This speech on the topic of self-renewal, delivered by John W Gardner to McKinsey & Company in November 1990, is outstanding (thanks to Zoe Scaman for the link). Gardner, who was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare for President Lyndon Johnson, wrote his book Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society in 1963. The book deals with why great societies thrive and die, the need for continuous renewal, and the contribution of individual innovators to that renewal process. He talks about the need for ‘tough-minded optimism’ about the future, experimentation, and empathy. It is, he says, people that continually renew themselves that have the capacity for innovation. The speech takes these themes and distills them into a series of life lessons full of richness and useful ideas. Worth reading the whole thing of course, but these are some highlights that I took from it.
Renewal is, says Gardner, one of the fundamental tasks we have as individuals, as organisations, and as societies. He describes the conundrum of why some people seem to flourish and thrive into old age whilst there are others ‘…even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in mid career‘. He doesn’t mean people who fail to get to the top and be high achievers, but rather people that have stopped learning, stopped growing, who are just going through the motions and not living to their full potential. Boredom, he says, is ‘the secret ailment of large-scale organizations‘.
The risk is that we become trapped in increasingly rigid opinions or habits, trapped by expectations, or roles and ways of thinking about ourselves that hold us captive, or held back by how we think about past failures or worry about the future. By midlife, says Gardner, ‘…most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves’. We should pause to acknowledge the lessons from our work, our friends, our successes, failures, setbacks and wins.
Life has a lot of chapters. And we can learn from every one of them so it’s a myth that learning is only for the young. We should never stop learning. We should stay alive in every sense of the word for as long as possible:
‘The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character. You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.’
I particularly liked his point about how one of the enemies of lifelong motivation is the idea that we should all have a tangible, aspirational goal that we are driving for. Too often, he says, we ‘scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal’, only to feel empty when we get there and question whether we’ve climbed the wrong mountain. Life is not a mountain to conquer but rather a continual unfolding and process of self-discovery…‘an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves’. It’s about the process, not the destination. It is the ever-changing challenges that we face that truly develop our capacities: ‘Life pulls things out of you‘.
A personal bête noire of mine is lack of enthusiasm. Back when I was hiring it was one of the traits that I always looked for, almost to the point of prizing it above everything else. Gardner also says that he bets on high motivation over any other quality except judgment: ‘The world is moved by highly motivated people, by enthusiasts, by men and women who want something very much or believe very much’. Enthusiasm and progress come from the vitalising power of being interested. Endless curiosity. Willingness to care. To risk failure. Motivation is less about ambition, less about forever striving to be interesting, and more about being interested. Never forget that opportunity can happen at any point in life. We need to welcome it with a kind of dogged, relentless enthusiasm and optimism.
The speech was so thought-provoking that I read it three times. Reflecting on my own journey, many of the qualities that Gardner picks out – enthusiasm, lifelong learning, curiosity, openness – have been personally important to me over the years. There was a time (when I was working in corporate world) when I felt trapped by expectation and the rigid view that others had of my role. I was frustrated. I still has a challenging role but the effort I put in felt increasingly meaningless and I was in danger of stagnating.
And then I was made redundant. In so many ways that was the beginning of a whole new phase of my life, and trying to make a go of working for myself was it’s own process of self-renewal. It felt like somehow I’d been stranded in a truck stop for a long time but suddenly I’d pulled out onto the highway again and I was motoring towards the horizon. But looking back I think I’ve always had that restlessness for progress and learning. If I ever feel that I’ve stopped learning that’s when I know it’s time to move on. So as Gardner suggests, self-renewal not just about those turning points in your life. It should be continuous. Always with you.
Gardner finishes his speech with a paragraph from another speech on creating meaning in life, which I’ll reproduce in full here:
“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”
Such wisdom.
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Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
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