Magic Powers

 Magic Powers

No Big Picture Is Too Big

If business is a tool to support what you believe in, Deni Leonard takes it to another level. For him, it’s not just a tool, it’s more like..a magic power. Business is one of many magical powers he can conjure to fight for his Big Picture, which is to economically empower indigenous groups around the globe. His other powers include law, education, government, and international relations. He is a Native American from the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon, and he lives in Mill Valley, north of San Francisco. He is fifty-six years old, but the fruitful phase of his career has only recently began. This is according to plan, and it’s because he planned for it to take this long that I was so impressed. What patience! What vision!

Here’s how I heard about Deni. After one of our weekly pickup soccer games, I was raving to another guy about how I loved the multicultural aspect of soccer. It’s one of the few places where people can embrace their national or ethnic identity can still play together by the same rules. Soccer assimilates without breaking down heritage and style. Where else can we see such a great thing? Our schools are bogged down in identity politics, every kid wanting to belong to a disadvantaged-hyphenated-minority, while our business markets tip in the other direction, every company pushing itself to be professional, i.e.  Colorless. This country’s becoming do divers. We need more examples of integration sans cultural annihilation. My friend said I ought to meet Deni Leonard. He’s met Deni only briefly, but had kept his business card.

Deni was exactly what I was looking for. I followed him around several days through the year, and I also took several people in his circle to lunch. I attended one of his conferences, in which he educated tribal leaders on how to finance and build power plants on their reservations. Once a month, on Saturday afternoons, Deni gathered with the others members of the Water Mushroom Club at Café Trieste to drink red wine and listen to the waiters sing opera. The Water Mushroom Club is a multiethnic, multigenerational network comprising business leaders who’s decided to stop chasing minority set-asides and find other ways to compete outside the white man’s mainstream. It’s one of a dozen networks Deni has a hand in founding.

You’re familiar with the term “parallel universe”? A parallel universe is our midst but can’t see it. Well, that’s sort of like what Deni’s up to. He’s spawning an entire parallel economy, using sources of capital you didn’t know existed, building factories and power plants you’ll never see, on land and in neighborhoods you’ll never go to, and selling the output to consumers you didn’t know were buying. If it continues to grow according to plan, it will slow or reverse the migration away from reservations.. it will diversify native Americans away from their reliance on gambling casino… it will resort lost traditions… it will bring jobs to inner cities.. it will teach young people self-reliance.. it will give tribes an identity they can be proud of.

Deni is medium height, solid. His skin tone is quite brown and etched with scars from his youth. His hair is graying only slightly; he wears it swept back and neat, with a pinky finger’s worth of ponytail hiding in back, often tucked into the collar of his dress shirt. He wears top-dollar banker suits and ties. He has a sly sense of humor, chuckles a lot. He’s often hard to pin down-never evasive, but will switch the subject to a different venture mid-sentence. He seemed to enjoy my confusion when I tried to chronicle everything he does. So with the caveat that I might have missed half of it-that I probably saw only a little of his parallel universe-here is a bit of his story.

He didn’t leave his tribal land until he was nineteen. He attended San Bernardino Valley College and worked as grocery store clerk at night. He was profoundly affected by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the Vietnam War, and by the time he was twenty-five, he was an antiwar leader. This was 1969. He had tons of energy and no sense of how to direct it other than through protest. The army decided to make an example of him. At his draft hearing, he said that as a person of color, he couldn’t go kill other indigenous people. They sent him to boot camp anyway. On the walks were framed pictures celebrating the army’s history, including many photographs and drawings depicting the slaughter of Indians? He protested again, and was told his pacifist ways were undermining troop morale. They came one night at three in the morning and dragged him off to his court marital. He explained that he was bound by a treaty never to pick up arms-this was a treaty his forefathers had signed with the U.S. government. Now the government was telling him to pick up arms? He refused; They imprisoned him in the Presidio stockade (a half mile from where he lives now). For seven months he was treated terribly, and the day he walked out, his stories triggered an investigation into brutality. The stockade was shut down; he was its last prisoner.

Deni went up to the mountains east of Eureka, into the hands of the Hupa tribe. He went there to think. To intensify his thinking, he fasted for ten days, drinking only water. After several days, in a slight delirium, he began to have a vision of his life. It was a raw vision, somewhat impractical, hallucinatory but genuine. Was fighting back the best use of his energy? Why were Indian ways disappearing? Tribes had their own land and their own sovereignty over it why were they losing people, why was their Wealth draining away?

He realized that everyone in the sixties who wanted to help Indians was, in fact, making them dependent. When a check up every month in your mailbox, you’re the one who loses, because you lose your own survival skills. The handout system had turned Indians into eunuchs. Assimilation had gone too far. Education was nothing less than a cognitive drug. When you lose your identity, you lose your source of power. How could they regain this power? First, there were 107 tribes in California alone-if they could connect, and work together; they would have a collective power. Second, young Native American needed to have their identities restored. Tribes had fought for political sovereignty, but they had never paid attention to their economic sovereignty. They had neglected learning business. Deni walked out of those mountains determined to write a new curriculum that embraced ethnic identity and emphasized self-reliance.

He wrote a business plan that set out his objectives for the next twenty years of his life. He would train himself for five years in four different areas: education, business and banking, indigenous government, and international relations. “I had to learn the white man’s ways to save the non-white man’s ways,” he explained.

I won’t go into the details, but he stuck to his plan marvelously. Five years in each skill set. Degrees from Harvard are Kennedy School and the University of Oregon. He taught at Berkeley and the University of Washington. He consulted with the Department of the Interior and the Department of Education. He learned investment banking and insurance underwriting. He traveled the world helping indigenous groups defend their rights in Samoa, Saipan, Mexico, Ecuador, and New Zealand.

In 1990, at the age of forty-six, he began to take that raw vision he had in the mountains and refine it into something practical and solid. This took another five years. He formed an investment bank and several other financial service firms under a subsidiary, DLA Financial. The basic premise was that reservations are special economic redevelopment zones. Corporations on these lands do not have to pay taxes. At the same time, commercial banks are pressured to lend a small portion of their portfolio to economic redevelopment zones; they do this in order to stem federal regulation. A small amount of initial seed capital-from tribe bank deposits, for instance-could be vastly multiplied using a variety of loans and tax advantages. In addition, the federal government has purchasing program called Section 8(a), instructing the government to purchasing from businesses that are owned by Indians, native Alaskans, and Hawaiians. Whatever they brought onto the reservation-courtesy of government tax breaks-they could turn around and sell back to the government-courtesy of more government breaks. The tax laws and the purchasing programs were already in place, waiting to be played. Indian didn’t need cash aid, and they didn’t need any more help.

