Do You Hear Me Now?

LaFranz Campbell, Clemson University 60m Hurdles

We’re a family of runners and that put my wife and me at plenty of track meets watching the kids literally run circles around us. There was this one time when our boys were in High School, and we were in the bleachers at Stanford’s Cobb Field. We were seated in the prime spot over by the finish line near collegiate coaches who were watching their own athletes while also scouting high school seniors. Our section was loaded with coaches, stopwatches, clipboards, sunscreen, and hats. You always yell from up in the bleachers—even the coaches do, but there is no way the kids ever hear any instructions at that distance. It’s a wonder they hear instructions from anyone at all.

We were waiting for the high school mile, and the college athletes were running hurdles. A crowd-sourced beat poem was developing amongst the coaches and assistants. One set of coaches were counting their runner’s steps between the hurdles, the assistants were calling out the lead foot that their runner used to clear the hurdle. Sevens, eights and nines were being tallied along with the words “right” or “left.” All this was punctuated with the occasional “Dammit Sheila” or “Come on Darnell!” Each race was a pop of the starting gun, the call of the announcer and then the count and foot calls droning all around us, not loudly, but insistent, urging, out of sequence until the crescendo of the finish line and then an exhale and a pause while the next racers set up. The step and foot metrics were noted and then marked on a grid; runners would get feedback later about their stride length and dominant leg as they ran the race. My kids never ran hurdles, but I still loved to watch the hurdlers flow down the track striding, and leaning. The races that day were particularly enjoyable because of the color commentary coming from all the nearby coaches as their racers finished.

The coach behind me was from Texas A&M: an expansive man with a gruff voice; he did not look like he could clear a hurdle at this stage in his life. I felt he was a good coach because he never stopped coaching. After each race, he was teaching his assistants what to look for in each race with each racer and why. Down below us at the railing closest to the track a young woman stood up and looked back towards me. She spots the coach from A&M, waves and yells out “Coach!” and starts to make her way towards us. I eavesdrop as she settles down next to him.

She was one of his athletes not too long ago, but now she’s the Track and Field coach herself at a small college. She’s complaining to him about how hard it is to get her team to follow her instructions. They don’t seem to hear her when she tells them things to try. She tells her ex-coach a story of trying to help a hurdler of hers—how to micro adjust his stride before the jump, how to minimize the time clearing the hurdle… but the kid never seemed to follow through. Later though (as she relates it), that same hurdler came to her and told her one of his friends had suggested some adjustments to his running style which he wanted to try; the same suggestions she had been saying all along. She was frustrated because it was as if her hurdler had never heard her. “How come he listened to his friend and not to me?” She lamented.

The Texas A&M coach listened to her whole story, making just a few grunting agreements as she spoke. Then he offered her some of the best advice I’ve heard. “Here’s the thing,” he says. “You don’t care how they heard it, you just care that they heard.”

I wish someone had said that to me when I was younger. There is admittedly great pride in giving advice that is heeded. It is a nice boost to the ego to provide direction and see it followed. I love the discipline and respect that “following orders” shows. If I take that pleasure down to its foundation, I find that “being heard” is also about “being right,” and that can come with a sense of self-satisfaction. However, when did giving good advice become more about me than the person the information was meant to help? Is giving advice intended to make me feel good, or is it better to give it away freely knowing that I might never get the credit? Another beautiful point captured by the Texas coach was subtle, but essential: listening carefully and acknowledging when advice was understood. Being humble enough to recognize that another person heeded advice irrespective of who gave it, honors the bravery and humility the other person has shown. I forget that all the time. It takes great courage and modesty to follow advice from another person; all we need care about is that the advice was heard, not who gave it.

An Anamnesis

There is no use trying,” said Alice. “One can’t believe impossible things.” 
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

Lewis Carroll “Alice in Wonderland”

There was this one time our company was dead. I mean it without hyperbole: finished. The latest parts we had built weren’t working; worse than that, they would work for a while and then they would burn out. We hoped to be a supplier into the consumer electronics market; making devices that short out is not a winning strategy. The complicating factor was that this was a brand new failure mode; we had never seen it before, and could not replicate it easily. The previous version of the parts had been built and tested enough that we developed a new, better, version that would combine everything we knew into our best possible device using most of our precious cash in the process. We were so confident in the outcome we couldn’t go back to our old imperfect version—we had “burned the boats” and could not retreat. The result was we were now dangerously low on cash, with no working parts and despite all our late nights and experiments, absolutely no understanding of what was wrong. This had been going on for weeks. We were well and truly dead.

