johnmaconline

I’ve noticed a curious mind-body confusion. 

For me, it’s my thumb. My thumb checks regularly. If it finds it, no big deal. I don’t even think about it. But when it doesn’t, my thumb throws up the red flags that I can’t ignore it. I can’t stop noticing the absence of it. 

I’m talking about my wedding ring. My thumb has been through this before, so it knows the drill. 

I lost my first wedding ring in the sand at the edge of the Pacific ocean. 

Two years into our marriage, my wife and I traveled to Hawaii. My favorite place was a wicked body-surfing beach just past the Halona blowhole on Koko Head — Sandy Beach. This was the only time in my (admittedly limited) body surfing experience where I purposely sought out the small waves. Balancing right along the edge of exhilarating and terrifying. 

After one particularly turbulent ride, I extracted myself from the sand, and my thumb told me immediately. It was gone. I remember constantly thinking about its absence. 

So I got another one quickly, which served me until a few days ago. I lost this second one to rheumatoid arthritis. 

Now my thumb is aggravated again. I can’t not notice its absence. From one perspective, this mind-body confusion makes sense. My ring was a constant physical presence.

I wonder, though, if the real confusion comes from the story I tell myself about the ring. 

If there’s one thing that I excel at — truly top of the heap — it’s being mediocre.

Here are some proverbs that have served me well in my dance to the top of mediocrity.

Never Quit
Take No Risk
Have No Fun
Blame Others
Wait Your Turn
Choose Comfort
Have No Regrets
Follow the Money
Never Be Content
Blame The System
Think Too Far Ahead
See Before You Believe
Worry About Getting Got
Look for the Straight Line
Let Society Define Success
Hope For a Promotion and Raise
Always Be the Smartest in the Room
Always Protect Yourself from Emotional Danger

This is a great system, and I can teach it to you because, as it turns out, I’m also a mediocrity coach. If you’d like to up your mediocre game, hit me up.

I know the exact moment we sealed our destiny. 

And the shame of it was that I had failed to learn the lesson from the Gladys affair. That should have taught me to embrace the opportunities of the future rather than shrinking into the soft pillow of the past. 

The executives at Agere looked at the challenge before them and failed to see the opportunity. All they saw was what had been taken away. They contracted rather than expanded. 

I did exactly the same thing.

The critical moment for our student housing business came when we decided to stay the course and play the hand we already held rather than expand toward possibilities. We had started on the journey of replacing on of our old apartment houses with a brand new, state of the art building. We had the idea, zoning, outline of a design, and the architect on standby. 

And then we backed down. We got cold feet and said no. 

Our reasons were sound. You might recognize them from your past as well. 

I had little experience. 
It would be hard.
What if it doesn’t work?
It was risky.

Therefore, we failed to see where the future was moving — what students wanted, what we should provide, and how we could give it to them. 

Therefore, I played small. I stuck with what I had and what I knew. I hadn’t learned my lesson. 

I had only piled up more regrets.

I’m an engineer.

That’s a description of both my vocation and personality. Knowing that now you know how to motivate me. 

For example, an engineer likes to make stuff. I like to make stuff. In fact, I’ve built my entire career and most hobbies around making stuff. My engineer friends are the same. 

Corporate executive, politician, or church leader — tell me a story that connects what I’m making to how it matters.

Of course, the fact that I’m an engineer is just the story I tell myself. It may be accurate on one plane, but it’s not exhaustive or immutable. But it starts with a story. 

All motivation starts with a story. Our personal stories connect us to our sense of being. Our shared stories connect us to each other and to our place in the world. 

We don’t all tell ourselves the same story, but at our core, each of us is motivated by a story. 

April fools.

To be perfectly clear, I’m all for four-day work weeks. Where do I sign up?

But let’s be real for a minute.

The moon landings, the space shuttle, and the mission to Mars don’t happen on four-day work weeks.

The Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPhone don’t make it to market with four-day work weeks.

Amazon, Google, and Facebook don’t launch on four-day work weeks.

By the way, these things don’t happen with five-day work weeks either. Five versus four is semantics when we’re talking about making great things. It’s arbitrary. 

You wanna make something great or be a part of something historical? There is no work-life balance. It’s work-life integration. 

Four-day work weeks are awesome. I’m all in. But let’s not kid ourselves about what can and should benefit from four-day work weeks. 

In 2006, Gladys knocked on my door once more, and I opened it only to the chain stop. 

My chief engineer friend, living in San Francisco and now firmly helping to drive the bus of worldwide technological culture change, called me with an offer. They were deep in the throws of creating “…an iPod…a phone…an internet device.” He asked me to join the party. 

I flew to Cupertino. Walked the halls again. Signed the NDA’s again. Ate sushi with the team again. Talked housing and relocation with HR. Got the offer, complete with stock options that would eventually be worth…well, let’s just leave it at “a pile.”

My dream job, working for my dream company, and working on my dream project.  

I turned it down.

Another regret for this column here? Certainly — you bet your ass — at least, from one perspective. 

But how does one accurately evaluate and sort out feelings about unwalked paths when you don’t regret the journey you actually took? You can’t, at least not rationally. So all you can do is lay in the grass, watch the clouds drift by, and daydream. 

And in our daydreams, we play an additive game whereby we take the best outcomes from what coulda, woulda, shoulda and add them to the unchanged journey we’ve experienced.

Kinda like, “Let’s take our life as it is and add another couple of zero’s to our bank account. Now how does that feel?”

But, of course, that’s a fool’s errand. Our life, our journey, and the effect on those sharing the road with us is a complex model rooted in chaos. The butterfly effect in full regalia. 

All I know is how my journey has turned out so far, and so far, so good. 

