Life

The Age of Questions.

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If we can be sure of one thing, it is that we're living in the Age of Uncertainty.

Our economic outlook seems cloudy as we hear our politicians talk about debt, taxes, and cliffs. Our national security seems suspect as we attempt to unravel ten years of war against an amorphous, unseen, unbeatable opponent. Our mental health seems precarious as we deal with the latest shocks to our safety and preconceptions. Our shared values seem most days to be merely a shared willingness to shout at each other on social media.

When I was in high school I remember asking my mother about the Sixties and early Seventies. I was trying to understand the time period around my birth. Was it as interesting as it looked in the books? "It was hard," she said. "It was troubling."

I can't help but thinking that, whether we like it or not, we are in the same kind of period. Perhaps in ten or twenty years we will look back with nostalgia about the better world that was borne from all of this tumult. But right now it just feels troubling.

I was thinking of all of this yesterday in Mass. Yes, I went to church on a Monday morning -- I can't say I wanted to. I went for the funeral of a friend. Someone killed far too young. So many questions. Too many, actually -- too many to even contemplate. 

As the words of the Catholic Mass washed over me I was reminded of a line in Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. A young man had written the great Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke asking for advice on how to make sense of the world. And we learn that Rilke is just as confused as the rest of us. He writes:

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Why do children die? Why must we torture each other? Why haven't we learned to practice tolerance? How can we value the contribution of each person without forcing our ways upon one another? How can we create a community that applauds achievement and still encourages kindness?  How can we build a country that aspires to its best qualities rather than reducing to its worst?

These are very difficult questions to live. But this is our role. This is our time. I pray we will live our way to the answers so that our children and grandchildren no longer have these questions to bear.

Suspending Skepticism: Ignoring Your Inner Ragdoll

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Could it be that the biggest part of learning optimism is just figuring out how to suspend skepticism? Is it that simple?

Suspending skepticism seems like an easy thing — a trite comment, really — but I’ve learned that skepticism is so ingrained in most of us that laying it aside is more difficult than we first imagine. From the first time we hear “You’re too big for that chair!” or “Be careful up there!” or the really insidious “Don’t get your hopes up!”, we start assembling a picture of the world that features a tiny ragdoll at the center (that’s us) surrounded by assorted threats, hazards, and disappointments (everything we think, dream, and wonder about).

I’ve become quite a Disney World supporter over the last few days. I’ve written about the superb customer service, the powerful combination of business and artistic vision, and more than anything, the great experience my kids have had at the various parks. But to be honest, I know enough about Disney that I kind of expected all of those things. I expected to see a fun environment produced by a well-run organization.

What I didn’t expect was the impact that Disney would have on me. I’d find myself passing by a ride or theater or walkway. “Nothing too exciting is back there,” my ragdoll voice would say. And I’d start to walk by when invariably a little child’s hand would grab mine and say, “C’mon Dad — puulllleaaaase?”

The first time I sort of rolled my eyes, re-oriented the stroller, and grudgingly followed. “Okay…” I said, which as everyone knows is Dad Code for “I already know that this is a stupendous waste of time, and soon you will learn that too, and then you will understand my incredible power of divination and will listen to me next time.”

But here’s the thing. It was never a waste of time. The concert with Mickey Mouse, the a cappella American folk singers, the 360-degree movie about China — everything was just, well, surprisingly delightful. Just really wonderful.

And what I noticed is that by the second day I stopped using Dad Code with the kids. “Let’s go!” I’d say. “I bet this is really cool!” And by the third day I stopped listening to my own ragdoll. Frankly, I’m not sure I even would have noticed that until yesterday, when we had three people feeling sick and run-down but had to travel home anyway. I heard the rag doll say “This will be awful. This will be a long and horrible day.” But I heard myself say, “We can do this.” And you know what? All things considered, eight hours of travel with six people went flawlessly.

