In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

Dante

If midlife is a slog, then the way out is through. So to that end, I wanted to share a handful of practices that I have found helpful. Some of these I would call fully “mine,” where they happen regularly and habitually. Others, I’m still working on developing but am finding them helpful.

Here are 11 of my favorites.

Put the right boundaries around money

1. Practice gratitude - this has so many positive effects

2. Grow in generosity - it is a learned skill. Start today and work to grow over time. Will do wonders to shift your perspective from self towards others

Time

1. Relentlessly say no - If it’s not critical, the answer is no. This stage is about narrowing your focus to doing the most important things.

2. Get time in nature regularly - see the 20/5/3 rule - Good research out about getting into the natural world and the positive effects from doing so.

3. Continually work to adapt your professional role to play to your strengths - A role can be evolved over time, slowly work to make yours fit you best.

Self

1. Begin each day addressing head/heart/body. Grow your mind, keep your body healthy, and develop your soul - a powerful way to holistically start each day

2. You need to regularly experience beauty - Arthur Brooks makes this case in his new book. Transcendence from the good/beautiful/true should be a regular part of life.

3. Make peace with your past - You can’t let you past continue to rule over your present. Do the hard work to find peace and healing, forgive past wrongs, and move forward.

People

1. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.

2. Bowen Systems Theory - There are many key insights from this theory but my favorite is that you can change your family by changing yourself. It’s really hard to change others, but you can change yourself.

3. You need friends. Friends are built through time. This will be hard unless you are relentlessly saying no to make the requisite space

Your kids are ‘differentiating’ which is good - but it also means they need to push back to find boundaries. But moments that previously would have passed in a second become hot wars in 2 sec - leaving you wondering what the hell just happened.

Work is busy - you are experienced enough to have some degree of seniority and plenty of things to do.

In all that, you need to take care of yourself - eat healthy enough and get workouts in - while your body is not as young as it used to be. And there is the challenge of how to take care of your own psychology.

Within all this, you are trying to sustain, and maybe build a marriage.

The late Rick Woolworth called it the “Red Zone” - a time in which every dimension of life is asking for all you can give.

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One study highlights that life satisfaction bottoms out in the early-mid forties and climbs from there.

There are 2 primary challenges to this stage in life. The first is just the volume of asks. Even if life is going swimmingly well, there is just a lot going on. I personally have found a lot of value in books like Essentialism or The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

But a good chunk of those books could be easily summarized by a comment author Atul Gawande made in a recent interview. “Before the age of 40, you should say yes to almost everything. After the age of 40, you should say no to almost everything.”

His point is that early on, novelty and exposure are good things as you build your life. You don’t know which projects, relationships, experiences are going to be key to opening the path forward. But as time passes, you hopefully know the things you should be doing. The goal then is to keep the main thing, the main thing.

The second challenge is what Jim Collins’ refers to as the “fog of success” or the “fog of disappointment.” Essentially, when we hit the seminal moments in life (“cliffs” in Collins terminology), they are often followed by extended periods of uncertainty.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. Hemingway

This is what I”m seeing a lot of right now. People who are either having big successes or who are being whipsawed by unexpected failure/disappointment/suffering. A big chunk of guys I know have been in therapy to work through this. And the ones who haven’t gone, in general, aren’t doing great.

Avoiding the second movie curse

So how then do we keep middle age from being the crappy second movie in a trilogy? Less Cars 2 and Oceans 12 and more like Godfather 2 or Empire Strikes Back?

The structure of movies can actually be quite instructive in answering this question. First movies are unique. You meet the characters, a lot happens, and there may be an initial first resolution. Life is similar. We develop, we find love, vocation, maybe start our families. End film.

At the end, we know that third movies bring ultimate resolution to the conflict. There will be setbacks along the way, but we know that at their end, all will be resolved.

But what about the middle film?

Like in chess, the middle is where the ending is setup. There are many moves, possibilities still ahead.

But a lot of second movies fall apart because they try to continue the story from the first - but there isn’t enough there. Trying to avoid that risk, many other second films try to tell a completely different story, but ultimately unsuccessfully.

The good second movies are different. They are a deepening of the story. Luke meets Yoda in the second movie. We see Michael Corleone move into leadership. Each protagonist grows and develops.

And keep in mind, Empire ends badly. Han Solo is frozen, Luke’s hand is cut off. Things do not look good.

Middle age is likely similar.

We see our assumptions and patterns tested to see if they are durable. The longings we want but haven’t had met. The pain / discomfort / unhealed wounds of our past clanging to be numbed.

The choice - around or through?

Middle age is fundamentally about the choice we will will make.

The choice to try and go around (aka avoidance) or a choice to go through. But we know the path - Luke had to enter the cave to become the Jedi he was meant to be.

This isn’t a trivial choice, and those who choose to go around now, only set themselves up for a poor ending.

In the slog, there seems to be a common thread of managing the tragedies/pain/suffering of life poorly. Some run into the arms of a lover. Others turn to substances to numb out the pain. This approach, to go around, works for a time, until it doesn’t.

But avoidance today accrues interest at a high rate.

Rather than the challenge of growth today, with the commensurate benefits of seeing greater joy from the great gifts life has to offer, avoidance gradually but inevitably narrows life until it has a singular, restrictive focus.

Conclusion

I have written and rewritten this post probably a dozen times in a bunch of different variations, trying to figure out what exactly it is I’m trying to say.

What I’ve settled on is that I want to offer encouragement to all who are in the middle and are doing the hard work to push through the “fog.” It isn’t easy for anyone, but find a friend, and work through it. The middle cannot be rushed through. The friends and acquaintances I meet who have encountered it head on and wholeheartedly have become inspiring, dynamic individuals.

At the same time, I feel like I’ve seen and spoken with a number of people who I’d put in the ‘avoidance’ camp. To them, I want to encourage them to face the middle in all its messiness.

And for the good number of you readers who are past this stage of life, your wisdom and encouragement can mean a lot.

I’m working on a longer piece, but didn’t get it ready in time for this week. So in lieu of that, here are a few more travel thoughts.

