HOWARD STEVENSON: I'm Howard Stevenson.

It's a pleasure to be with you.

I mean that sincerely, since I died once out here.

As I say, we're going to talk about building a life.

I was telling Howard I failed once at retirement,

three times at dying, and 71 times at being on the Forbes

list.

[LAUGHTER]

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 picking pockets and rolling drunks,

I started to ask a question.

My wife and I between us have seven kids and 12 grandchildren.

And we're both married to jerks, so one year I

got to pay tuition at Columbia, Yale, Harvard,

Williams, and Bowdoin.

I'm bragging and complaining.

[LAUGHTER]

But I sat down and said, why is it

that people say it's so hard for successful people

to have successful children?

And that's true across almost every culture.

It's rice paddies to rices paddies, clogs to clogs,

bogs to bogs, all of these things.

So I set out with a friend, Laura Nash,

to figure out the answer to that question.

The first question is, what do you mean by success?

So I want to talk about that.

The second thing I want to talk about at the end

is a little book that just came out in October.

When I died, one of the young people that had worked with me

said, you make so many wise-ass-- no, excuse me.

I didn't listen to all the advice you gave me.

Can I interview you?

And I thought that would be nice.

My kids or grandkids would--

I literally did die.

I suffered unattended cardiac arrest out here on the lawn

out here, and that's about 1% chance of survival.

But I was extremely lucky.

And so we wrote this book that came out as Howard's Gift,

and I want to tell you a little bit about the lessons I've

tried to pass on to the kids.

So the first question 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 it best--

count no man successful till he dies.

I tried that.

Didn't work.

[LAUGHTER]

But it's a state of being, because as soon

as you say I'm successful, you probably start to fail.

Because that's a constant process.

There's some unique activities.

If I asked the people in this room, were you successful?

I think almost everybody would 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, I was successful when?

Now, I always find it sad when people talk about being admitted

to Harvard Business School as the high point of their life,

or it's even worse if they talk about being admitted to St.

Paul's.

But it's a question of, what do we mean?

Is it a score?

If so, is it--

I loved Anne's comment about money this morning.

One thing about success, it's 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 life.

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'd imagined, like I gave up

a very nice activity because somebody had to drive them

to school and other things.

My youngest son was the second happiest person

in the room when he got his driver's license.

[LAUGHTER]

It's often quite unstable.

Things can be going well and 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 and emotional.

Who do I compare myself to?

If we look around the room I guess

everybody is telling Bill Gates he's handsome.

But if he really looks in the mirror--

well, anyway,

[LAUGHTER]

And a lot of the success books are weird.

They tell you to think through all the angles.

You've got to study it.

Look at Malcolm Gladwell, who 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, particularly now.

And you get on this life path, sometimes

call it a velvet-lined rut, and if you do it all your life

you're probably going to 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, we'll 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.

I started the entrepreneurship when nobody cared.

Well, if my sons or daughters tried to do it,

it wouldn't work.

There is a different path.

It's a different time.

We started the one of the first hedge funds

in the United States.

I was involved in starting and managed for 10 years.

Well, now there are 2,600 hedge 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 our interviews, I'm 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 life's reality is quite different.

Life's reality is all about choices.

We're standing at the crossroads and we don't what's

over the horizon.

I got tenure in 1978-- that's something that people seek--

and I resigned immediately.

And people thought I was crazy, but I'd

interviewed a whole bunch of tenured faculty and said,

they're not happy.

Why I go down a path where many of the more, quote, "successful"

people aren't happy?

Let me try something different.

But I had no idea where it would lead.

It led back here.

Now--

[LAUGHTER]

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 wanted at 22,

your name's Hugh Hefner.

[LAUGHTER]

And 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 experience a success that

could have been yours.

I'm the ST in Baupost.

It's a fairly famous firm.

I left it when I became a single parent.

I look on the Forbes list and see

the guy who took over from me.

Yeah, I wince.

But then I think, well, if I had 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 wince.

But that's OK.

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, there are really three great fears in life.

One is, I won't be a success.

Two, I will be a success.

Won't be enough, this famous Peggy Lee song.

And I'll be a 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, 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.

Oh, OK.

How many parents have kids on deep subsidy trying

to be an actor or a writer in Hollywood,

or those kind of things?

And they get to about 50 and they say,

I'm not really going to make it.

