It’s an Ego Thing

It is one of those morn­ings when, too ear­ly, I find myself on a jet head­ed east from Seat­tle. Thank­ful­ly, though I am in the last row of coach at the win­dow, there is a seat between me and the guy who sits down at the aisle. At least, I can stretch out my elbows. Not so thank­ful­ly, after he orders two vod­kas and bloody mary mix at 6:45 AM, he wants to talk. “Why me?” is all I can think about.

He is own­er and CEO of a small com­pa­ny and he is on his way to a con­fer­ence to make a speech. He wants to know what I do for a liv­ing. I tell him, with­out elab­o­rat­ing. “That’s very inter­est­ing,” he says. Always a bad sign.

Okay, I’m an intro­vert. I have a right. I work hard con­nect­ing. But do I have to do it now? I got up at 4:00 just to get on this jet. All I real­ly want to do is lean my head into the cab­in wall and drift away into the white noise of the engines.…

He’s laugh­ing with the flight atten­dant. Anoth­er two vod­kas. It’s bare­ly 7:00. I’m ask­ing myself how long this flight is going to be. I try to med­i­tate for a moment, get cen­tered, relax, but all I can think of is how every twen­ty-sev­en flights — on aver­age — I end up sit­ting next to some­one who just has to vio­late my space. Like the guy who leaned over my com­put­er to take a long look and then, shout­ing because I have my ear­phones on, says to the entire cab­in, “Say, whacha writin?” Or like the dude who spon­ta­neous­ly engaged in a polit­i­cal argu­ment with the stranger in the seat in front of him, and then turned to me, “You should hear what he’s say­ing up there. Can you believe it? You should say some­thing to him. How can you just sit there?” All I remem­ber of myself is a very dark, con­trolled, “Thanks, could you be qui­et now?”

“Lead­er­ship,” says the CEO next to me on the morn­ing flight, “is inter­est­ing stuff. You know I had to make a change a cou­ple of years ago, a real change in the way I did things.”

By now I feel like I’ve just entered a Joseph Con­rad nov­el and we are on a voy­age up a riv­er. I’m stuck on the inside seat. A sto­ry is com­ing. Oh, I could tell him any­thing: I’ve got to work to do; I’m sick; I don’t care. But I don’t say any of that. Instead, draw­ing on my (not so use­ful at this moment) train­ing in coach­ing and coun­selling, I ask “What do you mean?” Lord, some days, I real­ly wish I would­n’t do that.

“Well,” he starts, “I had to change my life. I was work­ing 100 hours a week. I was mar­ried, but the mar­riage was dead. She nev­er saw me. I had a big sail­boat and lived there a lot. I had a girl­friend on the side and we par­tied on the boat. I had six or sev­en peo­ple I’d hired as my man­age­ment team at the com­pa­ny — every one of them an idiot. And I looked at every sin­gle set of project plans that came in the door. Nobody could do it as well as I could do it. Nobody was as smart as me.”

“Real­ly.” I respond lame­ly. “But you changed?”

“Oh, yeah,” he con­tin­ues, with the sort of blithe can­dor that marks a sto­ry that has already been told too many times. “I had to. I was hold­ing the whole place togeth­er; at least that’s what I thought. I yelled at them a lot but they could nev­er get it right. They all lived in fear of me and I liked it. All I did was work and buy more toys and par­ty with my girl­friend. And then one night it hap­pened. I was lying in bed and it hit me. (He paus­es). The Big One. And I was in so much pain I could­n’t talk. By then my wife had her own bed­room down the hall, and I rolled out of bed try­ing to get her atten­tion. I rolled around on the floor try­ing to speak for maybe twen­ty min­utes — but I could­n’t yell out or any­thing. And I laid there, know­ing my life was end­ing, and for the very first time in my life (I’m guess­ing he’s about 48 or so) I did some­thing real­ly dif­fer­ent. I actu­al­ly took some time to reflect on my existence.”

By now, of course, I’m hooked. I’m grabbed by the Ancient Mariner.

“And I thought about what a schmuck I’d been and how I was cheat­ing on my wife and I was killing oth­er peo­ple at work and how I was one arro­gant son of a bitch, and I knew I had to change. Some­how I made just enough noise that my wife found me and got me to the hospital.”

“It’s fun­ny, you know…”

“Yes, fun­ny,” I say.

“It’s fun­ny how for the first time in my life I real­ized I was real­ly depen­dent on oth­er peo­ple. Here I am, ‘the guy in charge,’ and I lay there like a baby in that hos­pi­tal bed and here comes some 22 year old kid to help me take a crap and I thought to myself, I’ve got to fig­ure this out. I’ve got to get out of here. And so you know the first thing that I did?”

“No, what did you do?”

“I got to know my sur­geon. I real­ly want­ed to have a rela­tion­ship with him. Because he was real­ly my way out of this hos­pi­tal. I got to know him real­ly well. I talked and talked. I want­ed him to be my best friend. I want­ed him to get me out of this bed and I made him my friend, you know. To the point, he was talk­ing to me about his own life. I kind of got him to open up to me, and then when I felt like I could do it, I told him, ‘I got­ta get out­ta here.’ And because he was my friend now, he arranged it. … We’re still friends to this day. He still comes over to the house.”

“So then what hap­pened,” I ask, cer­tain of my own naivety; clear­ly just a shill by then.

“Well, I went back to work after a cou­ple weeks and the first thing I did was fire half of those god­damned use­less man­agers, and I got some peo­ple who weren’t just brown nosers, you know, peo­ple who would actu­al­ly talk back. I had to let go and I knew it. I had to deal with what a prick and know-it-all I’d been. So I fired the worst of them, and got some peo­ple who were actu­al­ly com­pe­tent. And then I dealt with my mar­riage. I moved out, lived on the sail­boat, got rid of the girl­friend. Got the divorce. And I stopped com­ing in to work every­day. I let them han­dle the com­pa­ny for me.”

“Wow,” I say. “So where are you head­ed now?”

“Oh, it’s a new life. That’s all. I don’t do much ‘real work’ any­more. I most­ly just go to con­fer­ences and speak. Or do pub­lic­i­ty events for our technology.”

“So you speak about your … change of life?”

“Oh no, no, not that,” he shares blunt­ly, “most­ly just tech­ni­cal con­fer­ences, con­fer­ences for own­ers, CEO’s, stuff like that.”

At that moment, for some rea­son, I need to be a con­sul­tant. I want to offer him advice. I want to be grat­i­fied with the thought of my own wis­dom, fac­ing such a man. So I sug­gest: “Why don’t you talk about your heart attack? Maybe you could help a few peo­ple avoid hav­ing to go through so much pain.”

“Oh,” he says. “That’s an easy one. The heart attack? It’s absolute­ly nec­es­sary. It’s an ego thing. You have to have the heart attack. You know, with­out that, noth­in’s gonna change.”

I turn to look out across the dry lands to the south and east, thou­sands of feet below. The bright light of the new sun is both­er­ing my eyes. It is 7:30 and while I don’t have a hang­over, I might as well have one. I am learn­ing, and it does­n’t feel very good.

[This is a true story].