I'm Howard Stevenson it's a pleasure to be with you I mean that sincerely since I died once out here and as I say we're going to talk about building life I was telling Howard I failed once at retirement three times a dying in 71 times it being on the Forbes list so I'm used to failure now we'll go forward from here what I'm going to talk about is as I aged out of fundraising which is you know picking pockets and rolling drunks I started to ask a question my wife and I between us have seven kids and twelve grandchildren and we're both married to jerks so when year I got to pay tuition at Columbia Yale Harvard Williams and Bowdoin I'm bragging and complaining but I said that and said you know why is it that people say it's so hard for successful people to have successful children and that's a that's true across almost every culture it's rice paddies - rice paddies clogs clogs bogs - bogs all of these things so we I set out with a friend or an ash to figure out the answer that question you come to some first question is what do you mean by success so I want to talk about that the second thing I want to talk about is at the end is a little book that just came out in October when I died one of the young people who worked with me said you you make so many wiseass no excuse me I didn't listen to all the advice you gave me can I interview you and I thought that'd be nice my kids or grandkids would this is I what do we did die and I suffered unattended cardiac arrest out here on the lawn out here and that's about 1% chance of survival and but I was extremely lucky and so we wrote this book that came out as Howard's gift I want to tell you a little bit about sort of the lessons I've tried to pass on to the kids so you know the first question though is you get into is what is success because when we tried to write the book that's obviously the first question what do you mean by it and that's been a dilemma that goes back to Aristotle Herodotus Herodotus said at best no captain no man successful till he dies I tried that it didn't work this is a state of being because as soon as you say I'm successful you probably start to fail because that's a constant process you know there's some unique activities if I ask the people in this room where you successful I think almost everybody to raise your hand yet there's no one profile that would fit it so this is some unique combination of what we bring to the party where we come from all sorts of things and there's also sort of I was successful when now I always find it sad when people talk about it being admitted to Harvard Business School as the high point of their wife or it's even worse if they talk about being admitted to st. Paul's but it's a question of well what do we mean is it a score if so is it I loved Ann's comment about money this morning one thing about success is really hard to measure who is the most successful person in the room well all depends on how you measure it's often uneven I joke about a divorce that's a painful part of your wife and dealing with it with kids I never expected to be a single parent I wound up being a single parent that caused me to do some things that were quite different than I imagined like I gave up a very nice activity because somebody had to drive them to school and other things and I my son was a second my youngest son was second happiest person in the room when he got his driver's license it's often quite unstable you know things can be going well then something happens and you can't freeze it you're there it's wonderful and you move on so one of the problems with success it's both rational emotional who'd like to compare myself to if we look around the room you know I guess if everybody's telling bill gates he's handsome but if he really looks in the mirror well Whitney Way you know and a lot of the success books are sort of weird they tell you to think through all the angles you got to study it you do you we look at Malcolm Gladwell it talks about 10,000 hours if you're naturally strong I'm not going to be a basketball player it's quite clear I don't jump and particularly now and you sort of get on this life path sometimes call it a double applied rut and if you do it all your wife you're probably get better at it so if you do that that's what they tell you nothing can go wrong the problem is sometimes things happen now I will evoke sympathy with this one but the other thing I found about success is when you talk to I think particularly many successful entrepreneurial fathers their view of success is you fire the bullet and then you draw the circle around it what I did is success now you should be just like me now this turns out to be reasonably hard I think about my own career you know I started the Entrepreneurship when nobody cared well if my sons or daughters tried to do it they wouldn't work there is a different path that's a different time you know we started the first hit one of the first hedge funds in the United States I was involved in starting and managed for 10 years well you know now there 2600 edge funds started each year and 2,500 going out of business it's a very different game and the other thing about it is it's really not the way that it works because if you do that you often leave out a few things like family community and as one guy said in their interviews I now retired it's time for me I just don't know who me is I've been so involved in doing what other people tell me to do so the other life's reality is quite different life's reality is all about choices we're standing at Crossroads and we don't know what's over the horizon you know I got 10 year in 1978 that's something that people seek and I resigned immediate people thought is crazy but I'd interviewed a whole bunch of tenured faculty and said they're not happy why would I go down a path where many of the more quote successful people aren't happy let me try something different so but I had no idea where it would lead led back here now but on a very different set of terms now success is a tough problem the external measures and the internal measures aren't always the same sometimes we're rewarded for things we're not proud of and sometimes we're proud of things we're not rewarded for I think secondly things change as I said the world changes we have to deal with it we teach about people opportunity deal in context and the context really