Develop a Peaceful Core
A peaceful mind generates power.
—NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
One of my father’s favorite authors was a turn-of-the-century Massachusetts writer named David Grayson. Actually, that was his pen name. When he wasn’t escaping into the peace and quiet of his pseudonym, “Grayson” was a famous journalist named Ray Stannard Baker.
Back in the early 1900s, Stannard Baker was a very important man, a newspaper reporter for the extremely influential McClure’s magazine and one of a group of writers, known as the “muckrakers,” who took on crooked politicians and industry barons. At the end of World War I, he served as Woodrow Wilson’s press secretary at the peace negotiations at Versailles. His was a colorful, high-flying career, and it took its toll.
Baker eventually got burned out living in the political fast lane and reached the point where he nearly had a nervous breakdown. Instead, he had a breakthrough. He discovered one of the greatest leadership secrets there is: the value of developing a peaceful core.
After deciding it was time to quit the big-city rat race, Baker bought a farm in the bucolic Massachusetts college town of Amherst and started writing about the country and simple living. His David Grayson books, including Adventures in Contentment, Adventures in Solitude, and Under My Elm, sold more than two million copies. For those days, those were James Patterson numbers. Grayson’s home has been turned into a fraternity house and is on the walking tour of Amherst College. The elm tree he used to sit under to think, ponder, and write still stands there. They call it the Grayson Elm.
Grayson wrote about the importance of developing a peaceful core. Following that wisdom has been crucial to maintaining sanity throughout my life.
Human beings mess up. Regardless of your particular philosophy or beliefs, that is one basic fact of life you can’t really argue. There’s just way too much empirical evidence. We try, and we do some great things, but no matter who we are, inevitably we do stupid stuff. So does everyone else.
The world is always going to be a messed up place. You’re going to have calamities and chaos and crises and catastrophes. All kinds of things will go wrong. It’s just the way the world is. You can’t control that. But you can control whether or not there’s chaos on the inside.
If you let that outer chaos seep into your mind and heart, if you have a storm of struggle and confusion whipping around in your inner self, then hoping to be effective in the outer world is going to be a losing battle. To achieve anything of substance, you’ve got to reach a point where you carry a sense of peace at your center, regardless of whatever craziness is going on around you. Otherwise it will all drive you crazy.
In his classic, The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale titled one of his chapters, “A Peaceful Mind Generates Power.” I believe that’s one of the greatest leadership secrets anyone’s ever been able to pinpoint.
A sense of inner peace acts like the gyroscope in an aircraft that enables it to adjust its flight path and stay on course. The only way you can make it through all the chaos intact is by having a peaceful core, a place inside of you that is content in who you are with all your best intentions and all your imperfections. If you reach that point of peace, then you can weather the storms.
To achieve anything of substance, you’ve got to reach a point where you carry a sense of peace at your center.
Many people develop this peaceful core through their faith and religious practice. Some read the Bible or other inspirational readings every day. Some people swear by meditation, or practice martial arts. One way I do it is by spending time in the country.
Over my years in business, I’ve put in a lot of time on the golf course, relaxing with associates and sometimes talking over some critical issue or other between greens. But to be honest, golf is not my idea of recreation. I’d much rather spend the day digging in the dirt, planting trees, working on my garden. Even at the most hectic times in my career, I’d spend all weekend every chance I got messing around on my little farm. Right now, as these words hit the paper, I’ve got a big raised-bed garden with 43 tomato plants I’ll be putting in tomorrow. There is nothing I love as much as getting in my truck, going to the nursery, buying up a ton of plants, and filling the back bed with them, then coming back and spending the day digging and planting. It’s the one thing I can do where I’m not worried about anything else or even thinking about anything else.
Not long ago, I had the chance to talk with Winston Churchill’s great-grandson, Duncan Sandys (pronounced “sands”), who lives in Atlanta. Duncan told me that when he was going through all his great-grandfather’s papers, he couldn’t help noticing how much the man talked about painting. Churchill was an accomplished painter who produced more than 500 works. (One of his most famous, “The Tower of the Katoubia Mosque,” he painted as a gift to Franklin Roosevelt during World War II.) The remarkable thing is that Churchill never took a single formal lesson and never held a brush in his hand until the age of 40.