In my book, the greatest thing about Disney World is that it got me to throw my skepticism into the recycling bin. I stopped looking at doors and saying, “There’s nothing interesting in there.” I stopped looking at people and saying, “They are opposed to me.” And I stopped looking in the mirror and saying, “I need to protect the ragdoll.” Instead I started actively walking towards each walkway, filled with excitement about what was coming next.

How effective would I be if I greeted every single encounter of every single day with that optimism and confidence? If we all did?

This is the biggest memory I hope to keep from Disney World. It could be powerful.

Learning Optimism

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Dad says, “That sure looks like a big hill.”
Kids say, “It will be really fun!”
 
Dad says, “It is pretty cold out here for a water ride.”
Kids say, “We’ll dry off in the sun!”
 
Dad says, “I’m not sure we have time to do this before lunch.”
Kids say, “The line is really short!”
 
Dad says, “I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
Kids say, “We’re going to love it!”
 
Kids say, “Can we go on again?”
Dad says, “Yes!!”

Perspectives on 2012: Putting Facebook In Its Place

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This article is the first in a short series of musings about 2012, its opportunities and challenges, and how to best meet them. 

It’s a snowy, cold first Monday of January here in Indiana — and I’m sure I’m the better for it. After twelve days of holiday break, hours of wrapping and unwrapping, countless toy-assembly sessions, a few toy-repair sessions, and lots and lots of play time with the kids, I badly need a day off before the official start of the work year. I need to get myself squared away. From big picture thinking like setting my 2012 goals to fundamental necessities like clearing off my desk (I swear, the wood surface is here somewhere), I need a few hours to decide what is going to be important in the new year. And, what isn’t.

This second subject was the topic of a brief story by Zak Stone in yesterday’s Good (see the bottom of this post for the reference links). Stone relates an effort by web designer Ivan Cash to encourage us to take a bit of time off from the ubiquitous social networking site. It’s a good idea, at least for me, and particularly at this time of the year. It is so easy to get caught up in posting what I’m doing that I don’t actually focus on doing it. And it is equally easy to aimlessly scroll through my news feed, absentmindedly reading about what people are doing — without really connecting to anyone at all.

So, I’ve decided to take the challenge and take a week off from Facebook. The simple absurdity of writing that previous sentence as if it were a momentous decision illustrates why it is worth taking a FB sabbatical!

I’ll admit that the first few minutes were odd — I went to Cash’s link, posted the status update on my profile, and within a couple of seconds a few friends had liked my update. I unconsciously reached for the mouse to see who had commented, and then remembered that I was taking a week off. It is exactly this kind of impulse response that runs counter to accomplishing bigger picture goals, and is at the crux of what Cash and Stone are encouraging us to do.

In organizations and in our personal lives we put a lot of emphasis on setting goals, creating vision, painting a picture, and so forth. But we put far less time to deciding what we won’t do. Focus is a key component of good strategy, whether the strategy involves building a billion-dollar charity or losing that last stubborn ten pounds. And focus means making choices. You can’t be great at everything. 

Don’t get me wrong — I love Facebook, and I think it can be a great conduit for personal connections and for organizational growth. But for most of us, Facebook is just a tool towards a larger end. There’s only one organization which has a goal for you to spend more time on Facebook — and that is Facebook itself. For the rest of us, the goal isn’t to spend more time on the site, but to develop deeper connections. I’m interested to see if staying away helps me do that.

I’ve rambled through a few different topics in only five or six paragraphs, and perhaps that is fitting for a snowy, sleepy start of the new year. I look forward to expanding on these and other ideas throughout the next few months, and as always I appreciate your visit. I wish you the best as you start to outline your priorities for the year ahead. 

Can You Hear Me Now?!?

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This morning a Facebook friend of mine share a link to an article by Daniel Gulati in the Harvard Business Review entitled “Facebook Is Making Us Miserable.” Delighted with the obvious irony of learning about the article through the tool it critiques, I gave it a quick read. I would recommend it to you as well.

