My “Fortunate Son” Myth

While delving into family history I am often reminded that I am the only son of an only son who was a fourth generation Idaho horse and cattle rancher.

This meant that I also carried the weight of what I came to call being the “Fortunate Son,” by my 21st year after the late ‘69 Creedance Clearwater Revival hit.

It’s an “anti-war” anthem, a cause I wouldn’t embrace for another two years yet.

For me though, the feeling of being a fortunate son began almost as soon as my parents brought me home to the ranch in 1948.  I grew up with the sense that I was treated differently.

By that, I mean that my patriarchal grandparents treated me differently, as did my aunts on both sides.

It was different than how it seemed they treated cousins who were both older and younger, male and female and different too than my two sisters when they came along.

Maybe it was just a response to the patriarchal ranching culture along the Rockies but to me the feeling came to symbolize getting things I didn’t deserve.

It is a feeling that revisits whenever I receive recognition as I did a few days ago with an award named for Charles Kuralt.

He was from North Carolina where I’ve lived for going on 27 years but his heart was along the Big Hole River in Montana, just across the Centennial Mountains from the ancestral Idaho ranch where I spent my early years.

Through his One the Road series, Kuralt happens to also be one of my influences  to follow a four-decade career in community destination marketing.

The sense that I was a fortunate son also meant that to me people expected things I couldn’t deliver, such as being a three sport standout in school like my father.

To their credit, my parents -- especially my mother – worked hard to instill humility in me but that came soon enough with the embarrassment, if not shame, of failure.

I failed to have my father’s bone structure or speed for that matter.

I was also left-handed which presents some learning challenges beginning with tying my shoelaces or lasso a moving steer from horseback.

These and many other tasks were complicated by an essential tremor in both hands which, in and of itself, was embarrassing enough.

Still, it took a while before I fully grasped that “fortunate son” was a myth.

Failure was an option with my parents but giving up and especially not trying were not.

In retrospect, I look back at my life through a lens of grit, determination, perseverance and success because it felt that way and people have reinforced those qualities and outcomes.

But closer examination reveals an incredible number of failures, including failed relationships, but they were not for want of trying.

But for fortune and luck, there would have been more I am sure.

But as an exercise in memory and to reinforce humility and empathy for my less fortunate, from the safety of distance I look back at the failures now.

Failure and shame seem closely associated for me.  Each one played a role in propelling me forward just as for many others they seem a permanent disability.

Having been invited by third graders to play tackle football during recess, I picked a fumble up as a first grader and ran the wrong way.

I was called out as a fourth grader by my teacher for using my finger on each word as I read.

I was cut from my little league baseball team as a fifth grader.  I got a C in P.E. as an eighth grader and quit the football team only to come back as a ninth grader.

I screwed up as a senior and let my grades slide and flunked my renewal drivers license exam test for using my left foot on the brake.

I’ve lost any reliable count of how many times I disappointed my parents.

I failed my military draft physical due to a football injury, and then failed five different times over the next four years as I relentlessly attempted end-runs to enlist in other branches of service.

I got fired from three different jobs before I turned 40.  Oh, and then there were those failed marriages.  As I retired in 2009, I read a great book by essayist and poet David White entitled, The Three Marriages.

The book’s subtitle is “Reimaging Work, Self and Relationship.”  It is not a book about balancing the three but for me especially it explained why I was so successful at the first and until late in life a failure at the third.

My take away was that only when I understood the marriage to self was I able to transfer my success at work over a four-decade career to an enduring relationship, which now seems so effortless.

One of Whyte’s most memorable metaphors is that “We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory we travel.”

In his book of essays entitled, “WHAT ARE People FOR?” Wendell Berry wrote about solitude that “Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness.”

I needed a lifetime of relationship-“exile and loneliness” as a part of consummating my marriage to self.  I simply had two of Whyte’s marriages in the wrong order.

He observes that “We often enter a marriage with images of how it will enhance our sense of self, increase the happiness we already possess and end a sense of loneliness.”

But, Whyte continues, “After the initial euphoria, we just as often find that in the marriage itself our sense of self is obliterated, our previous sources of happiness disappear and our sense of isolation is made more acute…”

Those failures of relationship were at most, a failure to know and understand myself enough.

Work was another matter for me but again fortune played a role.

I set out to be a lawyer and backed into the perfect career: community destination marketing.

I was always highly “engaged” in my work, as is 30% of the workforce according to Gallup, give or take a point or two depending on the year. 

But I believe much of that engagement was due to being and finding a line of work that was “purpose-oriented.”

This is the good fortune currently shared by 28% of the American workforce according to a study by Imperative, a company founded by Aaron Hurst, author of The Purpose Economy.

It is probably part of what made me so much more successful than many peers.

Purpose-oriented employees who pursue work as fulfillment and as a means to help other people are found distributed across the workforce and in every occupation.

I feel it is a mistake for those who aren’t to see themselves as a victim and look to management to fill them with purpose and engagement.

Tom Rath, a best-selling author and senior scientist for Gallup has written a new “must-read” entitled Are You Fully Charged?

He concludes that if you seek engagement or purpose directly you may not find it.  But if you seek meaning you will find happiness and engagement.

As in a sentiment my daughter forwarded recently, “Do what you love, love what you do.”

Find meaning and purpose in whatever job you do and you will find engagement, something I realize was one of the early values embedded by my parents.

For me the stars just aligned more closely than for many not because of the “fortunate son” myth but thanks to parents who put the emphasis on trying.

