My father told me three things he would later come to regret.
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| Deer Diary |
Usually it was my habit of ignoring his instructions that made him angry. Actually paying attention to his counsel, then applying it in ways that he did not expect or approve of, that’s what really put a burr under his saddle. The saddest part is, upsetting him was never my intention. It just seemed to happen regardless of my behavior.
Dad seldom gave advice. He preferred directives, usually preceded by the phrase, “You’re doing that wrong”, or “Here, let me show you something”, which was really just his other way of saying, “You’re doing that wrong.”
The most useful and lasting advice Dad had to offer came from his candid observations.
He couldn't go into a McDonalds, for example, without marveling at the organizational efficiency of the place. He always commented on the unidirectional flow of raw materials from the back of the building to the front, with value added along the way. What didn’t go out the front doors and into waiting cars, he noted, was neatly channeled into trashcans, and finally cycled in an efficient stream to the dumpster out back. Every action, every stop along the way was planned and executed for maximizing profit. He all but glowed over the prospect of cause, effect, and the managerial control that made it all work.
This marriage of knowledge, organization, and administrative power were epitomized by the university medical center where he worked, personified by the doctors whose budgets he managed, whose retirements he planned, whose paychecks he signed at the close of every month.
Dad practically worshipped order and control. His professional world functioned according to plan, with strict adherence to the dictates of established processes and concrete calendar deadlines. Things worked because people worked to keep things working. It wasn’t supposed to be fun.
Creative endeavors were a sideline, to be indulged only after the real work was finished. Even then, creativity should be productive. Practical. Exploration for its own sake was an unsupportable proposition, indistinguishable from play – which is why his occasional epiphanies to the contrary stood out in such stark contrast to his overall worldview, and carried so much more weight.
Of the many opinions, directives, examples, orders, platitudes and heartfelt paternal memoranda Dad offered over the years, only a few somehow found their way through my adolescent armor, took root in my mind, and burrowed in to stay. They may have been issued from his castle of practical conservatism, but once filtered through the rebellious prism of my rationally contrarian personality, these three recommendations did more to convince me to pursue my own devices and fulfill my personal, creative agendas:
1. “An academic degree is like a bus ticket. If you don’t want to go where the ticket takes you, there’s no reason to waste your time getting it.”
2. “Most people are too busy making a living to ever make any money.”
3. “It doesn’t matter what you do for a living, as long as you can pay the bills.”
“An academic degree is like a bus ticket.”
Academic medicine is a process marked by an endless series of milestones: diplomas, degrees, certifications, fellowships, continuing education and re-certification programs. After medical school comes the residency match, the pyramid system, and specialty board certification, followed by competition for positions in fellowship programs, election to national and international specialty colleges and professional societies, and hierarchal status within these same organizations. The academic career track provides even more markers of success (or lack thereof), in research and publication, assistant and associate professorships, committee assignments, and department administration.
As a surgical intern, all of these opportunities were laid out before me. If I worked hard enough, kept my nose clean, kept my mouth shut, did everything I was told without complaint, anticipated pitfalls, kept up with my reading, and behaved responsibly, one day I could make it all the way to Chief Resident. I might be offered a fellowship, then asked to stay on as an attending physician, and work my way up the academic ladder. If I proved to be good enough at medicine and politics, I might even enter the realm of administrative decision making.
Yes, the road to being a surgeon was rough. I’d worked hard to buy the ticket, and found my seat on the bus. Once I got far enough along the path to see where that road was leading, though, I decided I didn't want to go there after all.
Why? In a word, it wasn’t fun.
(“Work isn't supposed to be fun! That’s why they call it work!”)
I needed a ticket to an enjoyable life. I didn’t need a ticket to academic surgery. So why not go for a solo practice? Just hang out my shingle and …
Non-academic practices have pecking orders that rival the educational model, with rewards correspondingly based on competitive performance and supervisory review of board certification, licensure, association membership, continuing education and hospital affiliation. In addition, a solo medical practice offered all the hazards and pitfalls of self-employment plus the added burden of malpractice liability - without any preparatory business training, and peoples’ lives hanging in the balance.
I didn’t want a ticket to go there, either.
So, what do you do when you buy a ticket, let it take you where you thought you wanted to go, then find out upon arrival you don't really want to be there? I’d earned my ticket to medical school, and gave doctoring my best shot. More important, I took an oath as a physician, and I meant it: Primo Non Nocere (First, Do No Harm). If my heart wasn’t in it, the most responsible way for me to do no harm was to exit, stage right. But if you do that, what is waiting for you in the wings? Are you allowed to get a ticket to someplace else? And if so, where did I want to go?
I didn't know. If only my dad had offered some guiding insights for the uncertain traveller…
“Most people are too busy making a living to ever make any money.”
Dad’s general philosophy allowed that people who worked (to keep things working) did so grudgingly, and only because it was the only way they could put food on the table. Most people, in his view, were lazy, and, given the opportunity to stop working and sponge off of society, would do so at a moment’s notice, and happily keep at it for the rest of their lives. This was fact.
But he could also see that doing right by society, holding down a regular job and providing your family rarely allowed anyone to get ahead. To become wealthy, you had to have an angle. You had to be clever, and work extra hard to come up with an original idea, then develop and promote that idea until it finally paid off.
He wasn’t talking about pipe dreams. He was talking about ideas that had real potential in the marketplace. Unfortunately, he noted, few people had the time, the energy or the intellectual and financial resources to take a concept from the idea stage to the store shelves at Wal-Mart.
