NO SPECIFIC DESTINATION
Galen Guengerich
April 1, 2001
Randy Komisar begins his recent book The Monk and the Riddle by telling the story that gives the book its name. He was riding a motorcycle across what was then Burma and is now Myanmar with a group of Americans when, early one morning, he came upon a makeshift taxi truck, onto which thirty passengers were clinging and clambering. One of the passengers, a young monk dressed in a plum-colored robe, motioned toward Komisar, indicating that he wanted a ride. Since the monk spoke no English, Komisar simply nodded his assent, and the monk climbed onto the back of the motorcycle.
Komisar didn't know exactly where the monk wanted to go, but they headed off in the same direction the truck had taken, motoring along endless highways, through villages and open-air markets, among herds of lumbering cattle and carts pulled by water buffalo. They stopped once for Komisar to eat lunch with his American friends, and a second time mid-afternoon for the monk to eat in a ramshackle shed with a crowd of farmers and loiterers. Finally, near evening, they approached what turned out to be an ancient Buddhist monastery built into a mountain of rock. They stopped, and the monk immediately climbed off the motorcycle and disappeared up the hill. Komisar, still uncertain as to the young monk's final destination, discovered that the abbot of the monastery spoke English. "Is this where he wants to go?" Komisar asked him. "Oh, yes, this is where you take him," the abbot replied. They chatted for a few more minutes, and then Komisar asked for directions to the town where his friends were spending the night and headed back to his motorcycle.
To his surprise, he found the monk waiting for him. Confused, Komisar looked toward the abbot. "He wants to go back to where you picked him up," the abbot explained. "But you said this is where I take him," Komisar called out. "Yes, but he wants to go back. Now. Can you take him?" the abbot asked. "But he just got here," Komisar replied, a little exasperated. "I drove him all afternoon. It's nearly sunset. Now he wants to go back? Why?"
"I cannot easily answer that question," the abbot replied. "But let me give you a riddle to solve. Do not try to answer it now. You must sit with the riddle a while, and the answer will come to you. Imagine that I have an egg, and I want to drop the egg three feet without breaking it. How do I do that?"
Komisar's book bears the subtitle The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur. The book is partly about Komisar's significant successes (he was a founder of Claris Corporation) and his equally significant failures (Crystal Dynamics, GO Corporation) as a Silicon Valley insider. But the book is mostly about the lessons he learned. He discovered the difference between drive and passion, for example, and the importance of not being beguiled by exit strategies. Reading his story, I wondered what lessons might be found for the rest of us in the rise and fall of dot-com civilization. Is there a metaphor or parable to help us discover where we are going and how we get there? For those who believe that life is a tale of anarchy and upheaval, the metaphor gleaned from today's business pages is obvious. No one seems to know what is going on there either.
I recall a story about a theologian, a biologist, an architect, and an economist. They were arguing among themselves about what God's original profession was, before anyone needed God to hear the prayers of the pious and to beseech sinners to repent. Not surprisingly, the theologian thought God was a theologian, who in the beginning created the fundamental principles by which human beings are to live. "That wasn't the beginning!" retorted the biologist. "There was no need for principles to live by until after God had created human beings and other living things. Clearly God was a biologist." "Wrong again," replied the architect. "Before people and plants, God built the heavens and the earth. Before God the architect existed, there was nothing at all--only chaos and confusion." "Ah-ha" responded the economist triumphantly, "where do you think the chaos came from?"
Wherever economic chaos comes from, there has certainly been lots of it lately, along with plenty of pundits to assign the blame. As far as I can tell, most of the scapegoats live in Komisar's part of the world, where business plans were sketched at lunch on a cocktail napkin, then parlayed overnight into companies with thousands of dollars in revenue, millions of dollars in expenses, and billions of dollars in market value. Many people are smugly--or, to put it in religious terms, self-righteously--pleased that the bubble has burst, because the ensuing chaos reinforces the economists' version of the law of gravity, which decrees that revenues must exceed expenses, and that market valuations must bear some reasonable relation to earnings. The dot-coms are like Icarus, whose impudence led him to fly ever higher and closer to the sun, until his wings melted and he fell to his death.
