Make Your Parents Proud
I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle—victorious.
—VINCE LOMBARDI
On the morning of April 1, 2010, the day our IPO was scheduled to run, Rick and I hit the street early. Officials from the New York Stock Exchange had invited us to join them down in Lower Manhattan where they were holding a breakfast for us, to talk about the day and what was going to happen before we headed out onto the trading floor. Rick and I were staying up at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in midtown and needed to be down at the Exchange by 7:00 a.m. The car service met the two of us at 6:15, and we headed downtown. It was still dark out.
Ever since 9/11 the front of the Exchange at 18 Broad Street has been blocked off. Since we couldn’t just drive right up to the front entrance, our car let us out off to the side, at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets. We started walking down Broad along the barrier toward the entrance, when we realized what we were seeing. A crowd of people stood outside the barrier. As we approached the entrance, they all started cheering. A throng of local Primerica people, folks from our sales force living in the New York–New Jersey area, had assembled here in the early hours of the morning to commemorate the event with us. Up above them, draped across the six gigantic white marble columns that support the famous pediment crowning the entrance to the largest stock exchange in the world, was a giant banner, 30 feet high and 80 feet long, that said, “PRI listed on NYSE,” our name in giant big blue letters, along with our new logo: three rings—one red, one white, one blue, representing our sales force, our clients, and our company.
I broke down and wept. I had to sit down for a moment and collect myself.
Once inside and through security, Rick and I were escorted to the room where the breakfast was being held. We were seated next to Duncan Niederauer, the CEO of the Exchange, and had a fascinating conversation with him and the others around us. It had been more than a year, they explained, since they’d seen any major IPO activity happening there. For them, the fact that there was such great demand for this company that was emerging from one of the nation’s troubled banks was a great statement of renewal, optimism, and hope for the future.
“I know you two see this day as a big deal for Primerica,” Duncan said to us. “But let me tell you something: It’s more than that. It’s a big deal for America.”
That was when it sank in: The fact that we had pulled this thing off was as exciting for them as it was for us.
After the breakfast, they took us down onto the trading floor. Alison Rand, Peter Schneider, Glenn Williams, and the rest of the team who’d been closely involved in the inner workings of the deal were there along with Rick and me. We were introduced to Pete Giacchi, who ran the area of the floor that would be handling the trading in PRI stock. Pete showed us around as the people on the floor prepared for another day of trading. When you see the New York Stock Exchange on television, it’s easy to get the impression of the trading floor being this gigantic place. In reality it’s not all that big, about on a par with a decent-sized hotel ballroom. The trading floor is where all the “pits” are, something like the booths in a smallish trade show. Although more and more of the actual trading these days happens off the physical floor and via computer, there’s still a significant amount that happens the traditional way, and the place was a flurry of activity.
At 9:30, the opening bell sounded: DING-DING-DING-DING-DING …
Trading had begun.
But not trading of Primerica stock—not yet.
When we were doing our IPO road show presentations, we told people the stock might open at anywhere between $12 and $14 a share. By March 31, interest in the stock was so strong that Citigroup had decided they could afford to price it higher, so they put it at $15. At least, that was where it started. It sure didn’t stay there long.
As the opening bell echoed through the room, a throng of people crowded around our pit, guys in blue smocks, the actual floor traders doing the buying and selling. All those presentations we’d done had generated so much interest in Primerica that the stock was 22 times oversubscribed, meaning that even before it opened there was enormous demand. There was so much activity, with so many bids coming in and so much demand to make a market, that they couldn’t match up buy transactions with prices and reach an equilibrium point.
It took nearly a half hour before our stock finally opened—at $19.15.
Rick and I had been down in the pit for the past hour or so, surrounded by all these people running all over the place. Rick was standing there grappling with all the information whizzing around, working to understand the mechanics of exactly what was happening with the trade. One of these guys, an old trader in his smock, walked up to me, slapped me on the back, and said, “Buddy, I just want to let you know, it’s been ugly out here for the past year. I’ve needed to see something like this for a while. Man, this is old school.”
Pete looked at me, and he and I both jumped up in the air and smacked our chests into each other. He laughed and said, “I gotta tell ya, John, most CEOs don’t jump in the air and do the football chest bump.” I couldn’t help thinking, Maybe if they felt the way I do right now, they would.