Last week, an Aspirations of Excellence reader asked me to share a favorite travel hack. Naturally, after sharing 1, a bunch of other stuff came to mind.

So - if you are out and about this summer, here are a few things I’ve learned to make travel easier.

1. Keep a second set of toiletries fully stocked, at all times. You don’t want to be remembering if you have toothpaste in your bag.

2. Carry on only. Does this even need to be said? If you are out for longer than a week or have specialized gear, then maybe you should check. Otherwise, carry on and do some sink laundry if need be.

3. Always, always bring workout clothes. Health is super important on the road, make it a default to hit the gym each morning.

4. Same place, every place. When you get in your hotel room, keep your stuff in roughly the same spot every time. It makes it a lot easier to repack and ensure you haven’t left anything behind.

5. One time zone. As best you can, stay on your home time zone. It just makes the back and forth a lot easier.

6. Use a hanger to close the curtains. If you can’t get the blackout curtains to close all the way, grab one of the hangers with clips and use the clips to pin the curtains together.

7. Two drinks max. Whether on the plane or at dinner, over indulging makes for an uncomfortable next day, especially assuming you aren’t going to sleep as well as normal from being in a different place.

8. Noise canceling headphones and sunglasses. Whether AirPods Pro or something else, good headphones make a huge difference. Combine with sunglasses when you need to enter ‘nap mode’ on a flight.

9. Hotels points aren’t worth a darn. Airlines miles are worth pursuing, but hotel points are generally worth less (0.5c per point vs. an airlines at >1c). Choose the right hotel regardless of your brand loyalty IMO.

10. Multi-port USB-C charger. Get a charger that can handle multiple USB-C devices at the same time. It dramatically reduces the number of cords you need to carry.

11. Clear is amazing, when you really need it. Probably not worth the cost if you aren’t traveling a lot, but on peak travel days around holidays, spring break, etc - it’s worth it.

12. TSA shouldn’t be a surprise for you. Baring a random screening, you should approach TSA like the wind passing through a tree - quickly, quietly, without impact. For example, I have 1 belt that I know triggers certain airport scanners (but not my home) - so I preemptively remove the belt, rather than risking it, just to make the whole process easier.

13. Pick the same seat. Aim to sit in the same row, same seat every time if you can.

14. The Flighty app is great. - hat tip to ML for intro’ing me to it -

15. Reserve critical Ubers early. I’ve had good success pre-booking Ubers in the app. For critical times/places, it is easy and worth the incremental booking fee.

I’m sure there are others, but those are a few that came to mind. Safe travels this summer!

Your starting place often determines your perspective.

If you are in physics, you see order, predictability, and mathematical precision , and thus, a universe that is structured.

If you are in biology, you see difference and variation, and thus, a world of change and instability.

But, consider the paradox of solids.

Everything we touch is made up of atoms. Atoms linked into increasingly complex structures, but atoms still. And to us, they feel solid and firm.

But scale a proton of an individual atom to the size of a pinhead. At that size, the total diameter of the atom would be 200 meters.

Hence the paradox - every solid we touch is largely composed of empty space. Form and void in one.

Perspectives must be cautiously considered, especially when they seem to easily describe why something is the way it is. Perhaps the contrary is the correct perspective? Or perhaps it’s both, at once.

A quote

“Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar

A book I’m reading

The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris

A bestseller nearly 30 years ago, this was interesting overall, with a handful of chapters of deep profundity.

“Why would a married woman with a thoroughly Protestant background and often more doubt than faith be drawn to the ancient practice of monasticism, to a community of celibate men whose days are centered on a rigid schedule of prayer, work, and scripture? This is the question that poet Kathleen Norris asks us as, somewhat to her own surprise, she found herself on two extended residencies at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota.”

In May, we are talking about homes and travel. First, we looked at travel and why we do it. Last week, we discussed a few ideas about how we can transition from work to home better.

This week, I want to share one my favorite data points about the home itself.

About 15 years ago, UCLA tracked foot traffic in a group of American homes and guess what they found.

Generally, people spend time in the kitchen, the small den, and the bedroom. Below is an image from one of the houses they studied. In general, they found that families only use about 40% of their square footage regularly.

We may no longer be cave dwellers or nomadic across the savannah, but the places we spend time look a lot like places where there is fire, food, and coziness.

So what does this mean?

First, a home can feel homely whether or not it has your ideal amount of square footage. Whether your house is large or small, you only have to get a few spaces right to really impact your daily quality of life.

Second, it should help you think about where you spend your renovation dollars. Finding ways to improve these common spaces where people naturally congregate will dramatically improve the functionality of your home.

My track record of how I return home each day is mixed, charitably. Sometimes I enter the door like Mr. Rogers, calm and patient. But more often than I’d like, I come in like a panzer tank. Making the shift from work life to home life isn’t always easy.

So here are a few ideas I’ve been playing with.

• Don’t come home super hungry. By the end of the day, it’s been a while since lunch. But starting your home life with low blood sugar is not a recipe for success.

• The tone of your first words set the tone. I saw someone mention this on socials - your first words really matter. They can share a lot about your day and how your interactions might shift the dynamic in the house. Goal - Great everyone with an upbeat tone.

• While you’ve had a day, so has everyone else in the house. So often, I feel like I’m playing catchup with whatever the story line of the house has been that afternoon.
  

  That can be good if positive, but also means you are stepping in front of a tidal wave if the waters aren’t calm. It’s good to be aware of this, and even better if your spouse can give you a heads up.

• A friend told me that “work is where he goes to solve problems that he didn’t create.” After a long day of dealing with problems, it is easy to immediately see everything that is wrong when you come home.
  
  It’s either exhaustion - the oh’s—t, here’s something else I have to do. Or pattern recognition - your brain activated from solving issues all day and seeking out more wood to chop.
  
  It’s important to be super mindful about what problems you see are yours to solve at that moment.

• Build in a buffer. Not all commutes are bad. I had a period of time where my commute was too short (less than 5 min) and I missed that buffer window back home.

• You may need to extend your buffer. You may need to take a walk too - sometimes, I’m encouraged to go take a walk when I get home. I’m working to better self-diagnose when that should occur.