Duncan said his great-grandfather talked a good deal about how, when he was going through times of trial and struggle, the thing that most kept him at peace was his painting. Standing in front of a blank canvas and creating with oils was Churchill’s way of finding that peaceful core.
“If it weren’t for painting,” he wrote in his book Painting as a Pastime, “I could not live, I could not bear the strain of things.”
I know just how he felt. That’s how I feel about digging in the dirt.
As a leader, sometimes you deal with the challenges and issues that other people caused, problems that aren’t your fault and that you had nothing to do with creating. As a leader, that’s your job description: dealing with stuff you didn’t cause but needs fixing anyway. And sometimes you’re dealing with the fallout from stupid things you did yourself. Happens to all of us.
But that’s okay because a peaceful core generates the power to deal with all that.
Knowing and practicing this has been a crucial force in my life. It has allowed me to stay sane and calm, especially during times of stress. The greater the stress, the more I depended on returning to that peaceful core.
Little did I know, in the early months of 2006, that my life would depend on it.
When Loveanne and I woke up on the beautiful island of Oahu, on the morning of February 12, 2006, neither of us had the slightest idea that an event was about to occur that would affect the course of our lives.
We were there in Hawaii, hardly a place you’d think of as one of foreboding or danger, as part of a trip celebrating the incredible achievements of our sales force, soon to be joined by hundreds of Primerica reps who had won their place in the celebration.
The business was absolutely flying, and these incentive trips were a critical part of it. As I said, people will do more for recognition, for fun, or for a sense of being part of something big than they will purely for money. The previous year, we’d held a huge event in Orlando, where we rented out not one but two hotels-—the Ritz-Carlton and the JW Marriott. We took over the entire Universal Studios for one night for our exclusive use. (For that night, as I told the crowd, it wasn’t Universal Studios—it was Primerica Studios.) But this Hawaii trip was our biggest yet. All through the second half of 2005, people had worked extremely hard to grow their businesses and hit the targets that would qualify them to join us in Oahu, and a record-setting number of them had done it. About 1,500 couples were coming to spend a few days with us, so many people that we’d had to split it into two phases. The first phase had just ended, and the next group was coming in the following day, February 13, to start our second phase.
For now, we were enjoying a quiet day of rest and relaxation.
I had gone with a group of our executives to play golf at the Luana Hills course, a gorgeous location in the midst of a tropical paradise. On the first hole, I hit a great shot off the tee and then hit a good second shot up to the fringe of the green. I was walking from the cart, talking to one of the guys I was with and getting ready to chip my third shot.
Suddenly the earth started moving. I’d never felt anything like it. It was like the world had all at once decided to turn upside down. Vertigo on steroids.
I caught myself with my club to keep from falling. One of the guys with me said, “Hey John, you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel weird.”
After a few moments, I started feeling a little better. Whatever it was, it sort of stabilized itself. I hit my chip shot to within a couple of feet of the hole. As I was walking over to my ball to hit the putt, it happened all over again. Suddenly the earth was tipping and spinning on me.
I gave myself a “gimme” so I’d get a par on the hole, walked back over to the golf cart, and plopped myself down in the seat. Mike Adams, one of our veteran executives, took one look at me and said, “Man, you look awful.”
“I think I’m just having bad vertigo or something,” I said.
The Luana Hills course is up high in the mountains there. Maybe it was the altitude change from the sea level. I’d been dog tired after the first session of meetings and had gone right in to rest without eating anything. Just before coming out onto the course, I’d grabbed a quick hot dog at the club house. Maybe it was a bad hot dog.
I said, “Let’s just go to the next hole and see how I feel.”
Then, as we rode the cart down a steep incline toward the next hole, it hit again. Now I was having dry heaves. “Man,” I said to Mike. “I need to get back to the front of the course.”
Another one of our executive vice presidents, Duane Morrow, was following along with us in another golf cart. I managed to get out of Mike’s cart and into Duane’s. He gave me a ride back to the front of the course. By the time I got there, I was sweating profusely, my shirt soaked through. There was a doctor there just getting ready to tee off. From the look he gave me, I could tell he thought I was having a heart attack. He had me lie down, covered me with a light blanket, and called an ambulance.