Deni started with a single piece in the midnineties. The key was to stop the flow of money off reservations. Many Indians kept their scant deposits in non-Indian banks Deni taught tribes to set up their own co-op banks, and then he managed their assets for them, like a mutual fund. This was the seed capital to get started. He kept working up the food chain. Native American companies were buying worker’s compensation insurance from national firms- again, pennies on the dollar flowing off the reservation, never to return. Deni underwrote their insurance. Payroll services were next- more pennies on the dollar to keep around.

Then he became aware of the gross injustice, which he quickly foresaw as a huge opportunity. Indians were paying twelve cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity, almost twice the national average price of seven cents. Deni began financing the construction of cogeneration power plants. Co-genplants are small; they’re powered by natural gas, are built around jet engines, and each turbine costs about $1.3 million. They produce electricity, which can be sold in the newly deregulated power markets, and they produce lots of steam, which can be used to heat building on the reservation or to create even more electricity. Rather than buying electricity at twelve cents, why not make your own, at two cents, and sell the leftovers at seven cents to pay for the whole thing?

Well, why not?

Nobody could see a reason why not, other than it wasn’t the sort of ambitious thing tribal councils normally did. How could they pay for it? Deni would float the bonds. Who could buy the bonds?  Deni customers. Who were these customers? Banks. It sounded like white man’s hocus-pocus to them. Which was exactly the point? White man did this stuff all the time.

What if there was no building nearby on the reservation to heat? Build a large greenhouse and create an herb farm, growing organic herbs for the farmer’s markets! For every objection, Deni had yet another way to add jobs and make money. He kept working up the food chain. He trusted that if it worked with small cogeneration plants, it would work with a big geothermal plant. So he raised @180 million to build a 250-megawatt plant for the Elem Pomo Indian tribe. After enough cogeneration plants had been built, he started to wonder, “Why pay someone else to do this?” And so he purchased a power-plant construction company. Ho folded his banking company into larger holding company, united native Depository Corp., and created the first and only publicly traded company majority-owned by Native Americans.

Then he discovered another gross injustice. There was a ton of oil wells on reservations in the Southwest. Indians were routinely paid a 0 percent royalty on their oil when the going rate was 20 percent. Many of these wells had nearly dried up anyway. Deni found an investor in Odessa, Texas, who could clean oil wells by flushing them with water and an small concentration of surfactant he’d invented. Wells usually dried up because salt would make the ground swell, clogging off the veins that the oil moved through. This surfactant caused salt to drop out of water; I saw it demonstrated in a glass of dissolved salt water. The salt undisclosed and fell to the bottom. When this same process occurred underground, the wells returned to 60 percent of their peak levels. Deni offered to flush everyone’s wells. He would pay for it; each well would cost about $6,500. It would cost them nothing; they would split the additional earnings. Again, it sounded too good to be true. Those wells had been dry for years! You’re going to make us money off them? At no cost to us?

Deni was turning dust into oil, turning land into power, and turning nickels into dollars. Here’s how he’d turn a nickel into a dollar; he worked with an immigration attorney named Eugene Wong. Eugene would be contracted by businesspeople in Indonesia who wanted to come to America. Eugene would secure then an investor visa, an EB-5. This normally requires an agreement to invest a million dollars, but three thousand EB-5’s are set aside each year for investing in special economic zones. These can be had for a half million dollars. Eugene sends the money to Deni, who uses it as seed capital, and pairs it up with another $9.5 million in bank loans, which he’s free to invest in something safe and predictable, like a power plant. Thus, nickels into dollars. Is it a trick? It seems so. Too good to be true. More white man’s magic.

So where do all these dollars go? Back into education. Deni is board member of no less than fourteen councils, task forces, and associations. They’re created an American Indian Charter School in Oakland, and nearby, a native American Cultural Center. He’s helping strengthen the only native American-run university in the country, DQU, which is two hours north. DU is an impoverished school, terribly underfunded by the state (another gross injustice!) and struggling to survive. But Deni sees these students as the future leaders of the businesses that’ll spawn on the reservations. He’ll give them a reason to go back to the land they came from.

His list of projects is endless. Every time I called him, it was something else.

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, we’re building an ecotourism resort in Costa Rica run by Indians.”

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, a billionaire in Chine owns the world’s biggest sapphire, and he wants to put in on display at the Pequot casinos in Connecticut. I’m trying to insure it.”

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, I’m learning a little about hydroponics.”

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, we’re trying to repatriate this dead guy’s bones back to Hawaii.”

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, a water theme park to be run by the Morongo tribe in So Cal.”

I could write a story on any one of these venture. Deni resembled a venture capitalist, continually shopping for opportunities, hooking people up throwing his weight around when deals stalled. But he waded into the morasses that venture capitalists feared: government regulation. Politicking and lobbying, the cacophony of school districts, the idiosyncrasies of military requisition procedure. Bureaucracies didn’t behave like bureaucracies when he came calling. The waters parted. He said it’s because he speaks their language. “They hang funny things on the wall and speak a language you can’t understand,” he said. “They have ways of doing things. If you respect their ways, they’ll work for you. If you respect their sovereignty, they’ll continue to help you.”

Deni reinforced so many of the lessons I’d learned during my research.

Patience, long-term planning, resilience. That when you embrace your true identity, you will discover a productive power you never imagined having. That no Big Picture is too big. That you must be willing to speak the language of others (that you must walk in their shoes). But it is the one I first mentioned-that business is a tool to support what you believe in-that I keep coming back to.

For the past nine years, I was the chairman of Consortium Book Sales and Distribution. It is based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is the exclusive distributor of some of the finest independent publishers in the country. My relationship to the company was always odd; I had no equity and only occasionally received a nominal stipend for being one of its three directors. It’s not really much work-it’s more of a responsibility. The company grew 500 percent during this period, and ran fine with minimal guidance. I was appointed to the position back when I worked in small press publishing. It’s the one stray orphan from those years still tagging along in my life. I did it because it was fun; I did it because I’m very good at it. I did it because I believe in books. Books have been my classroom and my confidant. Books have widened my horizons. Books have comforted me in my hardest times. Books have changed  my life.

The thing is, book publishing is an absolutely crazy business. Most books lose a lot money. Large publishers smooth out this roller coaster by being big and spreading their risk. Small publishers ride up and down this roller coaster with total abandon, going in and out of bankruptcy, narrowly averting melt down by taking out a third mortgage on their homes, et ceters. Small publishers routinely take levels of risk that any classically trained businessperson would find completely unacceptable. They’re either that stupid or that smart.