I looked up at the illuminated electronic ticker that runs along the walls clear around the Exchange. It said, “JOHN ADDISON AND RICK WILLIAMS CO-CEOS OF PRIMERICA ON THE FLOOR … OPENING DAY OF PRIMERICA’S IPO …”
I walked over to Rick and grabbed him by the shoulders, pulled him away from what he was doing at the moment, and said, “Rick, look! Look at this.” I pointed up at the ticker, and then waved my arm to take in the whole view of the floor. “Very few people on earth will ever see this, buddy. This is amazing. You need to quit worrying about the details over there for a minute, man. Drink—this—in.”
The rest of the day was mostly a blur.
As we walked around the floor and talked to people, Rick and I were getting a steady stream of congratulatory notes via text and e-mail. An e-mail from Jamie Dimon saying, “Freedom must be sweet.” A great e-mail from Sandy. A long and very nice e-mail from Joe Plumeri and another from Pete and Judi Dawkins. One of the most meaningful messages of the day came from a guy named Meir Lewis, who was in investment banking at Citi (he’s now with Morgan Stanley) and had been very involved with the process. Meir was in Israel at the time and sent me a note saying he’d written out a prayer of freedom for us and put it up on the Wailing Wall that morning.
Throughout the day, I also talked to reporters from print and television. About 40 minutes before the closing bell, I stood in front of TV cameras for a live interview with Liz Claman on FOX Business.
“And now,” I heard her say, “the stock that is absolutely the huge story today: Primerica. The Citigroup spinoff is surging in its IPO debut, after pricing above its offering range and then selling more than three million shares more than originally planned. Joining me from the New York Stock Exchange, John Addison, the co-CEO of Primerica. Well, this is great news for you guys. …”
We talked back and forth about the company and its history, about its values and what it does for families, about its future for more than five minutes. As viewers watched the two of us, the headline on the screen read, PRIMERICA IPO SOARS.
We had invited about 200 of our top earners and their spouses to participate in the day. During the afternoon, they came out onto the floor and joined us. As our names ran across that electronic ticker board on the wall, Mike Sharpe came up to me, grabbed me, and hugged me. “I just want to let you know how proud of you I am,” he said. “This couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
I looked at Mike. I knew full well that if it hadn’t been for our senior leaders and the skill and sensitivity with which they managed to keep the sales force together during those dark times, none of this would be happening right now. If they had given in to panic during that crazy, chaotic time, if our sales force had started bailing on us and sales had started falling, then pulling off an IPO would have been impossible.
During our road show, ongoing performance was critical. When you’re selling a business, what you’re selling is future performance, not past performance. You can’t sit in a room with potential investors for some of the world’s biggest investment companies and say, “Yeah, things aren’t going so well right now, but we think they’ll go better soon.” We’d set out in a lifeboat on very stormy seas, and we’d not only made it to safe harbor, but we’d made it there with everyone still in the boat. If we hadn’t, none of us would be standing there on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
I hugged Mike back and said, “Back atcha, buddy.”
For the past two years, I’d been so task-focused that all I could do was keep my eyes on what I had to do the next day. Now, as I stood there and thought back to a year earlier, to those perilous early months of 2009, the full impact of what we’d done here began to fully sink in.
When the economy started imploding in the fall of 2008, if you had done a statistical probability grid of what would be happening at Primerica in April 2010, a successful IPO would have been right near the bottom of that grid. Or, slightly below the bottom. Somewhere near the top would have been the possibility of our no longer existing at all because at one point, during the worst of it in early 2009, Citigroup seriously considered shutting our entire business down.
For them, this would have been no big stretch at all. In the life insurance business, it happens all the time. You build up a big book of business as far as you think you profitably can go, then shut down all new business, eliminate all administration beyond the bare-bones staff needed to maintain existing policies, and now all your profits just drop straight to the bottom line as those policies stay in force. Suddenly your business is pure cream, like collecting rent on a huge property that’s fully paid off. There are lots of companies that buy these so-called “run-off books of business.”
For Citi, this must have looked like a very attractive option. At the time things were incredibly difficult for them, and on top of that, Rick and I were also being very difficult (from their perspective, anyway) in our insistence on what we wanted the outcome to be.
So Primerica came to within a hair’s breadth of being dismantled and turned into a put-out-to-pasture cash cow. This would have meant goodbye sales force, goodbye employees, goodbye to all of it for us and all the thousands and thousands of people we’d known for all those years.
