I never put my goal in a letter to myself because that would be a promise. The letter would be there staring me in the face. It would be harder to hide. And hide I did.

So often people tell me of frustrations in their careers, jobs changes they are going to make, initiatives they are going to drive, education they are going to get, inventions they are going to create. And when I check back with them, zero. Nothing. They never put it in a letter and they never did it and so often they never will.

Ever see someone blow a kiss? Of course you have. Why do they do that? Why don’t they walk right up and plant their lips on the other person’s? Because it is so intimate. So real. And so many of us are so afraid of that that we lie to ourselves and make secret promises we will never fulfill. That we will never put in a letter.

It is just so much easier to play it safe, to blame the gods, to fall short of our potential, to avoid changing our business models, to refuse to look in the mirror. To avoid risk at all cost.

And what a cost it is.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What are you afraid to put in your letter?

I watched an interview with former world figure skating Dorothy Hamill, who I remember so well for her electric style and breezy great looks on the ice, now revealing the unknown story of a life pocked with depression. Yesterday, I watched old men sob, remembering vicious battlefields and the horrendous loss of buddies, all 19 years old, in The War in the Pacific, more than a half century ago. A week ago I read of Owen Wilson’s near suicide.

Dorothy said she would cry for hours at a time. Wail out loud. And then it turned worse when Dino Martin, the love of her life, walked out the door, no rhyme or reason. There never is in love.

The gray soldiers admitted they’ve never been really happy since their pre-War youth, poisoned as they’ve been by nightmare visions.

And Wilson had everyone fooled but himself. The joy free persona; the aching heart.

At times Hamill, the boys in uniform and the Wedding Crasher experienced heaven. The gold medals, the swimming holes, the first box office hits. And when the hellish times set in, the view of heaven played games with their brains. How had they have fallen? How could they climb back?

You don’t have to be famous to experience these poles of life. We all do, every single one of us. I was mentoring a young man today, one struggling with some of the barbed wire of adolescence. And I was telling him of my time in hell and how I called on the memories of heaven as a ladder to pull myself out. And he understood. He understood.

Today, thousands of people lost their jobs. An equal number or more lost their businesses. And still more lost sales they were working on for months or years, or were demoted in a Management shuffle or walked away from a house, from an American dream, they could no longer afford.

For all it felt like hell. And it was truly miserable. But if you remember that time you had in heaven, or the mere glimpse of it, it is the fuel you can use to soar back to the place you want to be.

In business, in life, there is always, thank God, the opportunity for redemption. Every great career, every great life, has moved through the heaven to hell to heaven journey. Through courage and determination and a stubborn refusal to remain on the dark side of the moon.

Just how you respond when you look into the abyss is the true measure of who you are as a person. That snapshot of heaven you carry around in your pocket is the best assurance that you will walk through the gates again.

Hamill found her center and has a beautiful daughter. The boys of war came home and found jobs and love. And Wilson will walk on stage to win an Academy Award one day. He will.

Because the view of heaven is always best from hell.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How was your climb from Hell to Heaven?

Is actually a blessing. Why? For a zillion reasons but let’s look at one of those reasons with a billion implications. All positive. All life affirming. All for the greater good of the romantics and the world they inhabit.

More CEOs have graduated from Princeton than any other school. And guess what, this grand dame of the Ivy League doesn’t have a business school nor will it permit undergrads to major in business. That may be because it offers virtually no business courses.

So how does it cultivate CEOs? Because it germinates romantics. By this, I mean young men and women who read poetry, contemplate art, study architecture, drink too much, read Catcher In The Rye 100 times. They are the dreamers. They are the ones who come up with every earth-changing idea in the world. Hold on. Zig zag. I just happened to see an interview with opera legend Luciano Pavarotti who died recently. I am not an opera fan and knew little about him. And then I see and hear him talk about life, love and success and I, who think of myself as a romantic, see the real thing and I feel like an aluminum siding salesman next to this Italian giant. He ruled opera, yes, but he could have taken Dell to the next level when the founder stepped back. One reason the PC maker has been slumping is that its PC’s are dull. They’ve lost their sheen. Gone commodity. Pavarotti, with no business experience (like those liberal arts CEO’s) would never allow dull in his world. Fallen in love with a woman who entered his life out of the blue, he is asked by Mike Wallace, why he is in love with her. “If you know the answer,” Pavarotti says, “you are not in love.”

