Some would say Mark Albion was sitting on top of the world, but nothing could be further from the truth.
The Harvard Business School professor was losing his passion for his work, although he found it hard to argue with the financial success he had achieved. Then, on the same day he bought his first Jaguar, he received a phone call that brought crushing news.
His mother had been diagnosed with cancer.
Albion calls that day “the wake-up call from hell,” and in the months that followed, he began to seriously ponder whether he indeed was living what he really considered a successful life. In 1988, he left Harvard to focus on his long-time love of writing. His goal was to help others who felt trapped by the traditional definition of success find work that fed not just their bank accounts, but their souls.
Today, Albion is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Making a Life, Making a Living.” In it, he tells his own story, along with those of other high-level CEOs who have successfully walked away from the corporate game and lived to succeed another day.
He recently sat down with SBN to share his thoughts about the changing definition of the word success.
Obviously, you had a big wake-up call to make you realize you had not achieved your definition of success. Were there earlier signs that something was wrong?
Absolutely. I had a great job at an institution I’d been involved with for years. I was on the right side. I was in the inner circle. I was a doted on younger person there who could do no wrong.
I had great colleagues, driven students and could call almost anyone in the country and get a response, including the president (of the United States). But I wasn’t excited about going to school every day. I was looking for other things to do.
There are signs for all of us, whether we’re not jumping out of bed in the morning or we don’t really enjoy talking about our work. We only begin to change when the pain of not changing is greater than the fear of changing.
For me, I think the pain really began to increase when everything happened with my mom and forced me to look at what I already knew was there and make a change.
Do you think this trend is an issue tied to the boomer generation or more a product of the time in which we’re living?
Most of us were very influenced by our parents. From my dad to this day, you measure a man’s success by how much money he makes. So a lot of us started off on exactly the same track.
What happened as boomers is we came out and pretty much followed that same path. Even though we rebelled against our parents during Vietnam, we pretty much held the party line. We all sort of came back to this traditional success mold and then at some point we looked around and said, “What am I doing here?”
One executive at Coca-Cola, a good friend of mine, said to me one day, “I used to march with Martin Luther King Jr. I haven’t done anything involved with civil rights in 10 years here at Coke. I haven’t seen my children except at corporate events. What has happened to me?”
So we begin to go through this process of trying to shed the “shoulds” of our life and figure out how authentic we are being to ourselves and who we really wanted to be as a kid, or how we pictured our lives.
What is the first piece of advice you would give someone thinking about making such a bold step in their own life?
Talk to the people around you, because you’re going to be surprised by how much support is out there. Most of us who go through this feel like there’s something wrong, like we’re crazy. When I talked to my friends at Harvard Business School, I couldn’t believe how many senior people said they totally understand.
I was the guy who was supposed to do this job. I was supposed to be at Harvard my whole life. A lot of people were counting on me to take that position and I thought they were going to be pissed as hell. Instead, they were incredibly supportive.
Many people don’t actually leave a company. They go talk to their boss about what’s making them unhappy. If you’re a valuable employee, many employers say they will help you work it out. We rarely tell people to quit right away. Very few people can even afford it.
What I did was build a bridge, and it took me two years. You create something else, so when you walk away, you’re not walking into the abyss.
What are the difficulties of staying on this new path you’ve chosen?
The old money and fame thing can really catch up to you. For example, my friends are people like Roger Ferguson, who is going to probably take over for Alan Greenspan. Another friend of mine, Larry Summers, is now Secretary of the Treasury.
I’ll see my friends in the news and I’ll say, “What the hell am I doing here?” Here I am trying to be a writer or something. I think there is still the keeping up with the Joneses phenomenon, that the traditional measures of success are hard to throw off.
It is really tough not to look for external validation. It takes a Dahli Lama-type person to really internally be strong enough to really go on your path and not be buffeted by the fact that maybe your income isn’t the same or many people don’t pick up the phone and call you back as quickly as they used to.
When you have a clear identity, I think it’s easier, and when you make these changes, there’s usually this period of time where your identification is very unclear.
I was Professor Mark Albion at Harvard Business School and now I’m Mark Albion.
How to reach: www.makingalife.com
Jim Vickers ([email protected]) is an associate editor at SBN.