Now what am I 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 and having it all.

You're supposed to be Dr. Ruth in the bedroom

and Donald Trump in the boardroom.

Well, 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.

If I think of Rupert Murdoch, Jon

Corzine, can we imagine Lady Gaga, Leona Helmsley--

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 daughters said,

I really want to model myself on Lady Gaga.

The two that went to the Harvard Business School have done OK.

One has wound up being a family counselor.

We interviewed about 150 people.

They were high achievers in multiple arenas.

They seemed to care about others, which was probably

one of our criteria, for their success in life to 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 immigrant,

and that now has a firm with about 50 people

that work for her and is really amazingly happy,

and all her kids are graduating from college.

So it's a very fascinating group of people.

But mostly what you saw is people

that were quite satisfied, that they felt good about themselves

and good about their life.

So 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 deep research.

And what we saw in these people is

they seized opportunities that's presented.

They largely avoided regrets.

Now, my coauthor Laura and I argued a lot about,

can you live a life without regrets?

And it was, yes, we can, no we can't, yes--

a very intelligent argument.

But what we discovered is we were

talking about different things.

She was talking about consequences

and I was talking about process.

Things go wrong.

But if you acted honest to yourself, if things go wrong,

it's pretty hard to have a regret.

Say that I acted on the best information.

The regrets come when you kid yourself.

One of the titles in the Howard's Gift book is

"Don't Cheat at Solitaire."

We also found that people really enjoyed the here and now.

They weren't always putting off.

When we interviewed one of them, ice cream arrived at 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 was a landscape of satisfaction.

If you ask people why they succeeded,

they give you the same BS.

It's in Franklin, it's in Covey, it's

in a whole 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 pay $250,000 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 and your life?

Are you content?

And then there's legacy.

Have you done something to build upon?

Now, one of the things that's very clear

these are uncorrelated.

You can achieve without being happy, right?

Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway 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 you be happy without achieving?

Just go to Aspen.

How many parents told their kids, I have worked so hard.

I want you to be happy.

They go out to Aspen and meet their kids

and say, what the hell are you doing?

And they said, you told us to be happy, Dad.

We're happy.

What's your problem?

I'm a trustafarian.

That's great religion.

[LAUGHTER]

Now, legacy I was having trouble with until I

thought about Karl Marx.

He certainly wasn't known in his lifetime.

He was mean and abusive to his family.

He was a drunkard, which generally somewhat goes

with unhappiness.

And ye, he left a big legacy, whether 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 is 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 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?

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 would satisfy many people,

but as long as he compares himself to Bill Gates,

he can make himself really quite miserable.

And by the way, that'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 say, 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 do I want to do for them?

Now, when you think about them, they're really complicated.

Achievement, there's a time dimension to it.

Is it about the past, is it about the present,

or the future?

If you think about the impact, is it on me,

or is it on other people?

I could develop things that are achievement,

that are about me alone, or I can build a system where

other people are involved.

The emotional drivers.

There's some very positive drivers, mastery,

recognition, pride.

But there are Donald Trump's, envy, greed, and fear.

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 will make you feel bad.

And then there's the context.

It's the Wayne Gretzky.

I got to skate to where the puck will be, not to where it is now.

So there's a little thing called values here.

As one of our daughters said at 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 in 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 you look at it, each of these have twins.

You can think about contentment and fulfillment and happiness,

or laziness and gluttony.

They both can lead you to somewhat be happy.

You can 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 desires,

or there's the fear of death and need for control.

I know somebody that's written a thousand-year trust.

Trusts should be named mistrusts.

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 he's seen everything.

But when you look at these, does contentment and fulfillment

help you achieve?

Not really.

Certain neuroses help you to achieve.

Does fairness, generosity, and caring help you

in the competitive battle?

It actually doesn'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 creating legacy.

But it also will probably diminish your own achievement

because you're letting other people be recognized.

Whereas 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,

we're torn, we're tugged in different directions.

This one helps me achieve 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 that

don't want to have some measure of success

on all of these dimensions.

So one thing is find your passion, that will find somehow,

something, that in achievement will find significant happiness

and leave our legacy.

The only problem, it 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?

Bullshit, 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.

It requires different skills.

If you try and be CEO at home, the chief operating officer

generally has something to say about it.

At least that's been my experience, very subtly.

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.

