As business men and women, as leaders and entrepreneurs, our personal lives are brought to our workplace in many different ways. The challenges we face are not just technical in nature. As hard as some of us try, we can’t keep everything in separate and neat little boxes. Often, these challenges spill over. Personal adversity then becomes business adversity. Sometimes there is no way to distinguish the two, but you still need to find a way to lead because people are depending on you.
After my experience in Russia, I vowed to never be deceived again. I had worked hard to study business and people to get close to them and understand every nuance. I put down the books on affirmations and I read books on handwriting analysis, facial examination, and forensic accounting. I studied liars, cheats, and experts in fraud. I wanted to see them coming. I wanted to be prepared.
At this point in my life, at 35, I was glib about nothing. I was focused. I thought that I was doing all of the right things personally and professionally. I worked hard, I exercised daily, and I ate the right foods. I drove a safe car. I donated money to good causes. I had a beautiful and loving wife and great friends—hundreds of friends. I had a great company. Overall, life was fantastic; I didn’t think that it could get any better. Unfortunately, those feelings would be short-lived. The moment I thought that I was on top again was the very moment I was pushed off another mountain. The fall this time would be uglier, longer, and more painful.
Within a couple of weeks of speaking at Harvard, I would learn that my wife’s struggle with mental illness was worse than I could have imagined. She had two dominating problems: acute bulimia and a genetic pre-disposition to schizophrenia. She had struggled with bulimia since we first met as teenagers. We dated briefly as teens, but the struggle was too much for her to hide from a boyfriend, so she broke up with me. When we reconnected four years later, she appeared to have put her problems behind her. We resumed dating and soon after, her struggle with bulimia and anorexia returned. As with many ailments, there are varying degrees. She would be categorized as “acute.” At her worst, by her own admission, she would vomit 15 to 20 times a day.
Despite the severity of the problem, I thought it was surmountable. I was an eternal optimist. I would shower her with books and tapes on positive reinforcement, affirmations, and re-framing. It was a sea of people like Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Gary Zukav, and Marianne Williamson. I tried everything. Doctors, therapists, coaching, seminars with Anthony Robbins, but little of it stuck. She continued to struggle. I knew it was a serious issue. I knew it could have implications on our marriage and prospects for a family, but I believed that all of us have an issue to deal with and this was just hers. I thought to myself, So what if she has a couple problems? All of us have problems, including me.
When she was a teenager, those close to her knew of her struggle. However, now older, most thought she had overcome them. She hadn’t but I decided to keep her secret from friends, family, and coworkers. I wanted her to have the dignity and privacy to deal with this on her own terms. At times, it was very difficult. Her electrolytes were often imbalanced, so she would routinely pass out. I’d find her on the bathroom floor or closet and bring her back to bed until she was better. For years I called doctors looking for advice and direction. I tried to get her to go for longer-term stays at clinics that specialized in eating disorders, but she wouldn’t go.
Time marched on and her demeanor began to darken. She appeared to be displaying early symptoms of schizophrenia. This disease ran through one side of her family. Meanwhile, almost two decades of bulimia were causing her physical damage. The enamel on her teeth had worn out and they needed to be capped. She developed a heart murmur that seemed permanent. All of these issues weighed heavily on me. I worried every day that she might have a heart attack and that there was greater permanent internal damage on other organs. And now I worried that if indeed she had schizophrenia, her world would close in further.
Then, one day, in a letter to me, she confided that she had been lying about her whereabouts every day for more than a year. Almost every day, she would call me and tell me she was working late. How late? “Not sure” was always the answer. I told her it was fine and to take her time. I would make dinner and wait for her. On most nights she would show up at eight, sometimes nine. I was there, dinner table set, waiting patiently. I thought it was great; I admired her work ethic. I worked hard, and she was always supportive, so I returned the respect and support. I thought this is what you’re supposed to do in a relationship. But now, in this letter, I was reading about not just one lie but hundreds of lies.