The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned

Maya Angelou

The night was dark in early December 2024. I was high above the clouds, on the 75th of 78 flights that year, when this essay started to take form in my head.

By that point, nearly 40 round trips in, the novelty of the travel experience had worn off. You’ve been in good hotels and bad. You’ve had amazing meals, and grabbed the awful prepared sandwich in the airport as you run to catch a connection.

So, on that quiet night, I pulled out my iPad and, at the top of a blank page wrote:

Why do we travel?

It’s a question we typically don’t give a lot of thought to. Every trip has its unique reason - a wedding, a meeting, a funeral, a vacation. Isn’t the answer obvious in the goal?

But consider, in the last year alone, over 60% of the US population flew on an airplane - that’s over 150 million people. Travel is more accessible today than any time in history.

Years ago, I encountered the saying that travel ‘shrinks the world by broadening the mind.’ That concept has always resonated. Bizarrely, the more you see of the world, the smaller it is as you see how similar people are regardless of where they call home.

Today, I want to consider what being home offers us, as well as what being away does.

What is home?

Home is such an implicit concept that we may not think about it directly. If we probe our memories though, there are certain times and places that feel like home to us.

I can distinctly remember the first time I walked into the library at Wake Forest. The main foyer is the beautiful, open space and I immediately felt at home. I was 17, it was a gray, rainy, spring day, and I knew that’s where I wanted to go to college.

Maybe for you, it is a favorite window seat. Or the smell of something in the kitchen.

There are people who buy and live in the same house for 50 years. These are the “homes” that Steve Martin’s character in Father of the Bride was willing to stand in front of a wrecking ball to save.

But home isn’t solely defined by its longevity.

There are others who move frequently - military families or even the old school GE executive families. Homes for these families are more fluid - changing with more regularity.

But are they any less ‘homely?’

I lived in 3 houses before leaving for college. As an adult, I have owned 3 houses which have felt very much like home, even though we may have only stayed in each for 5 or so years.

Why? It seems odd that something so powerful, definitional even, can also be so arbitrary.

Certainly, homes are where our stuff is. Our possessions tell the stories of our lives. They bring us joy. They serve a declarative function - telling the world who we are and who we want to be.

Homes become places of safety. Places where we can lay down a degree of subconscious guardedness that we assume each time we venture out into the world.

Familiarity supports this. In our homes, we know what to expect. We know which light switch to use. Which floor board to skip to avoid squeaking. This predictability gives us the ability to shift most of the activities of daily living from conscious thought to the habitual.

I know where my tea cup is in the morning and where the kettle is on the counter. This incremental bit of mental space is quite liberating.

We can focus on other things.

But if home is so great - why do we so frequently want to leave it?

What we gain by being gone

Presumably, a simple definition of travel would be that anytime we are not at home, we are traveling. But more so, it is the disruption of the usual rhythms and routines that mark travel.

Travel may involve relaxation and recharge. It may be a place where our responsibilities are lightened and we experience the benefits of being served in a hospitality setting.

Travel may also involve new sights and experiences. Physical exertion in the form of hikes, walks, and elephant rides. Mental engagement in museums, tours, and other places of culture.

Travel can also be a lot of work. It may be about seeing existing clients, trying to sell to new ones. Trade shows, dinners and entertaining. It can be both a boondoggle and exhausting.

There is something deeply appealing about travel.

We’ve seen throughout modern history that when a middle class emerges in a society, they begin to travel. As the Japanese rebuilt post WWII, they began to travel en masse (read The Billionaire Who Wasn’t - the story of Chuck Feeney and the creation of Duty Free Stores).

If you have been abroad in the last decade or so, you’ve seen that the Chinese are doing the same thing.

Pastor and theologian David Gibson highlights that as humans we are in a forever [balancing act] between the familiar and the novel. Familiar things are wonderful and we love them. And at the same time, we crave new experiences.

Travel is one of the ways we experience the novel. Being in new places, encountering new things, stimulates our brains in new ways. We form new synapses as we navigate language barriers, strange locales and the like. This additional mental work heightens our awareness of our surroundings - giving us far ‘bigger eyes’ to see the environs we find ourselves within.

Importantly, travel offers perspective on the things that we consider as default. The postmodern concept of cultural “meta-narratives” is largely obvious to those who have spent time in multiple cultures. The norms of everyday living are only normal in a certain time and place.

But what do we lose?

Make no mistake, travel is not all gain.

There are things we lose when we are gone.

You may be familiar with the story of the beach in Thailand that has had to close as a result of all the damage from tourists trying to get the perfect Instagram snap.

But at a personal level, when we are gone, we give up our presence in our home places.

In an increasingly ‘thin’ world, our social relationships are already tenuous at best. Being gone puts pressure and risk on those relationships. It weakens the community ties of our primary community.

In fact, a regular conversation I have with client families is about the choice to consciously limit one’s ability to be anywhere, so as to experience the deep benefits of being fully somewhere.

Much of what makes home valuable is the lengthy duration we have of being in the same place. When we are gone too much, we limit the opportunity to go deep within a place. We do not give our relationships enough frequency of interaction to develop.

Travel can also become just another consumption experience. The travel industrial complex is real.

The ubiquity of the internet has homogenized large portions of culture. You can see the same stores and restaurants almost worldwide at this point. The risk of this is that we end up experiencing “the place” vs. the actual place.

My favorite example is the Morocco section of Epcot. Meant to be an encounter with the place and culture of Northern Africa, and yet, Disney has included ‘specialty’ Moroccan cocktails in the infamous Drink Around the World challenge. Of course, being a Muslim country, Morocco is essentially dry.

It’s not just Disney; it is easy to pull out markers of a place - its architecture, cuisine, and music - and call it the place. As if the distillation of something is the same as the thing in itself.

So what should we do?

First, we should all thoughtfully consider the objective of travel.

Where are we going and why? Is it for rest? for exploration? for escape? How is that counter-balanced by what we are leaving behind?

If we are leaving for pure escapism, how can we build more ‘novelty’ into our life at home? Are you investing in your community? Are you practicing hospitality with others as a way to root more deeply into a place?

