It's About Redefining What Makes You Get Up in the Morning by Bob Buford   [printer-friendly]

The value of things is the amount of life you have to put into having them. (Henry David Thoreau)

As successful people come to halftime, they begin to ask themselves, What causes me to get up each morning with renewed enthusiasm? What's in the box? What's the main thing, the pearl of great price? What's central to my life? And they often ask, Do I want to look back ten years from now and find myself with more of the same?

Many are waking up at halftime and answering that question, "No! I don't want to fill the rest of my life with more of the same kind of success I've been achieving. I've chased the mechanical rabbit long enough. I've caught it many times only to find myself looking for another rabbit. The quest is endless and meaningless. I'm ready for the real rabbit. It's dawning on me that I want more than just success; I want a more meaning-rich life now."

Success and significance are similar in terms of what you actually do day-to-day. But which of these you pursue makes a difference in why you get up in the morning, because the endgame changes. Success commonly means using your knowledge and experience to satisfy yourself with fame and fortune. Significance, however, means using the same knowledge and experience to serve others — that is, to change lives. The outcome defines the difference and changes your attitude toward what you do.

Sooner or later, you come to a fork in the road. Down one road you find more of the same. The first sentence of The American Idea of Success by Richard Huber pretty well summarizes all 450 pages of his extensive research: "What is success? In America, success has meant making money and translating it into status, or becoming famous."1

Pretty stark, but correct.

Down the other road-what Scott Peck called "the road less traveled"2 in another well-known book, the outcome is entirely different. The process of travel on either road may be much the same, but each will lead to different outcomes. Here's how Peter Drucker contrasts the outcome of same-ol', same-ol' success with the outcome of significance:

Business supplies ... either goods or services. Government controls. A business has discharged its task when the customer buys the product, pays for it, and is satisfied with it. Government has discharged its function when its policies are effective. The "nonprofit" institution neither supplies goods or services nor controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The nonprofit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.3

Down one road there's more money, status, and power. Down the other there's the opportunity to change lives — in many cases for eternity. It's not an easy choice. What do you choose? What's in your box? You can't put both in first place. Sooner or later you must choose. What is your primary loyalty in life? To which do you want to devote the day when you get up each morning?

Several of the people I interviewed gave up more money and status for the opportunity to change people's lives forever. Let's sit down with two of them to hear in their own words what drew them forward in Life II. Also, listen for the not-so-hidden clues that reveal the downside that each person sought to avoid.

The Connector

In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes three types of people: "the Maven" (wizard/expert/mentor), "the Connector" (networker), and "the Salesman" (someone who can get an idea across). It's hard to fit my Silicon Valley friend, Wally Hawley, into any one of these categories because he is consummately skillful in all three. But most of all, I see Wally as a Connector.

From the moment I met Wally, it was apparent that he had a passion for making a difference, and especially for bringing together groups of highly accomplished people, showing them how to get involved in the nonprofit sector. I have seen Wally at work, and I'm an admirer of his skill and tenacity. So when we got together for our interview, I asked him to fill in the picture for me with a little background on how he moved from capital investments to investing himself in changing lives.

First, as I often do in interviews, I asked about his Life I motives. "Wally," I said, "tell me about your business career. How did you get started?"

"I attended Stanford and Harvard Business School, and then went to work for McKinsey & Company in San Francisco," he told me. "I spent four years in the Netherlands, working with their European operations, and by age thirty-two I was hired as the U.S. president for a large privately held Dutch company that was one of our McKinsey clients in Holland. In addition to running the holding company and buying companies for them in the United States, I formed a venture fund to make minority investments in companies. That introduced me to the concept of venture capital, and I found it fun. It was challenging to get involved in smaller projects and help them grow."

"So how did you go from that high-energy world to halftime?" I asked.

"Well, I formed InterWest Partners in 1979," he said. "I launched it with a colleague from the Dutch company, and the rest is history. InterWest is now twenty-three years old, controls eight funds and a lot of capital. But somewhere along the way I ran into your book Halftime, which changed everything for me. Suddenly I realized that making a lot of money wasn't all there was to life. From a worldly point of view, everything was going pretty well. Finances, health, family — I was doing fine and had no serious problems. I didn't come to faith until I was fifty, but faith was becoming more important to me; reading your book then forced me to ask myself if I was neglecting another part of my life.

"At that point more than ten years ago," Wally said, "I moved out of venture capital, and today I'm only marginally involved in that world. I devote most of my time now to nonprofit. One of my reactions to this whole process is that I have too many friends who say they're retiring, but they don't know what to do. They're frustrated or bored because what they're doing is meaningless. If you ask me how I define the stage of life that you call "finishing well," I'd say I'm redeploying. I didn't retire; I've just redeployed. For me, that's what it means to finish well."

"Sounds like your work actually set you up to do all these other things," I said.

I found this to be true in many interviews. The incentive that drew people forward had played out and no longer produced stimulation and excitement. It was no longer what made them want to get up in the morning. As Wally put it, "One day I realized something was missing. I had this feeling that I'd been there and done that. But there was also something else regarding my faith: I had a sort of gnawing inside me. When I look back now, I realize that God was directing me, leading me along. I was starting to pick up books about characters in the Bible, or reading certain books in the Bible with no particular purpose in mind. Then at one point I joined a Bible study and started going to church. That's when I discovered the missing piece — faith and putting my faith to work.

"Faith is your guidance system now," I said, "but what was your guidance system before that?"

