There is a version of that question sitting in your calendar. The note from HR lands, the one that says 10 years, and you read it twice. What you feel is not pride and it is not regret. It is the quiet arithmetic that you have never once decided to be here. You just did not leave. If that landed, this one is for you.
My wonder in being Alive…
I was CHOSEN. That is the word my family used, and it is the word I still use. My parents got a phone call, drove 5 hours south to The Methodist Home in San Antonio, and came home with a baby. My birth mother put her own early life on hold for nearly a year to make that happen, a wonderful and difficult decision that gave me a family crafted, as far as I can tell, specifically for me. I have marinated in music for as long as I can remember, and I have never been able to say whether that came in the blood or in the house. Being adopted keeps that question Alive.
Eddie Vedder was raised as Edward Mueller, believing the man in the house was his father. In his late teens, after his mother and that man divorced, he learned the truth: his biological father was a man named Edward Severson, and he had already died of multiple sclerosis. The same fact I was handed early, as a gift. Handed to him in his late teens, backwards, with the door already closed.
…and if you need to wonder…
He carried that to San Diego, and when the cassette I wrote about on Monday arrived from Seattle, he went surfing, came back, and wrote his father into 3 songs in a single sitting. The first thing the voice of Pearl Jam ever said, on a song called “Alive,” was the story of finding out.
That is where this week’s theme was born, and I am saving that song for Sunday. Today is about the question that story leaves behind, the one wonder asks on a Friday: is this still where you want to be, and are you the best person for it?
What about Alive renews you?
In the summer of 2000, at a festival in Denmark, 9 fans died in a crowd crush during Pearl Jam’s set. The band stopped playing, went home, and seriously talked about whether to go on at all. Their first show after that was in Virginia Beach, and in a hotel room the night before, Eddie wrote a song, in his words, “to reassure myself that this is going to be all right.” He called it “I Am Mine.” At a show in New Orleans 3 years later he told the crowd what it was about: “This song is about what’s inside you. You own it, and you have the freedom for it to come out.”
It opened the next record, Riot Act, in 2002, and it was the first single. Matt Cameron has now been the drummer of Pearl Jam for 28 years, longer than anyone who came before him, and the band’s own history says it plainly: he joined “on a temporary basis, but he soon became a permanent replacement.” He said of the song… “…it has all the elements this band is known for: strong lyrics, strong hook, and a good sense of melody.” The “adopted” drummer, 4 years in, explaining why the song that says “I own this” opens the record. Of course it does.
… wonder what Alive means to you?
It is the Tuesday after the offsite. Somebody 2 levels down asks you, half joking, in the hallway, whether you will still be here in 5 years. You say something warm and true and completely non-committal, and they laugh, and it stays with you the rest of the afternoon, because you do not actually know.
So … when did you last choose it, and who heard you?
I have coached professionally for nearly 20 years, well over the 10,000 hours you hear about for Mastery. The ones I love the most… Senior, Technical, Quietly the best at developing the people around them, and completely unsure whether the seat they are in is the one they had chosen or the one they had failed to leave. Conscientious, so they keep doing the job beautifully… but are they really still Alive?
The question is whether you would choose it again tomorrow if the seat were empty. Matt Cameron would. My parents drove 5 hours to say yes to a question they could have let pass. Eddie found out as a teenager that nobody had asked him, and spent a career answering for himself.
And the balance, for the quiet leader, the one that is hard: wonder is a Friday word, but the answer has to be spoken sooner than you would like. If you choose the seat, say so, out loud, to the people who report to you, earlier than feels natural. If you do not, say that too, sooner, to the 1 person who can help you leave it well. Staying Alive in a role is choosing it in public.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: answer the first Job SEARCH question on paper, 2 lines: is this still where I want to be, and am I the best person for it. Then read it to 1 person who will remember you said it.
Being the person a leader reads that answer to is a large part of this work. We can start there… Schedule that here.
I was CHOSEN, and I have spent a career learning to choose back. Eddie wrote it down in a hotel room the night before the hardest show of his life, so he would remember whose it was … I Am Mine.
