Living Life at Full Throttle

Posted on April 19, 2008

St. Mary’s College of California, Moraga, CA.
April 20, 2008.
St. Mary’s Graduate Business Program Commencement.

If you keep the key areas of your life in good shape you can do amazing things:  you don’t derail, you don’t lose energy, and you’re focused on the most important things in your life.  In this message to the Spring 2008 Graduating Class at St. Mary’s, Robert Sher presents the four prerequisites for living life at full throttle.

Written and delivered by Robert Sher for the             

Graduating Classes of St. Mary’s Graduate Business Program,   April 20, 2008

 

Good afternoon! I’m honored to be here speaking to you all. I think that they chose me to be a commencement speaker because they figured I’m similar to the graduates sitting here, and that those of you that are here as friends and family might be in a position similar to my family, who are sitting here too, right there. That’s my wife Renee, and my two children Ben and Jessica. Not to leave out my mother Phyllis and her husband Jim who wanted to come out and hear me speak as well.

I don’t know if I’m similar to the graduates here or not, but I’ll share a little about me and let you draw your own conclusions.

I’m a full-throttle guy. That means I detest wasting time or standing idle. I rest only when I must. I’m always doing something or thinking about something, and most of the time that something has pragmatic value. I’ve got goals and plans and dreams, always way more than I can tackle. My “things to do” list is always long, and it’s never depleted. I would rather do all of those things on that list right now, if I could, but I can’t. I get excited about new things all the time and add them on the list and often start on them, but it takes discipline for me to actually finish them and put them away. But I play for the long term, building in my life a solid base of relationships, knowledge, assets and experience. I often embark on difficult tasks with little short term pleasure or short term results, knowing that I’ll be leveraging that investment soon. There’s a similarity. You graduates knowingly put yourselves and your families through a grueling 18 month program, because you believed that you can leverage it going forward. And you will.

I think I’m a full-throttle guy, but my wife says I’m a workaholic in denial. But it’s not true! In fact, I’ll tell you that this whole notion of work vs. life balance is wrongheaded. My work is fun, and my life is what I work on.

See, they would have you believe that work is not part of life; that it is this other, separate, unpalatable thing. And they would have you believe that life isn’t work; that marriage is easy, and children never require work, and hobbies like guitar and golf and sewing are a breeze to learn. But children and music and marriage and a job you love are all about creating things and improving the world around us, and I just can’t get enough of that. Alright, I’ll admit to being an achievement-aholic. It just runs in my blood— and that would make it my mother’s fault!

If you want to live life to its fullest, you’ve got to live it at full throttle, all the time. That means you’ll be excited about what’s coming up next for you, in fact, you’ll have so many exciting opportunities coming that you’ll have to skip the good ones and choose only the great ones.

So what are the results of my life’s work for the 20 years since getting my MBA here? I was found by, and married my wife Renee and together we have kept the marriage strong for 15 years; helped create and am raising two amazing children; led four successful acquisitions of companies; ran as CEO, a successful company for 22 years; survived cancer; authored a book; built a solid personal financial base and continue to live comfortably and within our means; taught here at the graduate level for five years; wrote over 100 published articles, and successfully started a new career as a consulting CEO 16 months ago. The list is jumbled between professional and personal items because that’s the way life is — it is one life, not two.

I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, but I’m not satisfied. At 46 years, I have so much left to do for the remaining 54+ productive years of my life. Part of what I have left to achieve is leading my family to increased happiness and fulfillment, and leading my children forward to fulfill their potential. It’s easy for me to get distracted by my hobby of business, and my addiction to achievement in so many areas. Thankfully I have help. My children and my wife have figured me out (except for the workaholic part, which is not true), and they accept me for who I am. But they don’t let me run amok. They chase after me, drag me along, and otherwise keep reminding me about how much we all enjoy being together, wasting some time together, and achieving together. It’s the team that is my family that makes us all better. Without my family and the role they play, I couldn’t achieve as much as I do in the other parts of my life.

But what about when a powerful but absorbing opportunity — like getting an MBA — presents itself?

There are times in our lives when we have to push our balance to the edge – to tackle a big opportunity that will yield big benefits later on. That’s what your MBA is all about. So now, for a few months, you’ll need to neglect your continuing educational interests, and instead, focus on aspects of your life that you’ve been ignoring. This is a critical part of living life at full throttle: improving your health, tending to your family relationships and more. I want my life to be sustainably good — A fairly steady but fast paced stream of accomplishments over the years.

