An Investment in Leadership and Impact — Part IV: Key Lessons (Learning Log #4)
In the final official hours and minutes of my leadership Fellowship with the Bush Foundation, I offer a fourth essay chronicling my experience as a Fellow. This particular essay is the final learning log submitted to the Bush Foundation.
The prompt for this final quarterly learning log: Reflect on your Fellowship journey in its entirety. What do you wish you would have known when you started? What stands out/surprised you the most?
The economist Daniel Kahneman wrote that when we think about our own well-being we cannot simply think about it in the moment. Something as complex as a concept of well-being requires a reflection of how we feel as we live as well as in the retrospective. Further, Kahneman suggests that another key factor is what a person wants at any given time. This multifaceted framework that Kahneman outlined in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is how I’d like to reflect on my Fellowship journey over the last two years.
It is fair to say that what I wanted at the very beginning was something incredibly black and white. My thinking was concrete. Attend an executive education program and meet as many people as possible in the data science world. If I did just that, first of all, the experiences in their entirety and at a very high level would be personally and professionally rich. Second, anything in the abstract that came from that concrete path would be a bonus.
My feeling was that in overthinking the residual benefit and trying to force that benefit I’d create false expectations upon which disappointment and regret would reign.
Fortunately, my general disposition and life experiences keep me from building too great of expectations. Most of us have to overcome some form of adversity in our life. If that adversity is properly contextualized, it can be a great source of grounding. Perception of our circumstances or lack thereof can dictate whether an experience is a good one or a negative one. This isn’t the same as comparing our circumstances to another; comparison never gets us very far.
And, between the time of the public announcement of the 2015 Fellows and the start of the Fellowship, I received valuable counsel and wisdom from three previous Fellows in Sioux Falls. These conversations set a realistic tone for my Fellowship experience. What I learned from each of them was to expect your plans to change. I also learned that I should take as much time as possible to pause and let the experiences sink in. Big thank you to Melissa Goodwin, Nan Baker, and Taneeza Islam for sharing their learnings with me.
There are a couple things I wish I would have known at the very beginning. You will not be as connected to your fellow Fellows as you think. There were times when I wondered if I was missing something. I wondered if I was on an island unto myself. Reading the monthly reports was helpful; so was the half-way retreat. But even after two years, there are individuals whom I’ve never interacted.
What is really special about the Fellowship is it can take you anywhere in the world. From time-to-time circumstances of the day job may have restricted the time allotted to a conference, meeting, or speech. I learned this as I went along, but had I known at the beginning, I might have been more intentional about how I used my time when traveling. What I mean by this is sometimes I felt rushed from one event to the next. Sometimes it would be weeks before I could sit down and process. If possible, I think it is very important to build in an extra day between the activity and travel for wellness, rest, additional connection, or reflection.
Back to Kahneman…
The role of time has been a refrain in this part of [“Thinking, Fast and Slow”]. It is logical to describe the life of experiencing self as a series of moments, each with a value. The value of an episode — I have called it a hedonimeter total — is simply the sum of the values of its moments. But this is not how the mind represents episodes. The remembering self, as I have described it, also tells stories and makes choices, and neither the stories nor the choices properly represent time. In storytelling mode, an episode is represented by a few critical moments, especially the beginning, the peak, and the end. Duration is neglected.
This final learning log is essentially a hedonimeter total — a sum of the value of each Fellowship episode. In this moment, there is a conflict between my experiencing self recalling the individual moments and my storytelling self aggregating some of those critical moments. What’s missing is the choice to recognize time in the equation, and not just the time allotted to the moment or to the length of our Fellowship, but a time spectrum that is our entire life.
As stated above, I learned this during the course of the Fellowship. Along the way I was introduced to the concept of behavioral economics — now all the Kahneman makes sense. I became obsessed. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” grew into a bible of sorts. This thinking about time and moments and how those two variables critically impact our personal perception of happiness consumed me. Slowly, I started to build in a day here and a day there. This led me to ask other current and past Fellows: “How did/will your Fellowship end?” The number one response I got: It just did/will — there was/is nothing special.
This did not sit well. I was not prepared to let this moment go by, ignore time, then let my storytelling self years down the road take ownership of all those experiences during the last two years.
Frankly, this is exactly what I’ve allowed my mind to do with the narrative I own and tell regarding my story of surviving addiction. The moments were whirling by so fast and the hedonimeter total accumulating at every turn, I failed at times to help my storytelling self put those moments into a context that was not void of time.
What surprised me the most about the Fellowship was how it would impact my ability to think and learn. I really was focused on the concrete objective: complete an education program; meet some data science nerds; move on to the next episode. My solution for this was to inject a buffer of time between the two years of the Fellowship and the rest of my life. That’s why my Fellowship experience ends with five weeks in northern Europe. At times during this trip I have succumbed to work back home — that was inevitable and impossible to ignore. But, the time shift and being in a series of different cultures is allowing me to process the individual episodes, the hedonimeter total (aggregated value), and time-void story my mind is attempting to craft.
One last thing that stands out about the Bush Fellowship is simply the reputation of the Bush Foundation that is bestowed upon you when named a Fellow. Speaking engagements have come my way and very important leaders and thinkers have responded to my emails and taken meetings thanks to my being a Bush Fellow. This would fall under the notion of a residual benefit and I am glad to not have forced this aspect of the Fellowship.
Finally, these last two years could not have been more meaningful without the tremendous support of my wife, Marie-Elaine. We are very independent and each have our careers, but she sacrificed in tremendous ways to allow me to explore each thread I chose to pull — including a month away from her in Europe. She knows that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity for growth and supported it fully. Thanks to the Bush Foundation’s keen awareness and impression of wellness in leadership, this wasn’t a solo experience. The silent meditation retreat that my wife and I attended will positively impact us for the rest of our lives.
I am forever in the debt and service of the Bush Foundation for this opportunity and experience.
Written May 9–11, 2017 at the Black Diamond Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, Denmark and the Metropole Hotel in Brussels, Belgium.
