"A teacher affects eternity, he never knows where his influence stops."
Henry Brooks Adams
Over an excellent lunch at the Oyster Bar (my red blood count is responding, by the way), my friend, a co-investor and co-director with me in companies that we helped to build, was kind enough to suggest that I had had influence similar to that of a teacher, through mentoring managements of companies and younger colleagues through the years. To my surprise, he said that he himself sometimes thinks about what I might say or do in a given circumstance. Because of the great esteem in which I hold this very decent and successful man, I must admit that I was not only flattered at the time, but also find myself pondering what he had to say. (He also urged that I write something, other than in my blog, about my experiences in business, which I have never done. I have never been convinced that I have anything original, of any consequence, to say about business. I could tell some pretty good war stories, but I would have to fictionalize many of them to protect the guilty-- and some of the innocent!)
As I think about Adams's quotation, I think it is probably true that all of us influence others, for good and for ill, if only in our personal lives and decisions, far more than we realize. Certainly I have been startled many times over the years when someone has mentioned to me how much he or she has applied in his or her life something I said to them fifteen or twenty years ago-- which I invariably have no remembrance of ever saying. (I never had a great memory, even when I was young.) In my career, I certainly did not have as much opportunity to influence others as does a lifelong teacher. Nevertheless, as I think about it, the nature of my career inexorably entailed affecting a fair number of people's lives.
From 1966, when I got out of training class on Wall Street and became assistant to the director of research at Reynolds & Co., I was involved in the hiring, firing, promoting, and demoting of people throughout my career. As a private investor and venture capitalist, I invested in well over eighty other privately held companies, in many of which I was directly and indirectly influential. Managements and co-investors at least have to pretend to pay some attention to you when you own voting shares, when you may be willing to invest more, and when you perhaps sit on the investee company's board of directors and compensation committee. In addition, I sat on the boards of publicly held companies and not-for-profit institutions. Most such responsibilities require making some difficult decisions that affect other people's lives. With the best of wills, not all decisions prove to be wise, and certainly many are viewed as negative and hurtful by people directly and indirectly affected. Ironically, many people who are cheered by a decision take the wrong message from it, and many who disagree with a decision, and dislike you for making it, learn from it-- perhaps consciously, perhaps not-- and improve their lives as a result.
Recently, I have been asked several times what I did best in my career. I think I hit my peak at about age 12 when I trained my Dalmatian, Colonel, for obedience trials. Otherwise, I think that I was best-- for which I have been immodest enough to credit myself elsewhere in this blog-- at giving people, particularly young people, a chance to do things for which they were ostensibly not qualified and which often had not occurred to them to try. Most succeeded at their new opportunity. Sometimes I suppose I "mentored" them intensively, sometimes not. But I never felt comfortable being called a mentor. I always felt that I was learning so fast, because I had so much to learn, that I was hardly in a position to regard myself as a mentor.
How does one define eternity? For me, it will last as long as the human race exists. I do not think that the human race, or our planet, or our solar system, will last forever. But I do accept that there is a secular eternity as long as human beings exist; as an imperfect being, I hope that the good that I have contributed to it outweighs the bad. As I think about it, I attribute most of my failings, other than mistakes in judgement, to cowardice. I am still trying to muster courage. It is never too late for self improvement!