matters you change if you still want the same thing at 82 as you want it at 22 your name's Hugh Hefner and what's obvious is sometimes the obvious route to success leads to failure because you get going down that path and you wind up in Amarillo and you had no intention of being in Amarillo I hope nobody's from Amarillo there's another thing that I've observed which often it hurts when others experiences success that could have been yours you know I'm the ST and bow post it's a fairly famous firm I left it when the kids I became a single parent uh I look on the Forbes list and see the guy who took over from me yeah I winced but I think well if I'd stayed in that path I couldn't have done the other things I've done but I still wince I have to admit when I open up Forbes and see it I winced but that's okay what we discovered is there are different kinds of success and the satisfactions of each are different and that's what I want to talk about a bit now I think for most of our graduates of Harvard Business School they're really three great fears in life one is I won't be a success - I will be a success well it won't be enough this famous Peggy Lee song and I'll be success but I have to sell my soul that somehow to be successful in the world's terms I have to give up something that's really important to me now my everything I learned from my mother I think came from Reader's Digest but this is one that I'll never forget success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get and one of the most important pieces of advice I think I've given my kids is marry a happy person because you're not going to change somebody who's unhappy into somebody who's happy so figure out if they're happy or not so there's a lot of bad advice out there simple rules follow your passion wonderful I'm passionate about being an actor okay how many parents are support have kids on deep subsidy trying to be an actor or a writer in Hollywood or those kind of things so and they get to about 50 and they say I'm not really going to make it now what I'm going to do and by the way that's about when the parents die so the subsidy stops and it's really a problem there is this stress on perfection of having it all you're supposed to be you know dr. Ruth in the bedroom and Donald Trump in the boardroom and well you know I don't know who you are but I find 24 hours a day doesn't let me do all those things all the time and we'll come back and talk about that and how you manage it and there are some wonderful success models that gloss over the flaws now if I think of Rupert Murdoch Jon Corzine can we imagine Lady gaga no we Anna Hans Lee we want would you really like to be some of these people that have been written up as great successes and even worse would you want your kids to be them I can't imagine if one of my daughter's said I really want to model myself on Lady gaga the two that went to the Harvard Business School have done OK about well the one who's wound up being a family counselor we interviewed about 150 people they were high achievers in multiple arenas they were they seemed to care about others which was probably one of our criteria their success in life make a difference to many others they weren't just about me I didn't interview Donald Trump they seemed to keep going and growing and they were unique we interviewed everybody from investment bankers to a cleaning woman that had come probably not originally as an illegal in and it's now has a firm with about 50 people that work for and is really amazingly happy and all our kids are graduating from college and so it's a very fascinating group of people but mostly what she saw is people that were quite satisfied that they felt good about themselves and good about their life so you know I could criticize this as a sociological study because these are probably the criteria we chose for success not something that was given to us by a deep research and what we saw in these people is they seized opportunities that's presented they largely reavoice now my co-author Laura and I argued a lot about can you live a life without regrets and it was yes we can know we can't yes a very intelligent argument but what we discovers we're talking about different things she was talking about consequences and I was talking about sort of process you know things go wrong but if you acted honest to yourself if things go wrong it's pretty hard to have a regret said I acted on the best information regrets come when you kid yourself one of the titles in the Howards gift book is don't cheat at solitaire we also found that people that really enjoyed the here now they weren't always putting off you know when we interviewed one of them ice cream arrived at the show the office he stopped the interview and he says you'll wait the ice cream will melt let's have ice cream now and that was a very important lesson for us and what we discovered is a landscape of satisfaction if you ask people why they succeeded they give you the same BS it's in Franklin pounds and Covey it's in a bunch of these books but what we did is we asked people tell us about successes in your life rather than tell us why you succeeded and it was a very interesting thing we saw obviously achievement what have you done against goals that others are also striving for that's money power fame there are lots of forms of achievement and you can't have them all by the way many of my richest friends are not known as one said he'd paid two hundred fifty thousand dollars to get off the Forbes list I think that Trump pays a lot to get on it there's significance have you had a positive impact on the people you care about there's happiness how do you feel about yourself in your life are you content and then there's legacy have you done something or is it build upon now one of the things that's very clear is these are uncorrelated you can achieve without being happy right Marilyn Monroe or an astoundingly probably demonstrated that conclusively can you be significant without achievement well my grandfather was never more than an assistant postmaster in a small town in Utah he was a silver beaver scout which is the highest award in Scouting he taught me a lot about conservation and love for the land I think he was very significant in many people's lives can he be happy without achieving just go to Aspen how many parents told their kids I've worked so