Author: Ricardo

The other aspect of the Dalai Lama’s life and personal beliefs that I believe is noteworthy and worthy of emulation is his compassion for all people.  He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 because of his dedication to the issue of Tibet.  He has gone to great lengths to educate the world on the issue of Tibet and fighting, peacefully and from a distance, the Chinese government and their occupation of his homeland.  While the Dalai Lama does not hold jurisdiction over other sects of Buddhism nor over every province of Tibet, he has elected to shoulder the burden of fighting for freedom for all Tibetans.  These are a voiceless people who suffer under a tyranny that would otherwise go unchallenged.  If not for Tenzin Gyatso, the issue of Tibet would not even register as a blip on our radars.  Because of the Dalai Lama’s relentlessness, the world is aware of the issue of Tibet and his disenfranchised nation has not been swept under the rug of world politics.  He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because of this.  However, while the Nobel Peace Prize is an incredible achievement, the award misses the main point of his personal beliefs and teachings: his kindness and desire for peace extend to all people.  He is practical yet clear on his views.  For example, while he does not condemn the war in Iraq and accepts that the war may be justified, he believes the final verdict cannot be made yet as the ultimate value of the outcome is not known at this time.  He has received much criticism as a political figure and as a religious leader because of this position.  That being said, he is quick to point out the bigger picture issue: violence will only beget more violence and will never be a tool for achieving enlightenment or lasting peace.  It is for this reason that he does not support armed conflict as a resolution to the issue of Tibet.  I remember telling my mother that the war in Afghanistan would ultimately wind up being nothing more than an exercise in revenge and would lead to more violence.  I espoused this view to others, as well, and I was met, more often than not, with resistance.  

“If we do nothing, then we teach them that they can do whatever they want to us and that America is weak.”  

“But if we wage war, we will only wind up giving another generation a reason to hate us.  Innocent people will die, and new hatred will be born.”  

Fast forward to today, and Afghanistan continues to be a source of death for American soldiers, as well as a source of conflict on a regional and global scale.  The initial illusions of US success in Afghanistan led us directly down the path of war with Iraq.  More violence, more hatred, and more death.  All these years later, and the situation has barely changed.  We’ve managed to move American troops from one spot to another, then back to the first, all in the name of…of what?  I am not quite sure myself.  At the time I made those statements about violence, I had not read the almost-identical position taken by the Dalai Lama.  I find my personal philosophies to align with many of his, and I admire and respect his open-minded position.  His dedication to compassion are singular, and, I believe, quite unique among those who walk the world stage.  

Compassion and love are what will make a difference in this world.

He desires a life of truth.  He is quoted as saying, time and again, “I am a simple Buddhist monk.”  Despite the fact that, as Dalai Lama, he is viewed as a political leader and figurehead, in his heart he is a monk.  As the leader of Tibet, the burden of putting to an end the Chinese occupation of his home country rests squarely upon his shoulders.  He pursues peaceful means to resolving the issue.  All the while, he lives his life in exile in India.  He has established a government-in-exile; negotiated an accord with the Indian government wherein he has established a Tibetan refugee community under the rule of his government-in-exile; and devised an education system to acculturate the children of the refugees in order to preserve the Tibetan way of life. As a monk, his spiritual life and development are most important to him.  He has pushed the bounds of not only Tibetan Buddhist beliefs but of religious conservatism in general.  He is a student of science and one of the world’s foremost scholars on subjects ranging from the study of human consciousness to physics.  He has said many times that science can teach us things that religion cannot, and, more boldly, that scientific discoveries may necessitate a reevaluation of religious precepts.  He is viewed by his people and the followers of Tibetan Buddhism as the bodhisattva (one who assists others on their journey towards enlightenment) of compassion, and his personal spiritual evolution is still his primary pursuit.  While seeking enlightenment allows him to fulfill his role as bodhisattva, it is the joy he experiences exploring his spirit and reaching out to others that is his primary driver in life.  He has said that he spends 80% of his time on Buddhist pursuits and 20% of his time on the issues of Tibet.  I consider this acknowledgement of who he is, what he believes himself to be, and the insight to be able to prioritize accordingly as traits worthy of emulating.

Last night, there was an absolutely breath-taking routine on “So You Think You Can Dance” that move so many people to tears.  I think the performers themselves were humbled by the reaction of the judges and the crowd.  I know my wife and I were moved.  It was incredible.  Do yourself a favor and check it out: 
My wife watched it again today; she watches her favorite numbers each week more than a few times.  Of course, this one “got” her again, and she cried.  Our littlest happened to be in the room with her, and he noticed her tears.  “Why are you crying, Mama?” he asked her.

