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

So I think Counting Crows is one of the best bands of the past two decades. No Led Zep but who is or was? At their best, Counting Crows was genuinely good, original, and at times (Recovering The Satellites, Anna Begins) exceptional.

And then they lost the artistic magic or Adam got tired or who knows what but a devoted following sat in disgust listening to Hard Candy, the first Milk Dud by a group of guys who seemed incapable of sinking so low.

Ok, so they had a loser. Everyone is entitled to a bad day now and then and so the devoted waited for the recovery album. And waited. And waited. And nothing…..

Until late last month when the band on the run released Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

It is a clunker. It is a once seamless band that made magic instinctively now trying too hard. You can hear the hard work. You can hear all the old riffs repeated here.

I think they knew it. I think they recognized this was January compared to August And Everything After.

So what do they do to breathe some life into a wounded bird? They try all kinds of traditional PR, which will drive some heightened anticipation for sure, but it’s sales they want. You can’t take anticipation to the bank.

They know a little secret about the Internet. You can listen to it. You can hear it. So they take the only hook song on the album, You Can’t Count On Me, create a landing page, give you a link to download and viola, digi does what print can’t even touch. (It’s not called a hook for nothing). It sells songs.

There is still a huge place for traditional PR in traditional media. And we should play it like it’s 1953. But with one hand, while the other is on the mouse. Because that “huge place” is relative and gets smaller every day.

And if you can’t hear the hook, you ain’t buying.

Think about it. The Web sings…..literally.

Mark Stevens

CEO

There are two kinds of people in this world. We’ll call them icebergs and palm trees. (Truth be told, there are likely thousands of types, but this is my blog and I’m in the mood to be simplistic. To make a point, of course.)

Anyway, back to my hypothesis, which I do believe in. In fact, which I think about all the time, some more than others, and when I do think about it, well, it opens up entire vistas of thought. Of insight. Of epiphanies.

Icebergs are impressive, but only from a distance. They can be beautiful in shape, pristine in color and composition, imposing in their steadfastness and they can be impervious to the elements that swirl around them. In human terms, they are stoic, silent, predictable. But get up close, scratch the surface, and it’s all just ice. It’s all rather cold. It’s all terribly inhuman. It doesn’t cry or think or change. It may melt, but that’s not the same thing as soaking in the moon and finding a way to chase it.

Palm trees give themselves up to the forces of the moment - the breezes, the gales, the tropical storms that emerge from nowhere and paint the day black - happy to twist and bend and make passionate love to the natural forces that rise up and make life so interesting, so compelling, so intriguing.

In my life, in all of the things I am so fortunate to experience at work and at play (which are really one and the same to me), I interact with and observe the icebergs and the palm trees. As I look for answers, adventures, innovations, collaborators, leaders, romantics, fighters, business builders, catalysts, friends, kindred spirits, inventors, new ways of growing MSCO, drivers of excellence for our clients and business partners, allies in my lust for life…..in all, it is the palm trees and only the palm trees that meet the test.

I need to be surrounded by palm trees.

It is only they who will not only accept the fates, the risks, the uncertainties, but will use the crazy quilt of life’s forces, of God’s forces, of the unknown, of the unpredictable, to continuously chase the moon, to reshape themselves, to give themselves with abandon to what they cannot see, or measure, or insure because they know, in most cases instinctively and subconsciously, that an iceberg is an inanimate object and a palm tree is a living thing.

The finest thing in life is to walk directly and confidently into the unknown. That is where success, in all of its forms, lies.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Today, I had lunch with two people I had never met before and it was one of those unusual encounters where the conversation zipped through a nanno second of small talk and zoomed into the heart of things. Into what’s this crazy thing called life all about and how do we leverage it to the hilt.

And I found myself ripping into one of my riffs about the two kinds of people on the planet. So now I’ll do it again to you. (At this point you may want to hit delete because this may be the musing of an overly philosophical mad man?).
So, the two kinds of people:

* Those in the “life protection” business.
* The tiny minority in the “live life like a reckless adventure” business.

