Today, there is a steady, inevitable growth of what many commentators refer to the “sharing economy.”  The most wellknown example of replacing sharing for ownership of a vital asset is the Zipcar business (recently acquired by Avis-Budget).  Zipcar is based on the principle that many individuals need automobiles relatively infrequently and for relatively short periods of time, so that neither ownership, nor leasing, nor even daily rentals are the most cost-efficient solutions for them.  They become a Zipcar member, rent a car for an hour at a time, pick it up at one Zipcar lot, drive it and drop it off at any Zipcar lot.

However, the sharing economy is progressing beyond the temporary use of automobiles. Airbnb is an example of a service which facilitates a process by which people may share all or part of their residences with others for a fee that, for the person needing accommodations, is lower than the cost of a hotel, and more readily available.  This service has the advantage of not only being more flexible, but enabling the use of rental property that is more conveniently located than a traditional hotel, which typically has to be in a commercially zoned part of a community.

Similarly, there are many businesses in which individuals can rent the use of a room or a suite for a meeting for an hour at a time.  Companies like Regus have a large supply of available offices for temporary use of facilities.  In my case, I have a network of friends or service providers that let me use vacant offices or conference rooms for meetings, so that I do not have to rent a very expensive hotel conference room.  The informal version of this is the use of coffee shops and restaurant spaces for regular meetings.  For example, the local coffee shops in Darien, Connecticut, where I live, are regular venues for morning and afternoon meetings, in one case,  for men’s prayer groups.  These groups do not rent a space, but simply reserve a large table and preorder breakfast or coffee for a group of 12 people.

New York City has a wonderful set of public spaces in Midtown buildings like the Park Avenue Plaza, the Sony building and the IBM building that have open lobby areas that have been converted into meeting places or even spaces where individuals can sit at a table at no cost for hours at a time.  The Park Avenue Plaza between 52^nd and 53^rd Streets between Park and Madison Avenues has gone one step further in converting a portion of its space to a group of tables for individuals to use for chess games.

A variant of this temporary use of assets is the penetration of extremely short-term rentals of equipment needed for one-time tasks often of such short duration that a purchase or even a fixed term rental is not a viable option.  My wife and I rented a dehumidifier some years ago for a period of 3-4 days when our basement had been flooded and we needed to get moisture removed from our carpet.

For communities, the use of shared services is a great alternative to having each resident separately contract for services.  My wife and I have lived in such an association for almost 20 years.  We have 19 homes, a clubhouse, two tennis courts, and significant open spaces for play areas for children.  Our lawn management, tree trimming and removal, snow removal, road maintenance, and refuse collection services are shared across the 19 residences, and, as a result, we pay far less than we would pay if each of us contracted separately for these services.

Another form of facilitated shared services is the facilitation of peer-to-peer selling of books, music, DVDs, and other tangible assets by one individual to another through sites like Amazon.com, not to mention that Amazon.com is also a major provider of shared cloud computing services.  My son James made significant money during his senior year of high school and the summer after high school collecting salable items people we knew no longer needed and selling them online to others.  He particularly helped the local Boy Scout operation sell the items that remained unsold after the annual spring tag sale.

Still another formed of shared service, which has been around for several decades, but is getting renewed life, is the use of ride-sharing for trips to and from work, and to and from places like airports and train stations. Back in the 1980’s, when I was a reverse commuter from New York to Stamford at Pitney Bowes, the Company had no shuttle service between the train station and the Company headquarters.  While I enjoyed walking between the station and my office, there were times when walking was not a practical option, typically at night when I needed to get to the station quickly to catch a train back to New York. Many people picked up and drove me to the station.  I developed some great short and long term relationships with those who regularly helped me.

What has given the sharing economy new life is the Internet, which enables those doing the sharing to have three capabilities they never previously had:

• The use of online matching between those with assets to share and those needing the use of the assets;
• An ability to get a high degree of advanced knowledge about the person providing the asset to be shared and the asset itself; and
• The ability of prior users to rate the experience and give feedback available to all future users of that asset.

For the sharing of automobiles and rides, the increased availability of insurance against both liability and damage is another factor that has enabled the sharing economy to grow, since many people are deterred by the financial risk they would appear to be taking.