Those purposeful, “out of balance” chapters like getting an MBA are valuable but only if for a short burst, and only if they’re part of a greater plan. If they’re not, living life out of balance just causes all sorts of problems. Some people live lives tolerating negative elements like horrible relationships, rotten bosses or jobs, and tolerate their own destructive behaviors like spending beyond their means, for example. It’s hard to win this way and certainly hard to live life at full throttle. It doesn’t take much of this negative stuff to cause you to crash, which really wastes time and takes years to put all the pieces back together. Crashing could be a divorce from the person you were meant to be with, a serious illness, or bankruptcy–you get the idea. I work hard to flush the negative and the petty stuff out of my life.

What really helps me stay positive and have the courage to wash out the negative nasty things is a clear and steady pole star–imagine the North Star— but it’s my own star– that I’m attracted to and focused on achieving. A goal of sorts telling me what direction I should be heading.

I’ll tell you the story of discovering my pole star. It was at the start of 1991, a few years after I graduated from here that I saw that Tony Robbins was speaking for two hours on the peninsula. I’d been going through a several year period of self improvement and had been listening to and reading a lot of the well known thinkers in this area. I’d heard a lot about Tony, but had never read his books. I asked my girl friend of three months, now my wife, if she wanted to go with me, and she did. It was disheartening to see the number of groupies that seemed to idolize Tony rather than put his message into action in their own lives. I started to regret my decision to attend, but when he reached out and pushed all the thousands of us in the audience to write down our primary life goals, I did, right there and then. I’ve carried that list in my wallet ever since, written on someone else’s business card that happened to be in my pocket. In fact, if you want to see a scan of that card with my goals, I’ll e-mail it to you, along with the text of this talk–just give me your card before you leave–you never know, I might keep it in my wallet for the next 17 years….

We were supposed to list ten goals, but I only got four down before he moved on, and the first goal that popped to mind was to be a great leader. That’s become my pole star, my guiding vision. It’s what makes me jump out of bed every morning. A few months later I added a fifth goal relating to Renee. It’s all right here on this card. Most of what I do supports one or more of these goals, and I avoid doing things that distract me or take me away from these goals.

If you keep all the key areas of your life in good shape (like family, work, health and so on), you can do amazing things because you don’t de-rail, you don’t lose energy, and you’re focused on the most important things in your life. And you keep at it, building year after year.

So let me tell you the four prerequisites for Living Life at Full Throttle:

1. Allow no significant negative problems or looming disasters to brew that will cause you to lose control. Fly around the thunderstorms if you can and don’t create any yourself. Some of these are unavoidable, but the fewer the better.
2. Actively monitor the health of family relationships, physical health, career health, financial health, and the health of your network or the community you surround yourself with. At the first sign of a problem in any of them, you jump in to intervene and handle it. You run into the fire the moment you detect it — not run away from it.
3. All those areas in your life should be getting enough attention and resources from you to show steadily increasing health. If they’re not getting healthier, they are worsening. Balance the good things in your life with all the other good things in your life.
4. You will have a passion or set of passions that make you jump out of bed every morning.

My use of the words “full throttle” come from an old sustaining vision I had back in the 80’s when I had a lot of negative stuff in my life. I imagined myself flying a military jet, with failure in hot pursuit. When I was almost done for, miraculously, my throttle, which was already at the max, got an extension, and I was able to accelerate even more, and escape failure. It worked, both in my boyish imagination and in reality.

I’ve cleared much of the negative things from my life now, and realize that the way to fly full throttle sustainably and at maximum speed comes not by just escaping the negative, but by hotly pursuing your pole star or passion, while living a balanced life full of great things.

This coming Friday I’ll be experiencing an interesting confluence of it all. I’ll be sitting in a meeting room at an airfield hangar in Reno, NV, containing two flight ready Russian built MIG jet fighters. And at the table with me will be a team of leaders that really know what it’s like to fly a military jet at full throttle, with the enemy in hot pursuit. I’ll be leading a business planning session with a former commanding officer of Top Gun, the elite Navy aviator’s academy. His business offers the US military a low cost outsourcing option for adversary flight combat training. I know I’ll have at least one Blue Angel pilot in the bunch, and I can’t wait to find out about the rest of the team. As you can tell from my excitement, this isn’t a good opportunity — it’s a great one, right on track toward my pole star.

Congratulations for earning your degree. Get some rest, then live life at full throttle.