I like to do my part to make sure that the books I treasure so deeply don’t become endangered species. It’s one way I give back. I could donate money as well, and do, but I’ve found the best way to help is to do what I can to ensure that these small publishers have a distributor that is on a sound financial footing. The distributor is the backbone of their network. It is the custodian of their trust. It lends them money, encouragement, and manpower to help them survive the occasional freefall. At the same time, a distributor should never profit at its publisher’s expense. It wouldn’t be right, morally. Greed has no place.

This past year, we lost both our CEO and our owner. Both decided they wanted out after nine years. The responsibility of holding down the fort and replacing them fell to the directors, and we weren’t looking forward to the work involved. I considered resigning but knew that would only leave the company weaker.

We began to market the company. From my years writing about Silicon Valley, I knew dozens of rich young men with time on their hands who might like to own the company. But I didn’t call them. Largely due to what I’ve learned from this book, I thought about the question differently from how I might have before. Rather than asking, “Who has the money to buy this company?” or “Who has the experience to buy this company?” I asked myself “Who has the character to own and run this company?” Who would be a worthy custodian of our publishers’ trust? Who will do what is best for publishing, rather than what is best for himself?

And I came up with a name: Don Linn, the former investment banker turned catfish famer whom I visited in Mississippi. He truly loved books, and if he could motive farm workers then he would do great with our twenty Spanish-speaking warehouse workers. He was whiz at finance. If he’d learned agribusiness, he could learn book distribution. He’d made moral choices in his life. He was not in it for the quick profit.

I e-mailed him to ask if the farm was sold yet.

The ink was almost dry.

Did he have a job at a biotech start-up yet?

Not yet..Biotech was tough to break into.

Did he still want to move to a big city?

He did.

Did the Twin Cities count as big city?

Big enough. What did I have in mind?

I told him only the basics, and then we sent him our offering memorandum. I didn’t push him at all. I knew how easy it would be to sell him on it. But I’d learn that it’s either a fit or it’s not-our publishers wouldn’t be served by someone I’d hornswoggled into a deal. Don flew to Minnesota two weeks later to meet the staff. He became excited. He came back, weeks later, with accountants and lawyers to kick our tires. By this time, I’d beaten the outgoing owner into submission, and he’d agreed to a reasonable price, and to take a note rather than all cash. It was not that much money. We had plenty of other willing buyers, but the staff and the directors and the publishers all loved Don. They were nervous because he had zero book experience, but once they met him they were quickly won over by the same traits I was. His business mind was very keen. He showed them respect.

Don moved to Minnesota two months later. He found a furnished condo- his family wouldn’t join him until the summer- and he began taking Spanish classes. He took to the business much like everyone else in this book-he loved a book guy, and because he loved it, he seemed innately great at it. He kept us on as directors, and I have faded back into the wallpaper, there only when called upon. I made not one penny on the deal, but it was richly rewarding to have done a good thing.

‘I have only one demand,” I said, before signing his letter of intent.

“This is just between us”

“Shoot”

“I’m not dropping you from the book. Everything between us as directors of the company might be private, but everything you’ve told me up until now is fair game.”

“Deal.”

I’d committed the cardinal sin of journalism_ I stepped into the frame and changed the outcome. I felt funny about it. It’s okay if our writing changes people’s minds, but not if our actions do. It’s like tampering with a crime scene before the police photographers show up. Who knows what Don Linn would be doing today if I hadn’t sent the e-mail? Maybe he would be floundering and miserable, suffering his inevitable punishment of leaving Wall Street behind.

But I’d rather help than watch. I’d rather have a heart than a mind. I’d rather expose too much than too little. I’d rather say hello to strangers than be afraid of them. I would rather know all this about myself than have more money than I need I’d rather have something to love than a way to impress you.

 

 

 

Closing Remarks

The Rewards are for only

Those who listen attentively.

I don’t think of the people in this book as the best stories out there. Rather, they’re the ones that came into my life. Once I heard a story, I was willing to get on a plane, and I was willing to be honest. In order to know people personally, I might have gone to great lengths, but I didn’t go to great lengths to discover them.

If some of the stories are amazing, it suggests to me that amazing stories must be everywhere. If the stories are inspiring, then inspiring stories are everywhere. If the stories are ordinary-which is how I think of them- then many ordinary people, everywhere, are daring to be true to themselves.

I began this book with nothing more than a glimmer. I was sitting in my office, staring into space, unable to write, when I asked myself: What was on people’s minds? A lot were wondering what to do with lives. That big, obvious, threatening, looming question. Unconsciously, I got up and knocked on my friend Ethan Watter’s door, threw myself down on his minisofa, and asked, naturally. I didn’t know. I had one instinct: writing about my own friends would be cheating. I needed to sample real people from around the country. “How would you find them?” he asked. I didn’t know. I secured votes of confidence from my agent and my ex-editor (who had left publishing, but I trusted his opinion, and it turned out he came back to books two months later). I set to work, trying to figure it out. I didn’t know where I was headed, but this seemed like what I needed, to plunge into the unknown, guided only by my muse.

I didn’t know that I would meet so many wonderful people. I never expected how honest they would be with me. I didn’t know that I would learn so much from them. I didn’t know that this book would become a vehicle for me to express a new voice. I didn’t know that my desire for this book would survive my son’s birth, or the catastrophe of September 1, or our parent’s falling ill. All that unfolded for me later, like a reward for trusting my instincts.

Here’s my point: usually, all we get is a glimmer. A story we read or someone we briefly met. A curiosity. A meek voice inside, whispering. It’s up to us to hammer out the rest. The rewards of pursuing it are only for those who are willing to listen attentively, only for those people who really care. It’s not for everyone. If we are the victim of an injustice, it is up to us to find a meaningful way to channel our anger. If we suffer a terrible crisis, only we can transform this suffering into a launching pad for a new life. These are the turning points from which we get to construct our own story, if we choose to do so. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick. Finding what we should do is one of life’s great dramas. It can be an endless process of discovery, one to be appreciated and respected for its difficulty.

There will always be those who say it’s impractical. I respect that we have to be practical in our approach, and we have to live up to our responsibilities. But it’s not impractical or vain. The reason is, people who love what they do are much more productive than those who are doing it for the paycheck. If we find work we care about, our productivity will explode. Our value will increase radically. We will be the source of good ideas. And we will be rewarded.

I studies economics in college, so let me address the question of whether this is practical from macroeconomic point of view.

