A Letter To A Lover. A Letter To Yourself.
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?
The Best View Of Heaven Is From Hell
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
The Curse of the Hopeless Romantic
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
When All The Roads Are Closed. All The Roads Are Open.
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.
In Pieces On the Ground
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.
