You have built that weekend for other people. The offsite, the team dinner, the session where everybody finally says the true thing. You planned it, you ran it, you watched it work. Then you drove home and put your bag down in a quiet house. If you are the one who makes the room for everybody else, this last day is for you.
renew to be Alive…
I was about 33, and somehow in charge of the church men’s retreat, standing on the roof of my car in the middle of the wilderness holding a cell phone in the air. No program. No plan. A cabin full of men arriving in a few hours expecting one. I was trying to get 1 bar of signal to reach my father-in-law, a minister, to ask him what on earth you do with a weekend like this.
I do not remember what he said. I remember the lasagna. Somebody had bought the giant warehouse-club pan. I missed the directions: You put it on an Oven Sheet. When I picked it up to serve, the pan folded, dumping the lasagna on the oven door… conveniently underneath. Standing there with no program, and now no dinner, there was a stunned silence. A man I barely knew looked at it, said “No problem!!!,” scraped it back into the pan with a spatula, and put it back in the oven. We ate it. We named it. Oven Door Lasagna. 30 years later, that men’s group is still going, and its tagline is the truest thing I know about a career: Man has a Plan, God has a Purpose.
Alive lifted the curse…
Eddie Vedder was the last piece of the band and the piece that made it a band. Stone had the riffs. Jeff had the bass and the business sense. Mike had the solo, which the guitar magazines still rank among the best ever played. What the tape from San Diego brought was a voice that meant it, and a man who, for the first years, would climb the lighting rig and hang from the stage roof while he sang, because he had no other way to say how much he meant it. Death-defying is the only word for it.
Then something happened that Eddie did not plan, and it is the reason this week exists. Alive and even Pearl Jam itself… came from Eddie’s deepest secret – a curse of not knowing his real father until … it was too late…
…and what did they sing back?
Night after night, the crowd sang the chorus back to him. And they were not singing a curse. They were singing it the way you sing something you are grateful for. A song about a boy finding out the worst news of his life became, in the mouths of a crowd, a song about being here at all. In 2006, on VH1 Storytellers, Eddie said it as plainly as he has said anything: “They lifted the curse. The audience changed the meaning for me.”
As a leader, read that again. The people around him sang it back another way. And the 2nd meaning is the one that survived, because it was the one that was true for everyone else in the room. You do not always get to decide what your work means. The people who sing it back do.
Who keeps you Alive?
Labor Day is tomorrow. The push starts Tuesday. Everything you have engaged, managed, partnered, observed, wondered about, and executed this week … the tape you gave away, the map you drew, the daily call, the letter you did not send, the seat you chose, the calendar you rebuilt … all of it runs on 1 thing you cannot supply yourself. Somebody has to sing it back.
So here is the practice for the last day of this week, and the last day of the summer. Name 3 people who sing it back. Not your team, they work for you. Not your boss. 3 people who have seen your work, who would tell you what it means to them without being asked, and who would scrape the lasagna back into the pan and say “No problem.” If you cannot name 3, you have found the fall’s first project. If you can, and you have not talked to them since spring, you have found the 2nd.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: before Tuesday, write down the 3 people who sing it back. Send 1 of them a note today that says only: thank you for what you have said about my work; it changed what it meant to me.
Those men saved my life. I do not mean that as a figure of speech. There were seasons in the middle of my corporate run when a room full of men who expected me to show up was the thing that kept me Alive. That is the renew question, and it is the last one of this week: are you investing in yourself the way you invest in your business … and who is doing the investing when you cannot?
Being 1 of the 3 for a leader who has never had them is the best part of this work. We can start there… Schedule that here.
The men scraped the lasagna back into the pan, and I have been here ever since. Eddie wrote a curse, a crowd sang it back as a blessing, and 35 years later the last word of the week is still the first word that voice ever sang … Alive.