Today, Roger Federer won the US Open Tennis championship for the forth time in four years. A modern record. And he may be the greatest player of all time. And he is not a tennis machine. Not a tennis engineer. He is a European romantic. He attends the Open with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. He refuses to study films of his opponents. “I watch their games for 15 seconds and that’s all I need.” A legion of would be tennis stars are deeply engaged in tennis physics. You have never heard their names. Federer is an artist. You know this. So will your grandchildren.

Einstein was the greatest romantic. Loved women. Loved music. Loved everything. He said that his scientific knowledge was important, but “my imagination enables me to encircle the globe.” And he arrived at relativity by allowing himself to fantasize about the impossible and work backwards to the possible. Precisely what Pavarotti’s woman said.

The world is built for crowd control. It can’t take too many romantics. So it sets up a system that tells us how to think and act. That way, there is order. And the engineers, actual and virtual engineers, breathe order. It is their oxygen.

And it is the vampire cross to the romantics. Look forward. The nerds won’t inherit the earth. The engineers won’t build the next great companies.

It will the Picasso’s, the Pavarotti’s… the Romantics.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How Will You Show Your Romance?

I went for a hike yesterday to sort through a major quandary. Or so I told myself. You see, I convinced myself that all the gods were conspiring against me. They had a meeting in heaven and Mark Stevens was tops on the agenda. Specifically, they were going to see to it that he had no place to turn. No road to run down. I was facing a business dilemma-or so I told myself-that I was turning into a life dilemma. A major chapter in the history of Western civilization. More than that, a biblical epic.

As I carefully constructed this drama, I made sure it was one of those stories Hollywood hates. There would be no happy ending here. How could there be: all the roads were closed. Every strategy I thought about, pondered endlessly, brought to life in a film noir I was directing, wound up on a dead end. Whoa, I was making damn sure that there was no viable exit from my business dilemma and that I had every right, excuse me, to feel terribly sorry for myself. The gods had it in for me and when they feel that strongly about a marketing guy and his business issues, well there’s a place in hell waiting for him.

And then the hike. And then the epiphany. All the roads are NEVER closed. In fact, none of the roads are ever closed. Not if you want to take a five minute break from feeling sorry for yourself and apply your creativity, your determination, your imagination and your guts to simply going down THE road you want to follow. I don’t care if every member of the Harvard Business School faculty says THAT road is closed. I don’t care if the Bishop Of Canterbury says it’s closed. I don’t care if an act of Congress says it’s closed. It’s not. Order takers, rules players, worshipers of conventional wisdom may be paralyzed by these decrees but the people in business and in life (which I happen to think are one and the same) who blow open the conventions and put genius in their place, they pick a closed road and walk confidently down the middle and no one is going to stop them.

Where do you see the myth of a closed road now? Where do you want to go in your career, your company, your business that the naysayers are telling you… well, sorry, but you can’t go there, do that, or think that. Revisit the issue. Look at it through a prism. Stand on your head and see it upside down.

I can guarantee you one thing: All the roads, every beautiful and glorious one of them, are open.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me How You Keep Your Roads Open.

You dream a thousand days and nights and work to the point of exhaustion to build something of great and enduring value. And then you turn around to see that it has fallen from the sky. Crashed to the earth. Lying there in pieces on the ground. What you do at that moment of truth is of overwhelming importance to your success, or lack of it, as a businessperson, marketer, entrepreneur, liver of life, lover, inventor, and romantic.