I am excited about the prospect of this economy continuing to grow.  We waste and consume too much, and, by buying items, we also end up with all the burdens of ownership.

Historically, shared assets and services often got damaged more easily and got excessively intensive use, which meant that their value to others was diminished.  Cooperative associations were valued less than pure ownership situations, and the ownership of assets was associated with status, power, and freedom.

Today, the world is different.  We have virtual offices, which are enabled by our ability to stay in touch with the world via our smart phones, Ipads, and laptops.  We have more ubiquitous cloud computing, which obviates the need for us to own servers.  We also have more online networks that are changing how we share information with one another across organizational and community boundaries. The concept of sharing space and other assets is not as strange as it once seemed.

I have learned how to do more of this with the need to manage a start-up business, Dossia, and to manage our film project.  It is a wonderful trend that, over time, is making our quality of life far better than it once was.

Celebrating everyday heroes

Type 1: the person who performs a single dramatic heroic act

When we talk about celebrating everyday heroes, we should pause to redefine what we mean.  When I was growing up, a hero was someone who did something “extraordinary” and positive for others or for the community at large.  We became accustomed to defining heroism in terms of saving someone’s life, such as a firefighter who entered a burning building to rescue someone or the police officer who saves a citizen’s life.

Type 2: the person who plays a vital role in a bigger heroic effort

More recently, we have expanded our definition of a “hero” to include those who provide a vital contribution to a major accomplishment, such as the work many unsung heroes played in winning World War II, as Paul Kennedy profiled in his great book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War.  On Saturday, March 16, 2013, I attended a wonderful event for the Explorers’ Club, which celebrated both a few very famous people, like Senator John Glenn and Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter, and both of these kinds of heroes.

The Explorers Club celebrated a Sherpa who saved many people’s lives in mountain-climbing accidents in Mr. Everest, who would be like our first kind of hero. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, who did a number of deep oceanic exploration efforts, credited a number of engineers like a wonderful gentleman named Kevin Hardy from San Diego’s Scripps Oceanographic Institute with being essential to his success.  Hardy, with whom I spoke at dinner Friday evening, designed and built the unmanned capsule that descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean in the world, took photos and captured other data essential to preparing Cameron for his deep dive in 2012.

Type 3: The person whose cumulative body of work is heroic, but is insufficiently recognized or rewarded

However, there is a third kind of hero, which we do not explicitly celebrate, but should:  the person who consistently develops innovative solutions that make a big difference in the lives of those he or she touches every day.  Often, these innovative solutions are not documented, and, as a result, they are not celebrated in books, movies, plays, or even in recognition events like the Explorers Club event, although the Explorers Club comes closer than any organization I have seen to recognizing this kind of unsung hero.

Along these lines, I was pleased to read today that baseball will be honoring Dr. Frank Jobe at the July 27 Hall of Fame induction ceremony for his pioneering work in what is now called “Tommy John” surgery.  Dr. Jobe invented that surgery on the baseball pitcher, Tommy John, who had damaged his pitching elbow to the point that his chances of recovering and pitching again were estimated at 1 in 100.  His ligament grafting process, invented in 1974, increased the chance of full recovery to over 90% today. Dr. Jobe has contributed to the career successes of several dozen pitchers and position players and has probably been responsible for billions of dollars of enhanced value for baseball team owners, only a fraction of which has gone to him.  Although he is a wealthy man, he is a relatively unsung hero in baseball and other sports.

Coach Catana Starks: the ultimate example of the third type of everyday hero

However, to me, the everyday hero we should celebrate in entertainment, books, and recognition events is the person who innovates everyday in multiple situations, changes the lives of many other people, but does not get recognized publicly for much of what he or she does, and often is far more under-rewarded than Dr. Jobe.  That is why I have put the story of Dr. Catana Starks on screen, and why her story and others like it need to be told.

Our film could only scratch the surface of what Coach Starks was able to do over a lifetime of coaching.  Part of the reason was because she did her job in such a quiet way that it was difficult to dramatize some of her accomplishments within the time constraints of a full-length feature film.  Part of the reason was that she did not think to tell us what she had done because she did not appreciate how heroic it was.  Finally, the major part of the reason was that her heroism was not the single, easily definable accomplishment that could be the subject of a large project, but the cumulative effect of many smaller, innovative acts that made a big difference in the lives of those she touched.

