My father was an academic, a brilliant philosophy professor, a demanding
teacher who urged his students to ask hard questions of themselves. He was incredibly
energetic and a highly principled person. Much of his research had centered on
ethics, and he applied what he taught—honesty, fairness, and respect for
others.
My father died unexpectedly last summer. He was sitting at the kitchen
table reading the New York Times one evening, and his heart failed. He
slipped into a coma, and three days later he stopped breathing.
I loved my dad very much. He had been a strong role model for me,
and losing him has been a painful experience. It has also been a reckoning with
my father and his life, with death, and with myself. Great sadness has brought
me to my knees.
At the same time, my father’s death also left me with several
gifts, among them a newfound appreciation for what we, the living, have. Like
many Type A personalities, I have spent much of my time focused on what I lack,
have not done, or need to do. My father’s passing has helped me to realize
that whatever is to come, I have today.
But his death gave me something else, too: the ability to see him
in a much more complete way. I wanted, I needed, to take all of my disparate
experiences—conversations, correspondence, moments I spent with him, favorable
and unfavorable impressions alike—and spread them out in my mind. With all
of the pictures of him before me, a truer image emerges. I can see his strengths
and achievements—but also his weaknesses and failures. His exuberance and
professional dedication coexist with self-doubt and harshness. His energy intermingles
with resentment. I can see the father I love—a man who was complicated,
intelligent, and flawed.
This experience has motivated me to try to look at other people,
and at myself, from as many angles as possible simultaneously, considering
the positive qualities and successes, and the imperfections and vulnerabilities,
and everything in between.
We live in a time when success is defined along one dimension—in
terms of specific achievement, be it financial reward, power, fame, or beauty.
We are rarely privy to the “flabby” parts of any successful person’s
life or to all the shades of gray between feats and failings. After all, we can
never be too rich or too thin, right? Or so the mantra goes.
I have tried to understand why the ability to see anyone, particularly
ourselves, as I can now see my dad—in a broader, more integrated and honest
way—remains elusive. The difficulty, I think, stems from a deep discomfort
with imperfection in a culture that encourages us to try to be perfect. We believe
that we can be perfect and should be, that we must never stop striving to be perfect,
and so we are embarrassed, disappointed—and exhausted—when inevitably,
we aren’t.
In our society of high achievers, flaws are frowned upon, vulnerabilities
forbidden. Consequently, these attributes are usually hidden. In some contexts,
merely acknowledging a personal weakness or a mistake is rare. And success, as
it is so often defined, gets an extra coating of gloss as a person’s accomplishments
are often idealized. Influenced by the media, we tend to view success as binary:
either you have it, or you do not. We’re used to seeing illustrious people
depicted as consistently, unflaggingly successful. And this perspective has important
consequences.
As we set our sights on perfection—on an all-encompassing,
no-holds-barred embrace of specific ways of being—an even bigger problem
emerges: we apply that same expectation to ourselves. Unrelenting success—being
at the top of that hill, all the time—becomes our barometer, the impossible
but seductive standard against which we have to measure up. When we fall short—and,
invariably, we all do—and make mistakes or encounter failure, the result
is a deep sense of shame, which can lead to a sense of overwhelming inadequacy.
We often swing from one extreme to another in our opinion of ourselves.
Those feelings, produced by the inability to live up to our own mythologized view
of success, can be corrosive. They are frequently draining and all-consuming,
and prevent us from learning from our mistakes, seeing others and ourselves more
realistically, and productively moving forward in our lives and careers.
Flawlessness, like worthlessness, in any human being is
an illusion. The more we uncover about any person’s life, no matter how
perfect it seems at first glance, the more complicated we see that it really is.
Alongside each positive personal trait, such as my father’s intelligence,
live vulnerabilities, like his diffidence. In a similar vein, an individual’s
weaknesses coexist with his or her strengths. If we had the luxury of reading
an honest biography of any successful person, there would be not only
paragraphs but whole chapters on their frailties and failures: stories
of the lost election, the broken marriage, or all the deals that fell apart.
My academic research has been a petri dish for studying both successes
and failures of high-achieving people—and the emotional fallout they often
experience in moving from chapter to chapter in their lives.
One man I’ve studied in depth is Henry Heinz, born in 1844.
His life illustrates the interplay of triumph and struggle. Despite enormous blows,
Heinz found his way back to the food business and to a stronger sense of himself,
using funds borrowed from relatives and knowledge gained from failure. He went
on to create first-rate products, a powerful brand, and a world-class organization.
How did Heinz recover from potentially crippling failure? By taking
stock of who he was, what he wanted, whom he cared for, and why things had gone
so bad so fast for him. This reflection, including his willingness to sit with
his own shame, had a profound effect on him, clarifying his faith in himself and
helping him learn from mistakes.
Of course, it’s one thing to hear that other people managed
to move past guilt, self-recrimination, and embarrassment, to bound back after
their failures, and it’s another to do it yourself. Merely accepting your
mistakes and shortcomings is difficult, and moving past a sense of shame about
them in order to learn from them is even harder, but essential.
As an aspiring leader, you want to make a difference—to add
your own patch to the quilt of human activity and to make that patch as colorful
and enriching as possible. But to do that does not mean merely learning how to
sew with a given stitch and the perfect needle, or having a sparkling toolbox
of skills suitable for every occasion. It involves something more elusive, more
slippery, and—I suspect—potentially more powerful.
Becoming a leader means learning to use your intelligence, integrity,
and experience to make sound judgments. How you use the authority you
will have, what you make of it and of yourself must be at the core of your leadership
mission and method.
I want to help prepare you to make good choices, good judgments,
in the whole crazy quilt of life. And without being able to look at yourself
and the people around you honestly, warts and all, the likelihood of making those
sound decisions goes way down.
So, I suggest you perform a kind of personal accounting. Learn to
consider your imperfections—along with your strengths. Recognize your mistakes
without becoming incapacitated by shame. Forget the tanned, toned, strong,
high-earning, high-achieving, unrelenting perfect person you think you’re
supposed to be. Learn to think of yourself and the people around you as “perfect”
in the true dictionary definition of the term: not as flawless or beyond reproach—but
as total, as lacking in no essential detail, as whole. And there’s
one simple way to do that.
Take all of your memories and experiences and lay them out in your
mind together, as if you were laying photographs out on a table. Let a new image
of yourself emerge—a fuller image, and honest image, one of you in your
entirety. See yourself as I now see my father: as someone who, like him, like
me, like all leaders, is complicated, intelligent, flawed—and complete. PE