I didn’t have to say this out loud—we all knew it was over. We didn’t need to see the beeping of heart monitors or hear the hiss of forced air in breathing tubes to realize we were on life support. Nothing we were doing was working, and the subcutaneous panic setting in was sapping all our remaining energy. The terrible thing on top of it was that most of the effort to find a fix was down to one person, our lead designer Marco.

Marco is an engineer’s engineer. Pragmatic to a fault; he measures twice and cuts only once. Marco does not know if his glass is half full or half empty; he will instead ask for the density of the liquid in the glass and then tell you its exact volume in your preferred unit of measure. Marco is not prone to sentiment.

The stress on Marco at this time was such though that from my desk I could hear him cursing in the lab nearby. I knew he was working on the problem and I knew we had all but determined an answer was impossible. So, I went to the lab, scooted over a stool and sat next to him at the bench while he picked up the parts one at a time, squinting at them through the eyepiece of a microscope. I’d seen so many pictures of the fried results that I knew what he was seeing and it was death-bed depressing. I started talking.

Hey, Marco. It’s okay. We’ll be okay. Put them down. Look at me…  I want you to trust me for just a moment, okay? Just listen to me. Will you close your eyes? Good. Thank you. Keep them shut. Now, I want you to think of a happy,  safe, relaxing place. You are there in that place right now, Marco. 

I said more than this, a lot more but it was all gentle patter aimed at reducing some of the strain and giving him a little space to think. While I was talking, babbling really, Marco’s eyes stayed closed. I saw his shoulders ease, his hands resting on his lap and his breathing even, comfortable. The fact that he trusted me enough to go along with this was an honor. We had tried everything else, right?

Stay with me, Marco… stay in the place too. Stay there and be content. Now, I want you to imagine that the reason that you’re there is to celebrate. There’s a cold beer in your hand, and it tastes good. You’re drinking the beer and toasting success. Pick a feeling for success… now hold onto that feeling, and the beer and the place… You feel so good there because you solved our problem. You found the root cause and fixed it. Remember that feeling? Remember the fix? You know the answer. Remember the answer, Marco.

Wonderfully, a smile teased around the edges of Marco’s mouth. Perhaps it’s because he thought the exercise was ridiculous or perhaps in his mind he was stretched out in a lounge chair on a beach, Corona in hand. However, he was relaxed and smiling and maybe, if only for a moment, my little talk bled off some of the pressure.

You know the answer, Marco! Problem solved. Now finish the last of your beer and open your eyes.

Marco opened his eyes, and the smile faded; his shoulders tensed back up into a fighting stance. We were back to reality, and playtime was over. Our impossible was still impossible.

“Now, quickly Marco,” I said. “Quickly, without thinking! Tell me what you remembered. What’s the answer?”

At this, I may have made a mistake because he looked angry and he started yelling. “The hell with it… I. DO. NOT. KNOW.” He punched his thigh with a fist, emphasizing each word. “IT’S THE DAMN PLASTIC. There. Happy?” He turned back to the microscope, dismissing me.

Leaning near his ear, not too close, I said, “Look at the plastic.” I left and went back to my desk.

Sometimes I think my job is to show up at meetings and help others to remember what they already know. The more impossible the problem the more we need to remind the people we work with of their birthright: they are the answer. Too often, we forget that we are the fix.  Instead we walk away sadly, all the poorer, while abundance is staring us right in the face. Remembering that the solution is “us” does not require we believe in impossible things; it simply requires confidence in our proven ability to deliver impossible answers. Pablo Picasso said it this way: “to draw, you must close your eyes and sing.” Marco closed his eyes and sang in the lab that day. I wish you could have heard the aria, it was beautiful.

As for the death of the company? Soon after our session in the lab, Marco fixed the problem and we went on to further success. 

It was the plastic.