Instead, here we stood on the NYSE floor as our stock’s currents surged over the riverbanks and flooded the plains of our IPO, knowing that our company had finally become its own entity, independent and autonomous and free to thrive unfettered. I thought about Jamie Dimon’s e-mail again and shook my head in wonder. Freedom was sweet indeed.
At a few minutes before 4:00, Rick and I climbed up and out onto the little balcony where the bell sits. There’s a big button you push that makes the electronic bell do its DING-DING-DING-DING-DING, and a massive gavel you smash down to signal the close of trading.
At 4:00, Rick pushed the button and I smashed down the gavel. Partners as always.
Trading was over. PRI had finished the day at $19.69, up more than 30 percent from its $15 starting price, and we had racked up a total of 24.6 million shares sold.
When we took the company public, its market cap value was about $500 million. As of this writing, it has grown to well in excess of $2 billion. It is a strong and vibrant public company.
Several hundred companies launched IPOs during 2010. When you compare their offering prices and where their stocks are trading five years later, the top-performing company of them all is Tesla Motors, the first American automaker to go public since Ford’s IPO in 1956. In second place after Tesla: Primerica.
Our IPO was not just a success. It was a blazing success.
Thursday, April 1, 2010, was April Fool’s Day for the rest of the country. Not for us. For us, Independence Day came three months early that year.
During the battle to bring Primerica safely out of Citi, I spent a good deal of time on airplanes and in hotel rooms reading about World War II and the life and times of Winston Churchill. An HBO movie about Churchill and World War II had just come out called Into the Storm, starring Brendan Gleeson as Churchill. Delta had an in-seat video service. I would board my plane, get into my seat, and the moment we were up in the air I’d switch on that movie and watch it again. I watched it probably 20 times. Maybe more.
During that time, I carried a Churchill quote everywhere I went: “Strength is granted to us all when we are needed to serve great causes.”
Churchill had led a fairly checkered career as a politician. As a young man, he’d been quite a successful politician, but by the time he reached his fifties he was out of favor and out of power. Watching the Nazis rearming Germany, during the twenties and thirties, he told people, “Look, this guy Hitler is not getting ready for a party. He means trouble and we’re going to have to deal with it.” But the men in power in England at the time didn’t want to hear that. They had all fought in the Great War as young men. The last thing they wanted to contemplate was another war with Germany. They called Churchill an alarmist and a warmonger.
When Hitler invaded Poland and England was forced into the war, Churchill’s perspective was vindicated. Neville Chamberlain resigned and on May 10, 1940, at the age of 65 and after a decade in the political wilderness, Churchill fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming prime minister of England.
In an interview conducted many years later, when Churchill was an old man, the reporter asked, if Churchill could live one year over again, which year would he choose? His answer came without hesitation: “1940.” That year was by any measure Britain’s darkest hour. It was the year Italy and Japan allied themselves with the Germans and France surrendered to them. It was the year before America would enter the war, the year of the Blitz. It was the year of no hope in sight, when Churchill knew it all came down to him and his people against the Nazis.
My answer to the reporter’s question would be: 2009.
In Churchill’s writings, he describes the day in the middle of that dark year when he first became prime minister:
I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.
That describes perfectly how I felt now.
In the end, it all made sense: answering that little newspaper ad, resigning from Life of Georgia, becoming Art’s “numbers guy,” being put in charge of compensation, sticking my neck out and speaking up at that “Hindenburg at Lakehurst” meeting, befriending Rick … hey, even that massive stroke on the golf course seemed to make sense now, in the big scheme of things. All the events, circumstances, and decisions of decades seemed to have led to this moment, to this point in time.
As I said, I’m no good at writing up big, sweeping life blueprints, but there was a blueprint there, all right. Just because I didn’t write it and didn’t always understand it, didn’t mean it didn’t exist or that it wasn’t important that I follow it. All those events came to this: save the jobs, livelihoods, and in many cases the dreams of thousands of people.
Obviously, fighting to save a company isn’t the same thing as going to war with all of Western civilization hanging in the balance, and I’m not comparing myself to Winston Churchill. The point I’m making is that every one of us, from Churchill to me to you, we each have our destiny.
You’re here for a reason.
That brings me back to the reason I’m writing this book in the first place. You may never be the CEO of a company or president or prime minister of a nation at war. Each of us has a different path to walk. But no matter what your path looks like, where it takes you, and what roles it places you in, I know this about your life:
It means something.