hard I want you to be happy they go out to Aspen meet their kids and say what the hell you doing and they said you told us to be happy dad we're happy what what's your problem you know I'm a trustafarian that's a great religion now legacy I was having trouble with until I thought about Karl Marx he certainly wasn't known in his lifetime he is mean and abusive to his family he was a drunkard which generally somewhat goes with unhappiness and yet you bit left a big legacy with her for good or bad so all these are uncorrelated and getting one doesn't get you the other and we'll come back to that and part of the reason they're quite different happiness is really about me and now you don't make other people happy you make yourself happy and you are happy and you're you don't say oh I'll be happy in the future you say am i happy now whereas legacy I'm sorry Bill Clinton you don't define your own legacy other people define your legacy and it's about your impact on the future now achievement is sort of funny who do I compare myself to you know I have a friend who feels not very wealthy because Bill Gates has a thousand times as much money I point out that 65 million dollars and satisfied many people but as long as he compares himself to Bill Gates he could make himself really miserable and by the way it's also led his children to think that unless they make a billion dollars they're not a success which has led them to some very interesting behavior and significance is another thing you have to see whoo yeah I want to help other people but who do I want to help Bill Gates can only give $10 a person to everyone on earth he has to choose who to help and that's a very important choice it's both an external choice and an internal choice who do I care about and what I want to do for them now when you think about them they're really complicated achievement is there's a time dimension to it is about the past is about the present or the future if you think about the impact is it on me or isn't on other people you know I could develop things that are achievement that are about me alone or I can build a system where other people were involved they're emotional drivers there's some very positive drivers mastery recognition pride but there are bill there are Donald Trump's and V greed and fear these are both these are all drivers toward achievement but if they're not positive very often they're driven by looking outside and saying I've got to compete and you can always compete with somebody who make you feel bad and then there's the context you know it's the Wayne Gretzky I got a skate to where the puck will be not to where it is now so it's there's a little thing called values here you know as one of our daughters said it one of my wife's round numbers birthday mirror mirror on the wall I'm like my mother after all and she was somewhat upset and saying it but we all I can hear my father speaking very often when I'm talking so all this stuff is complicated now when do they look at it you know each of these have twins right you can think about contentment fulfillment and happiness or laziness and gluttony they both can lead you to somewhat be happy you think about envy and greed driving into achievement or you can think about recognition pride and mastery you can think about fairness generosity and caring which is external or you can think a few of us have been on boards where power and self aggrandizement leads people to quote be significant outside and then even in legacy there's altruism and generative to his iers or there's the fear of death and need for control you know I know somebody that's written a thousand-year trust because he really does you know trust should be named mistrust if you trusted your kids you wouldn't put it in trust but to do it for a thousand years I unkindly pointed out that William the Conqueror still has 50 something years to run and I'm sure you've seen everything but when you look at these does contentment of fulfillment help you achieve not really you know certain neuroses help you to achieve this fairness generosity and caring help you in the competitive battle it actually isn't even help you be happy right because when somebody else is miserable you're miserable if you think about altruism those who leave room for other people's success it's an absolute requirement for the creating legacy but it also will probably diminish your own achievement because you're letting other people be recognized where there is there are many people and you see it all the time in entrepreneurship where the need to be the boss prevents you from actually developing something that will endure so these are complex most human beings except for Donald Trump have most of these emotions and because we have complex emotions we're tired or torn we're tugged in different directions this one helps me get jeev on this dimension but we all want them because we want all of these kinds of success and this is part of the challenge I think we all face is I don't know very many people don't want to have some measure of success on all of these dimensions so one thing is I'll find your passion you know that we'll find somehow something that in achievement will find significant happiness and leave our legacy the only problem doesn't work because one activity rarely has it all if you find love at the office you can get yourself sued and there's certainly different constituencies different judgments when somebody says to their children I'm working so hard I'm doing it all for you my children what does the kid generally think dad you're doing this for your own ego and yeah it's really nice I'm really glad that you're giving me some money but you're not doing your work for me it's for you I mean I can it requires different skills if you try and be CEO at home the chief operating officer generally has something to say about it we've been my experience very subtly uh and there's often collateral damage because if you focus on only one thing you're highly likely to forget some other things and this is a problem so I just remind you of this poor guy there's another approach which is sequential success you know we'll achieve in achievement after we achieve we'll find significance after we find significance we'll find happiness and then our legacy will be left when we die that didn't work either this is there's a lot of books generally