I spent some hours last week with a very good friend.  I don’t see him nearly often enough, nor for long enough periods, but regardless of the absences, I count him among the dearest of those people I have met.  Our relationship can well withstand the long absences, the frenetic catching up, the silences.  To me, those are all signs of a friendship in the  maturity of its span, one that is well beyond the formative blushes of infatuation (you may certainly call it “bromance” if that makes you more comfortable), but that has not yet reached a state of decay.  We can generally pick up the conversations right where we left off, and we understand each other’s codes and shortcuts well enough to follow the leaps of logistic we both make in the discussion.

My friend asked me to look over a manuscript he is working on, and I decided that the initial task was one best performed in person.  We had other business to discuss as well.  We have been working together for almost 20 years, and occasional visits are a way of ensuring that relationship continues smoothly.  As to the book, he doesn’t need an editor, someone is already handling that, and a publisher has already committed to the task.  Rather, he wanted my overall assessment of the work.  It is the first in a planned series of four books on a topic generally referred to as business success.  This one, the first, is on sales.  The topic is one where he has considerable expertise.  He also knows that I generally despise this genre of book.  I consider that most such works were written not so much to enrich the minds or lives of the reader, but rather to enrich the finances of the author and publisher.  There are exceptions to that, but those are, in my not-very-humble opinion, few and far between.  In my forty plus years in the world of commerce, I have read dozens, if not scores, of such tomes.  I have three book shelves dedicated to holding the fraction of them that I suffer to keep in my library.  Most of the rest I have given away, and I have thrown more than a few into the recycling bin, deeming their only value to lie in being reprocessed into some other paper product, preferably of the bathroom variety.

My ire with the works of this type has its roots in two major disputes with the thought process of the so-called “success literature”.  First, simply because a person has been lucky in their business dealings, and has the trappings of success, does not mean that they have any understanding or insight into how or why they achieved that status.  Frequently, they have confused sheer blind luck with skill.  They arrived at a point in their lives when opportunities were presented to them due entirely to extrinsic forces completely outside of their control or making.  Yes, they may have had the wherewithal to take advantage of those situations, but in general, no skill whatsoever was involved in the creation of the circumstance that placed them into a posture for the vaunted achievement(s).  I see this all the time at poker tables as well (yes, it is one of my last remaining vices.  No, I will not give it up).  In poker, dumb luck is often adopted as brilliance or insight, when in fact the mathematics of the game clearly dictated that the hand was not at all likely a winning one to play.  Such ‘heaters’ in the parlance of that game are great fun to ride, but they rarely lasts long, and those who rely on them fade as quickly as they blossomed.  To anyone who does not believe that status, location, friendships, gender, background and contacts play a key role in the parallel successes in life, I would commend the excellent work of Malcolm Gladwell, and those upon whose research he drew (the reference is to Mr. Gladwell’s book, Outliers, Little Brown and Co., 2008).  One premise of that line of thought is that while college and related activities are intended to educate, they are equally meant to form networks and friendships that will serve long beyond the fading of knowledge.  Many highly successful people draw upon those networks in a wide variety of ways to help boost their careers and accomplishments.  Those who cannot or do not take advantage of those relationships, or who have never had the opportunity to form them, are often, therefore, at a disadvantage.  Much of the real value of college or university education, therefore, lies far outside of the classroom or lecture hall, and those who do not attend such an institution are limited in proportion to what they have missed.

Most my friends (conservative and liberal alike) are well acquainted with my strong opinions on the topic of how anti-intellectualism and the devaluation of education have joined with outdated gender-roles, poverty/oppressive economic conditions, and racial and social injustice in further distancing these dreams from the grasp of the vast majority of Americans, but more discussion on that will await another day and another rant.  Suffice it to say for the moment that the illusion that any child can rise to become President of these United States remains one of our Nation’s most enduring myths, and one of the least true.  That is not to say that such a lofty office is the only measure of success, but the strong and occasionally brutal social and economic forces in our country do not aid well those in poverty should they seek a route out of that status.  Even the knowledge that such a path exists is beyond far too many of our youth, a sad truth that cuts across a great many geographic, ethnic and racial boundaries.