I’d never had much in the way of medical issues. The last time I’d been in the hospital was when I was four years old and had my tonsils out. Sure, I needed to lose some weight, and I wasn’t exactly in shape to run a marathon. I had borderline high blood pressure, and my cholesterol wasn’t perfect. Growing up Southern, my diet wasn’t the best in the world. But all in all, I was doing okay. I really didn’t think I was having a heart attack.
They trundled me into the ambulance and whisked me off to a small hospital on the northern shore, more of a clinic, really. They ran some tests and couldn’t find a thing wrong with me.
By this time, I was feeling a lot better. Still kind of washed out, but at least I wasn’t dizzy. They said it was probably an attack of vertigo, and that I should go back to my hotel room and rest. Duane and I grabbed a cab and headed back to our hotel.
Loveanne was planning to return home to Georgia late the following day after the opening session of the trip’s second phase. I described to her what had happened on the golf course, and my brief visit to the clinic, and how they couldn’t find anything wrong with me, and that I’d be fine.
She said, “John, you look pale. I think you need to come home with me tomorrow.”
I went to bed early that evening. The next morning I woke up still feeling washed out and tired, but I got up anyway, went downstairs to the welcoming session for the second group, and gave a 45-minute talk.
That afternoon, Loveanne and I went off to the airport and boarded our plane home. When we got up to above 10,000 feet I felt like my head was going to explode. It was a pounding headache, like my head had turned into a pressure cooker. The flight attendant gave me some Advil.
When we got on the ground the next morning in Atlanta, I called my office and said, “Dayna, I’m gonna go home and just sleep today. Can you call Dr. Roberts and see if you can set something up for tomorrow?” My doctor was over at Emory Healthcare, a big Atlanta hospital system about an hour and a half from where we live. No way was I going there today. I just needed to lie down and get some rest.
We made it home from the airport, and I had just laid down when the phone rang. Loveanne answered it. A minute later she came into our bedroom and said, “That was Dayna. Dr. Roberts called back and said you really need to come in and let him see you today.”
No rest for the weary. Okay … I hauled myself back up, put on my shoes, and followed her out the door. We got in the car and drove the 90 minutes back down to Emory, headed inside into the executive center and in to see Dr. Roberts. He ran all sorts of tests, blood work, EKG, checked my balance and motor skills, and everything seemed pretty good.
“I think it may just be vertigo or fatigue,” he said. Then he added, “Just do me a favor, though—go get an MRI before you head out.”
They sent me over to the lab where they took me through the weirdly space-age process of getting an MRI. You’re in a little tube, like an astronaut preparing for lift-off in a seventies sci-fi movie. Then you start hearing a loud rhythmic Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping! like they’re methodically shooting industrial rivets into you. Once that was all finished, Loveanne and I climbed back into the car and began our trek back north toward Gainesville.
We were about halfway home when I got a call on my cell phone. It was Dr. Roberts.
“John,” he asked, “are you still here at the hospital?” He sounded worried. I didn’t like that.
“No,” I said. “We’re already on our way home.”
He said, “Well turn around. You need to get back here right away. You’ve had a stroke.”
Loveanne started freaking out. Understandably, she was very upset.
“I’m sure it’s just a minor thing,” I said, doing my best to reassure her as we pulled off the road, banked a turn, and headed back the way we’d just come. She drove us back to the hospital while I tried to minimize things the whole way in order to ease her mind but was not doing that good a job of it. Meanwhile I kept thinking, “No wonder my head felt like a pressure cooker getting ready to explode.” Apparently, that’s pretty much what it was.
We reached the parking area outside admittance to the emergency department and found a guy waiting for us there with a gurney for me, ready to throw me on my back and roll me in. That was when it hit me: “You know, John, you just might be in a pinch of trouble here.”
Next thing I knew, I was on the gurney and inside the emergency department, waiting for someone to come look at me.
Two years earlier, my mom had been at Emory visiting a friend who was staying in this very hospital. My mom was like me. She loved to talk as she walked and didn’t always pay a lot of attention to what she was doing or where she was going. As she was leaving the hospital on that visit she tripped, fell on the steps, and broke her hip. She was 80 years old by then and had some health issues that caused her to be on the blood thinner Coumadin. They had to take her off of that so they could operate on her hip. While they were in surgery, an embolism broke loose. She died on the operating table.
