UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

When one of my sons arrived at college for his freshman year, one of his first classes took him by surprise.

The professor–brown tweed suit, bow tie, right out of central casting–proceeded to greet his highly impressionable students with a power point that outlined his impeccable credentials: cum laude this, chairman of that, Fields Medal winner in physics and on and on.

In an instant, my son wrote him off as a stuffed shirt, pompous academic who had to make a boastful impression on a group of young students. It looked like a classic case of overkill that had backfired on a prince of the Ivy campus.

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When I was a high schooler I worked as a short order cook at a pool club in the middle  class environs where I grew up in Queens, NY. I say “pool club” advisedly as it was really a concrete hole filled with hyper chlorinated water situated on a blacktop slab near a mall. No trees, no grass, no golf– really a bathtub in the street but we thought it was Nirvana so if perception is a major component of reality, I guess it was Shangrila.

Anyway, the snack bar owner, my boss– I think his name was Al–put up about 100 signs touting how much he aimed to please and that the customer was a god at this summer establishment situated in working class heaven. I made a mental note of the customer relations campaign and filed it away in my mind determined to imitate it when I started my own company someday.

And then I had the Wonder Years epiphany courtesy of customer centric Al.  One searing August day I opened a commercial size carton to french fries that I would regularly toss into a hot oil machine, get them crisp and sell them with the burgers and fries that were the staples at our culinary cul de sac.

This time the uncooked fries were completely covered in a thicket of blue moss that looked like hair. As we never rotated stock at Al’s poolside enterprise, the fries must have been sitting in the delapidated cooler since Memorial Day. When I showed Al the Petrie dish the carton of fries had become, and motioned that I had to toss out the goods post haste, the customer advocate grabbed my arm in a vice lock and spewed forth with the wisdom of the street:

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All of life is rife with paradoxes. Few as striking, profound and poignant as the contrast between Steve Jobs and Barack Obama.

It is more than likely that Obama’s childhood home will someday become a national monument. I have no objection to that. He was smart and skillful enough to charm his way into the seat of power and though he has used it to destroy so much of what is exceptional in America, the feat of a successful rise to power is undeniable. So let there be an Obama homestead monument erected smack dab on the beaches of  Hawaii.

But another childhood home, specifically its garage, will never be a national monument: that of Steve Jobs. More than Obama (and, of course, most presidents of either party) Steve Jobs did so much to sustain America’s leadership as the land of innovation and entrepreneurial genius.

The profound difference between Jobs and Obama is that the former used his origins to inspire while the latter has used his to insult, denigrate and diminish the nation that gave both the pass to achieve to their highest level.

For Jobs, the garage was a springboard to magical life of imagination and commercial execution. For Obama it was a score to settle, a gripe to avenge, a disdain for the red, white and blue that is the oldest enduring republic in the world and that deserves a salute from all who have been blessed enough to live within its shores. And to thrive here.

Obama ran as a unifying force who would bring all people together under a common umbrella of decency, hope and boundless optimism. Instead, he has divided, pitted classes against each other and– in a relentless drive to protect his power and imperial lifestyle– has proven to be a Chicago pol of the worst order.

Ironically, Jobs — who never ran for office and hardly had the temperament for the falsity of the campaign trail– has been the very unifying figure the President promised to be. Generations of people, especially the young, will want to be like Steve: dreaming, risking, building, making as Jobs himself liked to say, “a ding in the universe.” And all without a single handout from Mother Government.

As America looks into the future, it faces a titanic struggle between the operatives who sell utopian dreams for votes and those at the diametrically opposite end of the spectrum, who walk the high wire without a net, asking for nothing but the liberty to do so.

The battle between the garbage and the garage is hardly new. It simply seems to be reaching a breaking point.

Last night, I received a message from a dear friend whose marriage has imploded. The love, the laughter, the twilight swims, the Christmas kisses, the hand holding in bed in the middle of the night– all have disappeared in the smog of ugliness, recriminations and worst of all, dreams of what could have been.

In the wake of a once beatiful and sometimes torrid romance, there are bewildered, saddened children, a cold and barren home and a stone where my friend’s heart used to be. She is a survivor, a magical woman, and I know that this will pass and that the man who has caused this misery has locked himself out of the only heaven he will ever know.

As my friend reviews the events of the past decade– the rise and fall, the pain and the denial, the hope and the hopelessness– she is engaging in a postmortem that takes its greatest toll on all of us. Whatever goes away, falls apart, sinks into the sea– be it a love, a friendship or a business– we tend to look backwards for a mix of torture and salvation:

• Did I do something wrong?
• Could I have prevented this?
• What if I had been stronger? Wiser?
• Perhaps I was too controlling?
• Maybe I wanted too much?

Nonsense. Nonsense to all of these stupid and wasteful questions and nonsense to the impulse to stare into the rear view mirror when the windshield, and the future it portends, are all that is important.

The wonderful truth  camouflaged by periods of loss is that winners cannot be held down. Lovers cast aside can and will find new novas that will bath them in an even brighter light. Entrepreneurs suffering setbacks will bemoan their loss and then act on a plan to exceed all that they had accomplished before.

Thus is the beauty of being an independent person with relentless dreams. The blood between the lines evaporates the way the morning sun melts away the midnight snow.

It seems to be quite often that I talk to people who tell me they really don’t like their careers, plan to do something else but are just waiting for the time to be right. For the planets to align. For who knows what.

For the most part, they never stop talking about it (how frustrated, often miserable they are) but never seem to quit, find a new path, make a U-turn, take a chance, extract themselves from the morass that deprives them of the exhilaration life has to offer to those who reach for it.

I have never understood this feet in quicksand way of living. Whether it applies to a career, business strategies, artistic endeavors,  relationshipships: if it’s not working, it if fails to bring passion and joy, if it is like going through the motions in wet clothes and heavy boots, it needs to be tossed, junked, bypassed, viewed as an experiement that failed, that we learned from and that we use as a launch pad for a new adventure into the wild blue yonder.

None of these excuses to remain stalled in a hopeless holding pattern ring true. None of them work. Zero are authenic. All of them lies designed to buy time, to postone the pain and/or fear that will come for awhile as you walk the shaky bridge to a new life, a new business, a career change, a relationship that actually needs no work and affords immeasurable rewards:

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