Fathers of the Groom

Study me as much as you like, you will not know me, 
for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be. 
Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, 
for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see.

Rumi

There was this one time of mistaken identity at my eldest son’s wedding. If you have a son getting married, I feel your pain. There’s basically nothing for you to do at his wedding except maybe be a roving psychotherapist or unpaid Lyft driver. As I have five sons, I suppose I should just get comfortable with the ideal: a week of looking bemused coupled with directing questions to one of the many people who are actually in charge. Father of the groom is not a bad gig, really, it just takes a certain willingness to follow orders and then hide when things get tense.

So there we were at the wedding rehearsal at an old Catholic Church in Brooklyn, New York. It was late in the afternoon and fat, humid summertime clouds were threatening rain outside. Inside, there was some tension up by the altar—lots of wedding directions running headlong up against bad listening behaviors, so I made an excuse to go out to the front of the church and direct the late arrivals in. God forgive me, but this was a lie. I was going outside to hide.

The thing about New York on a summer afternoon is that if you are still enough, you can hear the symphony of the place. Standing near the curb, I could hear the orchestra tuning up: the distant sirens running scales, car horns hooting and the rubberized, hollow d-sharp of a basketball being dribbled. Children were laughing, and a dog was barking. There was the rasp of a window being opened and the bass notes of car engines idling. The comfort of the city singing to itself and the heat of the pavement leaking up into my shoes lessened my stress. In front of me, next to the curb, a minivan had popped its hatch and was beeping a warning as the back door was rising. A man stepped out of the passenger side speaking jovial Spanish to the driver, he couldn’t have been more than six feet away. He smiled at me, nodded and walked around to the back of the now open van. Leaning inside he said something else to the driver, and they both laughed, then he poked his head around, looked at me and said, “I can get the first one, but you’ll have to take the other.”

Now, this is one of those moments where you can argue the point or submit to whatever strange thing the universe has planned for you. Maybe it was also because I’d just spent several days congenially doing whatever I was asked in the name of peace and harmony. Whatever the reason was, I went along with it. “Sorry!” I said hustling over to the back of the van. Inside were two suitcases, one of them was apparently my responsibility. By this time the man had the other suitcase out and was saying his goodbyes to the driver. I didn’t know what to say, so I opened with something neutral: “Did you just get here?” 

“No,” he says. “I’ve been here about a week staying with my cousin.” The guy in the van toots the horn and waves as he drives off. “That’s my cousin.”

I’m standing there with his roller board, its metal arms almost accusingly pointing at me.

“Well?” he says. “We should get going! Lead the way.”

You might say at this juncture that that would have been an ideal time to clear the air as it were, but the city was so melodious and the walk of shame back to the apse just seemed wrong, so I went for it. I picked a direction and ambled up the sidewalk, suitcase in tow. Amazingly, he followed. Next to a black wrought iron fence, he stopped to admire a little garden full of flowers, and we chatted amiably. He had arrived from Costa Rica a week ago. He’d been to New York several times before. There was so much food at his cousin’s house, he felt as if he’d gained ten pounds. I started walking again, slowing down by a gate to let him catch up. To my surprise, he turned, opened the gate and began walking up the pathway of the enormous house next to the church. 

Now what was I going to do? There he was, standing at the foot of the stairs of the house, apparently waiting for me to go up and in before him. At this point even I was really curious about how this was all going to turn out, so I soldiered on, hefting the suitcase up to the porch and ringing the doorbell. The man I now knew as José was standing with his back to me, staring out at the front lawn. I could hear someone coming from inside, so I took the opportunity to walk down to him and get the other suitcase too. By the time I was back to the door it was open, and a woman was waving happily to José saying, “Father José! I’m so glad you made it! We’ve been expecting you!”

The plaque to the left of the door told me the rest of the story: “Blessed Sacrament Rectory.” Father José was the new Priest. Now the only remaining questions were: who did Father Jose think I was, and what did he think I was doing with him?

The woman (who as it turns out was the Parish Secretary) turned to me, held her hand out and said, “And you are?” 

Shaking her hand, I replied, “Father of the Groom.”

Father José was stunned. “Father of the Groom? What does that mean? Why did you help with the luggage?”