sold to YPO members about from success to significance half time I can go through the titles they don't work for a very simple reason when is enough to move on you know if you say what have I achieved enough I never want do you think any of us want to ever say I'll never achieve again I I don't know when II you know people even if they never play golf in their life they retire and go to Ford and they got to become a champion golfer unlikely to happen if you didn't start it at 16 it's like being a skier if you didn't learn to ski before you develop common sense you'll never be a great skier because what's enough for now it's certainly not enough for your wife in most of these areas so the notion I'll do something and then at the next stage I'll pass on and I'll focus this is good for ADHD people because since I'll focus on one thing and then I'll achieve it and then I can move on the only trouble is the decision to move on is really tough and there's also the problem is that you can always maximize I was a mathematician when I was young I don't remember how to do a riemann stieltjes integral but I do remember that there's no largest integer you can always want to add one to anything and if you're successful at something often you say well I just want a little more you know and it's a very interesting problem of how do you not maximize and we do have continuing emotional needs as I say I don't think you can ever leave the need for achievement when is it you want to say I've done enough for everyone else it's now about me I just want to be happy myself I mean I find that it's actually harder with kids my youngest is 38 and my oldest is 53 and yeah there is needy now as they were in the 17 existing there's just another zero in all the needs or two zeros or three zeros depending on what's going on in their life and by the way you'll miss some opportunities if you try and do it sequentially because you know can you wait to be happy I can't imagine living life saying I will finally be happy when I've got a hundred million dollars that's a little bit of a nonsense and by the way your family will never wait you know they find ways to cope if you don't deal with it now so what we saw in these people is a very interesting phenomena they sort of looked at life and said oh I achievement significance happiness and they told stories about starting small they tell stories of each of these things that happen to them when they're young they weren't having a big impact but they could talk about significance of what they did for people they could talk about small achievements when we had stories of high school achievements from people that actually Peter Ueberroth told us a story about his high school experience now here an Lea Los Angeles Olympics and was very famous in a lot of things he was also the guy that helped restore Weis Angeles after watts but his stories went way back both of significance and achievement and by the way as they went through this they told bigger and bigger stories and you know the problem is we don't know when it's going down I was pretty healthy I'd exercise the mornings walking across campus when I died happily it was January 3rd and it was a warm day and people were around but if I'd been 3 minutes later I would be I wouldn't be here because I would have been in my office and he had about 4 minutes to get help but they also told stories all the legacies they spun off and many of them could not they were much more interested in the legacies from early in their life whether it was something they did in high school that has endured something somebody they helped when they first got in their career so it was a very interesting set of stories about the way they sort of spun this through a spiral of life now there's it's really easy to put things in the wrong domain we live in Cambridge there is a school there where I swear that kids are the achievement you know mine is the smartest kid in the room and if you don't believe it I'm going to beat you up this is the parent speaking if you say I've never as happy as when I'm at the office I think you got a problem oh I love my work I I've had the best career in the world but actually there's some other things I like to is my children's trust the legacy I'm leaving I don't think so invisible leadership of charities as significance I've been the chairman of the board of NPR been actively involved in a lot of charities and some of its you know you get in there and some of these elbows are equally sharp shall we say in some of these charities as they are at any business that have been involved in and one of the questions I always ask people is where do you put your tennis and I'm 71 years old I play tennis badly but I really enjoy it but you know that's not going to I was with a friend the other day who's 72 who pays federer to warm him up he's very good but you know at 72 he can afford it so it's not a problem but it's that's a very important part of his self-identity is being able to win at Jenna's and his sons his sons are starting to beat him and boy is this bad now his son happens to be on the tennis team at a major university but he still thinks he should be able to beat his son now he can play head games on his son so he wins quite often but so you know if you think about it I think the lesson of the book was most people seek all four satisfactions in all domains and seeking one printer's you hinders you pursuing the others we only have 24 hours a day the time you spend on achievement you don't spend on significance that great satisfaction from one source can't make up for missing on the others and I hate the word balance I always think of it as a seal that has something sitting on his nose spinning around I think unfortunately it's about juggling now you know juggling is really an art if you think about juggling you got to keep your eye on all the balls you know if you only look at one ball you're gonna drop the others so you got to keep your eye on all the balls when you touch something you have to give it energy you know nobody applauded you as a juggler if you hold all the balls in your hand you can balance the balls but that's not a very interesting thing and in juggling you catch it and you throw it almost immediately but you have to give it energy you have to give it direction and you have to get rid of it and you have to calculate