If people are too busy making a living to accumulate wealth, it follows that someone intent on moneymaking should not worry so much about the day-to-day cares of bill paying. Rather they should lower immediate expectations, minimize their cost of living in the short term, and spend whatever resources they have carefully, selfishly creating the environment and the means to produce something original. If they succeed, they’re winners. If not, then they have to go back to the grind of daily labor – and pay off all the debt they’d racked up by following their dreams.
Legendary recording artist Sam Cook announced in his late teens that he was never going to get a job. His family was appalled. They knew that if you didn't work, you didn't eat.
For his part, Cook observed that people in his family who worked for an hourly wage got paid on Friday, and were broke again the following Monday. They existed to barely make ends meet, in an endless cycle of labor and debt. Sam Cook wanted more than that. He broke away from the family mold, followed his talent, and went on to become one of the most successful, most influential performers of his time.
I think Dad would have approved of Sam Cook. He certainly approved of Elvis Presley, a man with whom he identified at a basic level. Elvis was a truck driver from the country, who took a chance on his talent, and made it to the top of the list. Elvis made something of himself. He succeeded, against all odds.
Both Sam Cook and Elvis Presley succeeded in unlikely careers because of their understanding that they each had a remarkable talent, and to capitalize on that talent, they would have to step boldly away from traditional societal and professional roles. Dad admired that, because they succeeded.
He also, once, admired an artist – for his work, to be sure, but mostly for his business acumen.
Clark Bailey was an art professor at the Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts, where my father served as the school’s business administrator. An accomplished metal sculptor, Bailey wrought wonderfully sinuous human figures and abstract forms from such simple, available materials as coat hangers and car bumpers. By the time we came to know him, the artist had achieved a certain level of national recognition, and was making the best of it.
My father, whose signature appeared on the professor’s monthly paychecks (and likely his income tax forms as well), was well acquainted with the artist’s finances, and his sources of income both on campus and off:
“That Clark Bailey has the world by the tail, let me tell you! He’s the only artist I know who found a way to beat the system, and boy he beats it like a drum.”
Clark Bailey found a way to make a living that also left him plenty of free time to make money. His talent for doing so was separate from his artistic ability. Making art was a requirement of his chosen profession; making money was a function of his ability to use his art-making time to make business connections as well, and to put those connections to good use.
“I was over at his house last weekend for a cookout, and he took me out to his garage to show me his collection of sculptures. Most people have no idea how many he has done, and he likes to keep it that way. That’s his secret. Now, toward the end of the year, he’ll decide how much money he wants to make, in addition to his salary. Then, he says ‘I’ll sell that one, that one, and that one.’ Those are the ones he’ll release to the galleries for sale. The rest he keeps in mothballs until next year. This guy literally sets his own pay scale! Now that’s freedom, I’ll tell you. The man is more than a good artist. He’s a brilliant businessman.”
Create a consistent product line. Build demand. Manage the market. Got it. I don't know why that story wedged its way into the mind of a pre-teen whose only career interest was to someday get to medical school, but when it did, it sunk deep, permanent roots.
The other enduring lesson I learned from Mr. Bailey was the urgency to create now, today, while you still can. Clark Bailey’s promising career was cut short in a hunting accident, just about the time I was entering high school. His passing reinforced the unspoken imperative given by my mother’s premature death: Your life comes with an expiration date, and it’s sooner than you think. Don’t put off happiness for some point in the future. You may not last that long.
“It doesn’t matter what you do for a living…”
There was something else my father told me, about a man he once met in the mountains of eastern Arkansas, back in the 1950’s. It was meant to be an object lesson in laziness:
“He was as poor as a church mouse, this fellow, lived way up in the middle of the woods. A real Hillbilly. This man had nothing more than a shack to live in, and an outhouse, and an old dog for company. He kept a little garden out back, I guess, but mostly he ate whatever he was able to shoot.
“What money he made came to him in the summer and fall, when he would act as a guide for people who wanted to fish in the mountain lakes, or hunt up in the hills. He had no idea how poor he was. I once heard him brag to us city folks how foolish he thought we were:
‘I work two, three months out of the year, taking city-slickers up to the hills to catch fish or shoot some deer. I figger I’m walkin’ up that a-way anyhow, so what’s it to me if they want to foller along? They give me a hunnert dollars for it. A hunnert dollars! Come wintertime I can make three thousand, easy as that. The rest of the year I stay in my cabin, hunt and fish when I want to, come and go as I please. I don’t know many city folk as rich as that.’”
I don’t know many, either.
Dad’s reason for telling me this story was cautionary: Don't sell yourself short.
Instead I took it as a grand parable: Decide what makes you happy, and pay no attention to how others judge your success.
In my first half-century on the planet, I’ve been a student, a performer, a union laborer, a doctor, and an artist. According to many who have shared their opinions with me over the years, my father chief among them, the thing I was supposed to be best at was medicine.
Sorry, Pop. I’m much happier drawing pictures for a living.
I had been drawing pictures for twenty years when my father dropped by the studio for an unexpected visit. He rarely visited our shop, and his discomfort was apparent, as it always was when he saw me in the context of my art. That day, though, he seemed to have come to a place of resignation, if not acceptance. Whatever it was that led to his reluctant change of heart, I would never know. Maybe it just took that long to realize that art for me was more than a distracting sideline, or to acknowledge that with the passage of so much time away from the hospital, I would never be able to catch up with the medical advances required to go back into practice.
As he looked around the studio, its walls filled with my drawings and my wife’s paintings, he seemed to relax for a moment.
He sighed audibly, and said, “Son, I don't know what you do. I don't know why you do it. But you seem happy. You always seem to find a way to keep yourself fed… and you‘ve never once asked me for money.”
That’s as close to praise as I ever could have expected from my father the accountant, and far more than I’d ever hoped for.
I hope at some point that he realized that whatever success I’d achieved came mostly from listening to his advice.