The former want to be safe. To protect themselves from life’s curve balls.
To avoid risk. To be middle managers. To wear sunscreen. To drink wine spritzers. To do business as usual on the job because, well, it’s safe. To follow the rules. Anyone’s rules. Oh God, those rules are comfort food for the life protectors.

The latter say, I can’t protect against the vagaries of life. I can only wander out into the great blue unknown and revel in it. And if the sands shift or the plates slide or the bets come up bad or the curve balls come flying one after another, so what the hell. What the hell. What the flying hell. I will find a way to deal with it. I will see it as reason to think harder and smarter and cagier and to find a way to reinvent the wheel or to paint a gorgeous picture worthy of the Museum of Modern Art. I will walk right up to the safe middle managers so smug about their blemish-free performance record (never wandered from the straight and narrow, never made a single mistake) and I would break a rule right before their eyes. A sacred company rule. And then I would know how Picasso felt when he started turning French women into African masks. And when he made love in the middle of the day with a paint brush in one hand and a bottle of Bordeaux in the other.

Life needs livers. Risk takers. Dangerous minds. Total crazos. Lindberg.
Disney. Lauder. Houdini. Bezos. Jobs.

And we might as well all join category two. Because the life protection business doesn’t work. In the end, we all end, but the space from the beginning to the end is where the action is. And the action belongs to those who laugh at risk. Who jump into the water without a life preserver, swim the English Channel, stare down the sharks, best the world’s speed record, invent a novel category of software, put their chips on the line, fight to make it work and do it all again the next day.

That’s the arena. Everything else is like watching a concert atop Yankee stadium. Now that’s scary!
Mark Stevens
CEO

A few days ago, I was bestowed with a charming and old-fashioned gesture: A wish to “Have a Wonderful Weekend.” The problem is, the gesture was plastic. Literally. It was stamped on a bag of band-aids and toothpaste I’d purchased in a local pharmacy. Perhaps I am a cold-hearted SOB, but I don’t get the warm and fuzzies when a bag whispers sweet nothings in my ears. In fact I wanted to, and ultimately did, tell the pharmacy they would be advised to replace the weekend “love note” with one that reads: Whatever You Need, Whenever You Need It. Just call us at xxx or visit us at pleasingyoumakesushappy.com.

Why wasn’t this done at the outset? Why won’t they do it ever? Because what used to be one-on-one customer service that came from a culture that truly respected and appreciated customers as the soul and the lifeblood of a business has been reduced to a series of monotonous and superficial scripts that come from nowhere near the heart:

Have a nice day.

Please hold, we’ll be right with you.

If you would like to talk to a live person, press the pound key.

Well actually, I would prefer to talk to a dead person-or even a plastic bag- than push ten more buttons until I find someone totally annoyed that they have to DEAL with a customer. What’s really happening is that businesses are so focused on consummating transactions that they spend no time building enduring relationships. Plastic bags can’t do it. A “Thank You For Your Patronage ” note stamped on an invoice can’t do it. The only way it can be done is if Management develops a culture that truly embraces customers.

The classic customer service survey asks people:

1. Do you like our products/services?

2. Would you buy them again?

3. Would you recommend them to a friend?

What they don’t ask goes to the core of great business, of extraordinary companies:

Do you have faith in our company? Do you think we are committed to you?

They don’t go beneath the surface, the superficial, the scripts because they don’t want to know the answers. They don’t care. The DNA of true customer service, of businesses built on relationships as opposed to transactions, has virtually disappeared. Sadly, today’s managers think it’s all in the plastic bags.