While writing this book, I was invited by Michael Dell, of Dell Computers, to be on a panel at a gathering of the Business Council, a group of over one hundred CEO’s from some of the biggest companies in the country. Together, they pretty much are the economy. Our huge chunk of it. It was an honor to be invited to address them. My panel would last an hour, and I was one of five participant, so I would probably only get one shot to deliver a coherent message. I might never again speak to such an influential crowd. This was my chance. If you had a few minutes to address the leaders of the economy, what would you say?

W had a great lead-in. Before our panel, the podium was turned over to Dr. Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard and a noted economist. He reviewed some frightening demographics for any CEO’s in the audience who were bullish on the economy. He asked the question, “Where will the economic growth come from, if at all?” In the preceding twenty years, we’ve had the wind at our backs. The number of prime-age workers (ages twenty-five to fifty-four) increased by 54 percent. The percentage with a college degree increased by 50 percent. In other words, the economy has grown since 1980 largely because the number of people participating in the economy has grown.

Looking ahead to the next twenty years, during which many baby boomers are expected to retire, we can expect no growth in the number of workers. The percentage that is minorities and immigrants will increase by 50 percent, and there will be no change in the fraction with a college degree. In other words, unless trends are changed-or unless there are unforeseen boosts in productivity per worker-the economy won’t grow much, if at all.

In other words, audience, if you sell John Deere tractors, there will not be people with lawns to mow. If you sell Boeing airplanes, there won’t be people to fly in their seats. If you sell Tide soap, there won’t be people who need their clothes washed.

It was pretty intense moment at this sank in.

Could the most powerful CEO’s in America change something about that? That’s what this conference was for. The entire next day’s schedule was devoted to education reform. The notion was, it would be up to the education system to transform the unproductive and uneducated into productive consumers.

The question our panel was asked to address is, “What do employees want? What would it take to get more commitment out of them, more ideas out of them, more value out of them? The panelists chipped in with their ideas about benefits, flex time, day care, free M&M’s on Wednesdays, stock options, small companies versus large ones, cubicles versus private offices, and various methods of showing standout individuals a little extra appreciation. At this point, the conversation was passed to me. I leaned forward in my seat. “What do people really want?”

They want to find work they’re passionate about. Offering benefits and incentives are more compromises. Educating people is important but not enough-far too many of our most educated people are operating at quarter-speed, unsure of their place in world, contributing too little to the productive engine of modern civilization, still feeling like observers, like they haven’t come close to living up to their full true potential. Our guidance needs to be better. We need to encourage people to find their sweet spot. Productivity explodes when people love what they do. We’re sitting on a huge potential boom in productivity, which we could tap into if we got all the square pegs in the square holes and round pegs in round holes. It’s not something we can measure with statistics, but it’s a huge economic issues. It’s great natural resources that we’re ignoring.

The tone in the room shifted. To my surprise, people agreed with me. The value in their companies came from the employees who were passionate about being there. The extra effort came from them. the new ideas came from them. I didn’t tell this audience anything they didn’t know. I only reminded them of it.

In other words, with the wind now at our faces, it’s impractical to settle for less than a life we love.

How are we to think of the search for calling? We have to go looking for it, and yet what we’re looking for is inside us. Is there a metaphor that properly characterizes this search?

Lately, I’ve closed my eyes. I imagine I’m in a dream. It’s one of those dreams in which I toss and turn for a while. It’s dark out. It’s night. I’m walking in a neighborhood. There are a lot of stray dogs moving through the shadows. Some seem to be following me. It’s making me nervous. In this neighborhood are some of the houses from the Seattle neighborhood I grew up in, but other I don’t recognize. This confusion triggers a great urgency. I have to get home! Where is my house? I like houses a certain way. I think I know what my house will look like, but my vision is a little blurry.

I approach certain houses, but I feel like Halloween night- a lot of these houses scare me. Dogs are barking. That light in the window scares me. I don’t recognize that car. That’s not my house. I’m getting spooked. I can’t walk all night. It’s going to get cold. I keep walking. I’m sure I’m never going to find it. Maybe I should just go to a friend’s house. Maybe I can find and empty garage where I can get some sleep. Why does it seem like everyone has a house but me?

Now I’m walking with Carl Kurlander in Squirrel Hill. Now I’m walking with Chi Tschang through Jamaica Plain. Now I’m walking in the snow with Nicole Heinrich through Logan Square. Now I’m walking with Ashley Merryman through Culver City. Now I’m walking in the rain with Ana Miyares through Little Havana. They’re looking for their houses, too. But look at all these different types of houses people live in! I used to be afraid of houses like these! It’s okay now. I want to find my house, but I’m not going to stay there forever. It doesn’t have to be permanent. I’ll stay there as long as one stays in a house. I think back on all those houses I was so sure weren’t mine-was I just afraid because they were unfamiliar? Was I afraid of the barking? Maybe that dog was barking to tell me to come home. Maybe my wife left that light on in window so I would be able to find it. Damm! Should I go back? This is not a dream I can go backward in. So I tell myself, there’s another one out there. And I vow that I will not be scared of what it looks like. I’m sure I have lots of fears, but I won’t let them paralyze me. I’ll get rid of my prejudices. So when I come across it- and I know I will, eventually-this time I’ll be ready. And I’ll walk in the front door. And I’ll feel at home.

“Why am I here?” asked the first-year MBA at Harvard, who was frightened by the debt he was saddling himself with by attending grad school only to please his mother.

“What should I do?” asked the doctor at a prestigious academic hospital, after she had lost faith in universities when falsely accused of manipulating research data by a former lad assistant with a grudge.

“Where is my place?” asked the engineer who faced emigration back to Taiwan after being laid off by a friend.

“Should I go?” asked the woman who heard a voice telling her to go to Mexico.

“What should I do now?” asked the advertising salesman who took four months off to spend with his brother, who died of a brain tumor.

These were not question I could hide from. These were not dramas existing only on the page. I’m clumsy at ministering, but I have been, at times, pulled into that role. I prefer not to generalize, so I couch my advice in a person’s story. That person is me. I used to have all the notions that I no longer have- thanks to hearing stories from people like them. \

I used to think passion is rooted in deeply felt experiences, which can happen anywhere. I used to think life presented a five-page menu of choices. Now I think the choice is in whether to be honest, to ourselves and others, and the rest is more of an uncovering, a peeling away of layers, discovering talents we assumed we didn’t have. I used to treasure the innocence of first love. Now I treasure the hard-fought. I used to want to change the world. Now I’m open to letting it change me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Bronson Po, What Should I Do With My Life? Random House. New York. 2002

 

 

No Big Picture Is Too Big

If business is a tool to support what you believe in, Deni Leonard takes it to another level. For him, it’s not just a tool, it’s more like..a magic power. Business is one of many magical powers he can conjure to fight for his Big Picture, which is to economically empower indigenous groups around the globe. His other powers include law, education, government, and international relations. He is a Native American from the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon, and he lives in Mill Valley, north of San Francisco. He is fifty-six years old, but the fruitful phase of his career has only recently began. This is according to plan, and it’s because he planned for it to take this long that I was so impressed. What patience! What vision!