At this point we had been friends for more than 20 years and in a relationship for 13 years, and I had full knowledge of her mental health the entire time. At least I thought I did; clearly, though, I knew only the tip of the iceberg. In the letter she said that she told me she was at work but then she would go out to binge. Sometimes she would frequent fast food restaurants and all-you-can-eat buffets while at other times she would just load up the car with food from the grocery store. She would sit in her car and eat enough food for 10 people, then purge.
I read all of this and felt horribly sad for her. I thought about the loneliness and desperation that she had been experiencing in those moments. After all we had been through to help her, none of it was getting better; in fact, it was getting worse. I asked her where she would go to do this, and she told me she couldn’t remember because she would black out or just have a complete disconnection to her actions. Of all of the things she had to say, it was her last answer that bothered me most.
“You blacked out?” I asked. She nodded.
“You don’t know where you were? Were you alone?”
She started to cry and replied, “I don’t know.”
My heart sank. It was so sad. All of the devotion and love and support; all of the years of protecting her and picking her up off the floor, and that’s where we were at: “I don’t know.”
As the days passed I thought about the hundreds of phone calls telling me she’d be late, and I wondered how many “I don’t knows” were involved. A few? A hundred? My mind constantly wondered about where she went, what she actually did, and whether she was alone. If she had lied to me so convincingly for such a long period of time, what was to stop her from telling more lies?
I actually tried to make peace and forgive her. I thought I could, but I couldn’t. After this admission, I couldn’t trust her with anything. Each day I became less trusting and less forgiving. If she told me the sky was blue, I would go check for myself. The feelings of resentment also grew. For so many years I had put her needs first. I supported her, encouraged her to greater happiness, and stood by her even though she was confronting serious health problems. I could have left a long time ago, but I didn’t. I had stayed through so many dark days and nights and now, here I was, feeling like a sucker. I had been deceived on a daily basis. Every day, I would look at her and wonder where the next lie was. After a time, I knew that this was no way for either of us to live. Two decades of friendship had ended, and we went our separate ways.
Like many that go through a divorce, I was living in a state of disillusionment and melancholy. You’re never really certain what to feel. You’re constantly questioning whether it was the right decision.
I was in this exact state of disenchantment when I saw a car racing toward me as I crossed an intersection. I knew my light was green but I also knew that the car headed straight for me was not slowing down. It’s quite an experience to watch two thousand pounds of steel hit you when the only thing separating you is a window and a door. I remember tensing and leaning into it, instinctively thinking I might stand a chance at stopping it with my shoulder. Well, it wasn’t a linebacker and this wasn’t pick-up football in the park. The car plowed me directly into a telephone poll.
I was lucky to be able to walk away from that accident. I didn’t break anything but I had plenty of pain. It would be difficult to walk over the next couple of months.
Shortly thereafter, as if being scripted for TV, right on cue, I received another incredulous surprise.
I discovered that the senior partner and principal founder of our turnaround consulting firm was keeping a second set of accounting books.
In our firm we had a practice of getting a deposit at the beginning of every engagement. Unlike law firms that typically bill weekly against a retainer and then replenish when empty, we held the deposit until the end of the engagement. When the last invoice was billed, we would generally deduct it against the deposit and return the remainder. In a consulting firm that specializes in working with distressed companies, things often slip through the cracks. In a crisis, things get lost or forgotten. The principal founder discovered that clients often forgot about their deposits. He would send them a final invoice, they’d pay it, and he wouldn’t remind them about their security deposit. Unless they explicitly asked for it, he wouldn’t return it, despite the fact that returning the deposit was clearly delineated in our contract.
When I discovered that one of my clients had not received his deposit nearly two months after the end of an engagement, I asked the senior partner about it, and he made no effort to hide his scam. He explained it to me in great detail and was proud of this balance sheet enhancement. He gleefully told me he’d been doing this for years. When I asked how much he had put aside, he informed me that it was a few hundred thousand dollars, and he showed me the list. Most of the clients were from before I joined the firm but there were a handful that were recent. I was upset but I looked for a solution to this problem.