“My son’s wedding rehearsal is at the Church. I was standing outside getting some fresh air when you asked me to carry your suitcase, so I did.”

“You’re not a Priest? I could have sworn you were a Priest here. You were just standing there like you were waiting for me, so I assumed…” He says.

I picked the two suitcases up and moved them into the vestibule. José, the Secretary Alexandra and I were laughing. I extended invites to them to attend the wedding on Saturday. It was starting to drizzle, so I jogged back over to the church. Back inside, no had even missed me; they probably wouldn’t have even cared that I almost joined the Priesthood while I was gone.

Over my career, I’ve had a lot of people work for me. It was only after I was older and a tiny bit wiser that it occurred to me my employees had their own (unspoken) rationale for doing what I asked. People do things for their own reasons. A person’s motivation is wholly their own. Consider this: you cannot make anyone do anything. The best you can hope for is a result matching your request. The actual reason you got to a conclusion? That dwells in a place you cannot ever see (as Rumi might say). Every day we look at the outcome of our demands and believe we are the ones that made the results happen. In so doing we negate the precious singular agency of another person and substitute our own. When we do this, our spouse, friend, or co-worker ceases to matter in a small but significant way. What a loss! My new friend Father José thought a fellow Priest was waiting for him to carry his luggage. He walked all the way to the rectory with a worldview based on assumed motivations. Me? I did what he asked because I was happy to be away from a wedding rehearsal. This kind of thing happens every day to each of us. Give up the idea that you can make someone do something. Stop assuming you know the why behind another’s actions. And should you ever find yourself being asked to carry someone’s stuff but don’t know why, consider carrying it for them anyway and see where it takes you!

Staff Meeting Dilemmas

“One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.”

Stephen Hawking

I’ve been working at one company with the same group of people long enough now that our meetings have fallen into a comfortable pattern. There’s a lot of mutual trust and respect around the table, and we have settled into a lovely process. Everyone knows their area of responsibility, there’s lots of good listening and even better, lots of good humor. We laugh a lot during a staff meeting! There was this one time though where I got weird and killed the bonhomie to make a point about being too relaxed.

Here’s what usually happens at the end of our weekly staff meetings: one of our members, I’ll call him Krishna, almost always resorts to going to the whiteboard to write an equation or sketch out a graph that supports one of our conclusions. The group knows we’re coming to the end of the meeting because Krishna is about to buttress the group’s conclusion with math. Concluding in this manner wasn’t something we did on purpose, it evolved that way.

At this particular staff meeting, Krishna rises to the whiteboard, a purple dry erase marker in hand. As Krishna stands up to help us all find closure I guess I am not ready to be closed; we are being too easy on ourselves. We have done all the rituals all in the proper order. Our notebooks are closed and aligned neatly on top of our laptops. We have even unplugged the HDMI cable, so there are no powerpoint slides left to scroll through. Perhaps your meetings have a different liturgy of ending, but this is the way we do ours. Except when my need for discomfort strikes, so I said: “Hang on a minute, this time can we end on a theorem, and not a lemma?” I don’t know where this stuff comes from; I am confident in stating that I have not uttered the word “lemma” since high school. I am capable of much worse, I assure you.

If you don’t remember your mathematical terminology, a lemma is a result used as a support for a theorem. Lemmas are smaller “proofs” that support the big conclusion of a theorem. What I was inarticulately saying was that our staff had had fallen into a process of delivering little conclusions rigorously and feeling good about that outcome. However, we shouldn’t have felt good about that; lots of little conclusions do not necessarily add up to a proof of anything. As you know from your own experience, many conflicting conclusions are possible with such a process. If you were to end up with two different ones the term would be “dilemma” or two (di), lemmas. Satisfaction with multiple answers might be a process that cannot deliver THE answer.