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 doesn't work either.

There's a lot of books generally sold to YPO members,

From Success to Significance, Halftime,

I can go through the titles.

They don't work for a very simple reason.

When is enough to move on?

If you say, when have I achieved enough, I never want--

do you think any of us want to ever say,

I'll never achieve again?

I don't know any people, even if they never played 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

developed common sense, you'll never be a great skier.

Because what's enough for now is certainly not

enough for your life 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 it says, 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 add one to anything.

And if you're successful at something, often you say,

well, I just want a little more.

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 that 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, they're as needy now as they were at 17.

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 can you

wait to be happy?

I can't imagine living life saying,

I will finally be happy when I've got $100 million.

That's a little bit of a nonsense.

And by the way, your family will never wait.

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, achievement, significance, happiness.

And they told stories about starting small.

They tell stories of each of these things

that happened 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.

I mean, we had stories of high school achievements

from people that actually--

Peter Ueberroth told us a story about his high school

experience.

Now, he ran the Los Angeles Olympics

and was very famous in a lot of things.

He was also the guy that helped restore Los 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 the problem is we don't know when it's going to end.

I was pretty healthy.

I'd exercised in the morning.

I was walking across campus when I died.

Happily, it was January 3 and it was a warm day

and people were around.

But if I'd been three minutes later

I wouldn't be here, because I would have been in my office

and you had about four 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, somebody they helped when they first

got in their career.

So it was a very interesting set of stories

about the way they spun this through a spiral of life.

Now, 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.

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'm never as happy as when I'm at the office,

I think you've got a problem.

I love my work.

I've had the best career in the world.

But actually, there's some other things I like, too.

Is my children's trust the legacy I'm leaving?

I don't think so.

Invisible leadership of charities is significance.

I've been the chairman of the board of NPR

and actively involved in a lot of charities.

And some of it's--

you get in there and some of the elbows

are equally sharp, shall we say, in some of these charities,

as they are at any business that I've ever been involved in.

And one of the questions I always

ask people is, where do you put your tennis?

I'm 71 years old.

I play tennis badly, but I really enjoy it.

But I was with a friend the other day

who's 72, who pays Federer to warm him up.

[LAUGHTER]

He's very good, but at 72--

he can afford it, so it's not a problem.

But that's a very important part of his self-identity

is being able to win at tennis.

And 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.

So if you think about it, I think the lesson of the book

was most people seek all satisfactions in all domains,

and seeking one 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, juggling is really an art.

If you think about juggling, you got

to keep your eye on all the balls.

If you only look at one ball, you're going to drop the others.

So you've got to keep your eye on all the balls.

When you touch something, you have to give it energy.

Nobody applauds 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.

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.

I just love to 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 when you think of those spirals,

these people that we admire often

have been practicing this 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 at the top.

It's not the one in 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.

Family, that's a little harder.

Sometimes if you drop that one, it shatters.

So the falling ball is a tremendously important thing.

Now, if you think about the dynamics of life,

in the early stages, you don't think much about legacy.

I can think when I was 21, 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 to the kids,

I can tell them why writing 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.

As you get to be in early career,

this is a time when you start to make the attachments.

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 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 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--

after family, and if I don't talk to all my kids

at least two or three times a week, I feel badly.

And some of it's, they're busy, I'm busy,

but somehow we find time to talk.

But happiness, you've got to know what it means,

and you've got to say, that's something

I seek out on a regular basis.

I'm not going to postpone it.

And then, of course, the big red ball in the earliest career

is the achievement.

Very few people are Grandma Moses.

You don't achieve starting at 83.

So this is the early career dynamics.

In the mid-career, we get on a path.

We know what makes us happy.

We've settled on who's significant to us,

unless there's a major change.

And we 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?

There's usually something-- when one of your 43-year-old friends

dies of a heart attack, it's a wake-up call.

I remember when Pat Lyles died.

Some of you probably remember Pat.

But when he died, it was like, 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--

well, I had to figure out where the pieces were first

before I could pick them up.

It was a good lesson to me.

But then we get into this golden years.

I'm not going to achieve a lot more.

I've got one more book I'm working on now.

But of the 16 books I've written, they're there.

And as one time somebody introduced me, Howard,

you write books that once you put them down,

you can't pick them up.

[LAUGHTER]

But the achievement is what it is.