if those of you who I just want go to Cirque du Soleil you see them throwing these things and they catch them over there how they get them to come down at the right time over there is absolutely beyond me but I think what it amounts to is really practice which is why I when you think of those spirals these people that we admire often have been practicing the skill of juggling all of their life and what's the most important ball in juggling it's the falling ball it's not the one the top it's not the win the hand it's the one you're about to drop now in life I find that there are some rubber balls careers tend to be fairly rubber they'll bounce you know family it's a little harder sometimes you've you dropped that when it shatters so the falling ball is an a tremendously important thing now if you think about the dynamics of life in the early stages you don't think much about legacy now I can think when I was 21 I I didn't really think about what I was doing for legacy purposes although in fact when I look back and by the way if I tell the story of the kids I can tell them why writing the how the head ski case or some of the things I did when I was very young turned out to be a part of the legacy but that wasn't the reason I wrote it I just thought Howard head was cool you know as you get to be an early career this is a time when you start to make the attachments is it as Anne said it's one of the important things about having some people to talk to it may be a spouse it may not be a spouse but if you don't build your friends and it's amazing to me at my age how many of the people I really know well and like I would became friends with early in my life that somehow the shared experience the shared traumas the shared things are so important to those relationships and the happiness if you don't know by the time you're in your 30s what makes you happy stop and ask yourself that question I know what makes me happy I love to have lunch with friends or dinner with friends it's something I seek out because if I go for a week without having you know be too after family and if I don't talk to all my kids at least two or three times a week I feel badly you know some of its they're busy I'm busy but somehow we find time to talk but happiness you got to know what it means and you got to say that's something I seek out on a regular basis I'm not going to postpone it then of course the big red ball in the earliest career is the achievement you know very few people our Grandma Moses you don't achieve starting at 83 so this is the early career dynamics in the mid-career we sort of get on a path we know what makes us happy we settled on who's significant to us unless there's a major change and we're sort of know where the achievement goes and then legacy starts to raise its head well what do I really care about am i doing the things that I care about will I be proud of my life at the end you know there's usually something when one of your 43 year old friends dies of a heart attack it's a wake up call remember when Pat Lyles died some of you probably remember Pat but when he died hmm he was the runner he was in good health he was supposed to be my trustee if I died and now I'm picking up his pieces and by the way he wasn't welcome there I had to figure out what where the pieces were first before I could pick them up it was a good lesson to me but then then we get in this golden years I'm not going to achieve a lot more I've got one more book I'm working on now I've gotten you know but of the 16 books of I written they're there and as one time somebody introduced me one Howard you write books at once you put them down you can't pick them up but the achievement is what it is I find that with 12 grandchildren seven kids and lots of friends you know you have to work hard at maintaining those relationships you know now happily in the world of the internet and happily in the world of email and things you can keep in contact in ways that just never did before but you still have to work at it and you have to ask yourself do I have enough time or am i allocating enough time to it and then legacies there but at this point you know if you're not happy forget about it as they say so I want to go back to key problems you can't achieve in all dimensions I will never be a great tennis player I'll never be a great skier they're a lot of thing I will never be a singer I can go through all the things I won't be so I have to focus on what I want to be what are my skills what am I where do I feel good about myself in the competition in the world you know one of the things I learned early in life I worked with a guy and I said he was one of the people would help coin the word automation in the his manufacturing course and he went into the paper industrial said Joe why did he go in the paper industry he said John Diebold liked to compete with smart people I prefer to compete with dumb people and it was a lesson I learned in life why would I ever want to be a mathematician they're really smart people that work hard and love math I wasn't one of them again things change things change and you change you know I thought I would in my golden years with a lot of travel well it turns out I run out of breath pretty easily you know I was up on Mauna Kea two weeks ago at the Smithsonian Observatory there well I was really glad they brought oxygen because I could make it up the hill when I started to walk a couple hundred feet at 14,000 feet I said yeah 13750 six be precise but I was excited about going to the observatory but I recognized that I'm not going to walk up a lot of those hills by myself this still exists I still look around and see things I could have had I didn't have and I still wins there is a wins factor but if you don't get over it and say I don't feel like I made the wrong decisions I just went and say that was a choice I chose I chose it constantly consciously and I have no regrets this was if the first surprises the complexity of success and the second surprise was the emotional drivers and how complex humans are because of the diversity of motors from drivers the third surprise to us was the role of enough now enough so funny English word it has a lower bound have you done enough and when you're yelling at your kids that's enough it hasn't upper bound and defining it it's interesting if you do a search other than Bill McKibben's