What we would have liked to celebrate, but did not get a chance to celebrate, were many small acts of daily heroism about which we either learned from Coach Starks after we finished shooting the movie, or from others.  There are many stories about Coach Starks, and they fit into three categories:

• Redefining adversity as opportunity;
• Seeing opportunities to make a difference in situations that no one else saw; or
• Using scarce resources in novel ways.

Redefining adversity as opportunity

Coach Starks did not have the budget or the established, prestigious program to recruit the most sought-after golfers, so she often had to recruit people who were from less advantaged backgrounds.  Her genius or “heroism” was her innovative way of convincing them that their apparent “disadvantaged” backgrounds prepared them better for the competitive challenges of life than the so-called “advantages” bestowed on their competitors.

My favorite story about Coach Starks in this regard was how she figured out that the “disadvantages” of not having enough money to afford hotel rooms the night before a tournament and of not having a big enough van to enable everyone to have a sleeper seat could be turned into an opportunity.  In the beginning, the person who sat upright in front with her on a long overnight drive was disadvantaged, but she gave that person a special treat, in terms of hours of conversation in which she presented life lessons.  The golfers with whom I spoke told me that they eventually came to see the front seat position as a better option for them than a sleeper seat, even though they had a less comfortable sleeping position.  Every one of them remembered those long conversations years later.

Seeing opportunities where others did not

Coach Starks was a teacher.  Many teachers have invited inmates from local prisons to speak to students about the problems of drugs and how they lead to bad behavior.  Coach Starks did that as well.

However, she went one step further.  She had one drug dealer speak who had been sentenced to life imprisonment from three felony convictions during his teenage years.  It prompted her to use her accumulated knowhow on coaching and mentoring to persuade the prison system to give him an opportunity to get treatment and eventually be released.  She became an advocate for reducing the sentences of those whose drug-related offenses occurred early in their adult lives and who had reformed during their prison tenure.

Using scarce resources efficiently

Coach Starks did not have the high-priced instructors or technology to help her team refine its golfing skills.  She came up with two innovative solutions:

• She tapped volunteers in the Nashville area who gave her golfers free instruction at the driving range or on the public courses.  These volunteers became mentors beyond the help they gave players relative to their golfing skills.
• She used a video-cassette recorder to capture the golf strokes of her golfers and then urged them to send the video cassettes back to their coaches in their countries or communities of origin.  This accomplished two things:
  • It gave the golfers instruction from someone from whom they had learned to play golf and who was intimately familiar with their technique; and
  • It reinforced a lifelong support system they would need for not only golf, but also everything else they would do.

I could have used many other examples of her innovation solutions to problems caused by resource scarcity, but there are too many from which to choose.  Her decades long success as a coach and teacher is the result of many small innovations, no one of which is dramatic enough to be the foundation for a piece of feature film or documentary entertainment, but the cumulative effect of which was huge.

Her story deserves to be told, and it will be told in public venues, beginning later this year in From the Rough.

In the Saturday, December 22, 2012, issue of The Wall Street Journal, there was an inspiring story written by James Zweig called “The 107-Year-Old Stock Picker.”  The subject of the story was 107-year-old Irving Kahn, the chairman of the Kahn Brothers Group, an investment management firm based in New York City.  As Zweig describes him:

“He personifies the virtues that Graham (Benjamin Graham) spelled out in his classic 1949 book “The Intelligent Investor,” from which this column takes its name.”

Later on in the story, Zweig tells us more about Kahn:

“Discipline has been a key for Mr. Kahn. He still works five days a week, slacking off only on the occasional Friday.”

In answer to a question about his remarkable longevity, Kahn responds:

“Millions of people die every year of something they could cure themselves: lack of wisdom and lack of ability to control their impulses.”