"Good question," he said. "Good ethics, maybe, but that hasn't changed. What really changed was that it went from being about me to being about others. I've always felt I treated people well, but the measure was what I got out of it personally. Was I growing? Was I making more money? It was always I, I, I. Now it's about other people:"

"As you grew deeper in your faith," I said, "you began to turn toward more significance-oriented things. But I take it you didn't have a Damascus Road experience. It wasn't as if within two weeks you came to faith, quit your business, gave up all your old friends, and became a monk!"

"No, nothing of the kind," Wally said with a smile. "I left my monk's robe at home! I was beginning to do some work in the nonprofit area but without a lot of direction. I began to explore working with faith-based activities. That's when I got involved with Young Life, which, as you know, is a large Christian youth organization. Then I met you and got involved in FaithWorks.4 I also got involved in my local church because it has a wide outreach. Over time I began to replace my substantial interests in the secular world with comparable interests oriented to maturing in my faith."

"Would it be fair to say," I asked, "that you were the same person you were before, but you just moved into a new venue?"

"That's what my wife says," Wally answered. "She tells me I'm basically the same person, but I don't really think you can be the same person once you've given your life over to God. When you're becoming a servant, your heart is in a very different place. Sure, I have the same name and the same skill sets. The difference is that I'm not thinking about me all the time but am more concerned with helping other people. I'd contend that I'm not really the same person anymore. A passage in Luke 12 says, 'To whom much is given, much is expected:'5 I used to think about that only in the context of finances. What's expected goes far beyond finances. Much is expected in using your time, your talent, and your abilities for God's purposes."

Putting Faith into Action

"Through your work with programs like FaithWorks and Time Out, which is one of your programs to reach out to high achievers, you've played an important role in your part of the country," I continued. "Tell me about that."

"Well, I could tell you many stories, Bob, but let me give you just one example. Early on we brought some business leaders together with a group of faith-based organizations to test the Drucker Foundation Self-Assessment Tool6 and match people up as partners. Not only did the tool work, but people in that first group met each other, liked each other, and almost all of them started joining boards of directors to help them improve their work. "I remember one case where one of those businessmen began working with City Team, a well-known group that works in low-income neighborhoods. He liked it so much he left his job to become chief financial officer of City Team. He based his decision entirely on what he learned in that one-day assessment event. Others from that first group have gone on boards or on staffs and become major supporters of these groups. Today we have a database of over four hundred leaders that we've brought together, and my guess is that we've impacted between fifty and a hundred highly successful and influential people whose lives have been significantly changed."

"Is there a way to measure that kind of change?" I asked.

"The common denominator," he said, "is that it's putting faith into action, and committing one's time. A lot of these people are keeping their day jobs, but suddenly they're doing a lot more. They're involved in new things, and making a difference in the world not only for themselves but for a lot of other people as well."

"Wally, tell me what you think of when I say the word retirement?"

"It could mean one of several things," he said, "none of which I want to do. The first is to go play golf and just tune out. Another is just sort of dropping out, hanging around, gardening, or watching television. But the common denominator is that in every case you're not doing anything purposeful or beneficial."

"How long are you going to live?" I asked.

"As long as the Lord lets me," he replied. "You know, I had a good friend who was very successful in the real estate business, and he was just beginning to put his faith to work, getting involved in Young Life. He really had wonderful intentions. We were fishing with a group of guys up in Colorado last summer, talking about all this stuff at dinner one night. He was so excited. Ten hours later he was dead — a massive heart attack. That was a wake-up call for me, Bob. We don't know how long we have, so the answer is to get going today.

"After my friend's funeral, some of the guests gathered at a club to socialize, but I decided to take a walk out on the mountain. I was thinking, What if that had been me? Would I have to apologize for my life? I concluded that I wouldn't have to apologize, but I knew that if I hadn't redeployed my time and assets, and if I'd just continued in my search for personal wealth and success, it could have been a very different story."

"One last question, Wally," I said. "You've said that when you redeployed yourself, you realized it was important to be aligned with whatever the Lord would have you do. Is that a fair way to put it?"

"Yes, that's right," he said.

"How do you know God's will?" I asked.

"Simplistically, Bob," he said, "the Lord did m any things for me long before I was communicating with him and really acknowledging him. And when I look back at my life, including the circumstances of meeting my wife, I can see how he was leading me all along the way. So I say, if God can guide my life when I'm not even trying to listen to him, how much more can he do when I'm really trying? I'm just attempting to learn more about what God is doing in the world, and he directs my footsteps along the way."

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From the book Finishing Well by Bob Buford, ©2004. Reprinted by permission of Integrity Publishers, Nashville, TN.

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1. Richard M. Huber, The American Idea of Success (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 1.
2. Morgan Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: The Psychology of Spiritual Growth (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2001).
3. Peter F. Drucker, Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Practices and Principles (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), xiv.
4. FaithWorks was a predecessor organization to Halftime. See www.halftime.org.
5. Luke 12:48, paraphrase.
6. Peter F. Drucker, The Drucker Foundation Self-Assessment Tool. Learn more about this from the peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management at www.pfdf.org whose name has changed to Leader to Leader Institute. See www.leadertoleader.org.
7. See Tom Luce's story in chapter 1 of Finishing Well.

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Bob Buford is founder of Leadership Network, an organization designed to assist leaders of major churches. More recently he has focused attention on helping men and women to fill the second half of their lives with meaning and purpose.