Here’s how I heard about Deni. After one of our weekly pickup soccer games, I was raving to another guy about how I loved the multicultural aspect of soccer. It’s one of the few places where people can embrace their national or ethnic identity can still play together by the same rules. Soccer assimilates without breaking down heritage and style. Where else can we see such a great thing? Our schools are bogged down in identity politics, every kid wanting to belong to a disadvantaged-hyphenated-minority, while our business markets tip in the other direction, every company pushing itself to be professional, i.e.  Colorless. This country’s becoming do divers. We need more examples of integration sans cultural annihilation. My friend said I ought to meet Deni Leonard. He’s met Deni only briefly, but had kept his business card.

Deni was exactly what I was looking for. I followed him around several days through the year, and I also took several people in his circle to lunch. I attended one of his conferences, in which he educated tribal leaders on how to finance and build power plants on their reservations. Once a month, on Saturday afternoons, Deni gathered with the others members of the Water Mushroom Club at Café Trieste to drink red wine and listen to the waiters sing opera. The Water Mushroom Club is a multiethnic, multigenerational network comprising business leaders who’s decided to stop chasing minority set-asides and find other ways to compete outside the white man’s mainstream. It’s one of a dozen networks Deni has a hand in founding.

You’re familiar with the term “parallel universe”? A parallel universe is our midst but can’t see it. Well, that’s sort of like what Deni’s up to. He’s spawning an entire parallel economy, using sources of capital you didn’t know existed, building factories and power plants you’ll never see, on land and in neighborhoods you’ll never go to, and selling the output to consumers you didn’t know were buying. If it continues to grow according to plan, it will slow or reverse the migration away from reservations.. it will diversify native Americans away from their reliance on gambling casino… it will resort lost traditions… it will bring jobs to inner cities.. it will teach young people self-reliance.. it will give tribes an identity they can be proud of.

Deni is medium height, solid. His skin tone is quite brown and etched with scars from his youth. His hair is graying only slightly; he wears it swept back and neat, with a pinky finger’s worth of ponytail hiding in back, often tucked into the collar of his dress shirt. He wears top-dollar banker suits and ties. He has a sly sense of humor, chuckles a lot. He’s often hard to pin down-never evasive, but will switch the subject to a different venture mid-sentence. He seemed to enjoy my confusion when I tried to chronicle everything he does. So with the caveat that I might have missed half of it-that I probably saw only a little of his parallel universe-here is a bit of his story.

He didn’t leave his tribal land until he was nineteen. He attended San Bernardino Valley College and worked as grocery store clerk at night. He was profoundly affected by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the Vietnam War, and by the time he was twenty-five, he was an antiwar leader. This was 1969. He had tons of energy and no sense of how to direct it other than through protest. The army decided to make an example of him. At his draft hearing, he said that as a person of color, he couldn’t go kill other indigenous people. They sent him to boot camp anyway. On the walks were framed pictures celebrating the army’s history, including many photographs and drawings depicting the slaughter of Indians? He protested again, and was told his pacifist ways were undermining troop morale. They came one night at three in the morning and dragged him off to his court marital. He explained that he was bound by a treaty never to pick up arms-this was a treaty his forefathers had signed with the U.S. government. Now the government was telling him to pick up arms? He refused; They imprisoned him in the Presidio stockade (a half mile from where he lives now). For seven months he was treated terribly, and the day he walked out, his stories triggered an investigation into brutality. The stockade was shut down; he was its last prisoner.

Deni went up to the mountains east of Eureka, into the hands of the Hupa tribe. He went there to think. To intensify his thinking, he fasted for ten days, drinking only water. After several days, in a slight delirium, he began to have a vision of his life. It was a raw vision, somewhat impractical, hallucinatory but genuine. Was fighting back the best use of his energy? Why were Indian ways disappearing? Tribes had their own land and their own sovereignty over it why were they losing people, why was their Wealth draining away?

He realized that everyone in the sixties who wanted to help Indians was, in fact, making them dependent. When a check up every month in your mailbox, you’re the one who loses, because you lose your own survival skills. The handout system had turned Indians into eunuchs. Assimilation had gone too far. Education was nothing less than a cognitive drug. When you lose your identity, you lose your source of power. How could they regain this power? First, there were 107 tribes in California alone-if they could connect, and work together; they would have a collective power. Second, young Native American needed to have their identities restored. Tribes had fought for political sovereignty, but they had never paid attention to their economic sovereignty. They had neglected learning business. Deni walked out of those mountains determined to write a new curriculum that embraced ethnic identity and emphasized self-reliance.

He wrote a business plan that set out his objectives for the next twenty years of his life. He would train himself for five years in four different areas: education, business and banking, indigenous government, and international relations. “I had to learn the white man’s ways to save the non-white man’s ways,” he explained.

I won’t go into the details, but he stuck to his plan marvelously. Five years in each skill set. Degrees from Harvard are Kennedy School and the University of Oregon. He taught at Berkeley and the University of Washington. He consulted with the Department of the Interior and the Department of Education. He learned investment banking and insurance underwriting. He traveled the world helping indigenous groups defend their rights in Samoa, Saipan, Mexico, Ecuador, and New Zealand.

In 1990, at the age of forty-six, he began to take that raw vision he had in the mountains and refine it into something practical and solid. This took another five years. He formed an investment bank and several other financial service firms under a subsidiary, DLA Financial. The basic premise was that reservations are special economic redevelopment zones. Corporations on these lands do not have to pay taxes. At the same time, commercial banks are pressured to lend a small portion of their portfolio to economic redevelopment zones; they do this in order to stem federal regulation. A small amount of initial seed capital-from tribe bank deposits, for instance-could be vastly multiplied using a variety of loans and tax advantages. In addition, the federal government has purchasing program called Section 8(a), instructing the government to purchasing from businesses that are owned by Indians, native Alaskans, and Hawaiians. Whatever they brought onto the reservation-courtesy of government tax breaks-they could turn around and sell back to the government-courtesy of more government breaks. The tax laws and the purchasing programs were already in place, waiting to be played. Indian didn’t need cash aid, and they didn’t need any more help.

