Don McMinn

I don’t want this post to be morbid but it starts out that way. The main theme is living life to its fullest; but first, let’s talk about death.

Death is inevitable and unforeseeable. It can occur suddenly at any time, or it can approach slowly and predictably.  We all know the day of our birth but no-one knows the day they will die.

As I get older (and particularly as I approach that ominous statistical factor—the average life-expectancy of a male living in America), I often think about final experiences, because for everything I do in life, there will be a last time I do it. There will be a last time that I eat dinner with my family, embrace Mary, sing For the Beauty of the Earth, see a sunset, visit London.

This thought doesn’t bother me or make me anxious or fearful. To the contrary, it’s beneficial because it reminds me to savor every moment of each day and to delight in experiences both great and small … to approach every experience as if it were my last time to do so.

For instance, the last time we visited Dubai I said to Mary, “This is probably the last time we’ll ever come to Dubai, so let’s enjoy it fully.” Though we go to London every year at Christmas, last year may have been our last. You get the point.

This exercise in crafting perspective requires negotiating the inevitability of death with the immeasurable joy of living.

Hermann Hesse wrote,

“Life passes like a flash of lightning
Whose blaze barely lasts long enough to see.
While the earth and the sky stand still forever
How swift changing time flies across man’s face.
O you who sit over your full cup and do not drink,
Tell me, for who are you still waiting?” (from Klingsor’s Last Summer)

You never know when you’re experiencing something for the last time so enjoy every moment of life.

“One can’t lead unless he can leverage more than his own capabilities.”   Scully

There is a significant difference between an achiever and a leader.

• • • An achiever gets the job done.
    • A leader gets the job done through other people.

This is huge; don’t miss it.

Many people have honed their “get it done” skills; they live disciplined lives and accomplish immense amounts of work. They are achievers. Give them a job and they’ll get it done. I admire these people, but I don’t consider them leaders, because leaders accomplish work through others.

Peter Drucker illustrates this difference by challenging us to think of which pronouns we use when given work to do: “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.’ They understand their job to be to make the team function.”

When you are given an assignment or when you have a vision to fulfill, what is your first thought? “I can do that.” Or, “I need to put a team together.” As Drucker says, leaders think first of accomplishing work through their team. Leaders use plural pronouns when planning work.

No doubt, a good leader must also be an achiever—you must possess the skills necessary to accomplish tasks. When a leader doesn’t know how to get work done, he loses credibility with his team and progress suffers because he doesn’t understand how work is accomplished. So for a leader it’s not “I’m either an achiever or a leader” but “I am both an achiever and a leader.”

There’s even a difference between a leader and an achiever with helpers. Some high achievers will surround themselves with a group of assistants and helpers whose job is to help the achiever be more efficient, but this is still not the exercise of leadership. For instance, a dentist may have a staff that assists him in his work—a dental assistant, dental hygienist, receptionist, x-ray technician—but all the work centers around the dentist. A leader will empower others to conceptualize and perform work on their own.

The ability to get work done through other people is fundamental to leadership. In fact, if you’re not doing that, you’re not leading.

As you reflect on your past, have you functioned more as an achiever or a leader?

We should all have a vision of our future selves. An upgraded version of who we currently are. What do we want to be more of (kind, patient, healthy, friendly) or less of (selfish, nervous, fearful)? We should aspire to be better than we currently are.

But once we have identified areas that need improvement, how do we make the changes? The key is daily practice. Long-lasting change doesn’t happen immediately; it develops gradually. Behavior modification takes time. 

Here are two areas of my life that I want to improve, so I practice them daily.

Be a better listener.

Recently, I had a conversation with the help desk at a major cruise line. It went something like this:

Don — I’m calling about reservation QRDTGG. The Regal Princess ship leaves Ft. Lauderdale on April 17 and ends in Barcelona.

Agent — I’m here to help you. Do you have a reservation?

Don — Yes, it’s QRDTGG.

Agent — What is the departure city?

Don — I’ve already told you.

Agent — What is the departure date?

Don — Are you listening to me?

The conversation continued to deteriorate. The agent might have been hearing what I was saying but he wasn’t listening.

This frustrating encounter caused me to analyze my own conversational skills. Do I listen intently to what others are saying, or does my mind wander to other things?

I want to be a better, more focused listener, so I’m practicing that every day.

I also want to make my “resting face” more pleasant.

Our resting face is how we look when we’re not intentionally manipulating our face to look pleasant or engaged. It’s our default setting: the way we look when we’re alone. The challenge is, when we’re around people and particularly when we’re in conversations, our resting fact is inadequate. We need to change to an engagedface.

Sometimes a resting face unintentionally creates the impression that we’re angry, annoyed, irritated, or contemptuous, although we may simply be relaxed, resting, or not expressing any particular emotion.

I realized I had a problem in this area when Mary and my daughters would sometimes ask. “Don are you upset? Is everything okay? Are you mad at me?” My bland countenance left them wondering. If my family is struggling with interpreting my mood because of my sour countenance, I’m sure other people are too. 

So, I want to permanently change my resting face into a pleasant, more open countenance. I want to have a subtle but constant smile. It will take time, perhaps years. But I’ll practice every day. 

Here’s my challenge to you: Identify three or four areas of your life that you want to change and on a daily basis practice the new behavior. 

Last month, my HR department asked me to write an incident report about an event that happened at work. In the report I wrote, “I was standing in the break room when Ken and Nancy walked in.” In Ken’s report, he wrote, “Nancy and I were in the break room when Don walked in.”

So, who was right? Upon deeper reflection, I was wrong. My memory—even of a recent event—was inaccurate.

But I’m not the only one who succumbs to this human fallacy—we all do. Our memories are riddled with inaccuracies. 

Ulric Neisser was a German-American psychologist and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the “father of cognitive psychology”. His primary area of research was about perception and memory. In 1986, the day after the Challenger space shuttle exploded, he asked his students to write a paper about when and how they learned about the disaster. Three years later, he interviewed these students and asked them to recall what they had written. Less than seven percent of their comments correlated with their initial submissions. Fifty percent of their recollections were incorrect in two-thirds of the points and twenty-five percent failed to match even a single detail. One student had first written that she was in her apartment when she heard the news; three years later she said she was at work. One student had written that he was with friends; later he was sure that he was by himself.

When President Lincoln died, his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, allegedly said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” But James Tanner, a young soldier who was asked to take notes of the last hours of Lincoln’s life and who was in the room at the time of this death, wrote that Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the angels.” Was it ages or angels? It’s hard to know. Read here for an in-depth discussion of this interesting conflict of recorded history.

My best friend growing up was Brandy. Now we live in different cities but visit several times a year. We inevitably talk about the “good ol’ days.” Sometimes our recollection of events are drastically different.  Like, “We were in Mexico when that happened.”  “No, we were in Dallas.” What?

Perplexing, isn’t it? How should we respond to mankind’s unstable and fallible memory? 

For starters, don’t be so cocksure about what you remember. You’re probably often wrong. Secondly, be skeptical about other people’s recollections. When someone recounts an experience, hold it loosely.