Consider a more articulated rhythm of life. Just as a week has days of work and days of rest, craft an annual cadence of time away and time present.

But when you are away - be fully there. Among many things that were inspiring about the late Anthony Bourdain was his seeming ability to be present. His TV shows show a man enthralled by the places he is at, right then.

Travel is a part of modern life, a wonderful part. Engaging with it intentionally and thoughtfully can allow it to be even more impactful to us all.

A bonus freebie

When you are away, please, for the love, be self-aware.

I have overheard people in airports complain about being “hustled” by others. Someone trying to get around them in line or to their boarding group while the way is blocked by group 8 (seriously, just sit down).

While 150 million people may fly annually, the vast majority are only doing so 1-2x a year.

If that’s you, please recognize that there are those in your vicinity who may be traveling more in a month than you do in a decade.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be courteous, but please recognize that there are rules and rhythms that you are likely not aware of.

Pay attention and watch, you may learn a few things that make your own journey better.

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Last Saturday night, I had the privilege of seeing Ben Rector perform with the Nashville Symphony. Rector, a strong songwriter in his own right, reaches his peak as an artist when an orchestra brings depth and grandeur beyond his typical guitar accompaniment.

Sitting in the audience and enjoying the beauty being created in front of us, made me reflect on the facsimiles of beauty all around us. We don’t encounter real art, but a curated Instagram post. We don’t experience storytelling, but a TikTok or YouTube short.

Much of our day to day existence takes things that are transcendent and expansive, and reduces them to miniscule versions presented on a 5” piece of glass.

A Quote

“We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

― C.S. Lewis

A book I’m reading

I’ll give you two

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Maybe you’ve seen the movie (which is excellent BTW), but if you haven’t yet - read the book first. It’s absolutely wonderful.

and

The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. The behind the scenes story of how these three (and Martin Scorsese) made the modern cinematic world.

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Without further ado - this week, I want to introduce you to the Service Profit Chain. This idea is deceptively simple, but one of its creators took it seriously enough that he left being a professor at HBS to become CEO of Harrah’s in order to help bring the ideas to life.

We’ve talked for the last couple of weeks about why a service orientation is good for you personally. But it’s more than that, it’s actually good business.

The key insight of this article (and a book of the same name) is that great service originates in how businesses serve their employees. James Heckert and others introduced in the 1990s a model known as the Service Profit Chain.

What their research indicated was that the best way to provide excellent service to your customers (and thereby drive repeat purchase, brand loyalty, brand recommendations, etc.) was the internal service you provided to your employees. If you take care of your employees, they will be more engaged and better positioned to take better care of your customers.

The concept is deceptively simple (and maybe even sounds self-obvious). But it has critical implications. Considered thoughtfully, it should push you, whatever your role, to consider how you are taking care of your internal people as well as your external ones. This is true whether you are a supervisor, executive, or board member.

If you want to learn more - these two pieces are great and go into a lot more detail.

• Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work (1994)

• Service-profit chain: How Quality Drives Profit

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Today I’d like to offer a few additional benefits from a service focus, and a few practical ways we can work on shifting our mindset.

4 benefits from focusing on service:

1. Positive feelings from helping someone

2. It’s more in your control - You can help someone every day - vs. extrinsic rewards like compensation which may only be paid biweekly or change annually

3. Easier to get feedback - You can ask directly or observe your performance, allowing you the satisfaction of improving your performance in something

4. Pathways to growth - solving one problem may lead you to solve other problems for your client.

If those benefits sound appealing - how do you work to make the mental shift required? Especially if your work is busy..

4 ways to shift your mindset:

1. Do you clearly know what problem your clients approach you to solve? Is this the problem you think you solve? Do you find this problem compelling enough to care about it?

2. Do you know when you have solved the problem? Is there a sense of the service being finished/accomplished/complete? If not, can you structure some sort of a completion ritual into your workflow?

3. If you are super busy, can you slow your mind enough to recognize the human that you are helping? Can you build in a moment, even if brief, to see others in their need?

4. Can you get good enough at accomplishing your specific tasks so you can think about the overall experience? Once you can become unconsciously competent at something, you will often have the cognitive capacity to consider how to improve it.

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“Money comes naturally as the result of service. And it is absolutely necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service.”

Henry Ford

How do you handle your bad days at work?

As a younger man, I’d get frustrated or angry, but a workout and a couple of hours was more than enough to clear the fog.

The older I get, I have a lot less certainty about the world and my life. And if you knew me in my 20s, that’s not a bad thing.

Even a great job has its tough days. But sitting in mid-life, with both the benefit of perspective and a sense of the brevity of life. My anger turns a lot more quickly to existential questions. Questions like am I in the right spot? Do I have what it takes to be successful? And if I’m in the middle of an intractable problem, why do I keep trying to solve this?

These sorts of questions can be helpful, but not in the way that I thought originally. The point is not to answer them, time has a way of proving out the answers.

Instead, what I have found is that underlying those questions are often deep seated beliefs about what I expect my work to be like and what I expect my job to provide to me. What I’ve learned in sitting with and analyzing those beliefs is that most of the time, I’m approaching work with the wrong goal in mind.

What I really need then is not the answer to some deep existential question, it’s a reframe of the whole thing.

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So why do we keep showing up to work?

The need to make money makes this question irrelevant for most. Why does it matter why I show up, if I have to be there?

This is a lazy answer. Necessity might make it true, but it doesn’t have to be the final answer.

I have found it to be helpful to invert the question - and consider, how do people who don’t have to work for money feel about work?

Spend time on the high net worth Reddit channels (/rich, /fatfire /fattravel) and you’d be surprised what and how much people are willing to share. Reading these posts is a favorite distraction of mine.

One of the most common types of post is someone describing how they achieved their wildest financial dreams, and how they still feel lost in the world. There is probably one of these a week.

It seems that outcomes do not really matter to work satisfaction. Those who have to work can feel lost in what they are doing. Those who don’t have to work, feel the same way.