It begins by recognizing that it is not really a moment of truth. It is a phase of a continuum. If you are to make your true mark as a business person, marketer, liver of life, lover, inventor, romantic:

You must recognize right there at that moment of head on confrontation with the realities of life, that the pieces can be put together again. Or that they can be rearranged into a different type of satellite that will follow another flight path. Or that you can scrap all of the pieces you built your dream on and find others and others and others until you create the code breaker and the great and enduring achievement of your life stays in orbit. A beautiful vision to behold. Everyone is a genius, a winner, a king or a queen when a product, a service, a company, a love takes off. When it soars from a laboratory, a boardroom or a country road, and glides into the blue. But few of the kings, queens and geniuses retain those titles when they are standing there, alone and pole axed, staring at the pieces on the ground.

The greats, which we all can and should aspire to be, view these moments as beginnings, as challenges, as calls to action to find out what went wrong and how to fix it. Or more than that, to rethink everything from the blueprint stage and up and to create a new kind of satellite, software, company, that defies convention, flies in wild gyrations as opposed to predictable orbits and creates a new category far different than what you dreamed of from the start.

A category that first came to you when you stared at the pieces on the ground and saw not the disconnects but instead where the wise and true connections could be made. Anyone can walk away from anything, depressed, defeated and even bitter that it didn’t have a happier ending, a more fruitful result, a more stunning breakthrough. John McEnroe was just another talented mid-level kid on the tennis circuit until he walked on the court one day, saw the pieces on the ground, and
said, “this isn’t about beautiful ground strokes, it’s algebra. It’s all about angles.” with that he rearranged the pieces and became champion of the world.

It’s what we do when we see the broken pieces, not the achievements, that makes the difference in our lives. In our grand and blessed continuum.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me How You Recovered.

You wake up in the morning and you look at your clock and you get dressed and you go to work and you come home, eat dinner, watch TV and start the cycle all over again, every moment wishing for the weekend. What a miserable way to do this thing called LIVING. Why do you do it this way? In all likelihood, it’s because you see only one path. One route to your goals. One way to be a success. One way to bring value to your job. One way to grow your business. One way to be a friend. One way to learn, enjoy a special moment, make love, cope with pain, maximize joy…the whole crazy ass stew that is LIFE. One way?

No way! There are a million ways to run through your days, your years. All you need is a willingness to experiment. To eschew the safe and narrow. To put your butt on the line. To dream crazy dreams and turn them into reality. To forget the call for a safety net. To walk the high wire, come hell or high water.

It’s all a meteor shower. Is that dangerous or infinitely beautiful? Scary or exhilarating? The answer, that one damn answer, defines your life. Because if you see the fear, if you live it, if you are shackled by it, you get under the covers and hide. Not literally-because there is no place to hide-but instead by getting up, getting dressed, going to work, going through the motions, wishing for the weekend, waiting for Godot, eating Jell-O, blaming everyone for the fact that you go nowhere and are bored by the cocoon you have built for yourself. That’s what the routine is: just another way to hide under the covers. You take no chances. You have no risk. You are safe.

What a Pyrrhic Victory.

I am a businessman. This is a business blog. That doesn’t mean it has to follow the Harvard case study approach. That turns out managers who “live” by the book. And they are a curse to the shareholders in any business.

I just read Time Warner’s CEO Richard Parsons reject the idea that he should be compared to Rupert Murdoch’ because to paraphrase Parsons, the latter has been relentlessly driven to build a media empire and I just have a job to do?

A job to do? The fabulously compensated CEO of a major public company built by Henry Luce and other driven capitalists, and he sees it as just a job. As just one way? One route? If it’s just a job, let the guy who runs the mailroom do it.

Business success and life success are inexorably related. The dreamers, the rule breakers, the visionaries who see a million roads to run, who wouldn’t think of hiding anytime, any day, anyway, they become the Richard Branson’s turning music empires, into airline anomalies, all the while breaking speed limits flying hot air balloons around the world.