Deni started with a single piece in the midnineties. The key was to stop the flow of money off reservations. Many Indians kept their scant deposits in non-Indian banks Deni taught tribes to set up their own co-op banks, and then he managed their assets for them, like a mutual fund. This was the seed capital to get started. He kept working up the food chain. Native American companies were buying worker’s compensation insurance from national firms- again, pennies on the dollar flowing off the reservation, never to return. Deni underwrote their insurance. Payroll services were next- more pennies on the dollar to keep around.

Then he became aware of the gross injustice, which he quickly foresaw as a huge opportunity. Indians were paying twelve cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity, almost twice the national average price of seven cents. Deni began financing the construction of cogeneration power plants. Co-genplants are small; they’re powered by natural gas, are built around jet engines, and each turbine costs about $1.3 million. They produce electricity, which can be sold in the newly deregulated power markets, and they produce lots of steam, which can be used to heat building on the reservation or to create even more electricity. Rather than buying electricity at twelve cents, why not make your own, at two cents, and sell the leftovers at seven cents to pay for the whole thing?

Well, why not?

Nobody could see a reason why not, other than it wasn’t the sort of ambitious thing tribal councils normally did. How could they pay for it? Deni would float the bonds. Who could buy the bonds?  Deni customers. Who were these customers? Banks. It sounded like white man’s hocus-pocus to them. Which was exactly the point? White man did this stuff all the time. 

What if there was no building nearby on the reservation to heat? Build a large greenhouse and create an herb farm, growing organic herbs for the farmer’s markets! For every objection, Deni had yet another way to add jobs and make money. He kept working up the food chain. He trusted that if it worked with small cogeneration plants, it would work with a big geothermal plant. So he raised @180 million to build a 250-megawatt plant for the Elem Pomo Indian tribe. After enough cogeneration plants had been built, he started to wonder, “Why pay someone else to do this?” And so he purchased a power-plant construction company. Ho folded his banking company into larger holding company, united native Depository Corp., and created the first and only publicly traded company majority-owned by Native Americans.

Then he discovered another gross injustice. There was a ton of oil wells on reservations in the Southwest. Indians were routinely paid a 0 percent royalty on their oil when the going rate was 20 percent. Many of these wells had nearly dried up anyway. Deni found an investor in Odessa, Texas, who could clean oil wells by flushing them with water and an small concentration of surfactant he’d invented. Wells usually dried up because salt would make the ground swell, clogging off the veins that the oil moved through. This surfactant caused salt to drop out of water; I saw it demonstrated in a glass of dissolved salt water. The salt undisclosed and fell to the bottom. When this same process occurred underground, the wells returned to 60 percent of their peak levels. Deni offered to flush everyone’s wells. He would pay for it; each well would cost about $6,500. It would cost them nothing; they would split the additional earnings. Again, it sounded too good to be true. Those wells had been dry for years! You’re going to make us money off them? At no cost to us?

Deni was turning dust into oil, turning land into power, and turning nickels into dollars. Here’s how he’d turn a nickel into a dollar; he worked with an immigration attorney named Eugene Wong. Eugene would be contracted by businesspeople in Indonesia who wanted to come to America. Eugene would secure then an investor visa, an EB-5. This normally requires an agreement to invest a million dollars, but three thousand EB-5’s are set aside each year for investing in special economic zones. These can be had for a half million dollars. Eugene sends the money to Deni, who uses it as seed capital, and pairs it up with another $9.5 million in bank loans, which he’s free to invest in something safe and predictable, like a power plant. Thus, nickels into dollars. Is it a trick? It seems so. Too good to be true. More white man’s magic.

So where do all these dollars go? Back into education. Deni is board member of no less than fourteen councils, task forces, and associations. They’re created an American Indian Charter School in Oakland, and nearby, a native American Cultural Center. He’s helping strengthen the only native American-run university in the country, DQU, which is two hours north. DU is an impoverished school, terribly underfunded by the state (another gross injustice!) and struggling to survive. But Deni sees these students as the future leaders of the businesses that’ll spawn on the reservations. He’ll give them a reason to go back to the land they came from.

His list of projects is endless. Every time I called him, it was something else.

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, we’re building an ecotourism resort in Costa Rica run by Indians.”

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, a billionaire in Chine owns the world’s biggest sapphire, and he wants to put in on display at the Pequot casinos in Connecticut. I’m trying to insure it.”

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, I’m learning a little about hydroponics.”

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, we’re trying to repatriate this dead guy’s bones back to Hawaii.”

“What are you working on today, Deni?”

“Oh, a water theme park to be run by the Morongo tribe in So Cal.”

I could write a story on any one of these venture. Deni resembled a venture capitalist, continually shopping for opportunities, hooking people up throwing his weight around when deals stalled. But he waded into the morasses that venture capitalists feared: government regulation. Politicking and lobbying, the cacophony of school districts, the idiosyncrasies of military requisition procedure. Bureaucracies didn’t behave like bureaucracies when he came calling. The waters parted. He said it’s because he speaks their language. “They hang funny things on the wall and speak a language you can’t understand,” he said. “They have ways of doing things. If you respect their ways, they’ll work for you. If you respect their sovereignty, they’ll continue to help you.”

Deni reinforced so many of the lessons I’d learned during my research.

Patience, long-term planning, resilience. That when you embrace your true identity, you will discover a productive power you never imagined having. That no Big Picture is too big. That you must be willing to speak the language of others (that you must walk in their shoes). But it is the one I first mentioned-that business is a tool to support what you believe in-that I keep coming back to.

For the past nine years, I was the chairman of Consortium Book Sales and Distribution. It is based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is the exclusive distributor of some of the finest independent publishers in the country. My relationship to the company was always odd; I had no equity and only occasionally received a nominal stipend for being one of its three directors. It’s not really much work-it’s more of a responsibility. The company grew 500 percent during this period, and ran fine with minimal guidance. I was appointed to the position back when I worked in small press publishing. It’s the one stray orphan from those years still tagging along in my life. I did it because it was fun; I did it because I’m very good at it. I did it because I believe in books. Books have been my classroom and my confidant. Books have widened my horizons. Books have comforted me in my hardest times. Books have changed  my life.

The thing is, book publishing is an absolutely crazy business. Most books lose a lot money. Large publishers smooth out this roller coaster by being big and spreading their risk. Small publishers ride up and down this roller coaster with total abandon, going in and out of bankruptcy, narrowly averting melt down by taking out a third mortgage on their homes, et ceters. Small publishers routinely take levels of risk that any classically trained businessperson would find completely unacceptable. They’re either that stupid or that smart.