I find that with 12 grandchildren, seven kids,

and lots of friends, you have to work hard at maintaining

those relationships.

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 you 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 legacy's there.

But at this point, if you're not happy,

forget about it, as they say.

So you want to go back to the key problems.

You can't achieve in all dimensions.

I will never be a great tennis player.

I'll never be a great skier.

There are a lot of things.

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?

Where do I feel good about myself in the competition,

in the world?

One of the things I learned early in life,

I worked with a guy, and I said--

he was one of the people that helped coin the word automation

in his manufacturing course.

And he went into the paper industry,

and I said, Joe, why did you go in the paper industry?

He said, John Diebold like 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.

I thought I would end my golden years with a lot of travel.

Well, it turns out I run out of breath pretty easily.

Now, 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--

SPEAKER 1: 14,000?

HOWARD STEVENSON: Yeah, 13,756, to be precise.

But I was excited about going to the observatory,

but I recognize 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 wince.

There is a wince factor.

But if you don't get over it and say,

I don't feel like I made the wrong decisions, I just

wince and say, that was a choice I chose.

I chose it constantly, consciously,

and I have no regrets.

If the first surprise was the complexity of success,

and the second surprise was the emotional drivers and how

complex humans are because of the diversity

of emotional drivers, the third surprise to us

was the role of enough.

Now, enough is a funny English word.

It has a lower bound.

Have you done enough?

And when you're yelling at your kids, that's enough,

it has an 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--

we always want more.

It's like Samuel Gompers, the great labor leader,

when asked what he wanted and his answer was more.

Now, what we saw in these people was a reasoned sense of enough.

And that was a very interesting insight to us,

because there's enough on two different dimensions, two

counts.

One is the dimensionality.

What's enough in this achievement?

What's enough significance?

What's enough happiness?

Because if you don't define enough, 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 the question of 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.

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'm sort of a measurement type of guy.

And so 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 set a number that I've

stayed at for about 10 years, and anything over that

I give away.

But I want to keep track.

I want to understand 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 sit down

and say, oh, this is a good day.

I got everything done.

But you have to be realistic about what

you're going to do today.

My wife always has 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 that's left over.

But in fact that becomes very important.

But also by having 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 talked to three of them today,

I had to listen to one more thing about how

Hollywood is hard to work in.

[LAUGHTER]

But I listen to that every day.

I just wanted to turn on the tape and say, yeah, I told you,

I worked once with George C. Scott.

I understand the business you're in.

But the other thing about enough is

if you start to do it you can say, now,

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 lists, 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 say, 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?

I was with a 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 them.

I came from a poor background.

And if I give them money, they won't feel driven to achieve.

And I'm sitting there in a house which the ceilings were

at least 20 feet tall.

The main spine of the house was 300 feet long.

And at the end was a wine cellar which had Haut Brion, Opus One,

Harlan--

visible to the guests, by the way--

and you're saying now you want your kids

to do exactly what you did?

I think you're setting up for failure, because--

well, anyway.

SPEAKER 2: You actually said that to him?

HOWARD STEVENSON: Yes.

I'm getting to-- well, my grandmother at 92

said, well, I'm old enough to say what I think.

And I said, Bubbie, you've always said that,

so why worry about it?

But one of the things is enough sets limits.

If you start to say, well, how much

do I need to protect myself and 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 can 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 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, 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.

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 do?

So 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 an ideal?

Does your success reflect your core drivers?

Now, most of us can't get very far away from what

we were taught at home.

I know I can't.

I hope my kids can't.

It's interesting.

I had a discussion with the kids about grandchildren.

I said, they have 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 by the way, when 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 or 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.

Why do you really want to control your kids?

There are a number of funny stories of people--

I mean, this one guy talking to, quite wealthy.

We were talking about how they manage their money

and what they should be doing, and he said, well,

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.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, anyway, I did point that out to him, too.

I don't think it had any impact, but I felt like--

SPEAKER 3: But you felt honest.

HOWARD STEVENSON: Yeah.

So when we think about it, I think

these things apply in our professional careers as well.

Achievement's about innovation, getting results.

We've 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 the name Frank Batten?

Oh.

SPEAKER 4: I'm trying to remember why, though.

SPEAKER 5: Could be Batten Hall.

SPEAKER 6: Batten Hall.

