On [a rainy] Easter Sunday, it is particularly relevant to write a few thoughts about the past few years of my life here in Nashville. Today is about meaning and significance. It begs remembrance, reverence, and purpose. I feel that I must call myself to account for my time in this city; and as it has revolved much around business school, I will try to especially hone in on that context.
The title of this writing is borrowed from the reverend John Piper, who wrote a book by the same name that was given to me by my church community upon graduating from high school near Charleston, South Carolina. I had absolutely no idea nor conviction as to why I should have read it at the time, because I was 18 and ruled the world. But its message was as relevant then as it is today, will be tomorrow, and I suspect in the last minutes of my life. It’s also a great title because I figure that 97% of anyone glancing at this only wanting the twitter version, or executive summary, can already walk away with it.
Arrival
To set the context, I completed undergraduate study at Furman University, and immediately set out to work in nonprofit across the Atlantic. In Kenya, East Africa, I spent the better part of the next year trying to build hope and empowerment through the resources supplied by generous well wishers in the United States and Europe. In that experience and many thereafter, however, I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to single-handedly change the world. I also began to see that my own passions and talents were aligned more along the nature of business and enterprise. Optimistically, I figured that businesses had a higher potential to create sustainable hope, dignity, and value than a charity could ultimately do. Whether that was true or not, I left to get corporate experience under my belt, and after some time advancing in branding and health care, I found myself at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management here in Nashville.
In business school, you are essentially taught to better do three things: to lead, to create value, and to realize that value. Now of course, I can add a great many adjectives around those predicates: for example to effectively lead, to intelligently create value, or perhaps to sustainably realize that value. And certainly the list could go on. You pay exorbitantly for enough classes that I bloody well better be able to describe that further; but that is not the point of this reflection. At the end of the day, the Furman philosophy major resurfaces to his graduate-school personality and says, “What are you creating value for?”
Sometimes I don’t know.
It is a terribly difficult matter, trying to keep your bearings in life. Business school, in my experience, is the mire of all mires in the way of that effort. There are always going to be challenges everywhere in the world; but especially any institution that devotes its time, resources, and highly trained faculty to optimizing the “value” of their students is destined to present those very same pupils with an ungodly steep climb back out of such exercise. They (or we) spend nearly every waking moment asking themselves “why am I a leader?”, “why is my resume worth investing more than six figures in?”, “why is my resumé better than that individual’s”, or perhaps inevitably “why am I better than them?” It is a downward spiral of morality in the ironic process of increasing self worth. Granted, I can only imagine that Vanderbilt is the least of these, as here I have met more allies, dear friends, and role models than I can imagine ever meeting in one place. It certainly lives up to the “collaborative” strength and mantra that has become its brand.
But again, why do we do it?
Evaluation
My second-year curriculum finally demanded a course that all of us must take: ethics. Prof. Bart Victor, our scholastic guide and epistemological provocateur, set out to exercise our ethical foundations upon a matrix of conceptual trial and ideological stretching of sorts. It is certainly an element of reflection and introspection that is vital to our study. But here, I caught myself in the midst of an overbooked Outlook calendar and an overflowing to-do list, with a blaring voice of conscience saying “Hey Self! Hold the phone – this is a big deal! And you know that, you idiot. Press pause already.” It’s truly sad that we only have this one class in 8 quarters of study. If I had my way, I’d have the dean’s office assign Bart to accompany every professor to each of his or her classes and ask “why” after every reading and lecture. And he would hate me for it, or turn to drinking, so I should otherwise simply continue the nearly also impossible task of controlling myself.
Nonetheless, here are a few things that I thought I’d share, especially for my own sake, but also for my companions setting back out into the corporate world in May. Like a child, I must think about these questions, at least for starters:
- Why do I get out of bed in the morning?
- Why do I need more money to do that?
- How do I define “success”?
- Who is more important in my life than Me?
- Should I be fine with that?
- What will my life mean when it ends?
The reason that I must ask these questions continually is because I am human, have ADD, and am prone to forget where I set my keys 30 seconds ago. The reason I ask them at all is because it matters.