I found the article interesting and the implications more so. Clearly Facebook can broaden our connections with others, as evidenced by the fact that a friend from Israel shared the article with this Indiana boy and inspired comments from locations far and wide. And I will say I try to avoid the trap of thinking that anyone or anything can “make” us miserable — we do that all by ourselves!

Those two things aside, the article resonated with me. While Facebook has broadened our connections, has it deepened them? I’m not sure. 

More than Facebook specifically, it strikes me that the author is really commenting on the slow blending of our personal and professional lives — inexorably we’re moving to a place where our separate circles are not separate, where there is no distinction between different spheres, and, perhaps most sadly, where we feel compelled to share in order to stay connected.

Perhaps technology is not the culprit and these are human dynamics in any day and age — if you want social connections you have to be social, and the more you are the latter, the more you have of the former. It could be that we simply need to get over ourselves.

At the same time, something tells me that the game is changing. Not only are the rules different, but we’re on an entirely different field — one on which we’re all kind of muddling around looking for friendship and intimacy by broadcasting our lives, nonstop, over our own heads. Only no one can hear us, because we’ve each drowned out the rest of the players with our own megaphone. The louder we yell for connection, the harder it is to hear everyone else yelling too…

Happy Ninth Birthday Event 360!

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A quick post to share that today is an important day in our E360 family. Yesterday was Event 360’s ninth birthday, meaning that today is the first day of our tenth year. 

If you put your future on the flip of a coin you’d still get much better odds than if you banked on your company surviving into its tenth year. Fewer than one-third make it that far.

The fact that we’ve turned nine and are ending one of our busiest, most exciting, and most successful years – with a growing number of exciting projects, in the most difficult economy of the last three generations – says volumes about the vision, values, and commitment of our team. I’m continually amazed at what a great group of people we have here.  

Together with our clients and partners, we’re building an exciting future. Our mission continues to be simple: We help nonprofits use experiences to create a better world. There’s a lot of need out there, but we’re helping to make a difference.

And the best is yet to come. Onwards and upwards!

Galaxy Explorer

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Here’s a quick Thanksgiving post. When I was 7 or 8 years old, the one toy I wanted more than any other was the LEGO Galaxy Explorer. I could go on and on about it, but suffice it to say I hounded my parents for months and months and I simply tortured my poor sister with my pleading and begging. This was all way back, when Christmas was still a mystery, and gifts were few and far between, and winter meant staying home with the people I thought I’d always be with, my family.

Santa in the form of a loving Mom and Dad sought fit to place the Explorer under the tree that year, and I played with it for years. I still remember laying all the pieces on our blue shag carpet Christmas morning, putting it together for the first time with my Dad and Uncle Rich. I put it together and dismantled it and augmented it and blew it up and reconstructed it dozens, or probably hundreds, of times after that. I couldn’t count how many times the Galaxy Explorer crew and I saved the Universe.

As I grew older I lost or gave away or broke most of my toys, and I got involved in things that seemed cooler and more mature. But I knew enough to save the Galaxy Explorer — and my mother, bless her heart, never got rid of it. When my parents died I was touched and excited and oddly heartbroken to find the box lovingly stored away. 

This morning I pulled out the box and put it together with my two oldest sons. I’m not sure that this makes any sense to anyone except me — but the whole thing encapsulates everything I’m thankful for this year.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  

The Business of Multiplication

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It is fairly presumptuous of me to assume I have anything to add to the vast number of poignant 9/11 commentaries you’ve probably seen this weekend. But I do think I have something to add about my favorite topic, which is why the the world needs you and the work you do.

As I’ve listened, watched, and read a variety of 9/11 tributes today, I’ve been struck by how each person’s experience of that day is so similar and yet so particular. We each experienced the grief, and fear, and confusion. But we each experienced it in our own way. The person who sat on the phone trying to reach a loved one. The person who drove crosstown to help. The person who enlisted. The person who watched dusted figures walk by. The person who gave out free food and water. The same streak of light through fifty million prisms.