As I lay there waiting to be wheeled over to the neurology section, I glanced over toward the door and realized I was looking directly at the step where Mom had fallen and broken her hip. I was lying on a gurney, in the uncertain aftermath of a stroke, staring at the exact spot that killed my mother.
You want to talk about a dark moment.
I figured I had a choice. I could lie there and contemplate the imminent end of my mortal existence. Or I could shine the light of my thoughts’ focus in some other direction.
So I thought about my garden.
Back in 1999, right before Rick and I were put in charge of the company, I had found myself yearning for the quiet and calm of country life. For years, I’d been living on the outskirts of Atlanta and constantly neck-deep in business. Loveanne and I had wanted to get the boys out of the big public school they were in and get them into some place smaller. We’d heard about a small independent school up near the north Georgia mountains in Gainesville, called Lakeview Academy. That sounded perfect to us. In fact, the whole area sounded perfect to us. Finally we decided it was time to do something about it. We bought a beautiful place up in Clermont, just north of Gainesville, with 45 acres of land.
One day, not long after we got the place, I took the boys out and we walked the land together. They were 10 and 12 years old at this point, and the only life they’d ever known was city life.
“Man,” I told them, “This is perfect corn land. We’re going to plant a cornfield down here, and this fall we’re going to have corn. It’s going to be unbelievable. I’m going to show you guys how to do that.”
We went out on a Saturday to the feed store and bought all the stuff we needed. I had my tiller up there, and we spent all day just toiling out there in the sun. It felt great. We planted about a half-acre cornfield. It was beautiful, black mountain dirt, the rows laid off all nice and neat, just pretty as it could be. The boys were so proud of what we’d done.
I said, “Guys, when we come back in about three weeks, you’re going to have corn popping all over the place here. It’s gonna be beautiful.”
Things were incredibly busy at Primerica, as always. A day or two later I hit the road, back and forth to New York to meet with the executives there then flying around the country doing meetings in other cities. As I said, I’m a three-million-miler on Delta, and this was why. Turned out it was a good six weeks before I could take my two boys and get back up there to that land. When we did, we were not greeted by gorgeous neat rows of the most beautiful corn we’d ever seen. No, what we found when we got there was the healthiest field of weeds in North Georgia. We had stinkweeds. We had ragweed. We had goldenrod. We had everything. And down in there somewhere, when we scrabbled down at the bottom of all the weeds, there were a few stubbly, stunted little corn plants.
This happens to me a lot. I’ve grown crops that could have been on the cover of Horticulture magazine—if they’d ever wanted to do a cover story on milkweed.
We like to think of nature as being something nice and orderly and benign. We’re kidding ourselves. Nature is wild. Nature doesn’t respect any boundaries or follow your plans. It just goes wherever it wants and does whatever it wants.
Anyone who’s ever grown a garden knows this. It’s easy to start a garden. The challenge of getting a garden from a good start to a good finish is that it takes a ton of weeding, watching, and tending—all the stuff most people don’t really want to do. The fact is that it’s a lot easier to grow weeds than it is to grow flowers and vegetables. Weeds take no effort at all. They spring up without your even planting them. If you want to grow something productive and not just weeds, you can’t just poke at it once every six weeks. You’ve got to be focused on it every single day.
Your mind works exactly the same way.
The natural state of an untended mind is negative, as James Allen pointed out in 1902 in his wonderful classic As a Man Thinketh. “A man’s mind may be likened to a garden,” wrote Allen, “which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.”
That peaceful core doesn’t maintain itself. It takes vigilance and constant effort to stay positive.
Left on their own, negative thoughts will sprout up and strangle any successful, positive thoughts you may have planted there, no matter how strong they are. If you want to succeed, you’ve got to constantly do mental inventory of what’s going on in your brain. If you aren’t constantly focused on cultivating your edge, if you don’t till and weed your brain every day, controlling what you read and what you allow to come into your head, which thoughts you allow to take root and grow and which ones you pull out by the roots and toss to the side, your thinking will run wild and go to the negative. Inside the head of even the most sane, calm, sweet-tempered person there lurks a raging negativity that will start spreading its weeds at every opportunity. The moment you turn your back, they’ll take over the garden of your mind.
Your peaceful core doesn’t maintain itself. It takes vigilance and constant effort to stay positive.
