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My guest this week is Walter Green. Walter is a philanthropist, mentor to many, and teacher. He's the founder of the Say It Now movement and the author of This Is The Moment, How One Man's Year Long Journey Captured The Power of Extraordinary Gratitude. Walter is the former chairman and CEO of Harrison Conference Services, where he created the country's leading network of executive conference centers.
But that's not really what we're here to talk about today. I met Walter about two years ago at an event that was curated by a very close friend of mine, Rick Elias, who's been a previous guest on the podcast. And the things that Walter spoke about that evening really stood out to me. And I said to him a little while after that, I really wanted to sit down with him and share his story with all of you.
So in the conversation today, we talk about his background and his upbringing and how it shaped him. We discuss coming to grips with death, having peace at the end of life and the mindset of finishing strong. We talk about the value of time, the importance of saying no, focusing on relationships over success and why it's so important to focus on others instead of ourselves. Walter also speaks about his Say It Now movement and why he believes it's so important that we say things to people that matter to us long before the end of life.
In particular, this is something that really struck me. This is obviously not a podcast that deals with a scientific topic. Nevertheless, it is a very important part of the emotional health and mental health journey that is equally important to many of the typical things that we discuss on this podcast. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Walter Dream.
Hey, Walter, thank you so much for making the trip out to Austin from San Diego. It's been two years, about a year and a half since we met. For folks listening, we met at the home slash party of a very close mutual friend to both of us, Rick Elias, who's also been a guest on this podcast and Rick did something very special for that two day event, which was really not a celebration of anything. It wasn't a birthday or anything like that.
It was simply Rick deciding he wanted to bring a handful of his closest friends together for no reason other than to let us meet each other, which I thought was a very beautiful expression of friendship. And I suppose exactly as he planned, I am still in very close touch with a number of the people I met there, which I think means it was mission accomplished. Did you have a similar experience? First I thought that's perhaps one's greatest gift.
If you can give the gift of a special relationship to people you care about, there is no more beautiful gift. Then he structured that in an incredible way, providing entertainment, but mostly the opportunity where there was no introduction needed. Everybody knew each other because we all knew Rick. I've heard about the impact of some of the words that I shared.
Rick has also shared what's going on with others. So I've been in touch with a few. It's very special when you come at this stage of my life to connect with people that have been qualified, discriminated, selected with very high standards. So it was a real treat.
It wasn't that we got to sit with everybody in an intimate setting because we were only there for basically 30 hours. I don't know how many meals that turned into, but clearly the most interesting discussions or at least the closest discussions took place over meals. By fortune, you and I happened to be seated next to each other and maybe it wasn't an accident. My recollection is they were assigned seating for every meal.
So for one of the meals you and I sat next to each other, which led to the inevitable, hey, what's your relationship to Rick? Because that was, I think, the way we all started our discussion. And your son and Rick's son went to business school together. Actually, but sorry, you're saying Rick.
I'm sorry, went to business school together. Yeah. Let's not make Rick older than he is. But somehow we pivoted quickly from that into your story and what you're passionate about, which is really what we're here to talk about today.
And again, my recollection Walter is that it wasn't you talking about your current project as much as it was an evolution of your life story. I probably in my usual way just started pestering you with questions. Where did you grow up? Tell me about your childhood and what brought you to where you are.
I was really riveted by the discussion. So I think maybe for the sake of the listener, I'd like to reproduce as much of that as possible. So tell me, tell us, where did you grow up? Yeah.
So first of all, I consider it the ultimate compliment when someone shows the interest in someone else, it's never pestering to me. It's always very satisfying. So I was thinking about my life, basically. I'm in a very reflective mood at this age.
It's basically been three stages. I probably would call the first stage and they've been running around 28 years in their 28, 29 seems to be my staging. I haven't quite completed my, well, pretty much completed the third stage. How old are you, Walter?
I'll be 85 next month. So the first 29, 28, 29 years, we're pretty much finding myself. Just big picture. The next 29 were making myself and the last 29 have been becoming myself.
What would you like to know more of? Well, I feel like so much of what defined the second and third, we're talking probably a lot about the insights that have come in the third phase, but I suspect the seeds of those were sewn in the first phase. So if you're 85, it means that you were born the tail end of the depression. You're born in the late 1938.
Yeah. And so you're born before the war. You come of age when the baby boomers are coming alive. What was your childhood like?
And where was it? I know you were on the East Coast, but I can't remember where. When I think about it, I think what doesn't break you makes you childhood was for me challenging. My father was a dreamer when I was one year old and my brother was two.
He found a place that he thought in the Adirondacks would make a great dude ranch and he had been relatively successful. He had saved, I think, $40,000 back then, which was a lot of money. And so he actually was a chicken farm. It didn't work out as a chicken farm converted into a dude ranch.