I turned it down for reasons I’ll never regret, and those reasons have proven sound and correct. But yes, I sometimes still daydream about the what-ifs. 

Ultimately, though, I’ve concluded that the entire New Shoes experience is about control, specifically, control over one’s self, life, and direction. Recognizing who has it when you don’t. How to gain it, keep it, and respect it. When you have it, how to wield it properly and empathically. 

That tailspin of an experience taught me that I wanted, and still want, to have control. Even if that control means I fail, take the wrong path, or, yes, have regrets. 

That single decision — one over which I had zero control — profoundly impacted me, my career, and my family. 

Both positively and negatively.

A couple months later, I did find myself on the layoff list (as expected), as did most of my pirate friends. I got “saved” (then), but within a month or so, I had quit Agere on my own.

I just couldn’t do it anymore. 

A colleague asked me why I was leaving without a layoff package, and all I could say, because I felt it deeply, was, “I no longer believe.”

And when your profession intersects with your passion, belief is everything. 

I left Agere to try rekindling an old professional romance (it was as awful as the first time around) but returned six months later wiser and reinvigorated. Some time away, dancing with the train wreck of an ex-girlfriend cleansed my pallet and provided perspective. 

It catapulted me onto the path of focusing on what I can control and working to gain control — tech startups (failures), real estate (semi-successful), other marketing adventures (most failures), personal and professional development, and to a large degree, this writing before you. 

Most importantly, it gave me the courage to volunteer for a layoff in my mid-40s, leading me on a journey of interesting professional adventures, personal growth, and an evolving perspective on the intertwining of personal and professional being. 

What could have been, if even by association, sometimes has a way of turning into what is. 

About a year and a half after our disbandment, the marketing manager from the New Shoes team pulled me into his office.

By now, the iPod models that were supposed to be ours had hit the shelves. They were everywhere. 

“Look at this.”

And he pointed to the spreadsheet on his screen.

At the bottom of the summary column was a number around $4 billion. 

But we knew this would happen. We told you it was gonna happen. That single decision saved them, at the time, a few million bucks, maybe a few 10s of millions. It probably soothed the street and secured some bonus for jaw-flappers.

But it cost them the company. 

Because by now, all of Agere was starting to tailspin, not just the mobile phone division. Revenue was down 10% in 2005 and another ten in 2006, but we were about to fall off the cliff. We were jettisoning people and projects. The death spiral. By the end of 2007, LSI, a company from the servant class compared to our nobility status, had bought us. 

Agere was no more. 

It didn’t have to be this way. Twenty guys — twenty focused and excited pirates — had the power to change it all. Twenty guys would have doubled the entire company’s revenue with a single project. 

And that was just iPod. We later learned that Apple also wanted to commit to us the first generation of, well…

“widescreen iPod with touch controls…revolutionary mobile phone…breakthrough internet communicator…“

For God’s sake, just stay on the train. Ignore the ex-girlfriend. You know she’s no good for you. Stop looking back. Start looking ahead. Not what wasn’t, but what can be.

They would have been heroes, not just inside Agere but in the entire semiconductor industry. 

By the mid-2010s, in a particularly cruel twist of fate, the entrails of the former Agere Systems (by now already moved on from LSI to a company called Avago) would merge with and be consumed by Apple’s iPod rebound girl — Broadcom. 

Not just death, but death with an aggrieved, “It didn’t have to be this way.”

We got no answers. None that made any sense, at least.

And that was that.

We said our piece, but it had no effect. We walked in as a cohesive, highly skilled, and angry band of pirates and walked out a fractured, dilettante, and wilted group of lap dogs.

Tails between our legs.

The official disbandment filtered us individually into the myriad of other engineering teams within the division. I ended up back in a group I had purposely left about five years before. Ugh.

But we all knew what was coming. Quarterly reports with bad news beget canceled projects. Canceled projects beget layoffs. Layoffs beget counteractive good news to the street.

And when layoffs happen, who gets laid off? Well…

The chief engineer wasn’t waiting around. He pulled me aside a few days later to tell me he was switching coasts. Gladys had hired him to fix the heaping pile of shit that Agere left (and would cause ripples throughout the semiconductor industry).

Of course, Gladys’s New Shoes would still happen. That train was rolling and unstoppable. Just not with us. We stepped off at the last stop because the ex-girlfriend said she’d be there. But of course, she jilted us again.

I was happy for him and also a little jealous. Was there a spot for me?

Nope. Not right now, at least. But that would eventually come around.

For now, I was just another lap dog, praying my name wouldn’t show up on the list.

“We are canceling this program for two big reasons…

The first is we believe that Apple is about to lose its market share. Microsoft and Sony have both jumped in the game…blah, blah, blah”

Some hushed murmurs around the room. 

This one was at least plausible. As engineers, we had no insight into the market, executive relationships, or product pipelines. What do we know? Microsoft has killed off Apple in the past. Maybe they’ll do it again.

But it’s also an executive funeral service hack. Invoking the “market share” argument with a room full of engineers is a “get out of jail free” card. What do we know about the market?

So, OK, fair enough. Maybe this one has some merit. 

“And the second is that we think the iPod is a fad and has peaked.”

And the room erupted. 

Not exactly trading floor during a frenzied short squeeze, but twenty normally introverted and reserved engineers all talking loudly over each other.

A voice cuts through.

“A fad?! Peaked?! Have you been to the gym? Have you walked down the street? Do you have eyes?”

Who says that to the executive VP of a $400 million division?

Someone who’s exasperated. Someone who’s spent the last year-plus pouring his sweat and humanity into this project. Somebody who’s sacrificed at home to work the long hours required to make something great.

Somebody who doesn’t know business but knows with all of his being that this is the stupidest business decision in history.