Irving Kahn appears to be an individual firmly grounded in the real world, and as active as a 107-year-old can possibly be. Zweig commented: “In some ways, Mr. Kahn says, these are the good old days.”  As an investor, he correctly notes that he has more tools than ever available to level the playing field between investors and those from whom they buy securities.  His goal is to know more about the stock he is buying than the investor who is trying to sell it to him. He is energized by his job and his daily life, and his physical faculties have declined relatively slowly.

Although I have had many role models in my life, certainly Mr. Kahn has to be added to them.  I believe that the key to health and longevity is a continuation of one’s passionate commitment to family and friends, causes, and work.  When someone completely “retires” from active living, he or she actually increases his or her psychic burden.

The other key to healthy longevity is to live every day with the appreciation of life that a productive very old person carries through the day.  When I have met such people, very little that bothers me would bother them, because they have had a few extra decades in which to put life into perspective.

How do they think differently from someone at my age or someone far younger than I am?

• They have been through enough up-and-down cycles in life to realize that neither success nor adversity is permanent.  Life has a mix of both every year for us.
• Just as those who have had near death experiences tend to worry less about just about every other problem, those who have relatively short life expectancies tend to consider daily problems to be of lesser consequence.
• They celebrate small successes every day.  At first glance, this would appear to be an acknowledgment that a person has failed to achieve more ambitious goals, but it actually increases the likelihood of more ambitious accomplishments.  Efficiently taking small, successful steps often gives an individual the ability to adapt to changed conditions and achieve success with fewer big failures.

Conversely, by encouraging older people to retire and disengage from active work, we inadvertently put them in a much more psychologically vulnerable position.  They lose the ability to see past the news headlines into the many good things that are happening.  They get fearful, when they should be celebrating the progress we are making on many fronts.

Why do I believe that to be the case?  Someone in the flow of the business, political, cultural, and community world has a much better understanding of reality than someone who gathers information from the mass media.  The TV media, in particular, is designed to report what it calls “news,” but what is typically a highly distorted and negative selection of the broader flow of events and trends.  Initially local news editors, but now national and global news editors as well, on all news stations select stories for broadcasting or printing based on the principle of “If it bleeds, let it lead.”

For this reason, although the world is less violent than it was two decades ago, and the absolute level of crime is the lowest it has been for decades, the sensational reporting of crimes gives the impression that violence is at an all-time high.

Recently, I met a highly accomplished journalist and author named Greg Behrman, who feels the same way I do.  We spend far too much time covering what’s wrong in the world, and not enough time spotlighting the things we are doing right, and that require considerable innovation in solving problems.  Think about this point for a minute in a number of contexts:

• As a country, we are seeing a significant increase in the percentage of people that are overweight or even obese.  We have a true public health crisis in slow motion.  That is no longer news.  We see it all around us, particularly in the Southeastern United States, and in the lower income parts of big cities.

However, I learned that New York City has actually stopped and even reversed the incidence of childhood obesity, but I did not learn it from the news media, but from a speech given by Dr. Tom Farley, the City’s Public Health Commissioner.  I am sure that the advisory board meeting at which Dr. Farley spoke was not the first time at which this news was made public, but it would be difficult to find this story in the popular media.

• We get the impression that we are a more violent world than ever before, but Joshua Goldstein recently published a book called Winning the War on War, which documents that the absolute level of armed conflict is declining over time.  Why do we not see these statistics dominating the airwaves?

• The U.S. has had great success in several public health campaigns over the last four decades in reducing the percentage of adults who use tobacco, the likelihood of automobile related fatalities, the likelihood of workplace-related accidents, and the incidence of alcohol abuse.  This is not broadly or frequently reported.

• Our air is cleaner, there is a lower incidence of acid rain, and the level of hazardous waste discharges in our factories is far lower than it was 40 years ago, but there is very little reporting on these positive environmental trends.

• In many respects, medical science has enabled us to achieve a better quality of life than was possible when I was growing up.  My wife was an early beneficiary of lasik surgery, which eliminated her need to wear contact lenses or glasses for everyday distance viewing (although she still wears reading glasses.)

Whenever I am down, I think of Irving Kahn, but more importantly, I think of the old Frank Sinatra song That’s Life, particularly one section of the lyrics:

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king

I’ve been up and down and over and out and I know one thing

Each time I find myself flat on my face

I pick myself up and get back in the race

That’s Life, That’s Life

I tell you, I can’t deny it

I thought of quitting, baby but my heart just ain’t gonna buy it.”