Conclusions have a way of doing that. Sometimes we can fool ourselves that lots of little repetitive findings are a conclusion; that however is tautology masquerading as proof. Our staff meeting had fallen into a trap of adhering to the form of a proof, without the function of actually proving anything. A lemma, even a significant one cited many times, is still a lemma—the theorem is harder to get to, and sometimes you need to stick with it, unplugged HDMI be damned. It is worth considering that many meetings are lemma oriented. That’s not a bad thing if the lemma is the thing you’re after, but what happens if you need an unarguable proof? Here is perhaps an even more interesting question I have been asking myself: which one, the lemma or the theorem, represents how I operate in the world? Am I living my life as a string of loosley-connected lemmas or would I rather it be a single unarguable proof of something else? There’s a dilemma worth thinking about.

Welcome to the Hotel California

Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like
But you can never leave!”

The Eagles “Hotel California”

For years we lived in a beautiful community in Northern California near San Francisco. The city really had all the things we were looking for at the time. A high priority on our list was an excellent public school system for our kids. We chose this place to settle down and raise a family, calling a halt to any more job-related relocations. The decision was a good one and we made a beautiful home for our family in that spot for over two decades. Our city was a community of high expectations: well cared for homes, neatly edged lawns, plenty of parks and trails. With kids to worry about, we delighted in a place that lacked surprises: crime was low, test scores were high, volunteerism and civic engagement were good. You could rationally expect home values and standard of living to increase at a nice pace. You understood the boundaries of the place as if they were the neatly laid out chalk lines of the many soccer fields on which our kids played.

Almost two years ago though, we sold our house there and bought another place in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, about an hour’s drive south from our previous home. Those mountains are a much wilder, far less structured environment than the “East Bay” from which we hailed. There was this one time after a good rainstorm that a huge lodge-pole pine fell across the road at the bottom of our mountain. The tree took out power and prevented all the neighbors and me from getting home. I had to call back up to my house to get someone to come back down on the opposite side of the fallen pine to drive me the mile or so back. Then again, I couldn’t make the call from where the tree fell because there’s no cell service there—so I drove back into town, made the call and then went back to the tree. Based on what I could see, Pacific Gas & Electric was going to have to spend considerable time to fix this, not only clearing the road but restringing the wires and fixing the pole. So having made it back home, I fired up the wood stove and got ready to wait it out. I can confidently say that nothing approaching this sequence of events would ever happen in the community we left. Big falling trees are a common event in Santa Cruz County, especially during the rainy season. Finding a novel way back to your house is a way of life there. Making sure we were always conscious of a different way home is precisely the reason we made our move.

There is a steady opiate of comfort in well-worn paths. Confidence that the road will always be clear and the power always on is a drug. Success and prosperity are as much a tranquilizer as Ambien. Habits become, well they become habitual. Back in the East Bay, I was getting to a point where small interruptions to the intravenous drip of my sweet life produced outsized anger. How dare that neighbor’s sprinkler fill up my drainage ditch! Who’s car was that parked at the end of the driveway? Consider also that keeping in front of a culture of expectation is a stimulant—an amphetamine if you will. The car you drive, the seat in church, the accolade for a child, the restaurant table near the window is a rush. It is possible for a place to have both the stimulant and the depressant happening simultaneously—I will hazard a guess here that this is a defining characteristic of most prosperous communities. The life-change of children leaving home, becoming “empty nesters” allowed us to think about comfort in a unique way. Children had to a certain extent locked us to the place, and when they left, there was freedom to consider alternative ways of living that exchanged the comfort of the known for the wonder that comes with the unexpected.

For myself, I wanted to be in a spot where a pine can fall, and you and your neighbors laugh at the splintered giant that took it upon itself to sever your connection to the rest of the world. I wanted prosperity to look like a basketful of eggs from a chicken coop. There are no right-angled plots of fescue here; water cuts its own path; your skill with a chainsaw measures you more than a hood emblem. The sheer randomness of this place is so lovely you can be shaken awake in the falling of a leaf; a redwood chains itself to your eye and will not let you look elsewhere. Relocating here was a detox move; a nature diet; an attempt to give the muse her voice back, and it worked.

I am not belittling the genuine tragedies of actual drug addiction—my family has direct experience with it; all the more reason for us to examine dependence in any area of our lives and take immediate action. Realize though there are societal opiates, cultural amphetamines and they creep into most lives uncritically examined. In my own experience, these addictions walked into the marbled foyer of my beautiful home; they didn’t hide; they were prescribed not by doctors, but by neighbors and Pastors. These were socially acceptable cravings, encouraged even. These dependencies kept the peace, made sure we stayed well within lines prescribed by our social circle. When friends and neighbors heard that we were leaving and where we were going, they thought we had gone mad. We heard, “Why would you move?” over and over again. Some people stopped talking to us not out of anger, but out of fear. We were checked in, but we weren’t supposed to leave.