The root cause of the problem is not the absence or presence of money. Instead, it’s a flawed understanding of the purpose of work. For most, our labor has been about us - about our life and financial goals. It is about the effort expended in exchanged for the output received.

But there is an alternate motivation, a different fuel source, that I have found to be a lot more impactful.

Most of us are not actively choosing our vocations by considering whom and how we wish to serve our fellow man. But maybe we should.

Here’s how it’s looked in my own career.

While I hated my first job, I really liked my second. For ~6 years, I wrote and published roughly 2 articles a week of investment research. It was fascinating work to follow companies and markets that closely.

While the work was interesting, I was one of many analysts writing research on these companies. Trying to convince an institutional investor that we were the best was tough simply because the average potential client received hundreds of emails a day of similar product on similar companies.

The intellectual part of the work was compelling, but it was really tough to get to the place where someone would utilize the work we had done.

Over time, I moved into the advisory side of finance. Similar content, but I remember my first week on the job, we met with a family, who expressed a real need, that we were able to ultimately solve. It was exceptionally gratifying and I enjoyed helping someone with a real problem.

The ability to meet a need and solve a problem, doesn’t require you to have made your fortune. We can reframe our work from the perspective of service today.

Why service?

To answer that, we need to ask an orthogonal question. How do you become a person? An actual adult. A person of substance and depth. Someone who is left childhood behind and firmly moved into life.

Martin Shaw in his Liturgies of the Wild answers that question by looking at the great myths and finds that lives well lived follow a similar pattern. This pattern, like that of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a thousand faces, involved a departure from the status quo, a wrestling / facing of struggles, and a return.

Shaw characterizes those who return well, returns with both a limp and a blessing. A limp because of the cost of the lessons they have learned and a blessing they have ready to give to others. Shaw shows that the arc of life is to move towards the service of others.

The Pre-IPO Goldman Sachs was a great example of this. The partners of the firm were well compensated and certainly did not need to do anything else. But their had been a long history established of public service and many of those found places where they could take their smarts and relationships to Washington.

Or even consider retirees. The WSJ just had an interesting piece on retirement. “What these retirees were describing wasn’t just disappointment in a lack of opportunities. It was an erosion in something far more fundamental—their sense of mattering, the deep human need to feel valued and to have a chance to add value to the world. “

The author, Jennifer Breheny Wallace, went on to note that in her study of retirees, “the people who regained that sense of being needed tended to follow a simple, repeatable pattern: They identified a genuine need and met it with 3Ts—time, talent or treasure.” or said more simply, they were of service to others.

A clear interpretation here is that while their work was providing financial resources necessary to live (and prepare for their eventual retirement), it was at the same time providing tremendous psycho-social benefits. When the work went away, so did those benefits. As Wallace highlights, there are way to be useful to others, even if full-time, 40 hour a week work is not an option.

There seems to be something innate that points to wanting to help others as deeply orientating to our psyche.

How are we then of service to others?

To be a service, we have to address a real, actual need. Often we have ideas of needs people have. The question is - do those people actual want that problem solved right now, by you. There can easily be a mismatch between what we perceive and what people want.

Often, the needs we want to address are often things we really want to do. Using our imaginations, we easily envision that people might actually want us to help them in that way. And so because we can envision this, we assume the need is there.

For example, you go to the beach on vacation and one sunny afternoon on the board walk, you decide that a fresh squeezed, frozen lemonade would be the perfect refreshment. You look around at the local stores and no one is offering what you have in mind.

Should you start a frozen lemonade stand there?

You had a demand for the product. It doesn’t appear there is any competition. People love going to the beach and they love a frozen treat. Homerun - a can’t miss opportunity.

The problem? This entire analysis has occurred in your head, based off your personal experience, intuition and imagination. You may be 100% correct. But there is more data to gather to determine whether the idea is real and the need is actual.

There is a dialogue that must occur between us and the real world to understand where people are and what they are looking for. We cannot be of actual value to others if we are not in dialogue with them about their needs.

Service should solve the problem

When we work to address a need, our work should come as close as possible to actually addressing it. Like a motivational infomercial which promises “10 easy ways,” without ever revealing the answer, we must be careful to ensure that the service performed actually solves the problem.

It may take a few attempts to determine whether you have done so. For emerging types of problems, knowing you have arrived at the finish line may be an act of co-creation between you and the client.

There is tremendous satisfaction that comes from a job well done. Moreover there is a degree of madness that comes from having a project close, but not all the way complete.

Help your customer out and finish the job properly.

Service should feel like it did the job

Why do car dealerships wash your car? Sure it is is nice. But if you went in for maintenance or had a fan belt replaced, it all happens under the hood. Sure the problem is fixed, but does it feel like anything was actually done.

But a car wash returns your car with some degree of transformation - an outward sign of something that may have been hidden.

Don’t neglect the psychological feeling of the client when the act of service is complete. You may need to build in a moment or a ritual of some sort to help indicate the completion of / resolution of the task. To draw attention to the fact that the job was done and done well.

Service has boundaries

A common challenge with service is that if you have found a real need, people may need your service all the time. And because you are legitimately helping, saying no, putting boundaries on your service, can feel a lot like disappointing or abandoning someone.

But , service is always co-created between two people.

As a result, your limits are a key input to whether the service is successful. If you are too tired, run down, or no longer able to be fully present in the act, the service delivered will be greatly diminished.

You must know where the line is for where you are able to serve, and where you will stretch too far and be unable to continue.

Conclusion

Life knew better, and she was starting to guide me away from myself through service to others

Michael A Singer

Work does not have to be soley about the paycheck. If we will take a step back and connect to the service we are providing for another, we have a tremendous opportunity to see a higher purpose for our work.

This higher purpose can inspire us. It can provide fuel for creativity to find new ways to improve our work.

But moreover, this purpose can survive the bad days in our jobs that leave us scratching our heads or the good days in which we experience success.

Several years ago I was at an event for the leadership team, members and most engaged volunteers of a Nashville non-profit. During his address, the keynote speaker asked the audience to share the mission/vision statement of the organization.

The statement listed four or five priorities that the organization wanted to address. After hearing it, the speaker took a minute to reflect on each of the priorities and offer some thoughts that would be worth considering.