But back to my friend.  He will tell his own story of success when the book is published, and I have no doubts that it will be.  It is, after all is said and done, a good book and well written.  He will relate tales of his climb out of poverty, his fateful decision to take an offered college opportunity, and his discovery that the world consists of a great deal more than he saw from his rural childhood.  He will relate how his fear of returning to those roots drove him to understand the world of commerce, to grasp at proffered opportunities, and to persevere at them through failures and challenges.  He will write eloquently of how he hates to sell, and yet he has achieved some great successes at exactly that activity.  He has  even greater measures of achievement in motivating and training others to become more than he ever could.  And he will, despite all efforts of his publisher, remain very humble and grateful for the fates that met him at various intersections in his life, and who’s kindly hands he grasped to such good effect.  To me, however, the great key to this book lies not in the parables and epigrams he relates, but rather in the honesty with which he looks at one key concept that is often a distinguishing point in human behavior.  The basis underpinning much of this coming work is to talk rather frankly about how we face our fears.  The key premise being stated is that what moves people forward is not so much that they have no fear (a pathological condition) but rather how they relate to their fear, and what they do about it.  That level of honesty and insight is something that I see in the success literature all too infrequently.  The simple reality is that people most often will make safe decisions, and seek assiduously to stay within their comfort zone(s).  They only want to have what they will already know and are familiar with, they are not able to break out of their inertia and remain, to use an imprecise Newtonian analogy, at rest.  The motivation behind that choice is often fear.  In my experience and observations, there is a spectrum of responses to fear (as is the case with most things in life*), but the terror of the unknown and the unfamiliar is a potent motivator to remain safely within one’s artificially constructed mental cocoon of safety.  There is an old joke about there being only two kinds of people: those who sort people into two kinds, and those who do not.  The ability to embrace fear and to draw energy from that physiological response is, however, something that lies quite close to that artificial bifurcation. Most people that I have encountered tend relatively strongly toward one or the other poles of that emotional magnet.  Few remain in the middle or ambivalent in the choice, although I readily concede that context is crucial in such matters.  Those choices are not singular ones at all, but rather a series of such choices on a variety of many matters arising in great diversity.

But, back to the matter at hand.  As I work through my friend’s manuscript, offering some meager thoughts on facts cited or positions taken, I am above all else drawn to the core premise with which he is working.  This can be, if done well, powerful stuff.  I am acquainted with many good people whose lives are wrought through and through with fear.  A few of them are almost paralyzed into inaction at times because of dread and misgiving.  A woman very dear to me and my wife, and a very talented singer, grapples every minute of every day with an anxiety disorder so profound as to impact virtually everything she does, and she does so with tremendous courage and aplomb.  And in that lies a key.  None of us are immune from fear.  All of us have anxiety and uncertainty in our lives.  It is, however, in the heat of grappling those powerful emotions that much of who we are is forged.  It is in the simple yet profound daily struggle to overcome our fears and our doubts that we can truly discover our very core nature.  It is often in the moments of deepest despair that our naked selves lie in front of our own gaze, if only we would dare to look.

If we can but take in a little bit, a small glance into that mirror each day, then perhaps we can learn who we really are at our core.  From that, perhaps we can grow more truly into who we want to become with a greater measure of satisfaction than we find in the mere materialism of wealth.  In that task, our enemy is not only ourselves and our fears, but all the distractions, all the noise, and all the trivialities with which we fill our lives, such as the acquisition of trinkets we neither want nor need, or the hours spent in watching mindless drivel on television so badly mislabelled as reality.  And that is why I choose, today, yesterday, and I hope tomorrow, to measure my wealth (small and insignificant as it is) not by the size of my bank accounts or by the vehicle I drive.  I chose to measure my wealth in the friends I count dear, and in their wisdom and their honesty.  I measure my worth largely by how much I can be vulnerable with them, and by how much I trust them.  I measure by how much I can, in turn, rely on them to be as honest with me, and as open.  To me, these are the jewels of my life, worth so very much more than anything else that I purport to own.  And those gems are the ones I will guard carefully, and in which I choose to invest.  That investment in my friend’s book is, therefore, an investment in my own wealth and satisfaction.  As I have mentioned above, this will be a very good book, despite my efforts somewhat more than because of them I suspect, but I am happy to have played some role in helping another achieve what they have long sought, especially when the message is one that is close to my own heart and mind.  That, to me, is more than enough reward or a few day’s work, and quite sufficient recompense in exchange for some honest comments.

*I tend inherently and rather strongly to reject the myriad of false and artificial dualities so commonly accepted in today’s world.  Those improper bifurcations of complexity into simple polar opposites offend me.  These highly incorrect choices of either/or (with all due apologies to Søren Kierkegaard) serve only to limit the full spectrum of realities that we have in front of us, and to mask the beauty and subtlety of our lives.  My experiences with and rationale for that rejection will, perhaps, become a topic of  further discussion, but that needs wait for another piece of scribbling.