Issue #152 The Most Dangerous Story Achievers Tell Themselves?

Last week, I shared the story of being fired from the company I had co-founded and the question that I eventually was forced to confront:

Where do you derive your sense of worth?

If you missed that essay, you can read it here. This week, I want to pick up where that story ended because what happened after I was fired turned out to be every bit as important as the firing itself.

For nearly three decades, my life had been filled with activity. My calendar wasn’t simply full; it had become the rhythm of my life.

Then, almost overnight, much of it disappeared.

There were no longer meetings stacked one after another, and my phone had gone noticeably quiet. Decisions that once seemed to require my attention were now being made without me. Perhaps most humbling was realizing that the people and problems I had considered so dependent on me simply carried on. The world I had spent decades helping to build hadn’t stopped; it had simply learned to continue without me.

Suddenly, I had something I hadn’t experienced in a very long time: space.

I wish I could tell you I immediately recognized that this space was a gift. I didn’t. For most of my adult life, I had measured a productive day by how much I accomplished, how many problems I solved and how many things I moved forward. Busyness had become so familiar that I rarely stopped to consider how much of my sense of importance was tied to it.

Suddenly, all that activity was gone and for the first time, no calendar was telling me where to go next. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the silence.

Initially I struggled with the embarrassment of trying to explain this dramatic change to my family, colleagues and the people I had led. But eventually I realized there was a much harder conversation waiting for me.

The one I needed to have with myself.

If I was no longer the founder, CEO or entrepreneur I had spent years becoming, who was I now?

The Unexamined Life

Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Most of us would agree that reflection matters and that we should step back and consider where our lives are going.  Knowing that and actually doing it are very different things.

By the time I was fired, I had experienced my share of financial pressure, broken relationships, business failures and difficult decisions. I had also experienced tremendous success.

Through all of it, my response was remarkably consistent: keep moving.

If there was a problem, solve it. If something failed, figure out why and try again. If an opportunity appeared, pursue it. If something succeeded, ask how we could make it bigger. There was always something next.

I used to consider my ability to persevere through difficult circumstances one of my greatest strengths, and in many ways it was. My resilience has carried me through some extraordinarily difficult seasons.

But I’ve come to realize that the bigger our strength, the longer the shadow it can cast.

Mine was that I became so good at moving forward that I rarely stopped long enough to consider what all that movement was doing to me. My instinct was to solve the problem and move on, not to sit with it long enough to understand what it might reveal about me.

As I’ve gotten to know other high achievers, I’ve come to realize this is a common pattern. We move from one experience to another, assuming that because we are moving forward, we must also be growing. But movement and growth aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Years can pass before we stop long enough to ask whether the direction we’re travelling is still the direction we want our lives to go. Experience gives us the raw material, but reflection is what allows us to make something useful from it. 

Real reflection requires more than replaying the facts. We have to consider what happened, how it made us feel, and perhaps most importantly, why it made us feel that way. Then we have to go one layer deeper and ask what those feelings might reveal about what we believe, value or fear.

That’s usually where things get uncomfortable.

Why did being fired feel so disorienting? Why did no longer being needed feel so unsettling? Why did an empty calendar feel less like freedom and more like evidence that my life purpose had been taken away?

Those questions weren’t really about the company….they were about me.

I would never have chosen to be fired. I certainly wouldn’t have described it as a gift while sitting at that breakfast table. Even now, I don’t believe we need to pretend painful experiences aren’t painful in order to learn from them.

But with the benefit of time, I have come to see most of the major disruptions in my life differently. The bankruptcies. The failures. The firing. What felt like terrible interruptions at the time now look more like divine appointments….moments I was required to live through because they forced me to stop long enough to see things I had been too busy to notice.

The Stories We Live By

One of the things I began to hear in that silence was the story I had been telling myself about who I was.

It wasn’t a story I had consciously written. I don’t remember ever deciding that my value would come from building companies, achieving things or being needed by other people. It happened gradually, reinforced by thousands of small experiences over decades.