I don’t know why this is so, but that’s how it is. That’s human nature.
Because of this, positive thinking is not something you can cultivate just by repeating a few affirmations in the mirror while you’re getting ready in the morning. It doesn’t work just to go to church Sunday morning, hear a few Bible passages, and think, “Hey, I’m good to go for the week.” It’s not something you can do here and there, now and then. It’s not a matter of simply thinking about the right things, but also about not thinking about the wrong things. And of course, you will think about the wrong things. Everyone does. So you have to pay attention and be vigilant.
One more thing I’ve learned about weeds: It’s a lot tougher to dig them out once their roots get deep. Not only is it important to pull them, but it’s important to pull them early on. If you let them get a foothold, you’ll find that when you do get around to pulling them, all you’re doing is snapping them off at the ground level. They’ll just grow back again.
The exact same thing applies to negative thoughts.
If you want to keep your mind focused on the positive side of life, you need to be down on your knees, hands in the dirt, pulling out all the doubt seeds, worry seeds, criticism seeds, and frustration seeds. You need to do it all day, every day, before those roots grow too deep.
I wasn’t very good about keeping up with the weeding of our 45 acres there in north Georgia, but when it came to our business, I was on it. In an organization, one of the leader’s prime responsibilities is to tend the garden and keep the weeds under control. I took that responsibility extremely seriously.
I’ve met many business leaders I admire and learn from, but the big heroes and role models of my life tend to be great statesmen. As I’ve said, I love to read about the lives of men and women who achieved great things during times of struggle and challenge. One of the biggest reasons I so love reading about leaders like Churchill, Jefferson, and Lincoln is that I am inspired by how they managed to keep themselves calm and maintain their equanimity even when everything around them was chaos.
I don’t know why this is, but people love to freak out and panic whenever a problem appears. Maybe there’s something exciting in the drama of it, or maybe they’re genuinely worried. Whatever is the reason, it happens. Those are the times your peaceful core counts most.
Once Rick and I were in charge of running the company, people were coming to me constantly and saying, “John, we’ve got a disaster on our hands!”
The first thing I would always say is, “Okay, as a result of what’s happened, how many people have died?”
The answer, naturally, would invariably be, “Well … no one.”
“Okay,” I’d say, “now that we’ve established that we don’t have a crisis, what is the situation that we’re dealing with?”
Most of what people react to as crises, calamities, and disasters are really just situations. There’s a big difference between a problem and a situation. If writing a check or making some kind of adjustment to what you’re doing can fix it, then it’s not a problem. It’s a situation. If an asteroid hits the earth, I call that a problem. But that doesn’t happen too often.
Sometimes, of course, you truly are faced with genuine problems. If sales are suddenly crashing and nobody’s getting paid, as happened with us in early 1991, that’s a problem. The question is: How do you respond? You can panic and wring your hands. Or you can be possibility-focused, taking care to operate always out of the intention to move forward and not get stuck in where you are. Most problems, though, once you look at them with a calm mind, really aren’t problems. They’re just situations doing what situations always do, which is to constantly change, challenging us to figure out how to change with them.
Although I had to admit, as they wheeled me down the corridor leading to the ICU on that February day in 2006, maybe this particular situation qualified as a problem.
I stayed in the hospital’s neurological intensive care unit for the next three days. They weren’t telling me all the gory details, but obviously this hadn’t been the “little thing” I’d kept assuring Loveanne in our tense car ride that it must be. This had been a big thing.
Shortly after I first landed in the ICU, my son Kyle burst into the room, having just rushed over from Athens. He was going to the University of Georgia at that time. He looked awful, sweating, pale, just a wreck. He ran in and dove on my chest, hugging me. (Sometimes it’s nice to know you’re loved.) When I saw his face, I realized just how close they all thought they’d come to losing me. I also realized they were right. It had been that close.
When they first admitted me, as I would later learn, my brain was swelling badly. There’s not a lot of room inside the skull for the brain to swell, and it was starting to push on my brain stem. They were worried that if they couldn’t get the swelling under control, the pressure on my brain stem would be sufficient to stop my breathing and other vital functions.
For the first two days, they debated whether to go in with surgery to remove some of the damaged brain tissue in order to create more space for the swelling and give the tissue room to heal. On the third day, just as they were about to go ahead with the procedure, the swelling finally started going down.