But, the most interesting part was not his reflection on each of the items. Rather, it was a quip he made as he reached the fourth and fifth items. He simply stopped speaking and said ‘these are actually not that important to you and you probably will do very little towards reaching them.’

His point was that if they were of greater importance they would have been listed higher in the order. But it felt bad to leave them out entirely, so they were relegated to the end of the list.

Whether in an organization or our own lives, there are a limitless of things we can possibly be doing. Far too often, there are too many key priorities, too many core values, and too many initiatives. When that happens, the extras get dropped off or the overwhelm factor (think Cheesecake Factory menu here) is so large that effort gets diluted across the massive list - meaning none actually get done.

This mirrors our basic biology. The human brain can only focus on a handful of things at a time. In his 2010 paper, “The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?” Nelson Cowan notes that our working memory can only keep three to five items in mind.

From personal experience, five feels like too many. Three, with a maybe four, is a reasonable number.

The most critical thing is the curation of the three things that matter the most at the current moment. There is an old saying that if you have four hours to cut down a tree, you are best served by spending the first three sharpening your axe. Narrowing the list of priorities is the analogous form of axe sharpening.

Doing so may feel overly simplistic or reductionist. Yet, I’ve seen it first hand. The first 10 years of my career, I spent analyzing companies as an investor. No matter the business or industry, all businesses really only have 1-2 key things that really matter.

The same is true with our priorities. This is the 80/20 rule applied in yet another context.

This does not mean that other things may not be important for tomorrow. It is the sequencing of when they are addressed that matters. An apple picked early is bitter, but one picked at the right time tastes sweet.

But for today, pick what is most critical now. And the rest can wait.

For this month’s field notes, I thought I’d share a list of what I read in Q1, and offer a few thoughts on each.

Here we go...

Non-fiction

• The Molecule of More – Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long - This is a fascinating deep dive on how dopamine works inside the brain

• The Art of Spending Money – Morgan Housel - This was really enjoyable. Housel offers some a lot of reflections backed by research about how we should think about money and its use in our lives.

• Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert - Not one that would have been usually on my list, but a strong recommendation by a trusted friend put this on my radar. This is a poignant reflection on the role and power of creativity in our lives. I really enjoyed it.

• Liturgies of the Wild – Martin Shaw - I’ve mentioned this one in a prior newsletter - excellent

• Little Chapel on the River – Gwendolyn Bounds - A beautiful memoir on the power of consistent presence in a community

• Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman - A best seller, I didn’t love it but more because I felt like I had encountered a lot of the ideas in other sources before.

• Runnin’ Down a Dream – Bill Gurley - I skimmed through this quickly - Would be a great resource for a college student / new grad. Honest thoughts and wisdom about how to find a life’s work.

• The Art of Learning – Josh Waitzkin - This was a re-read for me. Josh is an exceptionally deep thinker, so I find it worthwhile to wade in to his idea periodically because you need to encounter them several times to fully appreciate the wisdom therein.

Fiction

• Stone Yard Devotional – Charlotte Wood - Still scratching my head over this one. I enjoyed it, haven’t wrestled what I think about it down yet

• Savage Son – Jack Carr - Another in the Terminal List series (source for the TV show) - intense

• The Dream Hotel – Laila Lalami- Good concept but lacked the big plot twist to make it exceptionally gripping

• 4 of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series - always entertaining

A quote

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

A book I’m reading

The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema

“The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries―Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg―revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it.”

But that’s part of the tension of any human organization. The board has its ideal state—how it should function. Then there is the actual state. Both can be true at the same time.

To explain further, I’d like to walk through a simple 2x2 matrix I use to consider boards.

The matrix compares the board’s purpose with its power structure. The dimensions are the stated (aka ideal) and the actual. In my experience, boards have stated dimensions for each, and at the same time, there is the actual reality.

The key to being effective as a board member is to understand the difference between stated and actual for each dimension, and then position yourself to be effective when a circumstance calls for it.

A board may have:

Stated strategic purpose – the headline purpose of what the board is supposed to be addressing

Actual strategic purpose – the actual, critical strategic question that the organization should be wrestling with. It may be obvious, but it often can be hard to discuss because it risks rubbing an ego the wrong way.

Similarly, boards have two power structures:

The stated power structure – maybe there are committees and a board chair

The actual power structure – where and how decisions are made. It may not even be in the boardroom.

Which of these boxes you are operating in will tell you a lot about how to behave most effectively.

If you are operating in a place where the stated purpose of the board is on display, within the context of its stated power structure, these are places with high symbolic value. This is the pomp and circumstance, but maybe of questionable utility or pragmatism. Little of long-term strategic importance may be decided.

If you are in the zone where the board is considering its actual purpose within the stated power structure, these often are board meetings with a lot of cordiality, but board members may be exceptionally hesitant to share their actual opinions. Group cohesion is very important and often is self-reinforcing.

If you are considering the stated strategic purpose of the board but within the context of the actual power structure, the risk here is egotism and peacocking on one hand, or whining on the other. While the decision-makers are here, they aren’t focused on the right thing, for whatever reason.

If the actual power structure is focused on the actual board purpose, this is the zone of leverage. A board operating in this way can get a ton done.

So, to maximize your effectiveness on a board, you should understand these dimensions. Moreover, you need to be aware of which box you are sitting in during a given meeting or interaction. The box you are in will dictate your actions and shape your behavior.

Moving from quiet dissatisfaction to purposeful alignment

Join nearly 2,000 readers moving from ambition to excellence through the pursuit of service, craft, and time stewardship.

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I’m David Wells, a strategic thinker and author based in Nashville, TN. Over two decades, I have worked as an investor, entrepreneur, and board member blending philosophical depth with practical judgment.

I’m the author of two books, When Anything Is Possible and The Family Enterprise Playbook. I started Aspirations of Excellence, a weekly newsletter about how we find alignment in life.

Professionally, I serve as President of Greycourt & Co., advising some of the world’s wealthiest families on investment management, governance, and preparing rising generations. Previously, I co-founded a hedge fund, launched a strategy consultancy for single-family offices, and spent years in investment research.