I looked at him and said, “You screwed up. But that’s okay. What you did in the past is the past. But now, we cannot do this again. We’re going to return all of it, right now.”
However, in complete disgust, he said, “There’s no way we are returning it.”
He then explained that some of the companies were no longer in existence and wondered who we would send the money to. I suggested that we find creditors that had not received full repayment of their loans and offer them the money. If not them, then the employees who got short-changed when the company was closed. If not them, then any suppliers that had lost. In my mind, there was a long list of people that were entitled to this money. Essentially, everyone but us should have the money.
However, he dug in his heels and said, “We earned that money.”
I asked, “If we earned it, why have you been hiding this information? Why didn’t you just invoice for the services delivered?” I received no response.
Since I was getting nowhere with him, I went to the other partners in the firm, but their consensus was to let sleeping dogs be. I explained to them that I would call and tell people that we discovered an accounting error and this money needed to be returned. The more options I offered, the more resistance I received. The senior partner was defiant, and the others were lazy and cowardly. They had to think about their reputations and how to explain all of this once it was made public. They knew that the odds of anyone else finding this money was slim, so why make a fuss about it? In my mind, this was theft, but they believed it was something else. I’m not sure what they thought it was, but it was accounting. It was black and white. It was a number that went into a box that didn’t belong to us.
It was now very clear to me that I could no longer be a part of this firm. I couldn’t understand any of the behavior. We were very profitable, very successful, and trusted at high levels, so why take this money from struggling and suffering people? Why not return it? What would they do with the money? Distribute it amongst the partners? Why the greed? They had enough. How much is enough? None of this made sense and none of it was in my moral compass. I knew that small problems would become big problems. If they could take this money, what would they take next? If they could sleep easily with this act, it would only give them more resolve for the next one, and I wanted no part of it. I had learned my lesson from the past. If I went along with this, I was equally to blame for any consequences.
After my years of hard work and great success in helping to build the firm, I decided to walk away. I resigned and gave up my partnership stake. I hated having to leave many of my colleagues. They were very talented and of high ethics. I was upset at the notion of having to start over again, but like Russia, it was a path I wasn’t willing to follow. In Russia, there had been a clear line of criminality. Here, in the USA, it was a bit more ambiguous for some. But for me, to operate in this manner was a cold, soulless, and cowardly journey.
For most people, by this point, it would have seemed like it was enough—enough suffering, enough surprises, and enough loss. It was too much. In less than seven months, I lost my wife and my firm and had been plowed into a telephone pole by a speeding car. God, the Universe, Fate, Science, Human Nature…whomever was responsible, I thought they proved their point and would now move on.
But that wasn’t the case. It was only August—five more months left in this very long year.
My next car accident bordered on comical. It was as if God was taking a popcorn break from dramatic cinema.
The chiropractor looked at me and said, “You’re in good shape again.” He was conducting the final physical examination after my treatments for the first car accident. He said I was good to go. I felt good to go. I walked out the door a healthy man. Five minutes later I was T-boned again, just outside his office. Only this time it was on the passenger side of the car. This one, I didn’t see coming. I bounced around like a beat-up rag doll.
The police came, they filed a report, my car was towed away, and then I walked back into the chiropractor’s office for a brand-new examination and treatment.
The lawyers for the two accidents wrung their hands with joy; they knew that no doctor or judge could determine exactly which car accident had caused which injury. As such, despite the extensive ligament and soft tissue damage in my back and hips, I had to settle each case for basic expenses.