You may not know right now exactly what that meaning is in all its glorious details. I didn’t have a clue, or at least not much of one, until it started unfolding in front of me. That’s all right. You don’t necessarily need to know all that. A life is like a good story: Give it time, give it space, do your best to tell it right, and it will all work itself out and reveal itself in good time. The opportunities will present themselves, the occasions will arise, for the story to take shape.
Live the story you want to tell.
I was at an airport one day, hustling from one gate to the next, when I noticed a young kid walking with his mom with these words on the back of his T-shirt: LIVE THE STORIES YOU WANT TO TELL. It stopped me in my tracks. I regrouped and headed over toward the mom. “Excuse me,” I said. “Look, I’m not being weird here—but would you mind if I took a picture of the back of your son’s T-shirt?” I explained that in my line of work, I often give talks to large audiences, and that quote was so great I wanted to use it in my presentations. (Fortunately, she believed me.) I still have the photo and still use the quote.
Live the story you want to tell.
Some people live their whole lives vicariously through the achievements of famous athletes, rock stars, movie stars, and other celebrities. Not that that’s entirely a bad thing. As I said, everyone needs heroes. I’ve certainly got mine. We all need role models to inspire us in our search for the right forks in the path, and in that sense, part of the way you learn to live your truest life is by trying on other people’s stories, the stories of those people you most admire.
But how much greater it is to live your own story?
After trading closed and the Exchange began the process of shutting down for the day, Rick and I were whisked back into a car and driven uptown again, back to the historic Waldorf Astoria, where we had a big event taking place in the magnificent Grand Ballroom.
When I was a little kid, I would stay up late on New Year’s Eve with my parents to watch Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians in their annual television broadcast. Every year without fail the announcer would say, “From the famous Waldorf Astoria Ballroom in New York. …” This evening, I was going to host an event there.
The very first time I’d actually walked into that ballroom was back in the late nineties, when I attending a dinner there. I vividly recalled how intimidating it had all seemed at the time. The Waldorf Astoria Grand Ballroom can seat 1,500 for dinner. Look up, and you’re staring four stories up at a forty-four-foot ceiling. I remembered looking down at the silverware laid out a foot wide on either side of the plate and realizing I had no idea which fork or spoon we were supposed to start with. Next thing I knew, an army of servers was bringing out food I’d never even heard of before. Everyone around me seemed like they knew exactly what to do. To me it felt like a foreign country. It was Day One in Political Science 101 at UGA all over again. I remember thinking, “Oh, man … I am not ready for this!”
In those days, I used to have a dream. I’d be at Georgia State, in the last day of our final exams, and suddenly realize I’d missed the entire semester. “I’m not ready for my MBA,” I’d say. “I am totally unprepared!” Back then, those same fears sometimes invaded my waking hours too. Many were the mornings, in 2000, when I would wake up in my bed in Gainesville with my first thought being, John, you are the co-CEO of a billion-dollar division of the largest company in the world. You’re a country boy from Salem, Georgia. How on earth did you ever find your way into this position?
Now, a decade later, here we were.
The event at the Waldorf Astoria got under way at 8:00 and was scheduled to go for an hour and a half, all of it carefully planned out, like a mini-convention. Several thousand Primericans filled the ballroom, and we simulcast the event to all our reps’ offices across the country so they could share in the celebration and emotional high of the day. Stock officials later told us they’d never seen any other company hold an event of this magnitude. A series of our top field leaders were there to give presentations, and these guys are some of the finest and most entertaining presenters you will ever hear. Kicking the whole thing off, of course, would be Rick and me. Between the two of us, this was my forte, so I would go first. My plan was to talk about this new day dawning for Primerica, and what it meant for everyone in this room and across the country. My plan was to talk about freedom.
Standing up there in the Waldorf Astoria ballroom and looking out over the assembled crowd, I thought about my dad in his glass-walled office out on the middle of the shop room floor at Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. I thought about how hard it was on him that he couldn’t save that company and all those employees’ jobs, that no matter what he did, he could not affect the outcome. Rick and I had been extremely lucky. Our company went through the biggest storm in generations and faced essentially impossible odds. Yet, through a long series of circumstances that none of us could have designed or fully predicted, we had been fortunate enough to find ourselves in a position where we could affect the outcome. And we had done exactly that.
I looked out at the cheering crowd and thought, This is for you, Daddy.
I walked out on stage, thrust both my fists in the air like William Wallace in Braveheart, and yelled, “FREEDOM!” The packed room responded with a roar of jubilation.