Corruption Rarely Begins As Corruption And Other Lessons

I have a friend who just completed his 24 months as a resident of TROSA in Durham, a best practice treatment center for substance abuse.

Now he is a post grad for a month or two before he walks the stage in their next quarterly graduation ceremony.  As is true for many graduates, the program has had a profound impact on the life of this individual.

I’ve known about TROSA and been friends with its founder from its inception, but I’ve observed even more about why the program has been so successful as I have participated in some events over the past two years.

It takes two years, not just to kick bad habits, but to drill down to the triggers behind them, and most of all, to inculcate values and coping mechanisms including not just work ethic but how to work with others.

These include techniques for conflict resolution and emotional control.  One that is particularly important in the program is zero tolerance for failing to disclose something that is awry, even if you weren’t involved, even if was for a good reason.

TROSA understands that corruption rarely begins as corruption.

It may even be a means to a good end as United Airlines executives recently learned the hard way.

As Dr. Dan Ariely who also calls Durham home, along with his colleagues including Harvard’s Dr. Francesca Gino have shown, “simply seeing another person cheat can lead us to cheat, even if we care about being honest.”

TROSA understands that even omission of acknowledgment is contagious and leads to a slippery slope.

The organization is famous for its entrepreneurial approach.  It’s is too bad one of them isn’t offering workforce and leadership training to businesses and agencies on accountability and the importance of speaking up.

But as Dr. Gino notes in a Harvard Business Review post this week, “Behavior can be contagious even when it’s simply described in a story.”

Stories of people, especially low-level employees, who uphold organizational values is a particularly effective means of “onboarding” new hires especially when it comes to orientations regarding ethics.

In my former life, I saw otherwise good people in each of the communities I represented who always seemed to be dogged by stories of corruption.

What they had in common was the way they made decisions, usually based on “who was asking” for something rather than a strategy of fairness and consistency.

I never felt this shadow on their reputation was deserved but the behaviors that brought it about often made it difficult to work with them as strategic partners because they were always asking me to subtly cross the line.

They never saw themselves that way.

But really, none of us do.

As Dr. Gino wrote in here excellent book entitled, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, we all have “a rose-colored view of who we are and what we do, and we aim to behave in ways that are consistent with our self-image as capable, competent, helpful, and honest individuals.”

The book deals with forces from within, forces from our relationships and forces from the outside, “factors that characterize the context in which we operate and make decisions.

It’s a good book, as is Ariely’s entitled, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.

I always found myself considered a pariah by the “who’s asking” types who would in each of the communities I represented, ultimately make it their objective to recruit as many others around me to their way of thinking, hoping that the isolation would make me give in, or at the very least get me fired.

While holding firm to strategic decision-making about what was best for these communities, I always made doubly certain that our organization gave them every service we were capable of giving while remaining authentic.

But I also owe becoming a better and better leader over the years to these people.  Just because they were wrong doesn’t make them stupid or wrong about everything.

I became the CEO of a destination marketing organization at a very young age, twenty-six, so until the day I retired I viewed myself as a work in progress.

Trying to be rigidly authentic or true to yourself can, if you are not careful, also keep you from evolving.

This all made more sense to me looking back as I read an article a few months ago by Dr. Herminia Ibarra, formerly of Harvard, now professor of organizational behavior at Instead, The Business School for the World, entitled The Authenticity Paradox.

The reputation I earned over four decades was all about change.  I may have led three DMOs but they literally evolved weekly - if not daily - so in essence I led about 1,700 different organizations.

My personal “authenticity paradox” was learning that building consensus for ideas and values among stakeholders in a community can feel, well, more than a bit slimy and political but it can still be data-driven and strategic.

During my career I was intrigued when I was frequently credited with grit, resilience and perseverance so when I come across research into those traits, I try to read carefully.

Based on recent research at The Ohio State University, grit and perseverance in the face of repeated obstacles and even failure arise when an individual is able to generalize from successful past success while still learning from failures.

People who can learn to do this stand out from those who have the appearance of grit but are betrayed by perpetually needing to self aggrandize, making them particularly vulnerable to “who’s asking” decision makers.

The latter may have learned grit but their perseverance masks an otherwise negative self-image, thus the self aggrandizement.

Researchers have found that losing is actually good for us.  People who self aggrandize are put off or threatened by participating in “post mortems” after a projects, something which I adapted from EST training or a Ken Blanchard seminar in the early 1980s.

During post mortems, some people literally can’t or won’t shift gears from “what worked” to “what didn’t work,” no matter how safe and blameless you make them.

Often this is because they have issues with accountability or accepting responsibility but it can also be because they have never learned the values of introspection and curiosity which research by the authors of The Innovator’s DNA found are indicative of a rare blend of humility and confidence.

Possibly this is due to the stories they were told as children, which in the words of Seth Godin, “matter far more than we imagine.”

Values imprint by observation or patterning from birth to age 7, then from modeling or identification until age 13, including making our own value decisions, then from socialization with peers until we’re age 20.

People who can’t admit, let alone learn from failure or even admit “what didn’t work” in an otherwise successful transaction were probably told stories along the way that led them to believe that success came from fixed states, making them vulnerable to “who’s asking.”

Learning from failure and even success, on the other hand, are investments in continuing and never ending improvement rather than chalking it up to fixed states.

The difference is between looking good and actually being good, the essence of authenticity.

These are things TROSA understands – teaches and applies – so beautifully.

New values can be learned after the age of 20 but it is very hard and usually occurs with a significant emotional crisis such as facing up to addiction.