book on enough there isn't much out there on enough that's not a word that come we always want more it's like Samuel Gompers the great labor leader when asked what he wanted answer was more now what we saw in these people was a reason sense of enough and that was a very interesting inside test because there's enough on two different dimensions one two counts one is the dimensionality what's enough in this achievement what's enough significance what's enough happiness you know because if you don't define enough you have to go for more and the more crowds out something else and figuring out where your achievements are what are the subparts of achievement what are the real dimensions of achievement that matter to you now to me ideas are important so writing books has been something I like and work hard at and then there's question time because what's enough for today what's enough for this week what's enough for this year and what's enough for a lifetime those become particularly important in implementing a sense of enough now I think there's some benchmarks for enough most of us need progress you know even if you have a lot of money you don't feel good if you don't make more now I developed a trick for myself I try and keep a balance sheet that includes the money I've given away because for me to die the richest person in the cemetery is not the goal but on the other hand I like you know I started with a measurement type of guy and so sort of understanding how much I've given to charity over my lifetime and keeping that in my balance sheet how much I've given to my kids those kind of things actually helped me just feel good about the total even though I sort of said a number that I'm going to I've stayed at for about ten years and over that I give away but I want to keep track I want to understand what's what's going on I think one of the things about enough is you can put an activity down with satisfaction if you say what's my and I enjoyed Anne's talk this morning because having that list of things that I want to accomplish today means you can actually do it if you don't have a list you'll never finish it if you have a list you can actually step down and say well this is a good day I got everything done and but you have to be realistic about what you're going to do today my wife always had lists that are impossible and she also starts with the hardest task I tend to start with those things that I can check off the quickest so I can get 15 things done that I feel good about even if there's one damn thing is left over but in fact that becomes very important but also by having sort of a sense of what you want to accomplish you can see different benefits from another activity so if you say well I got to talk to the kids today well that's not in the achievement goal but if I can say well I talk to three of them today I had to listen to one more thing about how Hollywood is hard to work in but I wasn't that every day I just want to turn on the tape and say yeah I told you I worked once with Jordan see Scott I understand the business you're in but the other thing about enough is if you start to do it you can see now I did I had enough work for today that doesn't mean I'm not going to work tomorrow so I want to come back to it tomorrow so part of it is list but part of it's a sense of what's enough because enough does some wonderful things what are your values now for example in money you see if one of my values is giving it away you have to figure out a way to in fact measure that in your life what do you want to do for your kids you know I I was with the person on one of my recent trips and he said well I don't want to give my kids too much money it will spoil then they you know I came from a poor background and if I give them money they won't feel driven to achieve and I sitting there in a house which the ceilings are at least 20 feet tall the the main spine of the house was 300 feet long at the end was a wine cellar which had aubry own Opus one heroine visible to the guests by the way and you're saying that now you want your kids to do exactly what you did I think you're setting up for failure because a well yeah yes I'm getting to it well my grandmother at 92 said well I'm old enough to say what I think and I said Bobby you've always said that so why worry about it but one of the things is enough sets limits you know if you start to say well how much do I need to protect myself my family you can start to say well then the rest is excess how do I want to use it one of the things about enough it allows the transitions because once you achieve something you'd say now it's time for the next thing and I think one of the most important things I learned from these people is having a sense of enough both motivates you because I want to get to there but it rewards you once you've achieved it and that becomes a very important part of life so setting limits increases the dimensionality of success which i think is sort of counterintuitive but in fact by setting the limits it allows you to juggle it allows you to say I can throw that ball away now what's the next ball I have to catch now the bad news is this is a dynamic activity the bad news is it requires a lot of energy there's a lot of bad news in this but that's ok because I think most of you are a little bit like sharks as somebody described me if I stop swimming I die that I can't imagine stopping and so part of what you do is say look I can't do this what can I do now that I want to so you know I think one of the things is what do you want in these four domains what's your profile look like now again being honest with yourself are you on your way to with ideal does your success reflect your core drivers now most of us can't get very far away from what we're taught at home I know I can't I hope my kids can't you know it's interesting I had a discussion with the kids about grandchildren I said you know they have well minimum four grandparents in some cases more because there have been several divorces and so I don't have a great influence on the values of my grandchildren everybody draws their tree this is my family but the kids all look up and say no I'm part of four eight 16 32 64 families which one am I supposed to be part of and I said and by the way when you they marry they bring a whole different set of values into the equation and you're not going