We should take a moment upon reading this and celebrate Irving Kahn and everyone like me who keeps getting “back in the race.”  For, in doing so, he has clearly discovered the true fountain of youth.

As my family and I celebrate the holidays this year, we truly feel that we have gone through a rebirth from the many challenges we have faced in the past few years.  Objectively, our path to get our film into the market has been strewn with obstacles, some of which resulted from our inexperience and others of which resulted from the fact that we are trying to do something very different from the kind of film traditional studios produce, finance, and/or distribute. Similarly, my efforts to battle the day-to-day challenges of leading Dossia have presented challenges I did not encounter when I led a more established business at Pitney Bowes.

Oddly enough, we are more energized and happier at this time than ever before.  As I reflect on this strange feeling of happiness as a result of the adversity we have experienced, I think of a quote from Helen Keller:

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery, of hardships.”

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In talking with Dr. Robert Green, one of the handful of leading-edge researchers and thinkers on the promise of genomics in transforming health and healthcare, I have gained some quite interesting insights.

Dr. Green is a physician-scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School and has focused much of his professional life on a subject of great passion to me, patient empowerment.  As strange as it may sound, he has had to do a considerable amount of clinical study work to prove to the medical community that the consequences of doctors telling patients that they are at serious risk of a degenerative and currently incurable disease are, on balance, positive.  His work in that regard has been done through a series of studies called the REVEAL Study, for which he has been the principal investigator.

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Many people have asked about the status of our From the Rough film project.  It is alive and well, and we have taken most of 2012 to take a fresh look at every component of the project. We are getting close to finalizing it, and expect the film to be released in 2013.

We looked more closely at the origin of our title, which came from a quote by Seve Ballesteros, the late, great Spanish golfer, who, when asked about what he would have wanted to be different about golf, said: “I’d like to see the fairways more narrow. Then everyone would have to play from the rough. Not just me.”

Initially, we understood his comment to be half-kidding and half-serious.  The serious part of his comment arose from the fact that he was the best player of his time, maybe the best of all time, in designing and executing on shots from the rough, or from any difficult lie or location.  What we did not understand was how these unique skills were foundational to who he was and why he succeeded.

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Vocational and Technical Education

As we just observed the Labor Day weekend, there is a tendency for the media and for elected officials to reinforce obsolete views of labor and of vocational and technical skills required to compete in the global economy. There is also a tendency to celebrate the wrong qualities of people they would generally characterize as being part of the “working class.” As a result many of us have image of “blue collar jobs,” the skills required to do them well, and vocational and technical education required to prepare people for them that is wildly out of date.

Why What We Celebrate is Obsolete

Blogger David Burr concisely described why the Labor Day holiday was created:

“The holiday originated in 1882 as a result of the labor movement and was intended to be a day of rest to recognize the efforts of the average working man.”

We need to reinvent what we honor for this holiday.  Labor Day was designed to recognize the value of the “average worker,” collective activity, labor union membership rights, and “hard work.”  The typical image of the “blue collar” worker is someone using muscular power to do a physically demanding, backbreaking task.  When I think of Labor Day as it has been celebrated historically, I am more likely to think of either the folklore of John Henry as a “steel driver” or the cleaning woman celebrated in Donna Summer’s great song “She Works Hard for the Money.”

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President Obama’s recent quote that “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help” justifiably is getting a great deal of publicity and commentary.  The statement is true, but incomplete in its understanding of what it takes to succeed. It is being used by many people to justify redistributing income and wealth from successful people who are simply more “fortunate” in having better support systems to those whom these individuals consider to have been “less fortunate.”

When I think of his remark, I remember the scene at the end of Superman II, in which Lex Luther, the master criminal  played by Gene Hackman, attempts to curry favor with the evil General Zod, played by Terence Stamp, by directing him to put Superman in an enclosed chamber in which Superman will lose all his powers.  Superman tricks Luther and Zod and ends up retaining his powers, whereas Zod and the two evil creatures with him lose theirs.  After this happens, Luther approaches Superman and says: “Wasn’t it great how we fooled them?  I was with you all the time, Superman.”