“This makes me miss my grandma’s,” she told him.  Both endured their own struggles with cancer during their lifetimes.  Both passed years ago.

He was quiet.  Our oldest was nowhere to be found but, even at a young age, he would have been all empathy.  He would have been articulate, too, and said something like, “I’m sorry you are sad, Mama.  I miss them, too.  Can I get you a tissue or something?”  If you’re smiling, it’s probably because you know our oldest…

So, my wife figured that the moment was lost on our littlest, perhaps a little too “heavy” a situation for him to fully process.

Children are much more acutely aware of the feelings of adults, particularly their parents and/or primary caregivers.  They are attuned to emotion in a way that I think is difficult for most of us, as adults, to comprehend.  Most of us lose that finely-tuned ability.  But the truth is, you often don’t have to speak a word in order for a child to be able to feel what you feel.  Empathy and instinct are two of the most fundamental communication gifts that we learn to ignore as we grow into adulthood.  It’s a shame.  The gifts we could give each other…could be so beautiful.

My precious, little boy looked up at his mother and spoke softly:

“I can pretend to be your grandma, Mama.”

Let’s just get this out of the way: my friend the former Buddhist monk would say “fate.”  Perhaps.  BUT…I would like to think it is by design.

The problem, though, relates back to quote I heard whilst at the University of Dallas: “Every system operates precisely as designed, not as intended.”  So, by design, not intention, I have become functionally irrelevant.

Allow me to explain.

At work, they are remodeling our floor.  A lot of people work on the floor.  So, they divided the floor in half and sent the first wave of us down to the basement of another building.  It smells like sewage down there.  You would figure that a Fortune 100 company would figure out how to vent a building in such a way as to eliminate the sewage smell in the men’s restroom.  Apparently, this is not the case.  However, I digress.

Down in the basement, I am largely isolated from the rest of the world.  My immediate team is around me, but, as has become painfully apparent to me, they don’t need me for much.  When they do need me, they E-mail me.  Or they call me.  Apart from them…yeah, pretty much not a lot going on in my work life.  It is an interesting situation.  I did not realize how much of my day is spent in walk-up/drive-by engagements, either perpetrating such visits or having such visits perpetrated upon me.  Either way, without the foot traffic, I feel functionally irrelevant.  

There.  I’ve said it.  The situation is exacerbated by the fact that, as the weeks pile up (and the smell persists), fewer and fewer people are showing up downstairs.  A bunch of people have opted to work from home more often.  Others are satisfied with “hoteling” space throughout the campus.  Yet others…I don’t know.  I think some of the missing may account for at least a small portion of the smell.  

This is not an entirely bad situation.  Apart from the injury to my ego, I consider the experience rather successful.  How so?  Well, it has demonstrated to me that I have achieved my primary objective…by design.  Not my primary CORPORATE objective, mind you, but my PERSONAL primary objective as a leader of people.  This is the objective that follows me wherever I go, whatever the assignment.  I could take it with me from company to company, if that were my career intent.  It transcends the person above me in the Grand Organizational Hierarchy, and it transcends the logo on my company-supplied notebook.  It is my very personal objective, and I measure success far outside the confines of a corporate employee performance assessment.

My objective is to be a coach.  It is to be a mentor, if appropriate.  It is to be a sounding board for my direct reports and my peers.  It is to be a person in whom others confide and in whom others seek an objective and reasonable opinion.  My objective is to be a guide for others on their journey through life should they feel compelled to entrust such a sacred gift into my hands.  In return, I ask only that they gently and compassionately guide me.

It is NOT my objective to tell people what to do.  It is NOT to tell them how to do it.  It is NOT to manage the details of their daily grind.  I know, I know: every good business person needs to understand what goes on in their part of any organization.  Understood.  But I also know that the best leaders also know that the sure-fire way to get results is to promote autonomy.  We talk so much about accountability at work, but I suspect we differ in our interpretation of the meaning of the word.  I look to promote autonomy and, with that autonomy, an acceptance of the consequences that come with it.  That is one of the ways I define success as a leader.

So, I am now taking this time to figure out what I do next.  How do I serve my team moving forward?  How do I serve my employer moving forward?  And how to I refine this art of leadership further to the benefit of everyone on my team?  It is time to spread the wealth a little farther, a little more evenly.  I’ve neglected a few, and it’s time to see how I can chip in to help them write the most successful story for themselves that they can.

So, by fate or by design?  I am in the basement by fate, but I am slightly more enlightened by design. 

 So, there was this other time that one of my star direct reports (we’ll call him George) handed me a letter.

I looked down at it.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s my letter of resignation,” he said.

I read it.

“I guess it is,” I replied.  “Why are you giving it to me?”