That right there, I would have to say, was one of the greatest moments of my life.
When I got back to my hotel room that evening after the event was all over, I found a note the hotel staff had slipped under my door. It was from Art Williams. Art doesn’t e-mail. He handwrites a note and then either mails it to you or has it faxed to you. This was a fax. It had come in during the evening while I’d been at the celebration. It said:
I was watching you guys on TV today. The day was perfect, couldn’t have been any better. I am so proud of you guys. —Art
That note meant more to me than just about any other I’ve ever received.
I was way too wired up from the day to even think of sleeping. After reading Art’s fax, I changed into some more casual clothes and went back out to join a few friends. A handful of us—Loveanne and I, Rick, my friend Stuart Johnson, and a few others, slipped out the side door of the Waldorf and walked down to our old stomping grounds, the bar at the Omni Berkshire, where sure enough our old friend Robert was tending bar. That place had seen quite a lot of drama during the long months of the past two years. Robert was glad to know it had all worked out.
We sat and celebrated quietly together.
Sometimes you’ll hear people use this phrase, “It’s a matter of principle.” In my experience, most of the time when people say that, it turns out it’s really a matter of money. But there are times when something really is a matter of principle. Those tend to be defining moments in the overall arc of one’s life, moments that reveal who you are, or determine who you are becoming, or both.
At several points in the 2008–2009 process, there was a great deal of money on the table. All Rick and I had to do was pick up a pen and sign a piece of paper, and I could go start picking out which plane I wanted. Those moments brought me face to face with the question: Would I take a big enough payoff to risk selling my friends down the river? And you know, it’s easy to say you would never, ever, ever do that—until they start adding more zeroes after the number. They start piling on those zeroes, and it’s amazing how creative people can get at justifying what they’ve just done. The more zeroes there are, the more likely you’re going to hear someone saying, “Look, I didn’t want to, but I had to do it that way. It was the only way it was going to work.”
I lay no claims to being any better a person than anyone else. My human frailties and failings are many and sundry. (Just ask Loveanne and all the other people who know me best.) But in those moments I knew that if I took that particular fork in the river and took a deal that would have Rick and me multimillionaires but left our friends on unemployment, I would have become a wretched, miserable shell of a human being. As much as it might have seemed like “the only way it was going to work,” I would never get another good night’s sleep because I’d be waking up at 3:00 every morning for the rest of my life, thinking, “What have I done?”
As I said, events shape your life, but it works the other way too. You also shape events. Life moves on the smallest of decisions, and so does destiny. This is a hero’s journey, and you’re the hero. When the call comes, you have to answer.
“But how do I know?” I can almost hear you asking. “How do I know whether to turn right or left, whether or not to answer that ad, take that job, take this action or that one? If the crucial junctures of life can appear so small and inconsequential in the moments they actually happen, how can I know what the right fork in the path to take is?”
I don’t have any solid, sure answer for that. I’ve probably taken as many wrong turns as right ones, and I’m not saying there’s no room for mistakes. Life is full of mistakes. You can’t live in fear of making the wrong choices. You have to live it courageously and without regrets. When it comes to tough choices, all you can do is your best. But here is a guideline I’ve always used that may help: Make your parents proud.
When I was a kid, nothing made me feel worse than knowing that something I’d done had upset my mom. Her approval, her being proud of me, was one of the biggest forces that drove me. Knowing that the people I looked up to—her and my dad, Uncle A.W. Dalton, and all their friends—thought Johnny was doing a good job was a huge motivator for me. It still is. You can call that “codependent” till you’re blue in the face, but I believe it’s a healthy thing, maybe one of the healthiest things there is.
What could be better than knowing you made someone you admire proud of you?
For you, it may not be your parents. Not everyone has parents who were as supportive as mine. Some of us grew up surrounded by people who were negative. Whether it’s your parents or someone else in your life you care about, whose views and opinions you value, the same principle still works. When I got married, Loveanne became that person for me. Loveanne is one of the people I look up to most in my life. She is not only a sweet, good person, but she’s also incredibly smart and very driven. I have always admired her a great deal. Marrying her changed my life, and not only because I now had someone to provide for and someone beyond myself to think about. That was true, but it was more. I wanted to make my wife proud of me.
Maybe you look up to a teacher, a coach, a big brother or sister. Maybe your kids are the people you want to make proud, or your grandkids. Whoever it is, there’s someone in your life that you care about.