When I wasn’t with my chiropractor, I was with my internist and naturopath. My immune system had come close to a complete collapse through another strange set of circumstances. A bad rotisserie chicken left me fighting several different parasites, and a bad root canal left me filled with mercury. To heal myself I had to begin rounds of antibiotics and a three-month process of detoxing by administering chelation IVs, in which I was administered an amino acid intravenously that would bind with the toxins to help remove them. Three times a week I sat among cancer patients and people who had been exposed to large amounts of toxins, such as firemen. It was a grueling process, and I learned that toxins can be more harmful when they are leaving your body then when they entered. If you’re not careful, the process can cause more damage—and even death.
So, I continued on in this manner, always seeming to visit the dark side of life. Now it had crossed over from my business dealings into my personal life; not just with my interactions with others but in my relationship with my own body. I was in constant physical pain that involved my back, my nervous system, and my immune system. But Life wasn’t finished with me yet. The final stick in the eye would turn out to be an actual stick in the eye.
In late fall of 2002, I developed acute keratoconus, an eye disease that causes the cornea to weaken and morph. One day I had 20/20 vision and then the next I had 20/1600, with no prospect of ameliorating it with contact lenses or glasses. For some, a contact lens can be customized to fit but, in my case, it couldn’t. After consulting with three separate ophthalmologists, they all concluded that I would go blind and eventually require a cornea transplant for each eye. For all intents and purposes, I could not see out of my left eye. They told me that my right eye could go at any time too, but they weren’t certain when that might happen. It could be in 10 minutes or 10 years.
I was 35 years old. I had no wife, no company, and lousy health, and now I was well on my way to being legally blind. Welcome to adversity.
I lay on the floor in my living room and cursed out God, Jesus, the Universe, and everyone else I could think of. I was furious. All the studying in the world could not give me answers to what had just happened over the course of the year. It was as if some greater power had decided to endlessly torture me. I started to believe that I was cursed. That my life was just one giant cycle of pain and misery.
I yelled at the air, “I give up. Kill me. Just do it. You win. Take me out. Just KILL ME!”
I felt as if I had nothing to lose, not even faith. I had lost any sense of optimism or hope. The only certainty I had was that some degree of pain was headed my way. It hurt to walk, to eat, and now, even to see.
I wasn’t prepared to kill myself. I figured if there was a grand design to this torture, I’d eventually die. I spent months wallowing in self-pity, anger, and fear, resenting everyone and everything. I made lists of everything I had lost and would lose. I couldn’t figuratively and literally see a future for myself. I didn’t know what I would do. My mind continually raced with thoughts that I would be physically and financially dependent on other people for the rest of my life. I couldn’t understand how I went from leading people to having to be carried by them. I was convinced that there was no good answer except that I was meant to die young. So, day after day, I beat myself up with regrets as I waited for more bad news. I was certain that my death was imminent.
While waiting for my own funeral, I continued to ask questions. How did I miss so much? How did I miss my wife lying to me every single day for a year? How did I miss the senior partner keeping a separate set of financial records? Why all of the greed? How did people close to me cheat and betray me again? Why all of the car accidents? Why my vision? I counted on my eyes for everything. I needed them to study people, to make eye contact, and to read the room. I needed them to make friends and to understand how to connect with people. Gone were the days of business development conferences, intense meetings, and even driving a car. Gone were the days of taking referral sources out golfing—I couldn’t see the ball. Worse still, I had developed intense vertigo, so I had to stop most outdoor activities. Even walking was a challenge. I had to wear an eye patch over my left eye to avoid bumping into things or falling down as I walked.
Eventually, reluctantly, I accepted that I wasn’t dead. After months of beating myself up, I decided it was enough. I was getting nowhere complaining to myself and an invisible deity. I had to do something, anything.
I threw my laptop in the garbage and I put all of my books in storage. I decided that I was done with the business world. None of it mattered to me anymore. I didn’t have any answers for my life experiences and none seemed to be coming soon. I just thought, “I have to get out of here. There has to be a better way to live.”
I was looking for a dramatic change so I decided to go as far away from my current life as I could find on a map.
