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

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

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

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

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

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

All of life is an ebb and a flow.

Success, beauty, joy, failure, disappointment washes in and just when you think any or all of these facets of life are permanent, they wash back out to the sea.

Gone. A thing of the past.

Why does this 180 occur? Only God knows. The seas ebb and flow, as does all of life.
The most interesting thing, however, is that the wise and the tough - and they must be both - understand this rhythm and work with it, in fact celebrate it, for its own majesty.

What do I mean by this? So you take on a client, a customer, or even more importantly a friend, and you are delighted by the union. There is something deliciously new in your life and you want, you are compelled, you are thrilled to make it greater than the sum of its parts.

For a moment, all is easy in the honeymoon. What a magical word “honey moon.” And then issues emerge:

* Are you serving the customer well?

* Is one plus one proving to be three?

* Is the client truly something special, a partner, or simply a party to a transaction?

If the latter proves to be true, the more you and your business give to it, the more disappointing that realization is. You are vesting in a ghost.

This must be where the term “paper thin” originated.

Back to the celebration. To the understanding of the ebb and flow.

The realization that we gave everything we had to a shadow but just because the customer proved to be an illusion, a wisp, doesn’t mean we lost a thing.

In fact, we gained. We learned more about the real and the artificial. About those who respond to a service culture, friendship, and those who live in a wax museum. Those who are not only no longer part of our extended family, but never really were. They are transactions lists. They are born for the ebb and the flow, especially the flow. All of our service methodologies fail to impact them because they are automatons.

Does this mean we stop behaving as friends? As family members? To the wooden soldiers, yes, but to everyone else who walks into our universe, our stores, our offices, our websites, of course not.

We celebrate the loss of the plastic. The customers who, once you seem to build a true relationship with them, turn quickly in search of a sale. Those who tell you in dozens of ways before you are prepared to hear it, that they see the kind of service you are seeking to deliver as a threat that pales in comparison to a cheap promotion.

And then, if you embrace the ebb and the flow, you wave goodbye. Why?

Because you understand. Because you never abandon your determination to give, to sustain your company’s service culture, your human human joy in moving beyond the transactional.

You just learn which doors to enter and which to close.

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

Okay, so the nation is stuck in the quicksand of a subprime crisis, millions are driving away from their split levels, banks are hemorrhaging red ink, the battered stock market is teetering on a free fall, and President Obama’s first day as Commander-in-Chief will be focused on declaring war on a full-blown recession.

As wise and creative as he may prove to be, he will likely tackle it the wrong way: the economists’ way, with all kinds of technical maneuvers five people in the Monetary Brain Trust pretend to understand. They will jiggle the discount rate and manipulate the money supply and create guaranteed mortgages and dole out health insurance and play 101 Washington games that completely avoid why we got into this morass in the first place and why we will do it again and again and again and again.

We formalize it all and make it sound inevitable by calling it economic cycles, but it’s really just a total personal failure on the part of Americans to treat money with the respect it deserves. Does this mean to worship money? Of course not. But it does mean to respect what money can and cannot do for you.

We all work for money. We all earn it. We all want it. The difference between the members of the religion of the rich and the atheists of the rich is that the former truly achieve financial independence from it while the latter watch it slip through their hands. And no matter how much they earn, they never feel rich. And they never are.

The idea is not to make as much money as you can, but instead to live life as fully and completely as possible. Of course, the two intersect. You need money to own a nice home (one you can actually afford), to vacation, to send your children to school, to weather the inevitable storms and curve balls, to indulge in luxuries now and then, to retire if and when you want, and to walk away from your boss or your client when they don’t deserve your time and your talent.

The only way to have this kind of wealth, this wealthy life, this independence, is to:

* Recognize that the most important money you have is the money no one can see. It is the money you don’t spend, it is the money that builds your financial bedrock, it is the money you worked for, yes, but that then turns around and works for you because it is invested in appreciable assets.

* Learn the importance of making money while you are sleeping. No one of real wealth earns it, grows it, and keeps it by simply working harder. They work smarter. They find a way to create a portfolio and\or to build a business that generates profits while they are fast asleep in their beds or dozing on a beach.

* Stop spending a dime to impress other people. This is incredibly shallow, hollow, and self-defeating. It prompts millions to buy homes and cars and Christmas gifts they cannot afford. It makes them slaves to jobs they hate, to bosses and careers they detest. It assures they will never have financial independence. It is the real reason for the mortgage crisis. It is the real reason people don’t have the money to retire after a life of labor. It is the real reason why people with no money for health insurance spend hundreds on lottery tickets. It is the real reason why men, women, and entire families with very significant incomes have no money in the bank and need sleeping pills to escape the night.

Working hard is noble. Working smart is even better. Making money this hard, along with smart work, produces a wonderful reward.

But unless you treat that money with respect, unless you live below your means, unless you treat the creation and protection of wealth as a near religious experience, you will always wonder why it’s you who comes up short.

When it’s no mystery at all.
Mark Stevens
CEO