Hide? Routine? Safety? Guarantees? Are these words in your vocabulary? If so, turn up the electric blanket and go back to sleep.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me How You Plan to Expand Your Business Horizons.

So it is deep August. The summer of ‘07.

The crickets are still jamming and the sun blazing and the moon painting tableaux of what could be. Labor Day is peeking its head around the corner but no one wants to admit it. To see it, to acknowledge it. The dream is to freeze frame the moment, but moments never freeze. They evaporate into one another. They rush headlong into the future. And they take us with them.

For all of us at some time and for some of us all of the time, we are carried by this white water. Victims of time, we allow it to take us, to propel us, to drive us headlong into the future, without truly thinking, wondering, demanding of ourselves a strategy for putting our stamp on it. We look down, or straight ahead, but rarely up, into the clouds, into the spiritual, into the wonderful bewilderment to identify a greater truth. A better way to live. A means of making our presence known. Of being an agent of change.

No. No. No. We just do our jobs and tick off our checklists. And manage our companies. And sell our products. And further our careers. And never bother to really question how the solar system works. And if there is a way to reinvent our industry. Or to redefine the role of a manager. Or to ignite employees who think they want to continue to be workers. Or invent a better search engine than Google’s. Or to make the search engine obsolete. No we walk backwards into the future, hoping fall won’t come. Denying there is a future. Sleepwalking.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Think of Newton, Galileo, Salk, Edison, Ford, Curie. They walked into the future facing it. No, more than that, racing ahead of it. And when it finally caught up with them, they were the victors. They changed life. Long after there was imprinted in the Pantheon of Greatness.

The only thing worth working for and living for is the unique, the exceptional, the enduring, the earthshaking. Everything else is going through the motions, like Campbell’s soup for lunch.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell me how you plan to turn yourself around and walk into the future facing forward…

Everyone has a dream. Martin Luther King’s was a Mother of a dream. Yours may appear petty in comparison…to everyone but you. It is yours and it is magnificent and sweeping and grand: The best that can be. But the question is, will it ever make the cosmic transition from dream to reality?

The truth is, life races by and the dreams wave back. And you keep promising that you will turn the dream into reality, but you don’t. You blame it on the gods and circumstances and religion and tradition and other people, but it’s you that builds the wall you refuse to pass through. Just you.

Life is a precious gift. To refuse to live it to its utmost, to the extreme -in effect, to seize the dream- is a form of “sin.” Not the kind you go to hell for but a more insidious kind that deprives you of what can and should be the most important thing in your life. When King Edward VII of England fell passionately in love with Wallis Simpson, the only way he could fulfill his dream and marry her, was to do the undoable: abdicate from the throne. Which he did in a heartbeat. In doing so, in breaking the rules others had set for him, he reversed the general and passive order of things: his dreams took flight and life threw a kiss for his courage and his passion.

I walk into countless meetings and hear of dreams. I fly in planes and hear of dreams. I attend conferences and hear of dreams. And I love dreamers because they have the electricity of life. But so often it remains static electricity. “My career would be what I really want it to be, but…”, “My company would break new ground in our industry and achieve truly dramatic breakthroughs, however…”

Dreams are like snowflakes. They dance from the sky and powder the world with possibilities and in most every case, melt and disappear, leaving nothing but what might have been in their place.

Those who took the snowflake in mid flight and refused to let it melt dominate the history of the world. Abraham Lincoln would not let the dream of a great and enduring republic vanish. That fact that there were armies of men slaughtering each other did not stop him. Franklin Roosevelt had a dream of a near broken America rising up from its despair to its finest potential. That he could not stand without braces did not stop him from carrying the whole damn world on his back. Edwin Land’s daughter asked him why it took so long to produce a photograph and he dreamed and created instant photography. Rosa Parks dreamed of sitting in the front of a bus. And with the threat of death all around her, that is precisely what she did.

