When Your Best Decisions Are The Ones Others Make For You
Programming Note: While I write literally all day at work - emails, slack messages, whiteboards and more, I haven’t actually sat down and truly written anything in many years. Encouraged by my wife, Mary, to start sharing some of the stories of my life, especially with our daughter, Emma, I’m going to take on the challenge of writing down as much as I can remember about the moments which have been important to me along the way.
Emma, I hope one day you’ll read and enjoy these as much as I’ve enjoyed remembering them.
When Conan O’Brien left The Tonight Show, he got to say a few words, entirely free of editorial oversight. After many weeks of very public discord between Conan and NBC, related to what would become Jay Leno’s return to the show, and Conan’s equally public grievances towards the executive decisions at NBC, he was finally allowed to say whatever he wanted, at the end of what would be his last appearance on the show. What happened next was a masterclass in humility, gratitude, and sincerity in the face of what was for Conan at the time, a crushing professional disappointment. He spoke about spending most of his adult working life at NBC, and how grateful he was for everything he’d been able to do. Of how it’d been his life’s dream to host The Tonight Show, and how incredible it was that he’d actually gotten to do it for seven months. And most importantly, he spoke about the importance of not being cynical. How it never leads anywhere. And how no-one ever gets what they thought they were going to get in life. But if you work hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.
I’ve thought a lot about Conan’s parting words since they happened back in 2010. I echo many of them to new Product Managers who join my team, ironically also at NBC, where along the way I’ve been as fortunate as Conan to work on some incredible things with some amazing people. I also tell them to simply breathe and arrive. And that if we build relationships, solve problems, and have fun, the business will take care of itself.
But there’s also that feeling Conan had of getting something, of achieving a dream, and having it taken away. The disappointment of someone else making a decision he felt was one he should have made himself. And the frustration of the learned helplessness which results from the loss of control over one’s immediate future.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was born of a similar climate. I was getting increasingly frustrated at not being able to build the things I wanted to build on the front end of our company’s website, and was just at a point of existential exhaustion and despair. That moment of ‘what am I even doing here if I can’t do anything’ which can surface in one’s career. My boss was brief, but I’ve always remembered what she said since. She said “if you can’t get what you want done there, go and be awesome over here instead”. In that moment, all the frustration seemed to just evaporate, freeing me of my current emotional doubts, and opening up a space of opportunity in real-time. That moment where you just need someone else to say that it’s OK to stop trying to get something to work which just won’t. Either for interpersonal, institutional or incapable reasons. That there’s a highly counterintuitive peace in this disappointment, and the origin of it for me was realizing that this wasn’t my fault, but it was my problem. That the feeling of loss was actually a feeling of empowerment, a limbic vacuum of opportunity waiting for me to fill.
Like Conan, sometimes the best decisions we make are the ones others choose for us. They can feel painful, and they cause our world to spin off its axis. But if we are able to find the peace and opportunity within that frustration and disappointment, they often result in wide open spaces in which to thrive on the other side. Many times over the course of my career, I’ve been in situations where things haven’t gone either how I’d expected them to go, or how I’d have preferred them to go. And very often these things happen around an individual, who fast becomes the villain of the story, or at least the villain of useless rumination. But rather than give them the power of such a role, it’s important to remember that you’re always the hero of your own story, and it’s surprisingly easy to turn the page and end a chapter. We can walk away, we can choose to distance ourselves, or we can simply elect to go and be awesome somewhere else. Within the same company, as I did, which was one of the best decisions I got to make, even though it wasn’t one I made myself. I had the decision made for me by the circumstance of frustration. Of course, it was in that moment that I also got to see what truly empathetic leadership looked like too, a lesson I’ll never forget as I try to model the same for my team. For Conan his elsewhere was TBS, which I always thought was a bit beneath him, and I, like many others, soon lost interest in his new show. But it didn’t matter because he was happy.
Getting past the emotional persecution of something, and feeling as if it is being done to you without any recourse is hard. Much of my timeline on LinkedIn these days is filled with layoffs, offer withdrawals and those actively 'open to work’. But for as many of these as there are, there are also hundreds of people finding new jobs, getting promoted, or doing new things. These aren’t people for whom things are happening to them, these are people who are doing things for themselves. They are simply being awesome somewhere else.
My faith has been increasingly important to me over the past few years, and I’m a firm believer in the hand of the universe at work in our lives. That feeling that however painful a door closing may be, that there’s an unseen force guiding you to the right thing. That whatever you choose to believe in, there’s a feeling that everything happens for a reason, even if it proves to be a testing experience. And that ultimately our decisions are our own, even if they are how to react to something. And how not doing something is just as much of an active choice.
I’m a work in progress with all of this, and I’d imagine most of us are too. I have my days where I hit this, and my days where I definitely don’t. It’s hard, but it’s the right kind of work. Finding the joy in not getting something, the peace inside of frustration, or the opportunity in a perceived lack of control can be incredibly freeing. Being able to spot these are really, really hard in the moment, but they’re always there, more present with practice, but often behind a wall of useless anxiety. Conan’s advocacy for a lack of cynicism is one way. Kindness, especially self-kindness is another. And it’s always exciting to write a new chapter, even if the one you thought you were writing doesn’t end up to be as long as you thought or hoped it might be. Conan’s disappointment turned into a profound catalyst for an unprecedented creativity, innovation, fearless pursuit of more and more ambitious goals, and most of all, happiness. I wish the same for you.
So the last word should really be Conan’s. If you work hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.
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