Make them proud.
Years ago, I visited a little island in the Bahamas with some friends. This place was unbelievably beautiful. The people who owned it had always loved to sail. For years they had dreamed of living in the Bahamas. Not only that, they’d dreamed of owning an island in the Bahamas. They started a furniture company years earlier, made a fortune, sold the business, and bought this little island. Now they lived an incredible lifestyle.
There was a guest book there. When I opened the book to write my name in it, I saw that a previous guest had written these nine words:
“Most people’s somedays become a handful of people’s everydays.”
Most people live in the land of the someday. “Someday, we’re going to take that vacation I’ve been promising my family forever. … Someday, I’m going to learn another language, take up an instrument, start working out and getting into shape, take dancing lessons with my wife or husband, go hiking with my kids. … Someday, I’m going to go visit those places I’ve always wanted to see, read those books I’ve always wanted to read. … Someday, someday, someday, someday …” Before they know it, they find themselves lying in a hospital bed, and they’ve run out of somedays.
For a very small handful of people, their somedays become their everyday. What they’ve dreamed of doing becomes how they live their lives.
But here’s the crucial point: This is not about having the money.
That’s one of the ways we deceive ourselves. We’ll do it, we say, “when the money is there.” But the money is never there. That’s not how money works. Money doesn’t just show up in great excess and say, “Hey, I’m here, what do you want to do with me?” Bold actions don’t start with money. Bold actions start with the taken initiative. The financing falls into place only once the thing is in motion. Our somedays don’t keep themselves at perpetual arm’s length because of the nature of money. It’s because of the nature of someday.
It’s also not about having the time. “I’ll do it when I have the time” is just another way we deceive ourselves. The time, like the money, is never just there. There will never come the day that you look at your calendar and suddenly realize, “Hey, look, there’s a three-week gap here!” In the same way that nature fills a vacuum, human beings fill time. The only way you’ll ever do it is to take that bull by the horns and decide to do it. Then take whatever steps you need to take to put the pieces in place.
As I said earlier, you need to live every day as if it’s your last. One of these days you’ll be right. You don’t know how long you’ve got. Maybe decades. Or it could all end tomorrow, just like that. Not only do you not know, but also it doesn’t matter. Tomorrow will take care of itself. The question is: What do you need to do right now to move your story forward?
Make your someday turn into your everyday.
Set aside the money, clear the time, and make the reservations. Whatever it is, do it. Make your someday turn into your everyday.
One day in July 2001 I was on the road, doing a talk, when I got a phone call from one of our executives, Greg Pitts. “John,” he said, “the first thing you need to know is, your family is doing great, everyone’s fine.”
Oh, I thought, what’s the rest of the news?
“The bad news is,” he went on, “you’re having a house fire. And it looks bad.”
It was bad. Though they never did figure out what started it, they were able to say that it began in the garage. The car exploded. The whole place burst into flames.
Loveanne was home with the boys when it started. She smelled the smoke, thank goodness, and got everyone out safely, including the cats and dogs. Nobody was hurt.
I needed to get home immediately. It was too late at night to catch a commercial flight. Marge Magner managed to get in touch with the aviation division at Citi, and they flew me home on one of Citi’s jets. When I arrived, the firemen were still putting out the fire. The house was not a total loss, but more than half of it was gone. I realized that what I now owned was pretty much what I had with me in my carry-on bag.
And you know what? It was okay. Life moved on. We had each other, we had our lives. It was a devastating event, but it also showed us, with terrible and wonderful clarity, what is important, and what is not. As I stood there watching the firemen work on the wreck that had been my home, my first thoughts were not, “My expensive suits are burned! My big-screen TV that I love is gone!” My first thoughts were about our photos of our kids.
Incredibly, they were mostly okay. One area that had burned the worst was the cabinets where we’d stored all the home-movie videos of the boys we’d taken over the years. The videocassettes were covered in smoke and ash, many of them were warped. Yet we were able to salvage most of the footage.
Life is no cakewalk. It will throw you curveballs, pull the rug out from under your best plans, toss you overboard just when you think you’re safe and secure. But even when it burns up half your home (or worse), it will often leave you footage you can salvage and a deepened appreciation of what truly matters.
Money is a decent scoreboard for how well you’re managing the practical necessities of life. But it’s a terrible measure of how successful you are.