HOWARD STEVENSON: Batten Hall was one reason.

Frank developed a company called Landmark Communications,

the Weather Channel, and things like that.

He is the guy that said he'd pay $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.

If 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 I was thinking, I'm getting in a fight.

Because I'm going to 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's going to tell me how 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 knew the conversation.

So I walked in and said, 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 five on your list?

And he looked at me and said, that's about right.

And he gave us $35 million.

And we were number five.

But he gave it in less than six weeks.

But Frank was a guy that had a tremendous influence on my life,

and somebody who really epitomized that.

Legacy is ethical conduct 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 Howard's Gift.

One is, I think you got to start at the end--

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 going to get an A-plus in 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 a thing

that Eric, who was the guy that actually wrote the book, said.

Everybody's outside looks better than my inside.

We know our inside, and we're seeing other people's outsides.

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 struggles about feeling occasionally that we're not to.

And then the last thing is, everything about the future

is a bet.

Even the future, is there going to be a future, is a bet.

Now, we probably all ought to 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 I ask, 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's no direction.

And we all run into inflection points.

My wife leaving was an important inflection point in my life.

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 without ever

stopping and saying, does this free me

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,

what do I want to do?

The second question is, is the juice worth the squeeze?

By that I mean, if you want a glass of orange juice,

don't squeeze grapefruits.

And yet, how many people--

I always say the thing about Harvard Business School

graduates is they're so competitive,

they have to be first at 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 got to Stanford and I discovered

there are really smart people who

love math, who worked hard at it,

and were willing to sacrifice things to do it.

I said, I'm not one of those people.

I love math, I love quantitative,

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?

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 have lost

but are unwilling to admit it?

They 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 the culture question.

Am I in the right place?

There are places that are toxic.

There are places that are good for other people, bad for us.

How do you evaluate the culture in which you're 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 a lot of places that I

think I would have failed, so I had to choose the right culture.

So some important rules, then I want to end.

I think we're supposed to end at 10:30.

Is that right?

Live life forward.

After almost 72 years of life, I find many people

living life backwards.

The divorce.

How many people are trying to change the past?

You can't change the past.

You can learn from the past, but you can't change the past.

So figuring out how you say, that's behind me,

what have I learned, now let me move forward, is so critical.

I was once in Ireland, and I was the guest of the government.

And as 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.

And 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.

When did you arrive?

He says, well, they came over 1,100 years ago.

And I thought, this is a different, interesting way

of calculating.

I mean, 1,100 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?

It was 16-something or other.

And you say, well--

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 a guy in charge of reconciliation.

[LAUGHTER]

And I found the same thing in Slovenia,

where people were telling me about the evils that

had occurred in either 1400 or 400,

depending on whether you were fighting

between the Orthodox and the Eastern Rite, Western

Rite, or between the Muslims, which is about 1100

they were fighting.

And they kept telling me these stories and I was thinking,

live life 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 think part of the problem is

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.

We looked at the Harvard Business School.

One of the jobs I had, I asked people to tell us,

as part of the resource allocation

process, who are 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, or at least

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 them, I 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'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 can talk to--

and you can't manage more than six or seven of those.

It's an important problem.

I guess another thing I would like to say to people

is life is risky, and some things are uncontrollable.

Now, I'm on the board of some health organizations.

I'm amazed how many people don't take their medicine.

That's a controllable risk.

You can't take furosemide if you're going to give a speech.

You have to wait till after the speech is over.

But in fact, figuring out what the risks are and say,

there's some I can control and some I can't control.

It's almost the Reinhold Niebuhr prayer of,

Lord, grant 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 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 piece of advice I'd give

is plan for the ripple, not the 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

and there are big ripples.

And one of the most satisfying things

that my life is the ripples, the things that you really

didn't 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 43 years of teaching and 72 years of life,

really make a difference.

So I'm going to give you a test.

First question is, who are you?

What are the values?

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-- and I

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 to your life?

Which satisfactions, if any, are you on the way to missing?

Now, again, it's the juggling metaphor.

Catch the falling ball.

Who's important to you?

Are you helping them to succeed?

I think that when Anne said, "Nothing wrong with money,

but the richness of your life won't be measured by it,"

is incredibly important, and the people you've helped are

probably as important a measure of life as anything else.

And then what's your time frame for action?

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.

[APPLAUSE]