I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to understand exactly what I should do with my life. I have few conclusions most of the time. I have just read a great speech from a man that has figured out his life’s purpose. His name is Jeff Sandefer. I am republishing his introduction and speech below. Jeff is a true Rhino.
Collegiate Entrepreneurs Introduction
Jeff Sandefer lives a dual life as an entrepreneur and a teacher.
As an entrepreneur, Jeff has founded a number of successful companies — his first at age 16. More recently, he sold Sandefer Capital Partners, an oil and gas investment firm with several billion dollars in assets.
Business may be his day job, but Jeff’s passion is teaching. While at the University of Texas, students awarded Jeff with the school’s Outstanding Teacher five times and he was selected by Business Week as one of the top Entrepreneurship professors in the United States.
Five years ago Jeff and the group of successful entrepreneur-teachers who created the University of Texas’ entrepreneurship program left to start the Acton School of Business, named after Lord Acton, the Victorian scholar of freedom.
The school’s grueling 100 hour a week, one year MBA program has won numerous awards, including having the Princeton Review – the gold standard for business school rankings – name Acton’s students at the “most competitive” MBAs in the nation and rank its faculty in the top three in the country -above Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton – for the last three years in a row.
Jeff is a graduate of the Harvard Business School, where he has served for over a decade on the school’s Visiting Committee. He is a longtime director of the National Review magazine and recently was one of the youngest members ever elected to the Texas Business Hall of fame. Please help me welcome Jeff Sandefer.
Collegiate Entrepreneurs Talk
Introduction
As I began to work on this talk, I tried to remember back to what it felt like to be a collegiate entrepreneur.
I was hungry. I was smart, or at least, smart enough. I had started my first successful business. I worked hard and would do whatever it took to succeed.
But deep down inside, I wondered: Was that enough? Because somewhere deep inside I feared failure, even if I wouldn’t admit it. I sensed a hole I couldn’t fill and that I was running away from something as much as towards it. I wanted to change the world – but I didn’t know which way to turn.
Do you feel as I felt? If so, listen closely to what may be the most important words you hear this entire conference:
Winning the rat race will not bring you happiness, satisfaction or fulfillment. The winner of the rat race is still a rat, no matter how fancy your corporate office or how large your jet. You can remain on this fool’s errand chasing money, power or fame or chose instead a Hero’s Journey – where you are the hero who changes the world.
Let me say that again.
Here’s the paradox of my talk today. It’s not about you; yet it’s all about you. How can that be true? I’ll come back to this before we finish.
Are you skeptical? I would have been too. But you see, I have been where you are going. So stick with me to the end, and I’ll tell you your future, where you choose a Hero’s Journey or not.
A Hero’s Journey
So what does it mean to choose a Hero’s Journey? It means living every minute of your life as if it mattered. Because it does. It means to live as if you have an important mission, because you do. It means seeing struggles as adventures, and setbacks as lessons. And like Harry Potter and Voldermort or Sir Lancelot and the Holy Grail, it means to realize that no matter how noble the quest, what matters most is how the hero is changed in the process.
Everything I say today is backed not only by 2500 years of wisdom literature, but all of the latest in neurobiology, experimental psychology and behavioral economics. It’s common sense too. It’s just that most people are too self absorbed to pay attention to the obvious.
At Acton, we make three promises to our students, that they will:
- Learn how to learn
- Learn how to make money and
- Learn how to live a life of meaning
We are serious about delivering on these promises. Most of our students, if they were to tell you the truth, come for the second promise, because they see successful entrepreneurs as teachers and want to know the secrets of making money. It turns our that this is the easiest promise for us to honor.
But by the time an Acton Scholar graduates, he or she will tell you it was “learning how to learn” that mattered most. That it was learning how to think, make decisions and defend them that mattered most. That they now know it’s far more important to listen intently and ask the right question, than to try to be the smartest guy in the room.