It would be disingenuous of me to say, “Money doesn’t matter.” Of course it matters. Having money is great. I’m a fan. It’s important to know you have your basic security and stability handled. Money is a decent scoreboard for how well you’re managing the practical necessities of life. But it’s a terrible measure of how successful you are.
Over the years I’ve known a lot of titans in business who’ve had great success in their positions, achievements, and finances, but who are unhappy, tormented people. I’ve always told myself, “Whatever happens, I don’t want to end up like that.” If I should live that long, I don’t want to be that 75-year-old guy on a Florida golf course with my marriage a disaster, kids who won’t talk to me, my life a train wreck, and my dwindling days lonely and miserable.
It’s easy to say, “When I’m making a lot of money I’ll be happy because I won’t have to worry about this or worry about that, and I’ll have this handled and that handled …” That ends up being a circular argument. The truth is: if you aren’t already happy, then getting a lot of money isn’t going to make you happy. Money doesn’t change people, it just amplifies them. It makes you more of what you already are. If you’re unhappy, all more money is going to do is amplify that unhappiness.
The measure of success is how happy you are—not eventually, not someday, but today, right now.
Money can’t become the thing you focus on. If you do a great job as a leader, you’ll make decent money. But if you make money your goal, if you start to worship it, it will never last. Money is a great servant, but a terrible god.
So if money is not the measure of success, what is?
To me, the measure of success is how happy you are—not eventually, not someday, but today, right now. If you are putting off happiness until some imagined future condition, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news: That planned-for happiness will never come. And the good news: Happiness is actually available to you right here, right now. In fact, that is the only place and time it is available.
Often people miss the happiest times of their lives, thinking about what it’s going to be like when … when whatever. When this happens, when that happens. When I get more stuff. If stuff made you happy, we’d have a lot more happy people. But happiness isn’t the result of more stuff. It’s a state that you place yourself in, consciously and intentionally.
The thing so many people don’t understand about happiness is that it’s not an emotion. It’s a decision. It’s a state of mind, not a situation. Happiness is not the fruit of success. In fact, it’s the other way around. True success is the fruit of personal happiness. Genuine happiness comes from the heart, not from your circumstances.
Back in the early days, when the kids were tiny and Loveanne and I were living in our little ranch house in Snellville with our little garden out back, scrimping to buy our Christmas stuff at Big Lots, we were happy. We’re happy today. And we’ve been happy right through the whole process in between. What has made us happy and kept us happy? Doing the things we love to do, the things we were designed to do best, and with the people we want to do them with.
If you wait for success to make you happy, you’ll always be miserable. You can’t wait for things to be better to be happy. You’ve got to be happy first, in order for things to start getting better. And when you are, they will, because happiness attracts people, it draws people to you. When you’re truly happy, you become a beacon of positivity in a world of negativity. You become the person that other people want to be around.
I need the basics of life: food, shelter, the essentials handled for my family and me. Our photos of the boys. A garden. Honestly, that all doesn’t take that much money. Beyond that, there are lots of things I like, lots of things I enjoy. There’s one thing I need. I need it to be there when I wake up in the morning, and I need it to be there every day: I need to feel that what I’m doing makes a positive difference in people’s lives. To me that feeling is like oxygen. If it’s not there, I can’t breathe. If it is there, then I’m a happy guy.
I set out to write about leadership and in the process I’ve told you the story of my life. The funny thing about that is that, I don’t know that I ever actually set out to be a leader. I mean, it wasn’t a goal that I consciously or intentionally set for myself. And you know: I’m not sure that’s how leadership really happens anyway. I think the leaders we admire most tend to be those people who set out, not so much to become someone who leads, so much as to live a life of service—service to others, service to a cause, service to an ideal.
Maybe that’s what all these nine “practices” boil down to: nine steps on the path of doing your best to live a life of service.
The leaders we admire most tend to be those people who set out to live a life of service.
Decide who you are and keep moving forward. Shine your light on others, build on your strengths, and earn your position. Focus on what you can control, and develop a peaceful core. Be a lighthouse; don’t burn bridges. And make your parents proud.
Maybe the key to building real leadership is simply this: to live a life that makes a difference.
A trip around the sun is so brief. Benjamin Franklin said, “You may delay, but time will not.” The passage of time is inexorable, and it goes by so quickly for every one of us. In this short stay you have here, why not make the trip worthwhile?
One morning in September 2011, the day after we went on television to announce our plans to build a new global headquarters in Duluth, my assistant Dayna greeted me when I arrived at the office by saying, “John, do you know a Gerald Padgett?”