But obviously not all dot-coms have gone broke. Before the Nasdaq crash, AOL founder Steve Case used AOL's huge market value to purchase Time-Warner, a stalwart of the established information economy. As a friend recently quipped over dinner, at the moment Steve Case looks like the smartest guy in the room. And not all of the people whose Internet jobs evaporated are sorry they took the chance. Several weeks ago, a member of All Souls who came into my office to talk about an unrelated matter told me that she was looking for a job. She had left a relatively secure post in the corporate world to work for a dot-com. When the market collapsed, her company foundered, which was why she was looking for work. Nevertheless, she said, she was still glad she had taken the chance, even though things had worked out differently than she had hoped.
If the abbot had heard her speak, he would say she is on the right path. But many people who started or joined high-tech startups were not. They weren't trying to build businesses; they were trying to make a killing. It's as if people who had never owned a dog and didn't even like them had decided to sell dog food and pet supplies over the Internet. Although some of the high-tech Forty-Niners did make a killing, the riddle is posed even to the lucky ones, perhaps especially to them. What happens after you reach your financial goals? Or--this is a more likely scenario--what happens if you do not? What happens if things don't work out as you planned, and the three-year blitz becomes a five or ten or twenty-year grind? In other words, if you never get to where you are going, will the journey have been worth making anyway?
This question is relevant for all of us, even those of us who don't work for technology companies or financial institutions, or who spend our days engaged in pursuits other than earning an income, such as raising children or enjoying active retirement. Enduring fulfillment comes not only in work's rewards but also in the work itself. That is not to say rewards are unimportant. Nor is it to pass judgment on the intrinsic value of various types of work. Almost any work--whether we are paid for it in the usual sense or not--can, if done in the right spirit, contribute substantially to our own sense of satisfaction and to the welfare of those around us. The key is the "right spirit" part, which is not about the destination, but about the character of the journey. It's about what we give to our work, not just what we get out of it.
For those trying to get rich, Komisar puts his advice in simple terms: figure out what you care deeply about and focus on that. Don't concern yourself with exit strategies. The temptation to defer your life on the chance that success will buy you the freedom to do what you want is a not a risk worth taking. Work passionately, but apply your most precious asset--your time--to what is most meaningful to you.
That's good advice, although it presumes a lot more financial security than most of us can muster even when the markets are strong. Nevertheless, Komisar also makes a distinction that all of us would do well to keep in mind, and it gets at the heart of the riddle posed by the abbot. He points out that passion and drive are not the same thing. Drive pushes you forward toward something you feel compelled to do. It is a duty, an obligation. Drive usually is expressed as the desire to achieve some goal or payoff, to make a quota or earn a bonus. Drive is about jumping through hoops. Passion, on the other hand, pulls you toward something you cannot resist. It is the sense of connection you feel when the work you do expresses who you are.
All of us need drive to do our work, whatever our work might be. There are hoops that need to be jumped through, and goals to reach, and projects to complete. But in the end, that will not be enough. We also need to feel that our journey through life has meaning apart from the hoops. Two weeks ago, I spoke about our need to take chances and follow our dreams: to venture up the mountain into thin air, toward that place in our lives where what we desire holds sway over what makes sense. This longing, which we might call the external impulse of passion, gives us something to dream about and aspire to--a distant goal that is not simply a natural extension of our established personal and professional commitments. The goal needs to be risky: elusive enough that we might not ever reach it, but achievable enough that with perseverance we could. It's something to imagine late at night when the air is thick with hoops and duties and sensible endeavors.
Today we are challenged by passion's internal impulse: the need to deepen our sense of where we are and what we are doing. Not our overall mission and destination, which are important issues in their own right, but what are we doing here, now. The question God posed to the prophet Elijah who had failed in his mission and withdrawn to the mountain to mope, was not: what are you doing? It was: what are you doing here?" The most telling question we must answer is not about our eventual destination. It is about what we are doing now: what we are doing here.
The theological term for passion's internal impulse is vocation, or calling. It is formed from the Latin verb meaning "to call"--a deep sense that the purpose of life is not merely to get somewhere or achieve some goal, but rather to be someone along the way. Paul Tillich captured the essence of what vocation means when he said that there are many things in our lives "which demand attention, devotion, and passion. But they do not demand infinite attention, unconditional devotion, ultimate passionThey are not ultimately important." Whatever is ultimately important to us--Tillich calls it our ultimate concern--is our vocation, which expresses who we are called to be as we live and work. If we never get to our eventual destination, the journey needs to be worth making anyway.
What is the answer to the riddle of the egg? Komisar
reminds us that the riddle speaks only of the journey; it states no specific
destination. If an egg must fall three feet without cracking, simply extend
its trip to four feet. When all is said and done, the journey must be its
own reward. In the end, there is nothing else.