He blinked.  Long pause.  “Because…I’m resigning.”

“Two weeks?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.  “That’s the fair thing to do to you.”

“Thanks.  You don’t have to do that, though.  You can go now.”

More blinking.  More silence.

Awkward silence.

“Why?”  I asked him.

“I got a better offer.”

“Better offer or more money?”

Pause.  “More money,” he responded.

“Come here,” I said, and led him into a room.

“Sit down, “I said.  

He sat.

“If you leave here now looking for money, you’ll be chasing money for the rest of your life.  That’s not a way to find fulfillment in your work.”

He said nothing.

“George, if they offered you a real chance to do something more with your career than I could offer you here, I wouldn’t even try to get you to stay.  As much as I love having you on our team, I wouldn’t stop you from doing what’s best for you or for your family.”  I paused.  “Is money really what’s best?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.  He sat in silence, something heavy weighing down his brow.  It was cut with deep furrows.

“You have a good thing here.  You have tons of friends.  Everyone around here knows you.  I see how happy you are going about your work every day.  You do more for the folks around here than most people in your position would do.  Others learn from you.”

He sat in silence, watching me.

“I don’t have to think twice about what goes on with this team day-to-day because you are such a good leader.  I know you’ve got a handle on things, and that allows me to do more than I would have otherwise been able to do.  I’ll miss you if you leave, but I think you’ll miss all of us more.”

“Yeah…I hear you.”

“I’ll shake your hand and wish you well if you decide to lead.  I just want you to make sure it’s what you really want,” I added.

“Yeah, yeah…  Listen, can…can you give me a few minutes here?  I’m not sure…”

“Look, I’ll take this letter, and I’ll put it in a folder in my desk.  Take a week.  Think about it.  If you decide that you want to do this, then let me know.  We’ll shake hands, no hard feelings, and you can go start the next phase of your career.  OK?”

“Yeah, yeah…OK.  Thanks…thanks, Ric.”

“Sure.”

We shook hands.

The next day, he stopped by my desk.

“Can you tear that letter up?” he asked.

“Of course I can.”  And I did.  Right in front of him.

He smiled and walked away.

Now, I don’t know if there are times in his life when George thinks about that moment and wished he’d made a different decision.  I can’t tell you.  I live 900 miles away now.  I see his name from time to time, so I know he’s still around.  I hope that he’s doing well, and I hope that he hasn’t regretted his decision.  For years after, I know he didn’t.  He told me as much.  We didn’t really talk about that exchange.  He just mentioned it to me one day.  He told me he was glad he stayed on, remained a part of our team.  I was glad he did, too.  He was…better after that.  He worked a little harder, led with a little more confidence.  He’s doing more technically challenging things now.

I like to think that, together, we made good choices for his career.  At minimum, I hope that I asked the right question at the right time.  And I hope he gave the right, most honest answer.  

My faith in him was a small part of the equation; his faith in himself was the most important part.

My youngest needed some incentive when we were potting train him.  He had perfect control over his…habits, but he just refused to go poo-poo in the potty.  I’m sorry; it was what it was.  The boy just needed to poop in a pull-up.  Pee-pee?  Fine.  Not a problem.  Poo-poo?  No way.  Pull-up, please.

So, my wife being the brilliant parent out of the two of us, set up a savings plan with him: for every poop he did in the potty, we’d drop 50 cents in an envelope so we could go to the zoo.  All he had to do was cover the parking.  The Lincoln Park Zoo, you see, is essentially free.  Parking is the only thing you need to pay for.

Of course, my little guy loved the plan, and, as a result, started pooping in the potty immediately.  Fast-forward a few months, and it’s off to the zoo we go, the $20 required for parking in that same little envelope.  When we got to the zoo, my wife noted that the parking rates were pretty steep and that $20 was only going to get us 4 hours.  “We have to make sure we’re back in 4 hours,” she said.  “Why?” asked the little one.  “We didn’t bring enough money to pay for 5 hours, sweetheart,” she announced.  Part of our education plan for our kids is to teach them the value of spending what you have.  In this case, we made a big deal about him saving $20, so we had to stick to that.  “I guess we’ll just have to stick with what we have,” my wife added.

“Don’t worry, Mama,” came that little voice.  “If we need more money we can just go back home, so I can poop some more.”

Ahh…if only life were that easy…

You read a lot about people who suffer.  It’s an odd thing to read about when you, yourself, aren’t suffering, at least not in the way many unfortunate souls in the world suffer.  It is easy for me to sit back in my middle-class neighborhood, with my all-American nuclear family, working my white-collar job from home…it’s easy to sit back and spin fanciful yarns about how life is all about choices and our attitudes and learning to live with the consequences of our actions.  It is easy because I don’t have to explain misery and true human suffering to those who experience it first hand.