What’s most interesting however, is ask an Acton Scholar a few years out which promise was the most important, and almost without exception they will tell you it is “learning how to life a life of meaning” – an that’s what we are hear to talk about today.
As part of our Life of Meaning course at Acton, each student chooses ten people who they believe are role models and interview them for at least two hours each. To ask about triumphs and regrets and lessons they wished they’d know earlier. Three of these interviews are to be people between the student’s age and forty five years old; at least three people between forty five and sixty and at least three of the role models must be sixty or older.
Those over sixty all say that at the end of life that only three questions will matter: Have I contributed something meaningful? Am I a good person? And Who did I love and who loved me?
By the end of a Hero’s Journey, it won’t be about money or fame or power but simply:
- Have I contributed something meaningful?
- Was I a good person?
- And who did I love, and who loved me?
Find a Calling
Have I contributed something meaningful? The secret to unlocking that first question is to find a calling. A “calling” is that rare mission where you use your most precious God given gifts, doing something that brings you great joy, in a way that solves a deep burning need in the world.
I found my gifts the hard way. I went to Harvard Business School thinking that I could outwork the few people I couldn’t outsmart and outsmart the few people I couldn’t outwork. But there I found people who worked so much harder that I did and were so much smarter than I was, that I realized that I had to focus on a niche if I wanted to succeed.
It dawned on me that being world class at something mattered. That people would pay a lot of money to watch Michael Jordan play basketball but nothing to watch him play baseball. That people would flock to see Tiger Woods play golf but cared nothing to watch me play. That I had to find a calling that fit my gifts – in my case, it was the oil and gas business.
Try this experiment. Ask five people who know you well what you do better than anyone else in the world. Press for specifics instead of generalities like: “you are good with people.” If you are lime most people, you’ll be surprised at what you find. The answers will be consistent, and you will discover your gift is something you assumed was easy, because as difficult as it is for most people, it comes easy to you.
So how do you find something that brings you great joy? I think the secret to this is what psychologists call “flow.” Try this. Think of the last time you lost track of time, doing something you loved so much that you would practice it merely for the sake of practice alone. Something that could become a life long discipline you would enjoy mastering. Find where your most precious God given gifts intersect with “flow” and you are close to a calling.
But it is the last part of a calling that is the most important of all, and that is that your calling must serve a deep burning need for the world. It must help others. It must matter to you. What need calls out to your heart? What problem do you feel as if you were put on this earth to solve? There you will find your calling?
Set Ethical Guardrails and Carefully Choose Fellow Travelers
Did I contribute something meaningful? Was I a good person? And Who did I love and who loved me?
The secret to unlocking the second question is to set clear ethical guardrails and do all you can to make it easier to stay within them.
Choose your ethical guardrails well. That means, at a minimum, writing down a list of “I will nots” – things you will not do. And whenever you cross one of these ethical guardrails saying “stop” to yourself, and pausing to reflect before you careen down a slippery slope.
Here’s some more practical advice, and I hesitate to say this, because it requires language I shouldn’t use in this speech, but I’m going to pass along the same advice that my mentor and most beloved teacher told us at Harvard Business School. He wasn’t someone who used strong language, so when he did, it stayed with me, and I hope it stays with you.
He told our class: “You’ll all soon be making more money that you need. Many of you will go in debt to buy a fancy condo and a new car. That’s a mistake. Before you buy anything, you should have at least six months of salary in the bank. Why? – and here comes the rough language – because you need to have some ‘Fuck You’ money. That’s so, when your boss comes to you and asks you to change a number or falsify a sale or tell even the smallest lie, you can say: ‘Fuck You’ and quit. Would you make the right decision if your house and family were on the line? That’s a question you don’t want to have to answer.”
My friend Jeff Skilling was the CEO of Enron. He too wanted to be the smartest guy in the room and he was. He had the big office and a fleet of jets and was the Master of His Own Destiny…But he was a good man on a fool’s errand. He forgot to set ethical guardrails and got so caught up that he couldn’t walk away. Now he’s in a federal prison for the rest of his life.
