The Big Story / My Exist Strategy
Three years ago I took up singing, taking lessons, joining choirs and really enjoying myself. In fact, I enjoyed it so much I gave up my 40-year, 5-days/a week tennis habit. In tennis, I kept getting depressingly worse, whereas my voice was getting gratifyingly better.
But I’ve stopped taking lessons and quit my choirs. I sing more than ever, seven or more public solos per week, but I realized there was no point, at my age, in getting any better. So instead of continuing to spend thousands of dollars on my own musical non-career, I’ve decided to back a young local star, 15-year-old Liza Catana.
My key insight was that it would take around seven years to achieve the kind of success I would find worth striving for, even making the assumption that there is something special about my voice, which is not a quantifiable fact. I look back on how I converted the quantifiable facts of my undergraduate grades and GMAT scores into earning first a PhD and then tenure as a business professor. I know how to wage that sort of campaign, but I think it would be silly to do so for myself again. I’d be 72 before I achieved any success I would value.
The same successful campaign for a 15 year old leaves her only 22, with a full life to enjoy the kind of achievement I richly appreciated as a college professor. I am frankly a bit embarrassed at this stage in my life to strive for more personal glory, as it seems pointless and a bit greedy. I will vicariously much more enjoy Liza’s.
I am so not alone in this. A shining example of our community’s generosity towards our youth is the Take Stock in Children program. Like me, dozens of volunteer mentors and generous donors work for years to help young people, not their own children, get into college. They, too, have achieved their own life goals, and can find no greater satisfaction than in helping a young person achieve theirs.
Some years ago I offered a specific kind of volunteer mentoring to our school district, but they have never taken me up on it. At that time, a Key West High grad nailed a national-level top score on his SATs. Then he went to a second-tier college.
It reminded me of my doing the same thing in my high school. No one there had a background for counseling anyone with the options I had. I applied only to two technical schools, and got a free ride at MIT, but it would have been better to have gone to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or Cal Tech as an undergrad. What I know now could be of tremendous help to a local kid with similar options.
Our egalitarian public education system aims mainly at the middle range. So it’s the job of folks like us, who are abundant here, to help polish our young diamonds in the rough.
My challenge in helping Liza is that I can’t personally advise her performance, as she is already better than me. The kind of help I’ll provide will be primarily financial, paying for extra lessons and travel beyond the stellar support her folks are already giving her. I would appreciate ideas from our local musical talent as to how best to further her training to get to the national level. I’ll also be a motivator and guide to take her to that level, my naturally aggressive pushiness and overconfidence being key ingredients in making it to the top in any field.
What helped me make this wonderful decision was a prostate biopsy a year ago confirming my high PSA. I realized I shouldn’t be waiting for my three choirs to dole out their limited amount of available solos to me, around four a year, when I could make my own. Life is short, and carpe diem!
In print, space is money, and the paper column ends here. But our eBlast electrons are cheap, and in general I will ramble on with less important personal stories in that medium. Today, that will be the amusing and humble way I have created my seven solos each week. If you wish, then, I’ll see you in the eBlast.
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