External resources can support, hinder, or be neutral in someone’s quest to achieve a goal.  In most cases involving transformational change, the individual has to work smartly and hard to steer those resources toward helping him or her, rather than being hindrances.  Essentially, there are five flaws with the implications of the President’s statement:

• Great leaders and innovators “connect the dots” in ways that others do not. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers uses the example of Bill Gates having access to a computer lab at his school when he was growing up to illustrate that Gates’ success was clearly attributable to that unique set of circumstances, and to the support the school provided.  That’s true, but Gates was not the only student in that school.  His family was not the wealthiest in the school, and he had no unique privileges that gave only him the ability to take advantage of the free resource that triggered his success.  Gates was unique in taking the initiative and having the vision to understand and use the available asset.  Great leaders find or create assets and support that others cannot imagine, much less use.
• Most successful people have the passion and the tenacity to pursue their goals under circumstances and against obstacles that discourage other people.   This is especially true of entrepreneurs who transform a marketplace.  Years ago, I read the story of Intuit, a great company that brought innovative consumer-controlled financial management software to the marketplace.  On many occasions, founder Scott Cook encountered obstacles that put him very close to going out of business, but he kept going.  Most people would not attempt to start a new business, much less endure the multiple setbacks it takes to succeed.  Great leaders and innovators have more tenacity and patience to realize the benefits of whatever support systems they can use.
• Unfortunately, most leaders who make a difference have the moral courage to take unpopular positions, even to the extent of being ridiculed by others.  Working hard is a virtue, but being willing to work hard often leads to a militant conformity with the status quo, not breakthrough successes.  Great leaders and innovators are unusually good at being immune from the discouragement that comes from external resistance from the so-called “support resources.”
• Great leaders and innovators find a way to win over neutral or even change-resistant people.  They are unusually gifted at finding common ground to move people toward their point of view.  Great leaders and innovators are accomplished at turning adversaries into supporters.
• Transformational change is never a linear, standardized process.  It requires a great deal of adaptation.  Great leaders and innovators are comfortable with being adaptable, not adhering to rigid rules and processes.

We are going through a very painful time in our country in terms of the changing nature of work, business, technology, healthcare, education, and the role of government.  Because of disruptive innovations in every sector of our society, the old rules about how people succeeded are gone, but it is unclear what will replace them.

The major changes that are horribly disruptive to people’s lives are these:

• Because every marketplace is changing more rapidly and radically than ever before, the value of decades of experience in a job, a company, or an industry is less than it has ever been.
• Because experience is less valuable, everyone is less secure in his or her current employment than ever before.
• When someone loses his or her job, the path to future employment requires more substantial adjustment than ever before.  Moving to the same job in a different company or industry is less and less likely.
• For many people, the right kind of paying employment may be in an independent contractor position, as opposed to a job with an employer.  In fact, many employers are going to sites like www.freelancer.com  to hire workers to perform tasks, without having to create a “job” without fixed responsibilities, pay levels, benefits, and taxes.  For someone to make a living, it is more important that he or she seek “paying work” than to seek a “job.”
• Adaptability and innovation are more important than conformity, a skill most people are not taught in the educational system, which rewards conformity to what the teacher believes is the “right answer.”
• Categories and definitions of what we think about the world are subject to challenge and are less permanent than they have ever been.  The ways we describe what is going on in the world are more likely to be challenged than ever before.  For example, when we use the analogy of a blueprint to describe our genetic code, a common metaphor for describing genetics, we are reflecting an obsolete understanding of genetics, since we now know that we are shaped by the way our genes are “expressed” or “switched on.”  Even something as seemingly fixed as our genetic make-up not only changes during our lifetime, but the altered genetic “expression” can also be passed on to our children.
• Education is increasingly about “learning,” from wherever source we can learn best, as opposed to “teaching.”  Teaching implies that there is a fixed body of knowledge that is imparted from teachers to students.  Learning changes that paradigm by inducing students to seek insight and knowledge from whatever sources they might be available, and to recognize that there are no fixed bodies of knowledge, but continually changing assumptions and paradigms within every body of knowledge.