There are things that we don’t think about enough between coffee in the morning and pulling the sheets back at dusk. Each one of us, like my 18 year old self, still believes in our hearts of hearts that we rule the world – or we’re going to. The reality is that we don’t. No one ever does. Somehow, you think that you will be happier if you get highest GPA not because it’s the highest, but because it’s higher than everyone else’s. You think that you will be happier if you make $5000 more on your signing bonus, or if you attend a higher ranked business school to begin with. You think you will be happier if you have more friends than Sally, or better friends than Sally, and you’ll do anything political to make it that way. You think it’s how you marry, what you drive, or what you look like. You bury and forget the notion that there will always be a bigger, faster, smarter, or attractive fish than you. Yet here’s a thought.
You are going to die. And all of those things, those desires, those accomplishments, that life – that will disappear.
That’s not particularly kosher, nor popular to say, but it’s true. And I dare say for the reasons described above, it’s even more important to think about during this pivotal point in our lives. On the surface we have the chance to redirect, reset, or at least curb our course in life from this point forward. We must ask ourselves why we’re doing it.
Is it for a higher dollar-per-ounce glass of scotch? Is it for a bigger house? A nicer car? I’m certainly not above it. My beloved wife caught me saying on the way to dinner, “I’d like an Aston Martin” (it wasn’t the only time, mind you), and promptly lectured me with good cause on my lack of sense. Not that a nice car is a bad thing, of course. They’re some of the most gorgeous creations that mankind has put its hands and minds to. However, I should know good and well that life is about more than an exotic car or my business in driving one.
Moving Forward
Another large part of the past two years at Vanderbilt has been my privilege to serve with an organization called Project Pyramid. In this class and club, fellow graduate students come together to discuss poverty, its symptoms, and to then engage frontier organizations with sustainable solutions to social needs. It’s a beautiful thing to see highly trained business professionals standing in the thick of Mathare, Nairobi, and consequently thinking “this is my burden to bare.” It’s wonderful. People of two worlds unite with common cause, laughs and smiles, and both shovels and spreadsheets. Then we return to the United States, to school, to our place of work, and the pressure returns. How to we continue with purpose?
This is where I must encourage both you and myself to keep these words close to our hearts and minds:
Don’t Waste Your Life.
Read it again. Think about it – it matters.
It is no more important for the MBA to remind themselves of these words than anyone else on this bustling earth should. But for my peers and myself in our common pursuit of “creating and realizing value”, it is terribly significant now. We have a burden to lead and to grow others, and we have a calling to realize purpose. From the advice of millions of aging elders to aspiring youths before us, we’ve heard of regrets and lessons learned, and we’ve often shirked such counsel. What we do in these days should be wrought of unwavering purpose, and the time for such passion cannot be wasted.
I cannot mandate for you what your passions should be, or what purpose drives them. I should like to share them, but for me that required giving everything else up first. And that’s seldom a popular choice. Nonetheless, Galatians 2:20 from the Bible hit me like a gunshot in a small room in Nairobi one night as I emerged from an enduring fog of unrest and agnosticism. If you are unfamiliar with the passage, it hinges upon the demonstration of love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ before the early church was ever born. The apostle Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” In the context of avoiding a life that is wasted, it seems that could be done no better than this verse says. You have to loose the things you used to value – or in a sense, die to yourself – if you want to truly live for something that matters.
For now I only ask and encourage that we all heed the words that Piper so frankly advised. Most of us will get out of bed tomorrow, get ready for the ensuing day, and walk out the door into it one way or another. Remind yourself as much as necessary why you’re doing it. It sounds simple, but it matters – it matters not too coincidentally about the same amount as your life itself.
So as I walk out into this rainy Easter weather today, it is my reminder to myself that I owe this time to a greater cause. This idea, this calling, is resurrected as I approach graduation. There is no greater value in a stock price, salary, or dividend, than the time I can give to others. A degree can perhaps help me better disperse that. A higher stock price can be a great tool. But it is a means to an end that I truly hope will be ever steadfast in focus for all of us. As an alternative to simply improving our own value to corporate America, let’s turn the idea on its head. We might become less so that those around us can become more. Focus outward rather than inward. Look at your loved ones, your job offer, your means, and make this resolve. Don’t waste your life.
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