Gerald Padgett. Did I know that name? I sure did. Mr. Padgett was my first boss. He was that vice president at Life of Georgia who took me into his office in 1982 when I announced my resignation and told me I was making the biggest mistake of my career going to work at A.L. Williams.
It was now nearly 30 years later. I figured Mr. Padgett must be, what, in his eighties now? Many years earlier Life of Georgia had been acquired by Internationale Nederlanden Groep (ING), the Dutch banking and financial services giant. In 2005, ING sold the company to Jackson National for its book of business. I knew what that meant: the Life of Georgia policies then in effect became assets for Jackson National to manage, and Life of Georgia folded in upon itself and effectively ceased to exist. It was the same fate that nearly befell Primerica before our IPO.
At one time Life of Georgia had been a major enterprise with its own tower jutting up as a proud part of the Atlanta skyline. Now it was a memory. And at Primerica, the fly-by-night operation that Mr. Padgett had predicted wouldn’t last more than a few years at best, now we were building our own tower.
I couldn’t help reflecting on the irony of our history. Half the companies that were in the top 100 life insurance firms in the mid-eighties, like Life of Georgia, now no longer existed. Which meant that of all those companies that had made such a ruckus about us, claiming we wouldn’t last, every one of them was gone. And little A.L. Williams had grown up to become one of the most successful insurance companies in the nation.
I asked Dayna if Mr. Padgett had left a message. “No,” she said. “Actually, he sent a handwritten note.”
John—Saw you on TV last night. Very proud of what you’ve done. I don’t know if you remember when I told you you were throwing your life away. Thank God you had the good sense not to listen to me.
Life moves on small decisions.
A year and a half later, on a warm, sunny Friday afternoon in May 2013, we held our biggest celebration since our IPO: the much anticipated grand opening of our magnificent new world headquarters. The governor of Georgia was there to join us, along with an enormous crowd of Primericans, friends, family, media, and other locals who had all gathered to be part of the event. And that wasn’t all. Art Williams and his wife, Angela, were there too. It was quite a full-circle moment.
Life moves on the smallest of decisions.
Our old headquarters, which we moved to back in 1985 when I was still just learning the ropes as director of compensation and licensing, was housed in ten separate buildings, which was great but not exactly ideal. This incredible new facility consisted of a single, three-story building with connecting wings housing 58 conference rooms, a state-of-the-art theatre and adjoining television studio, a 248-seat café, and an interactive tour called “Imagine,” designed to showcase the new global headquarters to current and prospective representatives and employees. Covering more than eight acres, our new home at 1 Primerica Parkway sat at the hub of the burgeoning Gwinnett County business, sports, and entertainment community.
Feeling the warmth of the sun on my face, I thought back to 1985, when we first moved here to Gwinnett County. Back then this area consisted of a cemetery, a truck stop, and us. We’d come a long way.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, we buried a time capsule containing an assortment of key mementos marking the company’s history. It will stay buried there until long after I’m gone—that is, unless I live to be a 120. The date the capsule is schedule to be opened: February 10, 2077, the company’s one-hundredth anniversary.
I won’t be there to see it, but I can already savor how it’ll feel to those who are.
Make Your Parents Proud
Your life means something. Every one of us has our own destiny. Each of us is here for a reason. You may not always know exactly what that reason is or which path to take, but if you do your best to follow it, it will reveal itself in time. And whenever you hit a fork in the path and aren’t sure which way to turn, ask yourself this: “Who in my life do I care most about?” And then make them proud.
Live the story you want to tell. It’s important to have heroes whose stories you admire, but how much more exciting is it to live your own story. This is a hero’s journey, and you’re the hero.
Don’t wait for the extra money, or the extra time, or the extra opportunity, to put your destiny and your dreams into action. Tomorrow will take care of itself. Take initiative now. Start making your somedays turn into your everydays.
Don’t let money become the goal you focus on. Money is a decent scoreboard for how well you’re managing the practical necessities of life, but it’s a terrible measure of personal success. If you make money your goal, it will never last.
Happiness is a decision. Not an emotion, not a situation, not the result of success but the source of success. Genuine happiness comes from your heart, not your circumstances. Find what it is that makes you happy, and make sure you are doing that.
ACTION STEP
List the people you care about most in the world. Now ask yourself, what would make them proud of you? And how would that feel?