And the third year after it opened, there was a big flood wiped out the bridge and we went essentially bankrupt. So my father at the time was in his 40s. And so we had to move back into Bronx in New York and to bedroom with his parents who didn't speak English. Really that first stage, I think I lived in 16 different cities.
So I won't go into all the details except to say that it really did set the stage for my life. But it wasn't just the movement from the Adirondacks to the Bronx to Elizabeth, New Jersey to Albany New York to connect to New York, Coral Gables, Florida, Jacksonville, Florida. It wasn't the cities. It was that my mother got cancer when I was nine.
We went on our first vacation as a family. She recovered back then. They were doing major mass activities for breast cancer. Our first vacation to Florida when we were living in Albany, New York, my father was coming a couple days later.
It was our first family vacation, the four of us. And my mother got a call that he had a heart attack. So she had a fly home, which was never easy from Florida, New York as it is today. And so began a very different way of life.
I was 11 years old. And we were reminded that we needed to make sure our dad was okay. He was 47 at the time. So that was a game changer.
The two things I remember specifically were all this movement preempted any chance to have a relationship. I didn't have any friends. They made no sense to have a friend I was going to be moving in a year or two. So this absence of a relationship and I've always found in life that I think people who are really motivated are people who haven't had it.
When you have had it, I think it's a little bit more difficult to be motivated. So not ever having a friend really had a few in high school, but prior to that, none. So the combination of no relationships and a fear that back then with breast cancer, five years was a long time. I got very lucky with my mother.
She lived a long life, had cancer again, but survived that as well. I went off to school at University of Michigan. Two months later, I got that phone call that my father died from a fatal heart attack. He was 53 and his brother died at 53.
So my dad was a little older than I was as a father. And so we didn't have much in common. And most of my concern was his welfare and his concern was his welfare and trying to provide for the family. The gift that I got was this incredible branding that life is short.
It's unpredictable. You never know. And from then on, I've been walking up escalators. That's the way I live.
I'm very intentional. I don't take anything for granted. And so that was my major gift for my father. That was a tough period.
I graduated from University of Michigan, which was a struggle because academically that was really tough for me. But I managed to get through. Then after a short stint in the Army, took a job with the fraternity brother. I had no place to go.
Wasn't going to go back to Jacksonville, Florida. His father was in the industrial textile business and I got assigned to Pittsburgh. The industrial textiles is another word for shot towels or rags. How glamorous you want to make it.
That was probably my 11th or 12th job. I was selling women's shoes when I was a teenager. I had been working ever since I could get qualified to get a job. I was always afraid that I'd be on my own.
In any case, I didn't have any options. So I went to sell rags in Pittsburgh two months after I started. I came back to Ohio at the corporate offices and I was told I was doing a really good job. And the man who had been training me, who was an older man, I thought was a really nice guy.
I was meeting, I got this message, Walter, you're doing so well, just as soon as you can learn that job, we're going to let that man go. And I went back to Pittsburgh and I couldn't get out of my bed. There was no mental illness in our family. Nobody really understood because I couldn't see it.
So I ended up being hospitalized. Didn't talk about that for 40 years because back then it was a real stigma. I thought it went influence getting into a profession, relationships, being in a mental hospital was not something that you told people about. Tell me a little bit more about how that happened.
So you're obviously in your mid 20s at this point. You hear this news, it obviously upsets you. You go back home. When you say you couldn't get out of bed, I assume you mean the feeling of dysthymia and helplessness was so great that you had no desire to do anything.
Yes. So when I said go back home, I want to clarify home for me at that time was an apartment with three guys. I had moved into a YMCA for a couple nights trying to figure out where I was going to live. And so I was in a room with three strangers.
That's who I had been living with for two months. So I came back from the corporate meeting from a while to where I was living. I didn't call it home. It was a rental apartment with three other guys.
I never had it before. I never had it since. But what happened was that I essentially I don't know. I would say I became catatonic.
I just froze. I could not move. Somehow they got me on a plane to Florida and got me to Miami. And then they said you'd be best off in a hospital in Massachusetts.
So I flew up. What was the length of time from when you returned to Pittsburgh to when you wound up in that Institute in Massachusetts? Less than two weeks. Your mom was obviously still alive.
What was her reaction? And what did you say to her? They had no idea. They just knew that this young boy who was president of his high school fraternity and president of his college fraternity and very mature young man was incapable of moving.
And to show you how things were, that time I had an uncle that was very close to our family. And he saw me in bed and he said, Walter, just get up. Just get up. You're fine.
No comprehension of what being mentally sick was. What happened when you got to the hospital? So it was a series of treatments, mostly dialogue and medication. And when I arrived there, it was very difficult because when I saw others, I thought, wow, it really looks like, but I really couldn't do anything on my own.
So I went from there to moving to Cambridge, which I always have to laugh about because when I tell people I graduated from University of Michigan and spent some time in Cambridge, I always thought, how this guy is really smart and he's really modest, man. Went to that little school back east just outside of Boston. Right. Really, that wasn't what brought me to Cambridge, but it was a terrific experience for me.