I like to do my part to make sure that the books I treasure so deeply don’t become endangered species. It’s one way I give back. I could donate money as well, and do, but I’ve found the best way to help is to do what I can to ensure that these small publishers have a distributor that is on a sound financial footing. The distributor is the backbone of their network. It is the custodian of their trust. It lends them money, encouragement, and manpower to help them survive the occasional freefall. At the same time, a distributor should never profit at its publisher’s expense. It wouldn’t be right, morally. Greed has no place.

This past year, we lost both our CEO and our owner. Both decided they wanted out after nine years. The responsibility of holding down the fort and replacing them fell to the directors, and we weren’t looking forward to the work involved. I considered resigning but knew that would only leave the company weaker.

We began to market the company. From my years writing about Silicon Valley, I knew dozens of rich young men with time on their hands who might like to own the company. But I didn’t call them. Largely due to what I’ve learned from this book, I thought about the question differently from how I might have before. Rather than asking, “Who has the money to buy this company?” or “Who has the experience to buy this company?” I asked myself “Who has the character to own and run this company?” Who would be a worthy custodian of our publishers’ trust? Who will do what is best for publishing, rather than what is best for himself?

And I came up with a name: Don Linn, the former investment banker turned catfish famer whom I visited in Mississippi. He truly loved books, and if he could motive farm workers then he would do great with our twenty Spanish-speaking warehouse workers. He was whiz at finance. If he’d learned agribusiness, he could learn book distribution. He’d made moral choices in his life. He was not in it for the quick profit.

I e-mailed him to ask if the farm was sold yet.

The ink was almost dry.

Did he have a job at a biotech start-up yet?

Not yet..Biotech was tough to break into.

Did he still want to move to a big city?

He did.

Did the Twin Cities count as big city?

Big enough. What did I have in mind?

I told him only the basics, and then we sent him our offering memorandum. I didn’t push him at all. I knew how easy it would be to sell him on it. But I’d learn that it’s either a fit or it’s not-our publishers wouldn’t be served by someone I’d hornswoggled into a deal. Don flew to Minnesota two weeks later to meet the staff. He became excited. He came back, weeks later, with accountants and lawyers to kick our tires. By this time, I’d beaten the outgoing owner into submission, and he’d agreed to a reasonable price, and to take a note rather than all cash. It was not that much money. We had plenty of other willing buyers, but the staff and the directors and the publishers all loved Don. They were nervous because he had zero book experience, but once they met him they were quickly won over by the same traits I was. His business mind was very keen. He showed them respect.

Don moved to Minnesota two months later. He found a furnished condo- his family wouldn’t join him until the summer- and he began taking Spanish classes. He took to the business much like everyone else in this book-he loved a book guy, and because he loved it, he seemed innately great at it. He kept us on as directors, and I have faded back into the wallpaper, there only when called upon. I made not one penny on the deal, but it was richly rewarding to have done a good thing.

‘I have only one demand,” I said, before signing his letter of intent.

“This is just between us”

“Shoot”

“I’m not dropping you from the book. Everything between us as directors of the company might be private, but everything you’ve told me up until now is fair game.”

“Deal.”

I’d committed the cardinal sin of journalism_ I stepped into the frame and changed the outcome. I felt funny about it. It’s okay if our writing changes people’s minds, but not if our actions do. It’s like tampering with a crime scene before the police photographers show up. Who knows what Don Linn would be doing today if I hadn’t sent the e-mail? Maybe he would be floundering and miserable, suffering his inevitable punishment of leaving Wall Street behind.

But I’d rather help than watch. I’d rather have a heart than a mind. I’d rather expose too much than too little. I’d rather say hello to strangers than be afraid of them. I would rather know all this about myself than have more money than I need I’d rather have something to love than a way to impress you.

Closing Remarks

The Rewards are for only

Those who listen attentively.

I don’t think of the people in this book as the best stories out there. Rather, they’re the ones that came into my life. Once I heard a story, I was willing to get on a plane, and I was willing to be honest. In order to know people personally, I might have gone to great lengths, but I didn’t go to great lengths to discover them.

If some of the stories are amazing, it suggests to me that amazing stories must be everywhere. If the stories are inspiring, then inspiring stories are everywhere. If the stories are ordinary-which is how I think of them- then many ordinary people, everywhere, are daring to be true to themselves.

I began this book with nothing more than a glimmer. I was sitting in my office, staring into space, unable to write, when I asked myself: What was on people’s minds? A lot were wondering what to do with lives. That big, obvious, threatening, looming question. Unconsciously, I got up and knocked on my friend Ethan Watter’s door, threw myself down on his minisofa, and asked, naturally. I didn’t know. I had one instinct: writing about my own friends would be cheating. I needed to sample real people from around the country. “How would you find them?” he asked. I didn’t know. I secured votes of confidence from my agent and my ex-editor (who had left publishing, but I trusted his opinion, and it turned out he came back to books two months later). I set to work, trying to figure it out. I didn’t know where I was headed, but this seemed like what I needed, to plunge into the unknown, guided only by my muse.

I didn’t know that I would meet so many wonderful people. I never expected how honest they would be with me. I didn’t know that I would learn so much from them. I didn’t know that this book would become a vehicle for me to express a new voice. I didn’t know that my desire for this book would survive my son’s birth, or the catastrophe of September 1, or our parent’s falling ill. All that unfolded for me later, like a reward for trusting my instincts.

Here’s my point: usually, all we get is a glimmer. A story we read or someone we briefly met. A curiosity. A meek voice inside, whispering. It’s up to us to hammer out the rest. The rewards of pursuing it are only for those who are willing to listen attentively, only for those people who really care. It’s not for everyone. If we are the victim of an injustice, it is up to us to find a meaningful way to channel our anger. If we suffer a terrible crisis, only we can transform this suffering into a launching pad for a new life. These are the turning points from which we get to construct our own story, if we choose to do so. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick. Finding what we should do is one of life’s great dramas. It can be an endless process of discovery, one to be appreciated and respected for its difficulty.

There will always be those who say it’s impractical. I respect that we have to be practical in our approach, and we have to live up to our responsibilities. But it’s not impractical or vain. The reason is, people who love what they do are much more productive than those who are doing it for the paycheck. If we find work we care about, our productivity will explode. Our value will increase radically. We will be the source of good ideas. And we will be rewarded.

I studies economics in college, so let me address the question of whether this is practical from macroeconomic point of view. 

