The Exception Experiment

This weekend, I’m heading to North Carolina to run a race called the Quest for the Crest 50k.

Now, there are three lies in this statement.

First, 50k, 50 kilometers, is a very specific distance. 31 miles, for us Americans. But this race, for some reason, is actually 33.5 miles,

Now, I know that sitting there reading this, in your comfortable chair and air conditioned room, two and a half miles doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I promise you that on “that” day and under “those” conditions, there’s a pretty good chance that those additional two point five miles…will be the ones that kill me.

But don’t worry, my wife assures me my life insurance is completely paid up.

But the bigger lies are the words “run” and “race,” because the Quest for the Crest involves running, I mean ”going,” up and over three mountains, including Mt. Mitchell, the highest point in the eastern United States, and there’s almost 12,000 feet of elevation gain over the course and 12,000 feet of descent, so, in all honesty, I will neither be racing nor, in most cases, running the Quest for the Crest “50k” this weekend.

Now, I’m not sharing this as a sort of therapy to allay my fears, although there is some comfort in making this confession – that I’m more than a little scared about this event that I voluntarily signed up for, paid money for and have been training for for months.

I share this to make the point that even after all the planning and thinking and miles and miles of running and hours and hours of climbing on the stairmaster (which is unarguably the most mind-numbing exercise known to mankind), I honestly don’t know if I’m prepared, don’t know what the outcome will be, and really don’t know exactly what I’ve gotten myself into.

And I’m okay with that.

You see, I’ve gotten used to doing things in my life that are the exception, rather than the norm; and, what I’ve come to realize, is that being the exception is actually what brings me joy, and, more than joy, it brings fulfillment and meaning to my life.

In fact, when I look at my life, my adult life, it has really been one big experiment – an exception experiment.

Now, as long as I’m using this as an opportunity for some self cleansing, a little confessional, this race isn’t the only thing in my life that I dove into headfirst without knowing exactly what I’d gotten myself into.

Since starting my business, Think Creative, almost 20 years ago, I’ve viewed it as an experiment, too, defining and redefining my vision, considering and reconsidering just what’s possible and trying and retrying new things with an open mind and an open heart all along the way.

I remember during the early days of Think Creative, when the business was just a few years old, I had this a-ha moment, that as long as I didn’t do anything too incredibly stupid (or as long as there wasn’t a worldwide recession caused by a bubble in the US subprime housing market bursting), well, that I could actually make a go of it.

And for those of you who own your own business, you know that that point where you realize you’re going to make it, that’s also the time you start thinking, “Ok, what is it I really want to achieve here? How do I actually define success? And, what’s my plan?”

For me, I knew that I wanted an agency with less hierarchy, more voices collaborating, a blurring of the lines that divided departments, and a place where everyone felt like he or she was contributing to something important. I wanted a place where we didn’t think about human resources, but instead, actual human beings.

Of course, once I’d defined what I wanted, I had to figure out how to get it. So I started looking around for models. I took friends to lunch, I read the trade magazines, I went to conferences, I asked Siri (if only that had been a thing in 2000!)... I was literally hoping to find some other company doing exactly what I wanted to do and just follow their path, replicate their plan, do what they had done.

But here’s the thing – when I looked around, I didn’t see anyone doing exactly what I wanted to do. I mean, believe me, there were plenty of cool agencies doing awesome work and hosting hilarious Halloween parties. There were plenty that seemed to have great clients and were making good money (at least the creative directors were driving cool cars) but none was exactly what I was trying to build.

So, there I was – a little lost, trying to figure out how to get where I wanted to go, but with no real plan.

Now, the best way I could describe what I was looking for was to say that I wanted a great culture, a happy culture, something that, frankly, I hadn’t experienced in my professional life. But as I started reading up on different philosophies around culture and workplace happiness, what I learned is that my work experience was not unusual, because “happiness at work” – well, that’s the exception, my friends.

Deloitte does a poll every year, asking US workers how they feel about their jobs, and, do you know what they’ve discovered? Workers in the United States hate their jobs. Any guesses as to what percentage of American workers will literally write on a survey “I hate my job”?

It’s 80%! Isn’t that incredible?

So, in other words, if you actually like your job, even a little, you are the exception.

And if you have a leadership role in a company in which more than 20% of your employees actually want to come to work on a given day (even if it’s not Tequila Tuesday), you are REALLY the exception.

Now, happiness is how I described my vision for the team I was developing, but my sights were actually set higher. I envisioned a team in which everyone felt connected to what we were trying to achieve – they understood the mission and our vision and were helping to realize that vision every day.

I knew that to achieve this goal, it would take more than a foosball table and a kegerator in the breakroom. It would take engagement.