Build a successful company and people congratulate you. Grow it and people pay attention. Create jobs and people depend on you. Solve difficult problems and people seek your advice. Walk into a room with the right title and people make assumptions about your importance before you have even said a word.

None of those things are inherently bad. Achievement is deeply satisfying and building something meaningful is one of the great joys in life. However the danger comes when the things we do slowly become the story we use to explain who we are.

Our culture reinforces this constantly.

Think about what happens when you meet someone for the first time. After exchanging names, one of the first questions usually asked is, “What do you do?”

We rarely answer by describing who we are, rather we answer with our occupation.

I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a doctor. I’m a teacher. I’m a lawyer. I’m an engineer.

A description of how we currently spend our working hours becomes the shorthand for describing a human being.

My answer was being an entrepreneur, and more specifically, I was someone who built businesses in the toy industry. Somewhere along the way, without recognizing it, the description became a definition of who I was. I had become so attached to a particular role that I forgot that the role was only one place where my abilities, interests, values and experiences were being expressed at that moment.

Which helps explain why losing the company was so disorienting.

If something is merely what you do, losing it is painful; if it has become who you are, losing it can feel devastating.

I’ve thought about Leonardo da Vinci in this context.

If I asked you what Leonardo da Vinci was, how would you answer?

An artist would be an obvious response. After all, he painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. But calling da Vinci an artist seems hopelessly incomplete. He explored anatomy, engineering, invention, architecture, science and design. He studied the human body, imagined flying machines, investigated water systems and filled notebooks with observations about almost everything that captured his imagination.

What seems more interesting to me is the thread running through all of those expressions: curiosity, creativity, observation, imagination and an almost relentless desire to understand how things worked and what might be possible. The work changed but the underlying person continued to develop.

And I believe that is a better way to think about our own lives.  Our current career isn’t who we are, it is simply one of the places where ‘who we are’ gets expressed for a moment in time.

What I Really Lost

At the end of last week’s essay, I mentioned that on the morning I was fired, I believed I was grieving the loss of a company.

I wasn’t.

It took me years to understand what I had really lost.

I had lost a story.

For many years that story had helped me explain myself to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to myself. I was an entrepreneur, a founder, a leader and a builder. As a result, I was someone with a full calendar, important decisions to make and people who needed me.

Then, in the space of one breakfast, many of the external things reinforcing that story disappeared.

No wonder the silence felt uncomfortable.

The mistake would be to conclude that those years were somehow wasted or that the identity I carried through them was false. It wasn’t, rather those years shaped me; but they weren’t the whole story.

The above photo of me mountain biking, captures this idea in a way I didn’t appreciate at the time. I’m riding through deep snow on the same trail network I wrote about last week. The trails hadn’t changed, but the season had. 

The rocks and lines I knew so well were buried beneath snow, requiring me to use familiar skills in a completely different way. I wasn’t starting over. I was adapting what I already knew to the conditions in front of me.

I think our careers work much the same way: your career is what you’re paid to do; your calling is what you’re made to do. Careers have beginnings and endings but a calling is something that is continually evolving. 

You are bigger than one career.

The silence after my firing gave me an opportunity to begin figuring this out. Instead of immediately asking what company I should build next, I began asking different questions. What had consistently mattered to me throughout my life? When did I feel most alive? Where did my curiosity naturally take me? What parts of me existed before the titles and would remain after they were gone?

I didn’t answer those questions quickly. In some ways, I am still answering them, but asking them has changed the direction of my life.

The breakfast I had initially experienced only as an ending had also created the possibilities that come with a new beginning. It interrupted the story I had been living long enough for me to ask whether it was still the story I wanted to live.

And where have those questions eventually led me?  To different businesses, different communities and a very different understanding of what I want my life to contribute. And this is the story I want to continue to explore with you next week.

Because once we understand that we are bigger than the career we have built, the question changes from “What should I do next?” to something much more interesting:

“Who am I becoming, and how might that person be best expressed in the next season of my life?”

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