While writing this book, I was invited by Michael Dell, of Dell Computers, to be on a panel at a gathering of the Business Council, a group of over one hundred CEO’s from some of the biggest companies in the country. Together, they pretty much are the economy. Our huge chunk of it. It was an honor to be invited to address them. My panel would last an hour, and I was one of five participant, so I would probably only get one shot to deliver a coherent message. I might never again speak to such an influential crowd. This was my chance. If you had a few minutes to address the leaders of the economy, what would you say?

W had a great lead-in. Before our panel, the podium was turned over to Dr. Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard and a noted economist. He reviewed some frightening demographics for any CEO’s in the audience who were bullish on the economy. He asked the question, “Where will the economic growth come from, if at all?” In the preceding twenty years, we’ve had the wind at our backs. The number of prime-age workers (ages twenty-five to fifty-four) increased by 54 percent. The percentage with a college degree increased by 50 percent. In other words, the economy has grown since 1980 largely because the number of people participating in the economy has grown.

Looking ahead to the next twenty years, during which many baby boomers are expected to retire, we can expect no growth in the number of workers. The percentage that is minorities and immigrants will increase by 50 percent, and there will be no change in the fraction with a college degree. In other words, unless trends are changed-or unless there are unforeseen boosts in productivity per worker-the economy won’t grow much, if at all.

In other words, audience, if you sell John Deere tractors, there will not be people with lawns to mow. If you sell Boeing airplanes, there won’t be people to fly in their seats. If you sell Tide soap, there won’t be people who need their clothes washed.

It was pretty intense moment at this sank in.

Could the most powerful CEO’s in America change something about that? That’s what this conference was for. The entire next day’s schedule was devoted to education reform. The notion was, it would be up to the education system to transform the unproductive and uneducated into productive consumers.

The question our panel was asked to address is, “What do employees want? What would it take to get more commitment out of them, more ideas out of them, more value out of them? The panelists chipped in with their ideas about benefits, flex time, day care, free M&M’s on Wednesdays, stock options, small companies versus large ones, cubicles versus private offices, and various methods of showing standout individuals a little extra appreciation. At this point, the conversation was passed to me. I leaned forward in my seat. “What do people really want?”

They want to find work they’re passionate about. Offering benefits and incentives are more compromises. Educating people is important but not enough-far too many of our most educated people are operating at quarter-speed, unsure of their place in world, contributing too little to the productive engine of modern civilization, still feeling like observers, like they haven’t come close to living up to their full true potential. Our guidance needs to be better. We need to encourage people to find their sweet spot. Productivity explodes when people love what they do. We’re sitting on a huge potential boom in productivity, which we could tap into if we got all the square pegs in the square holes and round pegs in round holes. It’s not something we can measure with statistics, but it’s a huge economic issues. It’s great natural resources that we’re ignoring.

The tone in the room shifted. To my surprise, people agreed with me. The value in their companies came from the employees who were passionate about being there. The extra effort came from them. the new ideas came from them. I didn’t tell this audience anything they didn’t know. I only reminded them of it.

In other words, with the wind now at our faces, it’s impractical to settle for less than a life we love.

How are we to think of the search for calling? We have to go looking for it, and yet what we’re looking for is inside us. Is there a metaphor that properly characterizes this search?

Lately, I’ve closed my eyes. I imagine I’m in a dream. It’s one of those dreams in which I toss and turn for a while. It’s dark out. It’s night. I’m walking in a neighborhood. There are a lot of stray dogs moving through the shadows. Some seem to be following me. It’s making me nervous. In this neighborhood are some of the houses from the Seattle neighborhood I grew up in, but other I don’t recognize. This confusion triggers a great urgency. I have to get home! Where is my house? I like houses a certain way. I think I know what my house will look like, but my vision is a little blurry.

I approach certain houses, but I feel like Halloween night- a lot of these houses scare me. Dogs are barking. That light in the window scares me. I don’t recognize that car. That’s not my house. I’m getting spooked. I can’t walk all night. It’s going to get cold. I keep walking. I’m sure I’m never going to find it. Maybe I should just go to a friend’s house. Maybe I can find and empty garage where I can get some sleep. Why does it seem like everyone has a house but me?

Now I’m walking with Carl Kurlander in Squirrel Hill. Now I’m walking with Chi Tschang through Jamaica Plain. Now I’m walking in the snow with Nicole Heinrich through Logan Square. Now I’m walking with Ashley Merryman through Culver City. Now I’m walking in the rain with Ana Miyares through Little Havana. They’re looking for their houses, too. But look at all these different types of houses people live in! I used to be afraid of houses like these! It’s okay now. I want to find my house, but I’m not going to stay there forever. It doesn’t have to be permanent. I’ll stay there as long as one stays in a house. I think back on all those houses I was so sure weren’t mine-was I just afraid because they were unfamiliar? Was I afraid of the barking? Maybe that dog was barking to tell me to come home. Maybe my wife left that light on in window so I would be able to find it. Damm! Should I go back? This is not a dream I can go backward in. So I tell myself, there’s another one out there. And I vow that I will not be scared of what it looks like. I’m sure I have lots of fears, but I won’t let them paralyze me. I’ll get rid of my prejudices. So when I come across it- and I know I will, eventually-this time I’ll be ready. And I’ll walk in the front door. And I’ll feel at home.

“Why am I here?” asked the first-year MBA at Harvard, who was frightened by the debt he was saddling himself with by attending grad school only to please his mother.

“What should I do?” asked the doctor at a prestigious academic hospital, after she had lost faith in universities when falsely accused of manipulating research data by a former lad assistant with a grudge.

“Where is my place?” asked the engineer who faced emigration back to Taiwan after being laid off by a friend.

“Should I go?” asked the woman who heard a voice telling her to go to Mexico.

“What should I do now?” asked the advertising salesman who took four months off to spend with his brother, who died of a brain tumor.

These were not question I could hide from. These were not dramas existing only on the page. I’m clumsy at ministering, but I have been, at times, pulled into that role. I prefer not to generalize, so I couch my advice in a person’s story. That person is me. I used to have all the notions that I no longer have- thanks to hearing stories from people like them. \

I used to think passion is rooted in deeply felt experiences, which can happen anywhere. I used to think life presented a five-page menu of choices. Now I think the choice is in whether to be honest, to ourselves and others, and the rest is more of an uncovering, a peeling away of layers, discovering talents we assumed we didn’t have. I used to treasure the innocence of first love. Now I treasure the hard-fought. I used to want to change the world. Now I’m open to letting it change me.

Bibliography

Bronson Po, What Should I Do With My Life? Random House. New York. 2002