While New Year’s resolutions aren’t my thing, I do find it helpful to do a bit more self-reflection this time of year than I do lying awake in bed in the middle of each night. Motivated by John Lennon’s “So this is Christmas, and what have you done?” a line that demands a personal accounting for the last twelve months, I reflect on a lifelong habit of over-committing to things.
Amid the whirlwind of raising children and climbing the corporate ladder, the most profound feedback often came from the most unexpected places. I’ll never forget overhearing my daughter describe my career to a friend. Her words were simple, yet they cut through my professional ego with indelible clarity: “He leans back in his chair, puts his feet on his desk, and talks to people on the phone.”
Kids say the darnedest things. Not long after hearing that, I became aware that the success ladder I’d been climbing was leaning against the wrong building. To extend the cliche, I started reading things that mentioned this: “No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business.’”
So, during these reflections on “What have you done?” I noticed a distinct pattern of procrastination and avoidance in my behavior. I feel guilty, a bit too self-important, sharing that with you here.
The next few years, I strategized to find the best way off the top of that success ladder, aiming to retire at 40. I started thinking about hobbies and other interests to carry me into the golden years. I decided to take guitar lessons. Once a week, I’d trek from the office to a music store somewhere along Highway 494 to play a bit for someone who mostly taught teens. I actually enjoyed learning new things, and sometimes even practicing them. Then my instructor put me into a clear avoidance posture. He asked me to play a piece in an upcoming student recital. Although I was an arrogant prick on the outside, I was a shy, pimply teenager on the inside. I would surely be exposed as a guitar fraud in public,
I searched for a way to weasel out, and politics offered me the exit.
Years ago, I served as my company’s envoy to a trade association for freight brokers—the “travel agents for freight,” to use a comparison that actually carried weight at the time. Beyond drafting high-minded statements on regulatory minutiae, I was privileged—or so I convinced myself—to partake in those much-maligned lobbying junkets for which big business and big government are so infamous.
While sequestered at the Saddlebrook Resort in Tampa—a junket ostensibly to “harmonize” conflicting federal and state trucking laws—two realizations hit me with uncomfortable force. First, I confirmed that the high-ranking officials tasked with overseeing American transportation possessed a profound and startling lack of insight into the actual business of moving goods. Second, I discovered that the caliber of our elected representatives fell significantly short of the lofty, dignified standard I’d been conditioned to expect. The pedestals I’d built for them were, it turned out, entirely vacant.
After a perfunctory business session on the first afternoon, the schedule cleared until dinner. I retreated to the hot tub with a cigar, a pair of swim shorts, and the quiet satisfaction of a corporate sponsor whose firm was footing the bill for every visiting poobah. It was there, amidst the jets and the steam, that I was joined by a sophomore Congressman from Illinois named Dennis Hastert. Accompanied by a staffer and a revolving door of children, he shared my soak in what may or may not have been a calculated coincidence, as we later found ourselves sharing a dinner table.
Between his questionable table manners, his lackluster parenting, and a grasp of freight transportation that hovered near zero, the mystique of the “statesman” evaporated. I knew then I could be an elected official someday; the bar, it seemed, was buried in the sand. I couldn’t have known then that Hastert would rise to become Speaker of the House, nor that his career would end with a 15-month federal prison sentence, the highest-ranking federal official ever to serve time in the real “Big House.”
By the time I needed to commit to the guitar recital, I’d found my avoidance tool: becoming a candidate for a seat in the Minnesota legislature in 1992. I broke the news to my music teacher: between the fundraising and the campaigning, my practice schedule had evaporated. I attempted a look of sincere disappointment, but it was a hard sell. He, in turn, put on a brave face to mask his sheer relief that he’d no longer have to witness my musical struggles.
I didn’t win the election, and I never mastered the guitar, but Lennon might ask: ‘What have you done?’ At the very least, I’ve learned the value of a well-timed exit.