This hadn’t been a little stroke. It was a major event. In technical terms, I’d had a dissection (a flap-like tear) of the vertebral artery, which formed a clot that went to my brain and wiped out most of my cerebellum. Among other functions, your cerebellum is your balance center. No wonder I’d felt the earth heaving and spinning under my feet.
At first they had no idea what state I was in or how bad the damage was. A procession of doctors and nurses kept coming through my room, looking at my chart, talking to me, looking at my chart again, having me touch my nose and do all kinds of basic motor-skill tasks. I guess I passed their tests because after a week I was released and sent home. I was placed on Coumadin (shades of my mom!) to prevent any further clots.
A few days after returning home to Gainesville, Loveanne and I went back down to Emory to see the neurologist who’d attended my case, Dr. Manuel Yepes, to get the lowdown on exactly what had happened, what needed to happen next, and what my prognosis looked like. Dr. Yepes was head of the neurological department there at Emory, a brilliant guy.
He sat us down and started talking.
“The first thing to say is that the brain is inexplicable. We really don’t understand what goes on in the brain. In fact, that’s one of the major reasons I went into this field in the first place—there’s still so much to learn and explore.
“So here’s the situation. John, you’ve had a massive stroke. Yet here you are, walking into my office, standing in front of me, talking to me, doing fine. Nobody looking at you would ever think, ‘This is a guy who just had his cerebellum blown out by a major event.’
“Then there are people who have strokes that are so minimal we can barely find them on a CAT scan or MRI, yet they are so badly impaired that they can hardly move. Why does that happen to them? And why do you go through something so massively damaging and come out the other side walking and talking and functioning completely normally?”
He shrugged.
“If you want my clearest answer, you’ve had a miracle. My physiological answer is this. Here, I’ll show you. …”
He had me stand up, then close my eyes and try to walk. It felt like he was giving me a DUI test, only with my eyes closed. I took a step and stumbled. Then he had me open my eyes and walk. No problem. As I sat back down, he explained.
“When you had that stroke in Hawaii and lost your gyroscope, your brain evidently rewired itself immediately, and your eyes became your balance. Your brain taught itself how to compensate with a heightened reliance on your sense of vision. Amazing. The term for this is neuroplasticity.
“The thing is, the older you are, the less plasticity you have in your brain. If a child has a major injury to his brain, for instance like your stroke, it’s highly possible that other parts of his brain will rewire in order to take over the functions of the damaged tissue. The older we get, the more compartmentalized our brain becomes, to the point where if we lose something, well, we’ve lost it.”
He paused, and then said, “Evidently, you have a very childlike brain.”
Loveanne started laughing.
She couldn’t help herself. I know she’d have loved to say, “Doc, I could have told you that!” But she just laughed, and that was enough. It was the first time in a week that I’d heard that sound, and I’ll tell you what, it felt good.
Dr. Yepes smiled and went on.
“We don’t understand it all. We do know that there are degrees of plasticity in the brain, but other than the age factor, we can’t always say just what determines how plastic an individual’s brain may be. But we have found that a person with a more curious, more positive mind tends to respond far more positively than someone whose mind is habitually negative and doubtful.”
So there really was something to all that positive thinking business.
In college, I did a lot of backpacking and hiked a pretty good piece of the Appalachian Trail, which starts on Springer Mountain up in north Georgia, not far from where we live, and winds more than 2,000 miles all the way up to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Most people just hike a small part of it. My buddies and I would go hiking that trail for two or three weeks at a time. Every year, though, there’ll be some people who start out in March and hike all the way up to Maine, usually getting there some time in August because it takes a good five or six months to make the whole trek.
If you’re up in this area in March, you’ll see the darnedest thing. The first few trail shelters you get to, 10 or 20 miles in, you’ll find a whole mess of food, perfectly good food, just sitting there. Why? Because it’s all the stuff people realized too late that they should have left behind.
Here’s what happens. People pack up all the supplies they can for the big hike, get it loaded in the car, drive up to the start of the trail, drag it all out of the car, and start hiking. Carrying all these pounds on their backs, pretty soon they come to a sobering realization: They brought too much stuff. They’re never going to get where they’re going with all that junk weighing them down. As much as they want to hang onto it, they realize that if they want to keep going they’re just going to have to let go of some of it.