The Gallup organization also does massive workplace surveys, and their aim is to determine what percentage of employees are engaged, what percent are disengaged and what percent are what they call actively disengaged - that means people who bring such negativity and toxicity into the workplace that their mere presence is actually moving the business backwards away from its goals. Tragic, right?

And do you know what Gallup has found? That about 70% of US workers are either disengaged or actively disengaged.

Man, that is sad!

But do you know what’s sadder? That over the 20 years that Gallup has been doing this polling – the percent of workers who are not helping companies achieve their goals has barely changed. Clearly we’re doing something wrong!

Well, not everyone because….if you’re part of the 30% that goes into work every day and are committed to helping your company achieve its goals, then you’re the exception.

And if your company has more than a third of its team members committed to your business goals and objectives, then you are REALLY the exception.

Once I became aware of how miserable and disengaged most employees are, I wanted to understand what actually makes people happy, and how I might create a work culture in which people were happy, fulfilled, and engaged.

One of the first things I stumbled onto in researching happiness was a TED talk by Shawn Achor. Shawn is this very cool researcher from Harvard studying happiness and productivity, and his talk is one of the most viewed in TED history. Now, there’s a ton of great insight in his talk – loads of statistics about how happiness makes you more productive, how organizations with happy cultures outperform those without, how happiness leads to quantifiable bottom line benefits – but here’s what really knocked me out.

Shawn explained that in American culture, we view happiness as a reward.

Happiness, he said, is not the thing that we Americans pursue, but a prize for achieving the things we pursue.

Let that sink in for just a minute.

This idea of happiness as a reward blew my mind because I lived like that for a long time, dreaming of the life I would live once I’d achieved the things I thought I was supposed to achieve, like a bigger paycheck, a bigger house, a bigger office, a bigger car. And I know I’m not the only one who spent time on the hamster wheel because this is America, where we’re taught to work hard, stress out, overcommit, over-caffeinate, buckle down, put our collective noses to the grindstone, brag about how busy we are, all with the hope that one day, once we’ve achieved whatever our benchmark is for success, well then...then we’ll take the time to be happy. Right?

Happiness, as Achor explains, is that thing that exists beyond the goal posts, a reward that will come after. After we’ve ignored and sacrificed the things that are truly important in our lives - our families, our health, our time with loved ones. This is the place where I would normally share stats about the prevalence of stress, anxiety, divorce rates, addiction and obesity in the United States, but I think you already get my point.

We ignore what actually matters in our lives, while we pursue some definition of success because we’ve promised ourselves that once we’ve achieved it, then we’ll take that trip, run that race, ride that motorcycle, learn to play the guitar, get scuba certified, go to cooking school, meet up with those college friends, do what makes us happy, be with people who make us happy, be happy.

But here’s the thing. In a country that values stress and is obsessed with material achievement, what we actually do when we achieve something is that we simply set another goal and move happiness again behind those new goal posts. In other words, we never make time for it, never make it a part of our daily lives, never actually make happiness a priority, much less a pursuit.

So, if you’re someone who actually makes happiness and fulfillment a part of your life and not just some nebulous reward that you’ll get around to at some point in the future, then, you guessed it, you are the exception.

Now, Shawn Achor’s illustration of our relationship between work and happiness really resonated with me, but I still wasn’t quite sure how to take that insight and translate it into a model for myself, much less a culture for my company.

Then I stumbled onto a book called Total Leadership by Stewart Friedman.

Friedman presented me with a very simple construct for looking at life. What he explained was that everything that’s important and meaningful in our lives falls into four realms. Anything and everything that we invest time and energy into can be classified into one of these four simple realms.

So, what are they? They’re fairly obvious - family, work, self and community.

Now, you can define these realms any way you want so they make sense in your life. My definition of family may be different than yours. What I do for “self” fulfillment may be different than yours. The community I want to contribute to may be different than yours, but if you think through your life, your day, where you commit time and energy, you’ll see that this makes sense.

If you’re getting something out of this piece of writing, then this time and experience would go in the “self” realm. When you make time later to binge watch Game of Thrones with your significant other or you pick up the phone to call your mom (I’m calling out my two college kids here) that goes in the family realm. And on and on. Four realms, that’s all.

Friedman elaborates on this idea with some simple insights. We all prioritize these realms differently, and if we are putting more time and energy into one that is less of a priority and less time into one that’s more of a priority, that’s where the friction in our lives comes from. That’s the root of a lot of our anxiety, tensions, sadness, nervousness and all those negative feelings that crop up so often.

And since managing negative emotions like these is the norm, if you go through life without them, then you are the exception big time.