to destroy that what's the rule of life you either gain a daughter or lose a son and you better remember that and then the question that's really deep is are my drivers positive are they negative my friend who's comparing himself to Bill Gates I think has some pretty negative envy drivers in it my friend who writes the thousand-year trust you know why do you really want to control your kids I they're they're number of funny stories of people I mean this one guy talked to quite wealthy we're talking about how they manage their money and what he should be doing he says I'm never going to get the in-laws in it's all about my children and I thought the money came from his wife's father uh you know I well anyway I yeah I did point that out to him to I don't think it had any impact but I felt like yeah so wouldn't we think about it I think these things apply in our professional career well achievements about innovation getting results we got to do that or we don't succeed that significance is about developing people focusing on the customer and our other stakeholders Frank batten how many of you know the name Frank batten bat batten Hall is one reason Frank developed a company called landmark communications The Weather Channel and things like that he is the guy that said he'd paid $250,000 to get off the Forbes list but he said my purpose with my business is serving my customers at a profit it's not about maximizing shareholder wealth profit is a constraint not my goal I want to serve the customers if I don't make enough money I go out of business I make too much money it says I'm probably not reinvesting enough in my people my community and my product and that was always something I served on his board for 21 years he's also somebody who taught me a lot about fundraising because I went in to ask him for a lot of money and thinking I'm getting a fight because I'm gonna tell him how important Harvard Business School is and he's going to tell me how important the University of Virginia is and then he can tell me how all-important Old Dominion University is where his wife is the chairman of the board then he's going to tell me about how he was going to be a juvenile delinquent and he went to military school Culver Academy and it saved him and I I knew that the conversation so I walked in sat Frank it's really important we've got this need to liberate the parking lot from the University and we need help can I be number 5 on your list and Heath what kept me that's about right and he gave us 35 million dollars and we were number five but he gave it in less than six weeks nicest thing but Frank was a guy that had a tremendous influence on my wife and somebody who really epitomized that legacies ethical contact and strategic leadership you know that old notion if you don't only the lead sled dog has a change of view and happiness satisfaction now I want to give you a few of the lessons that we got in the Howards gift one is I think you got to start at the end what is what's going to be said about me when I die what are my kids going to remember nobody publishes your balance sheet in your obituary so what do I want said I think the second one is we all got to Harvard Business School by getting an A in every class we're not getting an a-plus and everything in life and that's a pretty important thing to remember what is it that we can let go because we're not going to be great golf players unless we practice every day I think the other thing is thing that Eric who is the guy that actually wrote the books it everybody's outside looks better than my inside we know our inside and we're seeing other people's outside and I think the more we know people the more we see their pain and their struggles the better it is to remember that we're not alone in the struggle is about feeling occasionally that we're not tuned and then the last thing is everybody everything about the futures of Ed you know even the future is there going to be a future as a bad now we probably all lied act as though there's going to be a future and I'm sort of sad to see American savings rates where they are because it acts as though there is no future or somebody else will take care of us now these are the truths I learned some of the questions asked are we at an inflection point I think back in my career an inflection point for those of you who weren't math majors is where there is no tangent there there's no direction and we all run into inflection points my wife leaving was an important action point in my wife the decision to give up tenure was an important inflection point some of them are very visible but I think so many people pass inflection points where they're out ever stopping and saying is this free need to make a change in direction and I think of inflection points whether they're negative or positive as gifts because if you stop and recognize them you can say or do I want to do the second question is is the juice juice worth the squeeze by that I mean if you want a glass of orange juice don't squeeze its grapefruits and yet how many people you know I would say the thing about Harvard Business gradual graduates is they're so competitive they have to be first the dump on Saturday morning if the gun sounds they want to run the race now the question is are we going in the direction we want to go am i cheating at solitaire now again one of the things in my own life is I was pretty good at math I won the state math contest I didn't I got to Stanford and I discovered they're really smart people who love math who worked hard at it and were willing to sacrifice things do it I said I'm not one of those people you know I love math I love quantitative I but I'm not going to compete with those guys and thank God I didn't I went to the Harvard Business School am i explicit about the bets I'm making you know I think one of the things about being explicit about the bets is you can say there are three states of nature I won I lost or I still don't know how many people make a bet and of lost but are unwilling to admit it they sort of wiggle around well the world is changing I'll make it up next time and one of the questions we ask in the book is at the culture question am I in the right place there are places that are toxic they're places they're good for other people bad for us how do you evaluate the culture in which are embedded I know for me Harvard