That’s what you have to do in your life.
Once you get out of the car and start hiking, you come to the point where you have to get real with yourself. You have to get rid of a lot of the baggage you’re holding onto, or you won’t be able to go very far. You can’t go through life with every grudge you’ve ever held, everything you’re upset about, everything that got done wrong to you, all stuffed into your backpack. You’re not going to make it to the top of the mountain or the end of the trail. And grudges get worse with time. You’ve got to get rid of that junk now so you can keep moving and keep growing.
You want to be a real leader? Be quick to forgive and even quicker to apologize. Even if somebody thinks you did something that hurt them or made them mad and you’re sitting there thinking, “What did I do?” just let it go. Say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that,” and move on. Be the first to let go of the garbage.
Worry. Complaint. Criticism. Bitterness. Feuds. Negativity. You don’t need them, and they’ll only weigh you down. If you’re going to hike that trail, you might as well stop right now and leave them all behind at the shelter. Otherwise you just won’t be able to go the distance.
Back in 1999 when we moved up to North Georgia, we got a mutt named Rusty. Rusty was a great dog, but he did love to get out there and roam. We’d try to keep him inside our fence, but our property backs up to a dairy farm. The moment Rusty would see his chance for escape, he’d be gone. You could yell for him all you wanted, but it wouldn’t make any difference. You could just forget him coming back for a while. We always knew that when he did come back, we’d better have the hose ready. We knew he’d go find the smelliest, most awful mess in the woods, and he’d roll in it and show up back at home covered with it.
Be quick to forgive and even quicker to apologize.
I don’t know why dogs like to roll in a stinky mess. They just do. And human beings are pretty much the same way. They’ll run out and find the stinkiest, nastiest, most awful mess out there and roll in it until they’re covered with it.
Just look at daytime television.
Over all the years of constant travel, I’ve developed a habit. When I check into a hotel room, the first thing I do is hang my coat over the television. I know nothing’s going to come out of that thing that will influence me in a positive way.
It’s not that I want to be ignorant about what’s going on in the world. I do keep myself informed, but I do so carefully and selectively. So much of what’s passed off as “news” isn’t really news. It’s just looking at life with a completely negative or sensationalist slant. Why allow my brain to be polluted by all that negativity? Getting angry or upset about it isn’t going to contribute to my life in any positive way. All it’s going to do is make me bitter, and nothing good comes out of bitterness.
In data processing there’s an expression, “Garbage in, garbage out.” With the human brain it’s the same thing with one critical difference. With your brain, it’s Garbage in, garbage stays in. You are not a machine, you’re a living, breathing organism, and when you allow your brain to be steeped in a bath of bad news, alarmism, pessimism, criticism, rumor, and gossip, it colors your thinking. That stuff doesn’t pour out again. It soaks in and starts changing your view of the world. If you sit in front of the television and let garbage pour into your head all day, you end up with a head full of garbage.
In the eighteenth century Thomas Jefferson said, “A man who reads nothing at all is more educated than a man who reads only newspapers.” And this is coming from a man who took education just about as seriously as anyone ever has.
Of course, I’m not saying you should live in a vacuum or stick your head in the sand. Jefferson certainly didn’t do that. Obviously, it’s important to know what’s going on in the world. It’s equally important to manage your exposure and the amount of time you allow that stream of negativity to flow into your brain. Don’t allow all the noise, all the finger-pointing and screaming, to influence how you see yourself, your world, and your future.
This again is one of the reasons I so love gardening: It keeps me sane. It puts me back in touch with the basics of my life and with how blessed we are to have this earth, this air, this sun. It reconnects me to that peaceful core.
What’s more, kneeling in the dirt always reminds me that I’m up here, not down there underneath it. Hey, every day that starts out on the right side of the grass is by definition a good day.
Since my honorable discharge from the neurological ICU in February 2006, I’ve been fine. I never had to go to rehab to recover any motor skills. Dr. Yepes didn’t give me any big speeches about changing my routine at work, or taking it easy, or taking on less responsibility. “Let’s work on managing your blood pressure and cholesterol,” he said. “But, other than that, John, you need to just keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t start acting old. Just go on being you.”