Fellow Travelers
Did I contribute something meaningful? Was I a good person? And Who did I love and who loved me?
Who did I love and who loved me? Choose your fellow travelers on this trip well, for it’s a trip that you only take once. If you are like me, you will underestimate the importance of extraordinary people. I used to be frugal in sharing rewards, until I learned that extraordinary people get 10X more done than good people and good people 10X more than the average person.
I also didn’t appreciate how important it is to be surrounded by people of character. Because, like Jeff Skilling and those at Enron, you will come to be like the people who surround you. And until I was thirty, I didn’t spend enough time with my family. I forgot that not many people are heard to cry out on their deathbed – “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
The Paradox
This brings me to the paradox: “it’s not about you but it’s all about you?”
It’s not about you because it’s not about your happiness. If your goal is to be happy, whether on a fool’s errand or a Hero’s Journey, you surely will be disappointed. You see, all the scientific research shows that much of our happiness is genetically programmed – you have an inborn genetic happiness thermometer. You should enjoy momentary pleasure but it’s not your happiness that matters, if for no other reason that chasing after happiness scares it away.
You see, Hero’s Journey’s aren’t easier than a fool’s errand. You’ll have even more setbacks and more battles because the stakes are higher. But you’ll fight those battles and be more satisfied and fulfilled because what you do will make a difference.
It’s not about you; it’s all about you. It’s not about your happiness or selfish desires, that won’t matter when you face those three key questions at the end of life. It’s all about you because those of you in this room have a special mission, an important mission, that only you can fill.
If you are on a fool’s errand you will always be measuring yourself against others, and when you do this you can always find someone who is smarter or richer or better looking. You always will be dissatisfied and unfulfilled. If you are on a Hero’s Journey, sooner or later you will find the gift of gratitude.
Here’s one last bit of practical advice. Think of someone in your life who you are truly grateful for, but have never told them so. A parent or grandparent or favorite uncle or aunt or teacher or coach. Write them a one page letter expressing your gratitude. And then go to them and read the letter aloud. Scientific research shows that if you do this, you will be happier and more satisfied for months afterwards. You are likely to find more things in your past to be grateful for, and even begin to expect good things to happen in the future. It’s strange but true. According to the scientific research, grateful people who believe they will be lucky, are luckier.
In the beginning, I promised those of you who were skeptical, that I would give you a sense of what your future will look like, where you chose a Hero’s path or not. Here’s that glimpse. Every one of you in this room will look back and realize that you were worried about the wrong things. For some of you, it will be the most expensive mistake you ever make.
You will be successful. You’ll make more money than you need and you will learn that being rich is not about how much you have, but about spending less than you make, so your free time belongs to you. You will find that failure isn’t about setbacks or making mistakes, because those only make you stronger. But increasingly, and especially if your resist the Hero’s call, you will find that your greatest horror isn’t failure, but waking up at fifty five or sixty years old and realizing that you’ve wasted your life.
Lord Acton, the Victorian Scholar of Freedom for whom our school was named, said : A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.” The question today is, Which are you?
You are the best and brightest we have, in the freest country on earth, at a time when freedom is sweeping the globe. If you don’t choose a Hero’s Journey and protect this great land, then who will? And if not now, then when?
I’ll end with a very personal message.
Each of you will have to make your own decision on this, but no matter what happens in my life from this point forward, I now know that I was never mast of my own destiny…so when that final day comes, as it will for all of us, I will not be standing full of pride, believing that it was all about me, but on my knees, fully grateful, full of gratitude for all the blessings I have received, longing to hear those words so beautifully written in Matthew…”Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
God bless you and good luck on your Hero’s Journey.
Jeff Sandefer is a great Rhino.
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Love the Rhino! The shirts are great!!!!