At this moment, in companies and firms and homes around the world, millions of dreams are out there, in holding patterns, waiting to take flight. Will yours? Life WILL fly by.

The question is, will your dreams wave back? Snowflakes of the mind?

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me About Your Dreams…

Everything in life is doomed at the start. There is no question that it will have a trajectory, the only mystery is how long and far the flight will last. A heat-seeking missile embedded within whatever you have built, simply waits for the right time to fire and bring it to the ground. Why? We haven’t a clue. But in our moments of champagne euphoria, it is good to be armed with the knowledge of the truth. With the knowledge that this too will pass. With the knowledge that behind it, another rocket is ready to launch. Another journey ready to be taken. Renewal is one of the true majesties of life. Interesting, we think the end, of a business, a job, a passion, a relationship, tells us something about the beginning. But the polar opposite is true. The beginning and the end are born at precisely the same time. But in the giddiness of the new we refuse to see that it is an imposter for the end. All of the fault lines and limitations and physics and DNA that will destroy it, are there in full view when the opening toasts are made.

Imagine if we looked for them. If we engaged in due diligence at the start. Hunted down the enemies of the good and the beautiful and the successful-the enemies of longevity-and destroyed them before they ruined what we have built. What we adored. What we looked at with amazing pride. What we had every right to be proud of because we vested it with care and intellect and creativity and drive and faith. Blind faith. Reckless faith. Joyous faith.

It would change nothing. You have to throw yourself at the things you create in life with wonderful abandon and let them fly for as long as the gods allow. Probably the truest axiom is that the secret to life is enjoying the passage of time. That’s all you need to do… and it is endlessly wonderful. Because when the business dies, you can form another. When the job turns into a drudge, you can walk across the street. When the strategy or the campaign fails-and ultimately it will-you can rethink it and raise the curtain on ACT II.

It is just important to know at the start-not to dwell on it but to know-that there will inevitably be an ACT II. And you are alive. And you can seize it. We all have to live knowing that there is so much we do not and cannot understand. The trick is never to let that mystery hold us hostage. Or stop us from taking risk.

Until we know why the sun never shines at night and the moon never cries in the morning, we are on our own. Free to build and create and manage and love, knowing the uncertainty just makes it more enthralling.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell me what in your life, your work, have you forgotten has a trajectory?

All great people look the impossible in the eye and make it possible. Why? Because they know there is no such thing as impossible. It is a myth created by the observers of life who are threatened or frightened by the possible. And thus unwilling to scale the barriers they erect to achieve the magnificence of something all the Naysayers insist can’t be achieved.

The fact is, everything is possible. Think of the things that were impossible a century ago, absolutely impossible if you asked the life observers.

The barrier builders:

• Television
• Jet Planes
• Computers
• The Internet
• Antibiotics
• Genetic Engineering
• Cell Phones

If the observers of life ruled, none of these products, none of the companies that make them, would exist today. Nor would the impossibilities that will replace them every single year from now to eternity. The courageous will find a way to turn the impossible into the actual. Into the living, breathing things no one ever expected to see because, well, it was impossible.

In his fine album Back To Bedlam, James Blunt sings a haunting song about the death of bravery in the world. The sad thing is that it’s true. The good thing is that if you are brave, you can do it all. Replace the Internet. Out google Google. Find sweetness and joy and love and success where others see only the impossible. This is where opportunity lies: at the nexus of the Naysayers and the possible. This is where you can build a grand life. This is where you can develop an extraordinary career. This is where you can form a world-beater of a company. This is where you can be true to yourself as opposed to the observers of life. The worshippers of the impossible. They will always tell you that something is in the way of the voyage. To them, the possible is always 50 miles away and that last 50 miles is beyond reach.

What they really mean is that it is 50 miles to the impossible.

Don’t listen. Put in your earplugs and keep moving. You will cross the line from observer to a life truly lived. You will be brave. And you will inherit the earth.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What Barriers Have You Faced & How Did You Overcome Them?