So, a couple of weeks after I made that decision, on New Year’s Eve of 2002, I boarded a plane.
Four days later I was in a mud hut in Outer Mongolia, 50 miles from the Kazakhstan border and 90 miles from the Siberian border. I had taken up residence with a family of nomads. I was fascinated by the way they lived, and I wanted to understand how they still chose to exist with little technology and few possessions. The entire world was chasing more and better, but these people were content to live as they had for thousands of years. I wanted to know why they were living a life that seemed to be the polar opposite of mine.
By day, on horseback, we would hunt with eagles. Similar to falconry, we would release an eagle that preyed on fox or rabbit. It was an activity the Mongols had been engaged in for more than 2,000 years. It was meant to help the long, cold winters pass a bit easier. We would ride four to six hours a day in temperatures that hovered around 20 below. At night, it would drop to 35 below freezing. Despite wearing multiple layers of high-tech clothing and wrapping up in a sophisticated sleeping bag, I was still cold. We had a stove that was lit early evening that warmed the hut until roughly 2 a.m., but once that fire went out, it was bitter cold until it was re-lit around 8 a.m. I tried hand warmers, several hats, three pairs of socks, but I couldn’t stay comfortable. Finally, after a few days of watching my hosts I realized that maybe I should do what they do. They looked cozy all day and all night. Wool was the solution. They gave me one of their hats, a coat, and several wool carpets. The hat and coat kept me warm with only one layer while on horseback. And, at night, I covered myself in carpets, I was as comfortable as I could ever be. It was a great lesson in paying attention to your surroundings and adapting accordingly. No technology could create products better than nature.
During the day, we ate very little—only a piece of rye bread, a sardine, and some tea. At night, we had boiled horse meat. The Mongols and their children liked music, so each night I would put portable, air-activated hand warmers on small speakers and my CD player and play an album. They liked Sinatra and Enya the best.
The Mongols were extremely peaceful. They spoke in whispers—they had no need to raise their voices. The next nearest home was five hours away. There were no roads, no cars, no electricity, and no phones. There was no semblance of the typical Western world. It was quiet all day and all night.
They taught me a great deal about living in harmony with nature and with each other. They looked each other in the eye when they spoke. They listened with complete attention, and they were extremely mindful of each other’s well-being. Every day they would sing to their horses, goats, and each other. When it got too cold outside, they brought the goats into their home to protect them from the frigid temperature. Their eagle was fed indoors like a family pet. They were without politics or religion and they didn’t believe in fences. They had very few possessions, but they were as happy as you could ever imagine. When I asked them if they were ever curious about traveling to the world outside of theirs, they politely said “no” and explained that they had everything they wanted right there. They had a sense of contentment and longed for nothing. I admired them and aspired to be more like them. I had spent years chasing and climbing. I had spent an equal amount of time losing and falling. Perhaps I needed to try it their way; content and at peace with whatever was around me.
When I returned home, that calm presence from the Mongols stayed with me. Every day, I became more captivated with the path toward peace and silence. I spent months learning about monks who devote their lives to prayer, work, and silence. I read books about Thomas Merton, a well-known monk who wrote extensively about incorporating many different practices of faith. He had worked hard to show the similarities in different religions. His focus was on bringing people together in a common pursuit: peace.
Thomas Merton spent many years at a Benedictine monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemane, which was situated on 2,500 acres in Trappist, Kentucky. I made several visits to the Abbey over a period of a few years. I was intrigued as to why anyone would choose to live in seclusion with minimal dialogue and go to mass nine times a day. I wanted to know what it would feel like to sing the Psalms all day, every day, and then spend the rest of the time alternating between doing physical work and being alone in quiet reflection. No phones or computers were allowed. Once you checked in as a visitor, your name was erased from the reservation book the objective was to be private and nondescript. Any clothing with images or messaging was also prohibited.