When you sit together in silence and the music plays without a sound, you know there is a love no one has to work at. No one can replace. No one but a very few - perhaps no one else at all - can experience. It is yours. Everyone else can only look on in envy. It is The Music Of The Silences. And it is so much more powerful than the music of the orchestra. Of the exclamations. Of the boisterous proclamations. When nothing has to be said, and yet everything is as clear as can be, it is a masterpiece.This is the art of the subtle. Once in a lifetime it strikes from nowhere and must be treasured for the rarity it is. But we must also learn from it to enhance our careers, our businesses, our lives.

Every great love has a quiet confidence about it. Every great business person lets their accomplishments talk for themselves. Every great company delivers something exceptional and allows the silent referrals to build its base. People go to business school for years to learn how to make noise. To beat drums. To spend zillions on advertising. Caught up in the machine of conventional wisdom, they forget that yes, life imitates art but business imitates life as well.

Look around at your loves, your friends, your romances. All hold greater business lessons than a lifetime at Wharton. All of the passion, the pathos, the complexity in your personal life, has a mirror image on the business side of the ledger. Actually, there is no other side. It is but one ledger, one canvas, upon which we paint ourselves, our minds, our hearts, our brains. Everything you do in the dark-far from the office, removed from the Blackberry-has implications, has learnings, has analogies, for everything you do in the neon of the boardroom.

If we can look through the Berlin Wall of our imagination and look from east to west, personal to business, business to personal, without obstruction, knowing the lessons apply in both realms because in reality there is only one realm, LIFE, we are infinitely smarter than if we allow only the Harvard Business Review to guide us. We learn more from love than we can from an MBA. More about business. About how to deliver greatness. How to respect and adore. How to drive for the exceptional. How to identify the good and the great and how to accept nothing but the latter.

A champion diver lands in the water without making a splash. If you have ever been privileged to hear The Music Of The Silences, you have the greatest education, and the most magnificent gift, anyone can provide.

One day a few years ago as I was being wheeled down to the Operating Room for major surgery, a nurse asked me to name my favorite prayer. With less than a second of thought, I said the 23rd psalm and in an instant we were reciting it together. “The Lord is my shepherd….”

It is the masterpiece of prayers. Brief, gorgeous and inspiring. It puts life in the perfect perspective.

Note I said “life.” For all intents and purposes, the 23rd is supposed to be about death. “In the valley of the shadow of death…” But I prefer to see it as about life.

The psalm extols the values of faith and confidence.

Of living, and someday dying, without fear. With belief that we must live fully while we are alive on earth and let go with courage and dignity when the time has come to do that. When the time has come to rely on true faith. On God.

Continuing on this theme, a reader of this blog sent along a message suggesting that we should all contemplate what we would do on a given day if we knew it was the last 24 hours of our lives. Immediately, the mind whirls off to silly clichés filled with images of sky diving and bar hopping and wild spending sprees.

And then a lovely spirit I asked the question to, said, “Just what I am doing now. Enjoying a blue sky moment with a true friend in a little corner of the world that feels like heaven.” Nothing Hollywood would make a movie about. Just a friend and the sky and the sun and the warmth and the trust and the freedom and the absolute thrill of human chemistry when it is liberated to achieve and dream and love and sprint to places it has never gone before.

We all live in the valley of the shadow of life. This is our gift. This is our blessing. There is none better. Forget about the valley of the shadow of death. You have no control over that. Zero.

When you wake tomorrow, recommit yourself to life and;

• To risk.
• To courage.
• Rebuild your company.
• Quit your job.
• Invent something.
• Let go of an obligation.
• Kiss a friend.
• Make the impossible possible.
• Dredge up one of your failures of the past and make it work this time.
• Challenge your top three assumptions.
• Tell every judgmental person you know to look in the mirror before they speak another word.
• Admit your own worst trait and change it.

You live in the valley of the shadow of life. You are the luckiest person in the world.

Mark Stevens,
CEO

Tell me what you are going to do

tomorrow to live in the Valley of the Shadow of Life?

