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Beginning in 2017, to my great honor, I was invited to work with veterans to review applications for the Pat Tillman Foundation, the organization I had begun speaking to in 2015 and that provides scholarships to veterans, active-duty military, and military spouses. A lot of applications come from ambitious West Point alumni.
The essays were fascinating and inspiring. Nearly every single one spoke of some formative lesson learned in Afghanistan, or on a domestic hurricane rescue team, or while translating languages under pressure, or as a spouse moving again and again and arranging services for other military spouses, or even while becoming increasingly frustrated with some aspect of military conflict or bureaucratic dysfunction. The crux was that some unanticipated experience had led to an unexpected new goal or the discovery of an unexplored talent.
Applicants who receive funding join the community of Tillman Scholars, the group of high achievers whose concern about changing directions later than their peers helped inspire this book. Discussing late specialization was practically a catharsis for their anxiety about having taken time to do and learn things they were grateful to have done and learned.
No one in their right mind would argue that passion and perseverance are unimportant, or that a bad day is a cue to quit. But the idea that a change of interest, or a recalibration of focus, is an imperfection and competitive disadvantage leads to a simple, one-size-fits-all Tiger story: pick and stick, as soon as possible. Responding to lived experience with a change of direction, like Van Gogh did habitually, like West Point graduates have been doing since the dawn of the knowledge economy, is less tidy but no less important. It involves a particular behavior that improves your chances of finding the best match, but that at first blush sounds like a terrible life strategy: short-term planning.
CHAPTER 7
Flirting with Your Possible Selves
FRANCES HESSELBEIN GREW UP in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, among families drawn by steel mills and coal mines. “In Johnstown, 5:30 means 5:30,” she often says. So if the executives, military officers, and legislators who line up outside the door of her Manhattan office seeking leadership advice want their full hour, they’d better be on time. Even with her hundredth birthday behind her, she is in the office every weekday with more work than she can finish. Hesselbein is fond of telling visitors that she has had four professional positions, all president or CEO, and never applied for one. In fact, she attempted to turn down three of them. When she guessed where life would take her, she was pretty much always wrong.
In high school, she dreamed of a bookish life as a playwright. After graduation, she enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh’s Junior College, “Junior Pitt.” She loved experimenting with different classes, but her father fell ill during her first year. Hesselbein was seventeen, the oldest of three, stroking her father’s cheek in the hospital when he passed away. She kissed him on the forehead and promised to take care of the family. She finished the semester, and then dropped out to work as an adman’s assistant at the Penn Traffic Company department store.
Soon she got married, and had a son just in time for her husband, John, to report to the Navy during World War II. John served as a combat aircrew photographer, and upon return set up a studio, doing everything from high school portraits to documentary films. Hesselbein had a protean job she called “helping John.” When a customer wanted a photo of a dog to look like a painting, she grabbed oil paints and colored it, voilà.
Hesselbein adored Johnstown’s rich diversity, but it afforded some ugly lessons. As part of the newly formed Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, John responded to acts of discrimination in town, like a barbershop that would not cut black customers’ hair. “I don’t have the right tools,” the barber complained. John’s response: “Then you will have to buy the right tools.” When John confronted a teacher who kicked two black children off a playground, the teacher called him a “traitor.” Hesselbein decided then that a community that valued inclusiveness should answer “yes” to the question, “When they look at us, can they find themselves?”
When Hesselbein was thirty-four, a prominent woman in the community stopped by her home and asked her to lead Girl Scout Troop 17 as a volunteer. The previous leader had left to become a missionary in India, and other neighbors had turned down the request. So did Hesselbein, three times. She had an eight-year-old boy, and professed to know nothing about little girls. Finally, the woman said that the group of thirty ten-year-old girls from modest families who met in a church basement would just have to be disbanded. Hesselbein agreed to stand in for six weeks, until a real leader was found.
In preparation, she read up on the Girl Scouts. She learned that the organization was founded eight years before women could vote in the United States, and that the founder had reminded girls that they could be “a doctor, a lawyer, an aviatrix, or a hot-air balloonist.” Hesselbein thought back to second grade, when she announced that she wanted to be a pilot and her classmates laughed. So she showed up in the church basement to start her six weeks. She ended up staying with Troop 17 for eight years, until they graduated high school.
Afterward, Hesselbein kept picking up Girl Scout roles she neither sought nor intended to keep. She was in her midforties when she left the country for the first time, for an international Girl Scout meeting in Greece. More trips followed—India, Thailand, Kenya. Hesselbein realized she loved volunteering.
She was asked to chair the local United Way campaign at a time when that role was as foreign for women as aviatrix had been. It was a volunteer job, so she figured she had nothing to lose. But when she appointed as her vice chairman the president of the local United Steelworkers of America, suddenly the United Way president decided that wasn’t such a good idea and he had better check with Bethlehem Steel, a major supporter. Hesselbein stood fast, and managed to get both the company and the union behind her. That year, little Johnstown, Pennsylvania, had the highest per capita giving of any United Way campaign in the country. Of course, it was a temp role as far as Hesselbein was concerned, so the following year she handed it off.
In 1970, a trio of Johnstown business leaders who supported the Girl Scouts invited Hesselbein to lunch. They told her that they had chosen a new executive director of the local Girl Scout council. The previous one had left and the council was in serious financial trouble.
“How wonderful, who is it?” she asked.
“You,” they replied.
“I would never take a professional job,” she told them. “I am a volunteer.”
One of the businessmen was on the United Way board, and he said that if Hesselbein did not take the job and straighten out the finances, the Girl Scouts would lose the United Way partnership. She agreed to fill in for six months only, and then to step aside for an experienced professional. At fifty-four, she began what she calls her first professional job. She devoured management books, and a month in realized that the work fit her. She stayed for four years.