Max was my work partner, and, although I dislike the term for many reasons, what people typically describe as my work husband. We were colleagues who’d immediately, instantly, connected, and who built a great friendship at the same time we built a company. Max was a genius, but he didn’t know he was a genius. He thought he was just observant:
“God didn’t bless me with many gifts,” Max often said, “but there’s one thing he did give me: I can always tell when someone doesn’t like me.”
That’s a pretty nothing gift, you may be thinking, but think again. What Max was really saying was that Max had a gift for observation — he was a very very noticing sort of person. He noticed everything, even (or especially) when you hoped he wouldn’t. He noticed in meetings, in conversations occurring in any medium, in punctuation that was there and that was absent, in client signage or lack thereof, in everything. I used to tell him he had a dotted line to the flaw in things, but his genius wasn’t just critical. It was also opportunistic and highly entrepreneurial.
Max’s genius was opportunistic because it happened in the moment. The complex analysis required to assess the situation, its controllable and non-controllable variables, and its signals and indicators, was so natural, so unselfconscious for Max that it looked instinctual, almost reflexive. Max’s particular genius was that his instincts were almost always entirely correct, occurred at the right time, and also occurred at a deeper level than most people’s. Max’s instincts amounted to genius because they were timely, accurate, and in-depth. They told him when to take risks and when to sit tight. They told him when the moment had come.
Any professional success I’ve had is owing to careful observation of Max and his approach to decision-making and problem-solving. The most powerful example of this, the Max version of Socrates’ cave, is the story I’m about to tell you.
Max in Mid-Life & the 3 Big Things I Learned
Max and I were about 25 years apart in age. When I met him, I was a kid and he was almost 50. I still smoked then, and I’d stand around outside the office door with a cigarette and Max would join me. We scrambled, sometimes, to make payroll. At around 4 pm every day he’d lose his temper, literally kicking trashcans or throwing pens, paperweights, and once, memorably, a salt cellar.
I may have been inexperienced, but I knew something was wrong. Something wasn’t working. I was inside the situation and so my perspective was off; everything was too close for me to see it clearly. But for Max it was different.
Remember what I said about Max’s genius for observation? He noticed what was happening to him before I did:
“I can’t become my father, angry all the time,” Max said to me, puffing on a cigarette, looking at it as if seeing it for the first time. He put out the cigarette half-smoked; I’d never see him smoke another. “I’ve got to make some changes or soon it’ll be too late.”
And there’s the first Big Thing that made this moment special for Max: the first Big Thing Max realized is that mid-life was an opportunity — maybe the last one he’d get — to build himself into the man he wanted to be for the rest of his life.
Max made a plan and put it into action, and we never looked back: the business took off, and Max remade himself. Max wouldn’t have said that all the worthwhile things in his life came after that point — of course not. But I believe he would tell you that the most important, meaningful, and powerful satisfactions and achievements in his life came as a direct result of the decision he made that day.
I know what you’re thinking: this is one of those simple things that’s easy to understand but impossible to do. If I hadn’t watched Max do this, I might find it impossible. But I did watch Max deconstruct his personality, and then rebuild it, removing the qualities, habits, and patterns that he didn’t want to carry with him into the next stage of life. He had a method, and it’s that method I want to try to describe for you.
The Second Big Thing
The second big thing was recognizing the inflection point — the moment of decision — while Max was still enough in the moment to assess it and introduce change. For Max, the midlife switch went off around 49. He recognized it happening because he experienced negative consequences in a pattern. It’s important that no alarm bells went off prior to the establishment of a pattern — prematurely correcting something Max perceived as a pattern would have created misleading and inconsistent results — you can’t build a plan around sporadic or exceptional events.
In Max’s case the negative pattern — and by ‘negative’ I simply mean it didn’t lead him anywhere, or produce anything helpful or nice-looking or useful to anybody — was losing his temper at 4 PM every day. It was unpleasant. It was embarrassing. It wasted time.
We all know that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing but expecting a different result. Sometimes that intellectual understanding is hard to act on. I like to make it simpler: if you want something to change, introduce a change. Change the inputs, get different outputs. Adjust, measure, refine. To me, that’s the Third Big Thing (and an all-time favorite): make changes in a straight line to an outcome you can measure!
Max and I were direct marketers. Testing, measurement, and refinement were integral to our work. If you can’t measure it, how do you know it really happened? So, we both felt it perfectly natural to start at the end, with the symptom, and try to remove that. We didn’t start out with the goal of understanding a problem. We started out with the goal of changing the outcome of the test. We knew we could ‘read’ our test right away, and measure and refine around the test result. We could figure it out — understand all that drove it — later, when we had put out the fire. Once we stabilized, we could dig into our analysis and interpret causal relationships if it seemed useful.
Back to our specific example: Successful project conception, development, execution, and analysis — end to end project management — occurs in several dimensions. To refine our process, and remove the daily, always-losing-race against time, we needed to break our process into manipulable sections, paying attention to stakeholders’ contributions, the time period in which they occurred, the dependencies between various types of information, and so on. This type of analysis can be implicit or explicit, but the more complex the project, the more helpful and important explicit analysis is.
To dig into meaningful projects, we need to get our ideas in order. The hierarchies are important. We’re just getting started.
Goals, clarity, and KPIs. But more on that — on defining the guard rails — next time