Many of us are dream chasers, like kites floating through the Western sky, the dreams captivate and drive us. Running after them, feeling the wind in our face, we are exhilarated. Intoxicated. If we can only catch the kite, grab hold of the dream, we will pass through to another dimension. We will understand the mysteries. It will be our Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone, the dream, will be our prism. Through it we will see the truth. So we run into the wind and chase the kite. Such is the life of a dream chaser.

I am happy to live that life. I would have it no other way. But I know that this is a lie wrapped in a lovely and deceptive package. The kite is simply an illusion dancing in the blue. You can love it but you cannot rely on it. Not to reveal the truth about anything but your own limitless and invaluable imagination.

The real truth is delivered in the hard boiled experiences of the street. Of the nights alone in a laboratory or in front of a blank computer screen, searching for the words or the formulas that don’t come easily. They are embedded in Edison’s revelation that genius is 99% sweat and 1% kites.

The great among us know how to look past the lies we tell ourselves in the midst of our romantic delusions and how the focus on the tedious work of experimenting with compounds delivers the first antibiotic. Ask Alexander Fleming. And how the refusal to accept the lies about vaccines, led to the cure for polio. Look up Jonas Salk. And that the great bulwarks of media could be torn down and humiliated. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

When the lies are pipe dreams we refuse to see through, they are stop signs that thwart our personal achievement. But when they are soaring kites that prompt us to chase the horizon, to look beyond it, to enter states of thought and wonderment that place all of the lies in their proper light and turn them into catalysts for discovering the truth, they are divine. Divine.

Einstein liked to say that his intelligence was a wonderful asset but his sense of imagination enabled him to encircle the globe. It is so interesting to realize that in the right hands, our hands if we allow it, if we adore the kites but see them for what they are, we recognize they are something so strange and so sweet.

They are lies that open windows to the truth.

Mark Stevens
CEO

It is ironic that from the earliest days of our cognizant lives, we are programmed to fear its end. Especially, the last five minutes.

This entire notion, this ripe fear and in many cases dread, is preposterous. We have no idea where we came from, and why we arrived in the world, but we are certain that in death we are leaving it. That it represents an end. Finality.

How is it that we admit to looking backwards to our arrival on earth with no knowledge but look forward to our departure with great certainty? A certainty that has no basis. No founding. It is mindful of our predecessors who were convinced that if they sailed into the horizon, they would fall off the face of the earth.

Little did they know that the truth was the polar opposite: that they could sail into the horizon for eternity.

The fact is we are preoccupied with living a long life when life as we know it is never long. If we live 100 years, it is but a blip. And to complicate matters, but to introduce an essential reality. Whose life was longer, Mozart’s or Jane Smith, who died at 98 after a 60-year career as an insurance actuary. And who hated her work from the moment she left college and took a seat in her cubicle at Homestead Life Insurance Co.?

We have a monumental choice before us all: to be in the life fulfillment business-meaning we live every day without concern for when it ends, if it does, or to be in the life protection business-meaning we spend nearly every day seeking to postpone or circumvent the inevitable.

All too many people do the latter. And in the process, they waste so much of the joy of being alive on this earth. They seek safety. They run from risk. They make sure not to work too hard. They are sticklers about having balance in their lives, whatever that means. They look askance at those who burn the candles at both ends, walk the high wire without a safety net. Start companies with their life savings. Quit “good” jobs for careers that bring them joy. Abdicate the throne to marry a lover.

The only way to truly live, to achieve success as a manager, artist, factory worker, actor, CEO, mother, father, friend-is to do it with abandon. Without fear of when it will end. The more you try to control the ending, the less control you have over it. It won’t ask for your permission. It won’t ask for your timetable. It will just end. Nothing you can do will stop it.

And that’s the good news. You can let go. It’s out of your hands. And even better, the last five minutes here may be the countdown to forever.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How do you live your life before your five minutes are up?




Click here to read the full interview with blogger Lewis Green.