You cannot take half measures with addiction in any form. Trust me on this. Dependency does not negotiate; it kills the hostages, and you’re one of the hostages. Think about your personal hostage status in its present moment. What addiction are you yoked to? Consider for a moment that you might not be as free as you had previously imagined. If you’re ready to consider that, try an experiment: put down your smartphone, and check back in tomorrow. Try to log off and shut down for 24 hours. Go crazy and try this: leave and not tell anyone where you are going. Skip using GPS. Go ahead; we’ll all be here when you get back. Our move was an attempt to get back some choices. To be deliberate in place can be a move towards freedom. A fallen tree can be a lesson in going home your own way.

“Will it Scale?”

There was this one time one of the poor souls who had to work for me asked about scale. Hooboy did he get an earful. “Scale” is one of those buzzwords the cognoscenti out here in Silicon Valley are prone to throw out in conversation when they want to make a point about the viability of a plan, or product. The name drop usually occurs at the end of some pitch, and it will go something like this: “Yes, but…” (and the universe collectively inhales), “…Will It Scale™?”

The “will it scale,” question is a proxy for the prospects of a company’s growth. Not just any growth, though, big growth, huge growth. The term of art is a “hockey stick” increase—meant to mimic the curve of a hockey stick’s blade when turned on its side. If you’re starting a technology business making a point about scale is always on a series of powerpoint slides (also known as the “pitch deck”) where, inevitably, every graph has a lovely curve up and to the right. Un-ironically, the scale of the axes on those graphs matters less than the exciting visual of steeply ascending growth curves positioned well inside the investment return horizon of the potential investor. The discussion of scale matters a lot in a pitch: the scale of the market, your competitors, and of course, your ability to scale. However, here’s the question today (and the reason I directed so much ire at one of my co-workers when he asked about it): when did the word “scale” become synonymous with the word “large”?

The answer is our obsessive focus on measures of growth at the expense of almost everything else. Drastic increases in monthly active users, click-throughs, views, “stickiness,” licenses, revenues—anything that shows hockey-stick increases is the singular way to show success. Growth is the way to get funded. If you’re a public company any measure of growth is practically the only way to keep your investors happy. “Getting to scale” has come to mean rapid growth and that means success. Get big quickly is now the business mantra of our age and importantly, the fixation is altering our experience of ourselves. As a direct result of this, measures of apparent size are now a cultural obsession. How many followers do you have on Instagram is considered far more important than the quality of the pictures you’re showing. The sheer quantity of “shares” in a news article matters more than the veracity of the content. “Going viral” doesn’t mean getting sick anymore, it’s a measure of operational health. There are products that many of us are using right now that are specifically designed to provide the endorphin rush of pleasure when “followers” like something we have done online. The system we have built that rewards growth as the measure of success has created products and services designed to deliver on that metric; not because the products are good, but because designers have become adept at holding attention for the sake of a metric. We have become unhealthily obsessed with growth and size; ruled by a measurement. Such is our preoccupation with expansion and proliferation that scale has become more a definition of business success than good old customer satisfaction. The fact that that growth at any expense is rewarded proves we have learned to game the system.

The adage “what gets measured gets done” applies. The reality distorting focus on measuring growth has in-turn created a slew of technologies meant to deliver on that measurement. You and I and our fingers and our eyeballs are the measures. Growth comes despite the effect it has on us, its users—and certainly in spite of the workers that have to mass-produce the products. Obsessions over a single metric make for costly business decisions; we won’t be the first generation to figure that out. It wasn’t that long ago that banking’s obsession with never-ending returns led them to collateralize debt obligations (and look at how that worked out). Every age seems to have its Enron. The dire warning this time is that we have put the attention of our children on the line for the sake of “scale”. We’re telling our kids that growth and “likes” are measured in clicks and that these metrics matter more than internal development and self-satisfaction. We are teaching that character matters only insofar as described by follower counts. Perhaps it is time to realize that companies using attention-keeping technologies for growth are just another Ponzi scheme.