Business School has been a great benefit in my life I was embedded in a place that gave me freedom to do what I wanted to do it gave me insight and access but there are lot of places that I think I would have failed so I had to choose the right culture so some important rules and I want to end I think we're supposed to end at 10:30 is there live life forward no I after almost 72 years of life I find many people living life backwards you know the divorce how many people are trying to change the past you know you can't change the past you can learn from the past but you can't change the past so figuring out how you sort of say that's behind me what have I learned now let me move forward is so critical I I was once in Ireland and I was the guest to the government and one of the prizes I was meeting with three ministers for dinner and we'd all had a few drinks and I turned to one and I said that's an unusual Irish name he says I'm not Irish I'm Danish I said that's unusual that you'd be a Minister of State in this country I wondered you're when did you arrive he says they came over 1100 years ago I thought mmm this is a different arresting way of calculating I mean eleven hundred years ago that's 50 generations what percentage of his blood is really Danish but he identified as being Danish I turned to the minister of reconciliation I said why is there a problem between you and England he said they stole our land and I said when did they steal your land I was 16 something rather and you sort of say whoa but we've been watching it I said boy that's an old man that's been watching it he says no generations have been watching it and it's ours and I thought and this is guy in charge of reconciliation I found the same thing in Slovenia where people were telling me about the evils that had occurred in either 1,400 or 400 depending on whether you were fighting between the Orthodox and the Eastern Rite Western right or between the Muslims which is about 1,100 they were fighting and they kept telling me these stories and I think it might move light forward it's a lot easier I think a second lesson I actually don't particularly like the word mentor I enjoyed Anne's comments on mentorship but I part of the problem is there I'm not even quite sure what it means because I know nobody that I want their advice on all parts of my life so I think of it much more as trying to form an individual board of directors where you're trying to find people whose advice you value on certain aspects of your life that means I mean wow we looked at Harvard Business School I asked one of the jobs I had I asked people to tell us as part of the resource allocation process who their mentors and we divided them up into teaching research and course development and it was interesting nobody received more than 17 mentions even though everybody could name three names because mentoring is hard work secondly very few people were mentioned in all three categories and thirdly some of the people who thought they were mentors were never mentioned by anybody which I thought was also interesting they were perfectly willing to give advice it just wasn't listened to but I think what you discover always - what I've discovered is there are people I go to to say here's what I'm thinking about in certain areas and some of my wouldn't ask anything about personal life because I don't particularly admire their personal life but I do admire and one of the things that does is ask you what are these person's what are the what's this person's particular skill where do I value their advice because then you can start to say well if I can get six or seven people that I will I can talk to and you can't manage more than six or seven to those it's an important problem you know I guess another thing I like to say to people with life is risky and some things are uncontrollable no I am on the board of some health organizations I'm amazed how many people don't take their medicine that's a controllable risk you know you can't take for us might if you're gonna give a speech you have to wait till after the speech is over in fact figuring out what the risks are and say there's something I can control in some account control now it's almost the Reinhold Niebuhr prayer of where it grants me the strength to change those things which can be changed the patience to accept those which can't and the wisdom to know which is which but I think that what you start to say is let me make sure that I understand this is not a risky career these these are the aspects of the career that make it risky which ones can I control which ones I can't and if you can't control any of it you probably ought to get out of the way and then the last sort of piece of advice I'd give is plan for the ripple not to splash I think one of the interesting things is we're in a culture that's interested in the splash but in fact most of us are in a place where we throw some stones there big ripples and one of the most satisfying things that my life is the ripples the things that you really didn't know you had any impact on and people come up and say oh you helped me you said something to me you helped me choose a career I mean those are the things that really at the end of you know 43 years of teaching and 72 years of wife really make a difference so I'm going to give you your test first question is who are you what are the values what what do you want at the end to be able to say if in that last second of life I didn't get a chance to do that I just went down people I'd smelled neither sulfur nor did I see a white light so I don't know what happened but maybe they got me too fast but who are you what are the values that you're bringing through your wife which satisfactions offending are you on the way to missing now again it's the juggling metaphor catch the falling ball who's important to you and are you helping them to succeed I think that when Ann said nothing wrong with money but the richest of your life won't be measured by it is incredibly important and the people you've helped are probably as important to measure of life as anything else and then what's your time frame interaction and being an old hippie the time for taking this test is the rest of your life otherwise known as today is the first day of the rest of your life so that's my story and I think I almost ended it on time so thank you very much