A Wake Forest graduate with a business degree and a philosophy minor, I write about navigating midlife through the lenses of service, craft, and the wise stewardship of time. I’m an avid reader and lover of the arts, and live in Nashville with my wife, three children, and one very patient goldendoodle.

The best of Aspirations of Excellence

Excellence

• How to build a meaningful life Who we are becoming matters. It offers hope to those sad about who they are. It offers direction and purpose

• Why it’s so hard to be intentional

Craft

• Embracing mundanity through focus and practice “The little moments of life are profoundly important precisely because they are the little moments that we live in and that form us.” Paul David Tripp

• The Quiet War Between Now and Not-Yet When we narrow our focus on craft, on the steady pursuit of improvement each day, we remove the tyranny of the past or speculation about the future.

• The business of re-work. Whatever your creative act may be - whether in the arts or the office - get your repetitions up. Do more of it.

Service

• It may take 20 years to start your vocation. Not that anyone has asked (yet), here’s the college graduation speech I’d give today

Time

• You don’t know anything until you’ve had 100 meetings The first time I looked for a job I accidentally learned one of the most important lessons of my entire career.

• The pain of delay A problem avoided today accrues interest like a payday loan. Avoidance is never free.

I’m focusing in March on boards of directors and the high likelihood that you may choose to serve on one at some point.

Last week, we looked at the 'when’ of board service. Today, today, we are going to look at the ‘where.’ Specifically, how you can determine whether a board may be a good fit for you.

Here are a few questions that I have found to be helpful in your evaluation.

1. Is the company/organization/cause something you are actually interested in and do you have the time for it?

   1. For a for-profit, the rule of thumb is 100 hours / year time commitment per board

   2. You will be introduced to a community of others who do care about this organization / issue. You should actually be interested in it

   3. How does the board, the term length, committee meetings fit within your overall bandwidth?

2. Is your spouse ‘on board’ with adding something else to your agenda? If they were not super enthusiastic at the outset, they will be downright hostile if something arises that takes even more of your time.

3. How is board organized? Committees? Where does work actually get done? For some boards, the real work happens in the executive committee. What actually are you signing up for and are you ok with that?

4. What gap in the board matrix are you filling? Do you want to fill that gap? Maybe you are a lawyer and then board needs a lawyer, so you will be expected to serve in that way. But maybe you are a lawyer and want to work on fundraising - get clear on where you want to fit and where you are expected to perform.

5. Who is the CEO? How are they doing? Supporting a high performer is different from triaging the weaknesses of someone struggling.

6. Who is the board chair and how effective are they? How do they run meetings? Are they supporting an effective board culture or is dissent not something that occurs?

7. Do you understand where the organization is in its lifecycle? A startup will ask different things from a board vs. a mature organization that needs re-invigoration.

8. What is the culture of the organization like? How do they make decisions? How much/little bureaucracy? what is their approach to risk taking and management.

9. What is the financial condition of the organization? I’d recommend seeing 3 years worth of audits, the current year’s budget, and actual to date financial reports at a bare minimum. You need to know what you are stepping into.

10. What are the big issues the board is wrestling with? Also, Are there any quasi-political issues/stances - are you ok with being affiliated with? In this day and age, everything seems to have political or PR risk.

Years ago, an emergency all hands meeting was called by my then employer. The firm’s star employee, a gentleman with a tremendous reputation, not to mention an uncanny ability to generate revenues, had decided to leave the firm.

The CEO of the business announced the departure to the quiet room. A few gasps and gulps as the room digested the news. The CEO asked for questions, so I cautiously raised my hand and asked “what did the company’s board think of the departure?”

The CEO paused and then said that he hadn’t informed the board yet, nor did he know their point of view…

Maybe you want to serve on a board?

There are a lot of motivations for doing so - a chance to support a favorite cause (for non-profits), a chance to share your expertise, a chance to grow, potential compensation, prestige, etc.

It all sounds good and noble. But sometimes board’s have hard business - having to make decisions to terminate underperforming leaders, navigate crises, and more. Sometimes boards are functionally impotent, as in the case above.

For the month of March, we are going to look at boards and governance. Whether you are actively looking for a board role or like a stray cat, one finds you, odds are high that at some point, board service will be on offer.

I have been serving in governance roles for 20+ years - 9 non-profits, multiple industry organizations, and 4 corporate boards. I’d like to share a few things i’ve learned over that time.

You may have your ‘why’ for serving on a board. Today, I want to consider when. When are you ready to serve? When do you have the right mix of skills, wisdom, and enthusiasm to be impactful as a board member.

It’s a matter of perspective

First, the best time to join a board concerns your perspective as a leader. Careers follow a common ladder of perspective. Early on, your job is to manage yourself to achieve functional excellence. You were hired to do a thing, your job is to get quite good at it.

After that, you may be promoted to the Manager/Director level - depending on the corporate hierarchy. Managers are able to capably oversee doers of a function. The Managers perspective gets a bit broader, but is still highly focused on a single functional area.

Manager/directors typically then become vice-presidents. VPs are executives who know how to run something. They can consider multiple competing priorities and weigh their implications across functional groups. They may also have some degree of strategic input into the shape of what they are doing - aka bringing in an outside perspective regarding the competitive environment.

As VPs grow into “Chiefs” - CFO, COO, and CEOs - their perspective gets more and more broad. It begins to include regulatory concerns, priorities of shareholders regarding returns, etc.

This progression matters because at the Board level, your the perspective shifts even further. Board members sit at the nexus of the organization, the competitive environment, the regulatory climate.

But unlike VP and “chiefs”, board members do not have operating responsibility. I have seen time and again that some board members have a very hard time turning off the ‘operator’ skill set. It’s an honest mistake - the remainder of their careers they have been in the business of getting things done.

But the work of a Board member is different - it certainly involves goal setting and accountability - but is does not include the ‘how’ of getting things done - even if the how is compelling.

Many board members get caught discussing the how and can’t escape the trap. That’s not their job - it’s the job of management to determine the how.