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I have been through a very stressful period in my life, for a variety of reasons.  However, the challenges of coping with the sources of that stress have actually changed me for the better and improved my long-term health.  I have had to adjust my orientation to problems in two fundamental respects:

• Increasing my focus on the present, as opposed to brooding and worrying too much about the past or the future; and
• Believing that every problem I could conjure up has a solution.

Both of these orientation changes were most difficult for me.  I am a person blessed (or cursed) with a great ability to understand and dissect history, and to learn from it.  I also have prided myself on my ability to see potential opportunities and risks quite far ahead.

Being a CEO particularly reinforced both orientations.  I studied the history of both successful and unsuccessful initiatives within my own organization and learned from the successes and failures of others.  I saw patterns as I looked at the present, based on what happened before.  I also was able to plan and envision the future, because I could see multiple potential futures and prepare for a broad range of those futures.

However, both orientations, taken to an extreme, are unhealthy. Understanding the past without reliving the emotional burden of past failures, whether they are mine or someone else’s, is healthy, but it is very difficult to revisit past failures without experiencing some regret or guilt associated with them, or some nervousness that they will be repeated.  There never is a perfect fit between any past set of events and useful insights for a problem currently presenting itself.

As for the future, I found that I spent too much energy worrying about low probability events that never came to pass, especially if those events were further out in time.  One of the biggest challenges leaders face, as Andrew Grove of Intel eloquently and thoughtfully describes in his classic Only the Paranoid Survive, is distinguishing between true strategic inflection points and false alarms.

By letting time pass and letting things happen, I found that my resourcefulness was sufficient for addressing problems as they came up.  I also found that I approached those problems with a clearer head and with less draining emotions.

The second change in my life came with the most important change in my headset, largely as a result of the innovation of which I have become aware from doing a lot of research online.  That change in my way of thinking about the world is the belief that every problem has a solution, and that there is no problem that cannot be overcome, no matter how difficult it seems in the short run.

Over a lifetime, I have tended to believe that there are natural boundaries to the range of solutions available to solve a problem.  I now believe that someone who is determined to find a solution can go beyond traditional boundaries to find a solution.  Those boundaries come from thinking in fixed categories when the world consists of increasingly fluid categories.  Ways of thinking about the world that we assumed were immutable laws of nature turn out to be much less immutable than we believed them to be.  We even find that our vocabulary no longer captures what is happening.

For example, in thinking about a future time in which we may no longer have the ability to drive because of reduced capabilities, we may narrow our geographic options to locations with public transportation, because we think of either “driving” a car or being a “passenger” in a car someone else is driving.  What we have not contemplated is the idea that a car can operate automatically with no human “driver.”  Google has created such a car, and it would not surprise me that, as I get to be unable to drive 2-3 decades out from now, I will still have mobility because of access to self-driving automobiles.

We also think that cars ride on land and airplanes fly in the air.  What we have not contemplated is a vehicle that can operate in the air at some points in time and on the ground at others.  Cars may also have the ability to operate on the water, as well as land and air. A combined land-air vehicle exists today.  Is it an airplane when it is operating on the ground or a car that flies?  We have no terminology that describes it adequately.

Today, we are in an era in which anything we contemplate, good or bad, can be made to happen, given sufficient time, resources, and tenacity on the part of someone or a critical mass of individuals who want to make it happen.  I still have trouble internalizing this, and wake up in a cold sweat worrying on too many nights, but I eventually remind myself that we are living in the most innovative time in history.

In the book Imagine, author Jonah Lehrer describes situations in which great creative people are blocked and then have a burst of insight that breaks new creative ground.  In fact, his first example in the book is the process by which Bob Dylan ushered in a new era of lyric creation with his process for creating the song “Like a Rolling Stone.”  Lehrer argues that the most transformative thinking happens when people let go, relax emotionally, distract themselves with seemingly unrelated thoughts, and then allow the transformative insight to present itself, often without an understanding of how or when it will happen.

For those of you reading this blog, learn to relax, use the tremendous resources available online, and envision less bounded and constrained futures.  It will make your daily living routine a whole lot easier and less stressful.