Just go on being you.
Now, I had to think about just what that meant. There’s nothing like waking up in the ICU with wires running out of you all over the place, surrounded by beeping machines and nurses with long faces, to make you take a fresh look at your priorities. A situation like that tends to focus the thoughts and prompt a little soul searching.
In another year I would be turning 50. I don’t subscribe to any of that nonsense about getting old. I’d always believed that you truly are as young as you feel. Now I had neurological proof of it. Still, there’s something about the number 50 that prods a person to do a different kind of self-reflection. At least that’s how it was for me. Fifty is halfway through a century. Just the fact alone that I was approaching that number would have probably made me start thinking about the arc of my life a little differently at this point. Throw into the mix a life-threatening stroke, and I was staring deep into the mirror.
Let me tell you what we’ve all got in common: 100 years from now, 100 percent mortality. I often say this in my speeches. “Live every day like it’s your last. One of these days you’re going to be right.”
Realizing that I’d just nearly died made me step back and take a look at my life. I went through a period of asking myself what I really wanted to do. Did I want to keep doing this all, maybe see if I could shoot for four-million-miler? Did I want to slow down? Did I want to retire?
Was that what go on being you meant? I didn’t think so.
We’d weathered the crisis when Art left. We’d been through that challenging decade of transition in the nineties and made it into the new century. Rick and I had been in a position to help the company flourish as part of Citigroup, and it had done exactly that for years. Could it be that my work here, or whatever work I had to do here that was truly important, was more or less done?
At the time, Citigroup stock was doing awesome, trading for $50-something a share. Rick and I had been well paid in stock options through all those years. I could retire right then with millions in net worth.
I gave it serious thought. Maybe I should just call it a day, turn the job over to someone fresh, and get the stress off my back. Stepping down on the eve of my fiftieth birthday, with millions in excellent stock options, would mean Loveanne and I would be set for life. We could live in the peaceful country style we loved. I could garden during the day, read about my heroes Jefferson and Lincoln and Churchill in the evenings. We could travel and see all our friends. Heck, maybe I could even show up at company events now and then as a sort of elder statesman. The point was that I could let go of all the stress. The brass ring at the end of the merry-go-round was mine for the grabbing.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted. But I couldn’t do it. If I did, I wouldn’t be true to myself.
I wouldn’t be going on being me.
The thing was that this wasn’t just about my own mortality. Going through that stroke and my three-day VIP tour of the ER and ICU also got me to look at the company’s mortality with a sober eye.
Yes, Rick and I had had a tremendous run in the six years since we had taken over. It would have been easy to lull myself into a false sense of security, to let myself be content with the idea that Primerica would just go on coasting and growing forever, no problem. But just because denial feels good doesn’t make it a good strategy.
The truth was that there was a situation brewing in New York that was profoundly affecting our lives at Primerica. No, I take that back—not a situation: a problem. And it was getting worse. Tempting as it was, I couldn’t bail, not just yet. I had to stay and help guide the company through one more transition.
As it turned out, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. If I’d thought the nineties had been tough, as the song goes: You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
I was about to head into the most difficult, stressful years of my life.
Develop a Peaceful Core
To be effective in the world, you have to carry within you a core of untroubled calm, a sense of inner peace that is content in who you are, with all your best intentions and all your imperfections. When you maintain that peaceful core within you, you can weather whatever storms are happening on the outside.
It takes vigilance and constant effort to stay positive. Tend the garden of your thoughts. Check in with your inner dialog. Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. When you find critical, resentful, blaming, worrying, or complaining thoughts starting to sprout, yank them out and toss them over your shoulder.
Don’t let yourself react to problems with panic or anxiety. Stay possibility-focused. Most problems are really just situations waiting for your measured response.
Be quick to forgive and even quicker to apologize. Grudges only get worse with time. Let go of the garbage.
Be conscious of how much negativity you’re letting into your brain, from television, newspapers, gossip, and so forth. Manage your exposure. Do what you need to do to stay positive, and be protective of your peaceful core.
ACTION STEP
Identify what action you can take every day, or at least every few days, that keeps you calm and connects you with your peaceful core. Write it down. Now write it into your calendar. Don’t leave it in limbo. Make it a regular habit to schedule time for that activity. It may be the most important appointment you have.