In terms of solutions, Friedman’s first piece of advice is that we recognize those imbalances and find a way to reorganize our lives so that we put the appropriate amount of time and energy into the appropriately prioritized realm. In other words, we need to plan our lives so that we spend our time and energy doing the things that make us feel fulfilled instead of frustrated.

But Friedman followed this thought with another suggestion that blew me away, and at the same time made all the sense in the world. His suggestion: what if you could organize your life in such a way that you weren’t managing four separate realms at all, but instead you were living a life in which you were serving more than one or all of these realms at the same time?

That’s what I had been looking for.

Granted, Friedman’s reference points for crafting a life like this were pretty lofty – Gandhi, Buddha, Jesus – but I understood that, while I may not reach “that” bar, I at least had something to strive for. If I could figure out how to make a life that erased the lines between the four realms, then I would be the exception. And if I could figure out how to create a model for my company that allowed work to be a place where our team members filled multiple realms at the same time, then that would be a huge win, and we would be the exception, too, individually and as a company.

So that became the model I was looking for, the experiment, an exception experiment for myself as well as my team.

Today at Think Creative, we say that our purpose is to bring more thoughtfulness into the world. That means more thoughtful marketing strategies for our clients, more thought leadership in our industry and our community and more thoughtful ways to help people to be the best versions of themselves they can be.

We’re pretty confident that our way of looking at and defining success for our business is different than how most companies do these things, which makes us the exception. And we’re proud of that.

Personally, I try not to look at my day as segmented into “me” time, work time, family time and time that I give back to the community. Every day, throughout the day, I exercise, learn new stuff, work with our younger team members, sit on nonprofit boards, come up with new ideas, write, hang out with my wife and kids…it’s not perfect, by any means, but it makes sense and makes me aware of why I feel the way I feel throughout the day and in my life.

This moment is the perfect example. Right now, I’m filling the self realm because thinking about and sharing these ideas is personally fulfilling, and they are, in fact, part of how I try to set a good example for my kids and family, so that realm is being filled, and perhaps someone who is reading this will hire me to come speak, so the work realm is being filled, too.

Within our Think Creative team, we talk openly about our culture and our goals. We have a mantra that team members shouldn’t be worried about home while they’re at work or work while they’re at home, which has led to a policy we call flexibility with responsibility.

We take Quarterly Days On, volunteering all over the community. We conduct an annual Think-A-Thon, where the entire team donates 26.2 hours each of pro bono work for one nonprofit every year. We have Unexpected Accessory and Adventure Lunch day. We host quarterly Creative Campfires where we learn from thinkers and innovators outside our industry, and we work hard to create a judgment-free office where we feel confident sharing work and experimenting creatively.

And then, there’s our 4o Hour Sabbatical (40hoursabbatical.com). This started as a way to encourage our team members NOT to put off happiness, NOT to delay their desires to explore their interests and passions, and it has turned into something more incredible than I could have ever imagined.

Every year, each of our full-time team members has the opportunity to take a week to go pursue some goal, dream or idea. And this small gesture has made a huge impact on our team and our team members.

The first year we offered the 40 Hour Sabbatical, Diane used the time to learn how to play the guitar and wrote and recorded an original song. And since 85% of Americans regret never having learned to play an instrument, with a little support from Think Creative, Diane became an exception.

That same year, Kim used her sabbatical to learn to speak a little Italian and travelled to Italy to visit, for the first time, the cities where her great grandparents came from. And since 64% of Americans have never traveled outside this country, and 74% can’t speak a second language, Kim became an exception.

The next year, Sarah used her sabbatical to complete her scuba certification and make her first open water dive. And since fewer than 1% of Americans are scuba certified, Sarah became an exception, too.

Last year, Audrey used her sabbatical to work on her manuscript for a children’s book, for which, I am proud to say, she recently won a huge award and is about to sign with an agent. Now, I don’t know what percentage of Americans has a literary agent, but I’m quite certain it is an infinitesimally small percentage, so Audrey is absolutely an exception, too.

And right now, as I write these words, Kim is on her 2019 sabbatical, hiking part of the Appalachian Trail. And since less than .007% of Americans step onto the Appalachian Trail in any given year, Kim is an exception again.

I myself used my 40 Hour Sabbatical to complete a run across the state of Florida a couple years ago, but more importantly, I run a company where our team members like coming to work every day, are engaged and committed, are not stressed about home while they’re at work or work while they’re at home, and they’re not putting off happiness as a reward for some nebulous goal. Moreover, Think Creative will be 20 years old in just a few months, and since only 4% of companies in America survive even ten years, yes, we are an exception.

This is my life.

It’s one big experiment.

An exception experiment.

And that makes me happy.