My memories, like yours, are likely special only to me. My uniqueness involves the impending birth of my son Matthew. He had his dad’s love of drama even then, already ten days overdue. Waiting to make an entrance. That morning found me at home in Los Angeles getting ready to take Jeanie to the hospital. She was to be induced. As we woke to pack the bags for the hospital, we turned on the television and our lives changed in the same way yours did. In the ways everyone’s did.

The morning was a flurry of phone calls. Calls with family, and friends, and of course, the family and friends I worked with — many of whom I still work with ten years later. Did Murph stay overnight or did he go direct? Did anyone know what freaking flight he was on? Was Conigs downtown? Can anyone reach her? Was the team from Canada accounted for?

When Jeanie and I finally made it to the hospital, we looked at our O.B. and said simply, “We are not inducing today. We will not have our son born today.”

And yet, the most troubling and redemptive characteristic of life is its imminence. It won’t wait. Life is always just about to be. And so on the 12th we were back at the hospital, unable to exert any more influence on Matthew’s timing. We sat and watched CNN and wondered, at least a bit, what kind of parents we were to be if we were selfish enough to bring a child into a world like this.

And you know the rest, or at least your part of it. It is not historical self-indulgence to assert that the last ten years have been fundamentally different than those that came before. We have seen, in a real way, a decade of division. Towers split in half. Families torn apart. A world brought briefly together, and then too, a world splintered.

We became used to separating things. Our shoes and belts at the airport. Our loved ones sent to other places. Our inward thoughts from our spoken opinions. It became a decade of divisions in geopolitics, and then domestic politics, and then in business and economics too, as the math we learned years earlier seemed to stop working. The reds and the blues; the right and the left. More disturbingly, the haves and the have-nots. The us and the them.

There are many groups of people, many talented and dedicated groups of people, working to overcome these divisions. And despite my penchant for cynicism, I have immense respect and gratitude for the women and men of the military, the political community, and the government. I think by and large they are doing their best to solve the vast array of problems that a decade of division has laid at the doorstep.

Yet these people can only do so much. There is only so much that can be accomplished when the prime directive is to stop the loss. “Minimize the damage” can only take us so far. At some point, the momentum has to be reversed.

That’s where you come in. You may not recognize it, but you are in the business of multiplication.

In event fundraising, the multiplication works in a mathematical way I can prove: One participant brings 50 or 60 donors. It is in datasets; I can see how it works.

But the multiplication is more powerful than that. I have seen it in the way one walker brings five family members to cheer her on. In the way laughter spreads across a camp. In the way a small email encouragement is passed on to dozens of friends. In the way one shoe raised ripples across a crowd 1,500 times.

Whatever your profession — teacher, attorney, firefighter, bus driver, pilot, consultant — I will bet that when you reflect on the myriad of interactions you have each moment of your day, you will find there is multiplication at the core of what you do. Every single day of every single week.

The most profound reason my last decade has been different than the ten years before it has nothing to do with 9/11 at all — nothing to do with terrorism, or anti-terrorism, or financial collapse, or political discontent. It has to do with a wonderful boy named Matthew. When I look back on how my life has changed, I can say that he changed it more than any of that, in a huge, positive, profound way; that he multiplied my love and care and hope and optimism fifty thousand times more than anything that happened to divide it. Love is the ultimate force multiplier.

We are indeed still at war, and mainly we are at war with ourselves. Are we strong enough to look forward and create a better world? To take the risks and make the commitment to a more powerful future, a future that is the right future to create even though we may not be here to enjoy all of it? To sacrifice ourselves for a cleaner earth, a more tolerant community, a more equitable country, and a more peaceful world?

Answering the questions to create this world will require an abundance of character, and mainly it will take hope, love, and hard work. When I really open my eyes to look at the people around me, I see all three evidenced in dramatic quantities — and it makes me proud of the “what” you do, and excited for the decade of multiplication we together will help to create.

Watching you, I am ready for the next decade. It is onwards and upwards from here.

And finally: Happy birthday to the fourth of my force multipliers, Danny, who turns three this very day.