A good board member is in the ‘so what’ business. What are the implications of the choices being made and how does that align with the longer-term goals of the business?

You might be ready to serve on a board when you are ready and capable of making this shift in perspective.

Building a strong network

The next critical determinate of ‘when” is the strength of your professional network. Board members bring more than just expertise - they bring relationships. These relationships might be with vendors, suppliers, customers, any of the key constituencies of the organization.

You may be ready for board service when you have a network that is of some actual value. A portion of your day should be spent getting to know others.

The more you can get to know others and be helpful to them, the more valuable you will be in the marketplace. Sometimes a business or organization needs a fast way to make a new contact - board members can be invaluable in that process.

Managing your calendar

The final ‘when’ is ‘when in your calendar’ will this fit. There is a rule of thumb to budget ~100 hours of time for each board. In my experience, the time commitment can be quite variable.

Regardless of the absolute amount, you should have enough space in your calendar for the meetings to fit. If you cannot attend, especially the in-person ones, you are missing out on a large portion of the relationship building that makes board work enjoyable.

Next week - we will consider where board service might be a fit….

Life’s greatest challenge may be endurance. Some times we must endure suffering. Some times, instead of suffering, it is delay. Endurance then looks a lot like patience.

So often we don’t recognize that a moment calls for endurance.

We know the proverb about the frog in the kettle. Dropped into a kettle of hot water, the frog wants to jump out. Put into a lukewarm kettle that is gradually warmed, the frog will stay put.

So often, when things happen - we want to just jump out. Something is hard, it isn’t going our way. We want to get away from it as quickly as possible.

For those of us with high self-agency, we may just attempt to bull doze our way through it and get to the other side.

But sometimes, that is not going to work. There are times where the path forward is the path through. And, we do not know how long it will be, what waits along the way, and what it will require of us.

If you aren’t scared by that, you should be.

These are places where we must be patient. We wait, but we don’t stop and waste away. It is not a place for idleness.

We persist. We encounter the ‘thorns and thistles’ of the ground. The failed harvest, the bad weather. The lost client. We see those as part of it.

We work to learn the lessons being offered.

We also don’t fall for the head fake. Some times there is nothing to learn. Luck can just be bad.

In all - we must guard our self talk - knowing how powerful negative language is.

A quote

“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future.”

-Ian Wilson quote, former GE executive.

A book I’m reading

Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw

“There’s an old Irish belief that if you aren’t wrapped in a cloak of story you will be unprepared for what the world will hurl at you. You remain adolescent at just the moment a culture worth its salt requires you to become a real, grown, human being.”

The article’s thesis was this - “Ambition must be powered by the right motivation, for it to be durable and sustainable over time.”

Here are the main points from the essay and a few questions that can help you consider the implications for your own life.

Point 1: You need to understand why you want to achieve your goal(s)

• What are you actually pursuing right now? Is it the thing you are working on or something deeper?

• How do you respond when things work in your favor?

• If you never achieve this, what will that mean in your life?

Point 2: Outcomes won’t be determined by ability

• Where are you telling yourself that you aren’t good enough yet?

• How are you exploring the limits of your capability?

• Where are you pushing yourself? Do you need someone to help push you?

Point 3: Learning to be patient and impatient

• Where can you simply go faster?

• How do you chose each day’s/week’s priorities? Are these priorities aligned with the most important thing?

• Where are you not seeing results? How will you continue to be disciplined where results have not materialized yet?

Point 4: The destination is uncertain and progress will be slow

• For destinations with a clear path, have you set the right goals to get there?

• For uncertain destinations, how are you feeding your curiosity? What are you reading? Who are you meeting?

• Where are you finding ways to experiment within the mundane of the day to day grind?

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Recently, I was having lunch with someone earlier in his career. He was trying to decide whether it was worth staying at his current job or if it was time to make a change.

Knowing when to quit is really hard.

We grow up in a culture that rightfully teaches us to honor our commitments. “We don’t quit sports teams in the middle of the season” or something similar.

At the same time, overstaying your welcome is fraught with its own challenges and long-term implications.

So how should you think about when to stay and when to go?

Here are a few thoughts of when it might make sense to quit -

• When something illegal and /or unethical is required of you. Obvious - If you have to violate your deepest principles, probably a good reason to bail
  

• Your boss is a jerk. My summer internship after my junior year of college was at a large financial services firm in FL. The guy who ran our department would call me into his office and yell at me for an hour - as a summer intern. He would regularly bring in members of his team to mock and shame their performance. Just an all around bad person - life’s too short.
  
  But please note - there is a difference between getting tough feedback and working for a jerk. Good bosses will push you and it may not feel great in the moment.
  

• When you are no longer learning and you are limited out. When you are earlier in your career, optimizing for learning is worthwhile. But you’ve got to give yourself at least 2 years in a job (generally), and longer as you get more senior.
  
  The key here is that you may be at a developmental plateau and with some patience, a next layer of learning may open up.
  

• When your boss does not see what you are capable of. Just as a prophet may be despised in his home town, sometimes the fact that you started at a junior level will limit your ability to grow at a firm.
  

• Knowing what you know now, you wouldn’t take the job / go down this path. Sometimes you go down a path, but what you learn tells you it’s the wrong one.

Here are a few indicators you may be on the right path - even with the normal ups and downs of a job?

• Do you like/respect the people you work with? The people you spend time with matter deeply.
  

• Do you get to spend the majority of your time in alignment with what you enjoy doing/are good at? Hopefully you can get as high as 75-80% within your zone of competence/enjoyment.
  

• Is your compensation within a reasonable range of what is a market rate for the role? If you aren’t drastically underpaid, don’t be too quick to make a change.
  

• Can what you feel is missing in your job be addressed in other ways? No job is going to bat 1,000 in leveraging everything you like doing, want to do, feel capable to do, etc. It can be exceptionally helpful to think of your career as a portfolio. Starting a side hustle. Volunteering. Finding a board to serve on.
  
  Assuming your core job is not taking 100 percent of your waking hours - you have time to engage in other things in your life. The blend of everything you are involved in can be a powerful contributor to feelings of career alignment.