My dad was not the greatest American I knew, but he might have been the most American: an immigrant who arrived with little and learned to love baseball and popular standards, who scratched out a few years at City College and served in the Army, then enjoyed a successful career and family.
I had worked in journalism—first in newspapers and then in magazines—for two decades, yet what I realized is I knew next to nothing about how books were created. I had a sneaking suspicion a part of it involved sitting in front of a computer typing, but that was pretty much it.
We were driving him to college, an event that loomed for most of the summer, if not longer. Everything was a milestone. High school graduation. Our last family vacation, then a last family dinner. On the 18th hole one evening in late August, I remarked this will be our last golf hole together, which drew a chuckle. I’m not going off to war, he noted. Just Maine.
Chris’ plane crashed into the tower when we were all in our 20s, so he never got the chance to have his own family, or a career, or to know the stress of those two worlds occasionally colliding. When I walk by the 9/11 Memorial many mornings, I strangely think how fortunate I am to be consumed by the dumb minutia of middle age. So many people that day were stripped of even that.
What I’ve found, of course, is that banking your existence on perpetual youth is a flawed long-term strategy, like deciding to build in more closet space by eliminating all of your bathrooms. At some point nature takes over. And what I’ve also found is after all those years defining myself by being young, I am increasingly wrapped up in the reality of getting old.
I lean too heavily on hockey metaphors because I find hockey illustrates life in ways that everyday life rarely can. The pushing and pulling of trying too hard and not trying hard enough. Of not wrapping one’s self worth entirely in results. Of missed shots still being better than those not taken at all.
The problem with book sales is it provided a metric to something I'd actually prefer not to measure. You know how when your kids are young, they hold their hands apart wide and say, “I love you thiiiiiissss much”? It would be as if now you knew precisely how much. And if the answer was anything less than the maximum amount, well then it doesn't feel like quite enough.
In recent weeks, as Hillary Clinton has returned to the public sphere in promotion of her new book, I've given greater thought to her defeat, how she's digested it, and what larger lessons we might draw from her ordeal. It is rich terrain given was at stake, and how we feel the reverberations of that loss every day. One could argue there's never been a bigger loss than Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. You can’t blame her for at least squeezing a book deal out of it.
I have neither the time nor the disposable income to be smashing $200 rackets at will, and I am horrified by the thought of my sons following suit. (“I would kill Charlie if he did that,” Lisa said -- which is not true, because I would kill him first.) But there is an important distinction between losing gracefully and losing well, and while I think we can all agree I fell woefully short of the former, the latter is where I choose to spend most of my energy.
For years, Sergio Garcia fit the description of a fixed mindset almost perfectly. Garcia was supremely talented, and when he won often as a young golfer, it portended well for his future. He was too good not to win. But when Garcia lost, as one inevitably does in professional golf, frustration mounted. Garcia blamed outside circumstances. He grew increasingly sullen. As famously captured in a rant after the 2012 Masters, he started to wonder if he really was as good as originally thought. “I'm not good enough ... I don't have the thing I need to have,” Garcia told Spanish reporters. “In 13 years I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to play for second or third place.”
What I’ve found about participation trophies is while people have strong opinions about them, those opinions are often misguided. For starters, there seems to be this belief that this is only a recent phenomenon. But I’m 42, and I, too, had a bedroom of trophies growing up, and most were for the noble distinction of showing up on the last day.
The other day I spoke at a conference for investors and executives at United Nations Plaza, which I agree makes no sense. The only reason is they wanted a few speakers to venture outside of business talk and provide some thought-provoking worldly insights. Then when those people were done, they asked me to speak. I did 20 minutes or so aboutWin At Losing, the benefits of failure, and the power of a growth mindset. It went pretty well. Only one guy got up and walked out (he received a phone call). Here's my speech:
There's not really a correct answer when your wife asks if you were aware that your son had pissed himself in sub-freezing temperatures and that the inside of his underwear is now crusted with ice. To say no is to reveal yourself as alarmingly incompetent. To say yes is probably worse, because at that point your explanation is something about how you were having too much fun playing hockey and didn't really want to deal. They are both the type of answers that, in another context, might involve the intervention of a state agency.