I haven’t really been tried, in that “life’s trials” sort of way.  I have had my share of issues to work through, but there is a whole wide world to help me put my trivial problems into perspective.  I am fortunate beyond measure, and for that I am so very grateful.  My children are asleep upstairs, cozy and comfy in their beds, carefree.  They have issues, too, you know; problems that consume them and are extremely important to their young lives.  But, overall, their lives are good…very, very good.

My children…all children really…have that uncanny way of slipping in life’s important lessons.  They mainly do so covertly and unintentionally.  Today, my children taught me that losing a bracelet you made yourself is an event that can bring a person to tears, to nearly inconsolable tears.  When found, the same bracelet can generate such joy and enthusiasm.  They taught me that not getting to cuddle with their mama at night is as horrible an ending to a day as one could not possibly dread more.  They taught me that mama coming home early because of the rain is reason to smile like an idiot from ear to ear and giggle with excitement.  Such are the lives of children.  Such are the lives of my children.

For me, there is a lesson in there about reacting to emotions.  There is a lesson about perspective.  There is a lesson about turning on and off this notion of suffering.  This last one intrigues me the most.  What is the threshold for suffering no longer being a choice?  When does suffering transcend the realm of childhood and enter the darker world of adulthood?  At what point do we become bona fide victims of the indignities and misfortunes that the world heaps upon us?  

I don’t know the answer.  All I know is that at some point, like most adults, I lost the ability to clearly see that line.  Maybe children see it more closely for a time but then lose it.  Again, I don’t know.  What I do know is that it would be magical to get that back.  It would be even more magical to help others see it, too.

I’d love to live in a world where misery and suffering are optional.

 You have to take with a grain of salt these people who want to be the first to “break” a story.  The grain has to be rather substantial when it comes to the death of Michael Jackson.  That said, word is starting to spread that police are treating Michael’s death as a homicide.  For whatever reason, that got to me.

It’s one thing for Michael to have died as a result of his own actions.  We take our lives into our hands every day; we make decisions, often in a split second, that can mean the difference between life and death.  Some times, the decisions aren’t that dramatic.  And some times those mundane decisions can result in death.  It happens every day, all over the world.  Life is weird that way.  No guarantees…the Grim Reaper can come knocking at any time.

It’s another thing altogether to put your faith in another person and wind up dead because of that person’s negligence or…well…stupidity.  I know; that’s a decision just like any other.  To me, though, in this instance, it seems like Michael Jackson’s death is that much more…avoidable?  Pointless?  Presumptuous of me to judge the Master Plan, but hearing that Michael’s death might be a homicide…I don’t know.  I didn’t really feel real sadness until now.  

Like I said, take it with a grain of salt.  We’ll probably never know what really happened that day, and it’s honestly none of our business.  The whole situation just made me appreciative of the fact that the circumstances in my life let me sleep at night.  I don’t need any help falling asleep.  Just ask my wife.  

Maybe my life isn’t that glamorous, but I have people with whom to share it.  And I am alive.  For that, I am most grateful.

Some days, there are too many different ideas bouncing around my head for my own good.  Eckhart Tolle talks about quieting the voice inside your head as a way of attuning yourself to the present moment.  I have a hard time quieting that voice.  

I’ve been thinking about a conversation and E-mail exchange with my colleague and good friend, the former Buddhist monk.  My experience as an artist this past Sunday pretty much stands as the polar opposite of the kind of Sunday he had.  He made a comment about how we are, indeed, opposites…yet we are such close friends.  His comment left me wondering: why are we such good friends?  Do opposites attract?  Or are we the same on some deeper level that allows us to connect in a genuine, life-giving way?  Perhaps we just experience life differently because of cultural differences.  I am not sure I know.  I am just sure that I am profoundly grateful to the Universe for the gift of this human being in my life.

I’ve also been thinking about my job.  I moved to a temporary work space in a basement of another building, and it has left me feeling really isolated.  Ironically, my team is right near me.  One of the things it has made me realize is that I depend on being near a lot of other people to give my day structure and purpose.  Down in the basement, there is just a small group of people apart from my team sharing the workspace.  None of them are people with whom I would normally interact.  I find myself with a bit more free time on my hands.  I’m struggling to feel productive.  What to do?  Seems like a golden opportunity when I really think about it…

Finally, I’ve been thinking about what I have to offer other people as a writer.  I am a part of an on-line social network that is chock-full-o-people who do amazing, incredible things with their days.  Some of these people are moving mountains and changing lives.  It is humbling to be able to partake of so much awesomeness.  What the heck am I doing?  Not enough…that’s for sure.