Let us reconsider what the metrics of success genuinely are. Consider this: small is good too. Very small can be even better. Scaled down and personal can be deeply satisfying. The scale of each of our impacts on society is best measured in the life we have changed, even if that life is just our own. Growth happens to each of us one day at a time, just as it always has, just as it always will.

Ali vs. Foreman and “The Rumble in the Jungle”

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
Or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world

Mary Oliver “When Death Comes”

There was this one time that I realized I could categorize a lot of people’s life ambitions into whether they were an Ali or a Foreman, two of boxing’s greatest champions. By lots of societal measures, they’re both successful men: celebrities, wealthy, philanthropists. Both have been honored numerous times for their achievements, but Muhammad Ali risked so, so much more over the course of his life. Ali didn’t risk himself once, he did it over, and over and over, and he did so publicly–facing massive ridicule and condemnation along the way. Ali versus Foreman: pretty good outcomes, entirely different legacies.

Foreman versus Ali: say that, and a boxing fan will reply with “the Rumble in the Jungle.” A favored heavyweight champ against a has-been contender in the boxing match of the century on a steamy 1974 morning in Zaire. Ali’s story, even up to this point is the classic hero’s journey (and it kept going!). Let me say at the outset that I’m a fan of both George Foreman and Muhammad Ali even though you might read what I’m about to write here as more condemnatory of Mr. Foreman. It’s the archetype of the fight’s winner, Ali that matters here.

Consider Muhammad Ali: widely known today as “the greatest” a counterculture hero; a gifted athlete who fought a racist American system and went on to reclaim the heavyweight boxing title against stacked odds. He was a braggart—if you remember him, you probably also recall his rhyme laden, almost lyrical trash-talking. That gift for syncopated haranguing though is now seen as prefiguring rap and hip hop. Did you know he was Grammy-nominated twice? He’s known as a talented boxer, but did you know he also fought a Japanese wrestler to a draw late in his career? Forgettable at the time, that fight presaged MMA. Ali was edgy, a boundary pusher. He was willing to face ridicule in spite of conscientiously objecting the draft for the Vietnam war, being banned from the sport during his prime, and winning a right to rejoin boxing from the U.S. court system. Most of us would have given up by then. Ali was the Olympic-gold-medal-winning Cassius Clay who became the Sufi Muslim Muhammad Ali. He defies categorization. Even if you’re not a fan of the “sweet science,” chances are you know him.

George Foreman. Think about him for a moment too. What’s the first image that comes to mind with his name? It’s probably a grill. Now, this is in spite of a back story that is almost as compelling as Ali’s. Big George went on to win back the heavyweight championship at the age of 45! He became a Baptist preacher. Also, he sold the George Foreman Grill.

Think about it. These two men fought each other in Kinshasa, Zaire in October of 1974. By that time they were both already famous. Ali, a 4-1 underdog facing what looked to be an unbeatable, bigger, stronger Foreman in “the jungle.” Ali wins in a stunning knockout with a strategy and no small amount of chutzpah that is still studied. One man goes on to light the Olympic cauldron in Atlanta capping national pride in a nation that 28 years before had vilified him; the other made a fortune selling cooking products.

A friend who happens to be a Catholic Priest will sometimes say to me about someone: “Oh that one… he’s a company man.” At that moment although I do not know the man’s company, I do know some important things about him. That “company man” is not released to his moment. He’s ransomed to sell grills. He’s probably the victim of expectations other than his own. His most significant risk is not meeting a quota set by someone else. He’s known for a product, not as a person. His gains are all external, and his pains are internal, probably unexamined. His net worth? Climbing. His self-worth? I’ll bet he questions it at times.

Which one are you? Are you selling grills or are you changing your name? Are you risking exposure, willing to be called “fraud”? Alternatively, are you terrified of “not hitting the number?” Whose measures are you measuring yourself against? Are you ready to risk being kicked out of the tribe to speak the truth? How many times would you be willing to do that? Consider it: are you just a visitor to this world or are you going to do something particular and real?