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.

Where Democracy Is Still Potent

Recently during a public hearing in southwestern North Carolina, the head of the state association for outdoor billboards tried to argue that North Carolina was a safer and better place in the 1970s when it didn’t have roadside trees.

Of course that wasn’t the case, but his point was that cutting down all of the trees along the state’s roadways and especially around billboards would make them safer.  Of course, that isn’t true either.  Current setbacks for trees along roadsides have long been calibrated based on meticulous safety research.

However, those who might fall for this faulty reasoning, which unfortunately may include far too many legislators coupled with copious amounts of campaign donations, might be surprised to learn that it was proven at the dawn of motorized vehicles that cutting down roadside vegetation actually made roadways less safe.

This phenomenon was first observed in the English countryside where early roadways were often lined on both sides by very tall hedgerows.  However, when the hedges were lowered, it was found that drivers then increased speeds and drove more recklessly because they “felt safer.”

Andrew Zolli, co-author with Ann Marie Healy of the 2012 book Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, included that tidbit in a presentation recently.  He also shared findings that when bicyclists wear helmets they may wisely be protected from the occasional fall but the fact is that when they wear one, drivers feel they can move closer to bicyclists at higher speeds increasing the likelihood of accidents.

Zolli is the executive director and curator for a fascinating organization known as PopTech, a collaboration of social innovators and scientists dedicated to investigating, prototyping and growing social innovations and breakthroughs.

In my opinion, at heart he is a futurist.  In a recent presentation Zolli noted that one reason we’re so lousy at predicting the future is a condition he calls “novelty bias.”  When we think long term, we take what is newest and make it the dominant feature of the future.

We’re doing that now with many technologies.  Today smartphones and tablets are toppling desktops and laptops but that doesn’t mean they won’t be just as rapidly toppled.  Thinking long term means looking beyond today.

Zolli notes that we have a tendency to focus too much attention on fast-moving threats such as terrorism, and not on far more powerful slow-moving threats such as climate change.

For instance, he cites that we’re spending trillions on the 1 in 28 million chance we’ll be impacted by an act of terrorism but zilch on the 1 in 6 chance we’ll be impacted by climate change.

Too often this misdirection is fueled by media frenzies that give us very unrealistic expectations.

The same phenomena can be fueled by social media such as neighborhood listservs.  On one level they can provide a useful heads up on suspicious activity, but on other levels they amplify and recirculate alarm to the point that many subscribers tune out just when they should be tuning in.

In organizations of every size you can see “novelty bias” undermining strategic thinking both at the management and board governance levels.  As Dr. Michael Porter argues, ninety-five percent of executives are too focused on operational effectiveness.

Governing boards often spend far too much time on compliance and not enough on strategic thinking.  This results in what Porter cautions is trying to mimic and then best the competition.

Truly strategic thinking should lead them instead to “compete to be unique.”

I find it disingenuous that many of the people who trash government regulation as ineffective are adherents of the ideology that has gutted its capacity over the last forty years.

But I agree with Zolli that regulations often become far too complex to be effective, primarily made that way, in my experience, by lobbyists who continue to pollute the regulatory process on behalf of special interests long after the legislative mandate.

A wry example Zolli gives is that BP had stringent rules for being careful with the handling of coffee while something obviously wasn’t working as intended with higher risk requirements such as proper capping of wells.

Regulations need to be more nimble and resilient to be effective and that starts with far more adequate enforcement by executive branches at every level. Regulations must also protect the process from legislative and special interest meddling.

Strategic thinking begins with executives and governing boards being aligned on the true purpose of the organization.  This isn’t, as the authors of Can’t Buy Me Like argue, just a mission or vision statement.

Purpose has more to do with intent.  Who is served?  How are lives touched and improved?  What is the organization’s ethos or character?  Purpose according to the authors is the core that informs every move.  It isn’t just about marketing.  In fact, they point out that an organization’s true purpose may never show up in its marketing.

If as consumers we only valued organizations, brands and products with passion, maybe we wouldn’t need regulations.  The author of Red Thread Thinking defines passion as drive connected to the heart of what the organization is all about.

Since the 1980s, anti-government partisans have largely gutted the effectiveness of regulations.  Today their work perverts true democracy by demonstrating that six people for whom only a few of us were permitted to cast ballots can thwart things supported by 90% of Americans or North Carolinians.

However, we are not powerless.  There are companies such as Chipotle Mexican Grill, that even as meat inspection has been eviscerated, has firmly stood for “food with integrity” and a core purpose illustrated by the commercial at this link and in this article in Onearth magazine about the pork growers who inspired it.

A tool I use and hope to help improve by factoring in companies that use desecration marketing such as outdoor billboards is GoodGuide which is most useful in the form of a smartphone app.

It ranks companies, brands and products by a 1 to 10 scale for how they treat society, health and the environment.

This is where true democracy can still  be potent.