Over time, as I walked the property, read, and went to mass, I learned to live in prayer and silence. The quiet was unsettling at first, but then I came to seek it out. The more silence I experienced the more I wanted to experience it. I then started to visit the monastery for longer retreats. On one visit, the monks invited me to use their personal retreat space, a hermitage. Deeper into their property stood a simple home. Monks would leave the monastery for this cabin when they felt they needed to go further into their prayer and silence.
Like the Mongols, the Benedictines were extremely peaceful and nonjudgmental. Over the entrance to the monastery, written in cement, were the words “God Alone.” They believe that no one can tell you how to get through this world; that it is between you and God alone. For me, this was a profound message. In my life, up until then, someone was always telling me how to live. It was either a religion or it was Madison Avenue or family, friends, colleagues, partners. Everyone had the answer to what I needed to do in order to be happy, fulfilled, and redeemed in the afterlife. But now, I had met a group of men who had been living in continuous prayer since the fourth century and had a different belief. They said to me and everyone else that came to their door, “We’re here to give you a place to rest and eat. How you live is between you and God.”
In prayer, I spent most of my time forgiving others and praying for their well-being. But outside of prayer there was this message: “It’s just you and God.” It was an interesting dichotomy. Like most learning, one answer leads to more questions. At least, that’s how it was for me. I came to learn that God is about two things: love and life—mostly the love of life. We have the freedom to choose how we want to live, but what is most important is that we live and respect the life in others.
I continued on like this for a few years, delving deeper into spiritual and environmental worlds and studying life and practices that had carried over thousands of years—sometimes billions of years. I was trying to experience a greater resonance with life; trying to understand how to heal myself and heal others. I spent a lot of time in nature studying the natural, uninterrupted flow of life. As business leaders we are constantly trying to make order. We put things into a lot of boxes and rows and categories. We’re always straightening, analyzing, and reshaping and creating direction through strategy and mission. At this point in my life, I wanted to do none of that. I just wanted to observe and let be.
The more I looked at nature, the more clearly I understood the importance of inter-connectedness. Everything in the sky, land, and ocean had a purpose. Everything touched each other and helped the other grow. Often, one thing—one entity—had many functions and served many roles. There were days I would just look at a tree and wonder at how many things it does. It provides shade, shelter for birds and squirrels and their nests, a highway for ants and other bugs, branches for firewood, and oxygen for us to breathe. It even serves as a urinal for dogs. It sounded basic and simple, but it was anything but. It was teaching me to pay attention, to look closer with an open mind and see the value of life in all things living.
After years of studying peace and harmony, I went in the other direction; I wanted to learn more about pain. I then began a long journey reading and talking with those who help heal others: EMT, doctors, therapists, and trauma specialists. I spent a lot of time with a trauma specialist who eventually became a good friend. He has treated more than 16,000 people who have been through every possible trauma imaginable—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. He had treated people from the Oklahoma bombing and 9/11. He helped me understand the neurology behind the physical trapping of pain and how it manifests in erratic and debilitating behavior.
I learned that most of our traumas are hidden from us and that they only present themselves when we are ready to deal with them. They first manifest in annoyances and then escalate to throbbing, unshakeable pain. Eventually, if not dealt with, they result in deterioration of the cells in the body. Within time, it will manifest some form of disease. I learned the importance of shining light on problems and going to the source of their origin. It was a journey not to be feared. It was one to be celebrated. Once free of the trauma, our mind, body, and being is clear to experience new things in life. He had an incredible gift for helping guide people to release these traumas.
Despite working with me for years, we could never conclude exactly why I had lost my vision in such a dramatic fashion. Maybe my soul had seen too much suffering, or maybe my eyes had too much exposure to the sun. I didn’t know. The only thing that was clear was that my vision continued to worsen in both eyes.
As my vision weakened, my other senses became more sensitive and alert. My sense of hearing, smell, taste, and touch increased dramatically. I learned to turn off my head and live in my body and often would spend entire days with my eyes closed. I would just feel my way th