I learned so much about myself. I was so afraid of failing and I failed and I survived. So it was a great experience. I spent two years in therapy, learned a lot about myself.
How long were you hospitalized? Two, three months. You mentioned that there is medications involved. Do you remember what types of medications of the era?
I don't have a deep enough knowledge of the psychiatric prison, really some sort of era appropriate antidepressants. Apparently. Did they use shock therapy? I didn't have any shock therapy.
It was a great learning opportunity for me. It was fantastic. How did you know you were ready to leave? Well, that's a funny story.
Actually, I was seeing a therapist and it was inconvenient. I was seeing him a couple of times a week and I'm thinking at the time I was in public accounting. I was selling mutual funds on the weekends. I was really busy and having to go to this therapist.
It wasn't convenient. I finally said to him after two years, I said, when do I finish? He said, I think you're done. That was it.
But I mean, when did you leave the actual hospital after two to three months? What prompted that? Oh, what prompted leaving the hospital? Not what prompted the leaving of the therapy.
My guess I felt I was okay to return to society. And how frightening was that? You know, Peter, I can't actually say that it was frightening. I felt like I was in a pretty good place.
I had always been in a good place. It was like just this two or three months. I just completely lost it. And it might have been an accumulation of losing my dad in the freshman year, never really dealing with that, feeling the pressure of, oh my God, what am I going to do?
I'm finally getting a job and knowing my job is if I'm successful, I'll let this guy go. And I think it was just more than I could handle. Yeah, it's interesting. It seems that one of the real challenges of getting over an episode so traumatic would be the fear of not knowing if it could happen again.
Did you feel that through the experience of speaking with the therapist while you were impatient, you had sufficient resolution of that such that you weren't worried that you were kind of an accident waiting to happen an emotional train wreck that you couldn't anticipate? I'm sure that was present. I was sufficiently back to who I was. This is a guy who had been in pretty good place for all but three months of his life.
And he had dealt with a lot of challenges along the way, a lot of moving, a lot of unknowns and parents' health and challenges at school that were really tough for me. So you can't say it'll never happen again because that's just being a little naive, but I never feared that it would happen again. So you mentioned insurance. I assume when you got out of the hospital, you did not go back to the textile company?
Oh, for sure. I mentioned public accounting. So I was in public accounting for three years, so I got certified as a public accountant. In the evenings, I was selling mutual funds because I wasn't paid enough in public accounting at that time to survive on my own.
I had two jobs. All right. So continue with the story. I love it.
Yeah. So my brother called actually my brother Ray Call from Florida and he said he had just made a thousand dollars in his part time. And I said, that's more money than I'm making for my other two jobs. What did you do?
He described he was involved in a multi-level marketing for a fellow by the name of Bob Cummings. He'd be impressed because it had to do with health. There were nutrition through biochemistry. It was a sale of vitamins and minerals.
And Bob Cummings, I think he had like seven kids and he looked half his age. I was anxious to make a thousand dollars. So I became a distributor. That was my third job.
I put a little card up in the longer mat near where I was living. And the first person I said, if you want to earn money in your part time, please give me a call. You wouldn't get away with that today. But back then that was okay.
So I answered the phone, the person on the phone said, I'll come over and I had my little audio visual kid and the slides and everything. She seemed really interested in selling the vitamins. And as it turned out, Bob Cummings had solved arthritis and they shut him down three weeks later. So I lost my $500, which is all I had.
But my first sales person became my wife. So it was the best thing that ever happened to me. And that was at 22. We were married at 24.
So what did you continue to do professionally? Okay. Sorry for this long list of activities. But I then went into the hotel field.
Actually, we moved to New Orleans. Another move really decided the hotels weren't for me. The search firm called and said there's a large food service company in New York, like to be the vice president of administration. Lola, my wife and I called herself single.
We didn't have any children at the time. But right prior to the move, she became pregnant and delivered twins when we moved to New York for my other job. And I decided really the restaurant field wasn't for me either. So now I'm with twin boys in a field that still didn't work for me.
I had really developed a lot of competencies. And when I met two people and then two young people as I do today, those competencies I knew were transferable. I was contacted by someone who had a startup company in a new industry, a new niche of an existing industry, which is the development of high-end executive conference centers for corporations, mainly Fortune 500 companies as an alternative to meeting in hotels. So there were specially designed facilities with guest rooms and fitness and dining and recreation instead of the folding walls and the bad acoustics.
And so that was a startup company. I put my $10,000 that I had into a very, very, very small percentage of the company. It was funny. It wasn't until I did that.
And I began to think with more compassion about my dad who had taken his 40,000 and put his life savings when he had a one and two year old. And I had twin, one year old. And I was doing the same thing as he did in a very unestablished brand new niche of the hospitality business. As it turned out, the company almost went bankrupt in three years.
Same pattern. The founders were asked to leave and I was given the opportunity to become president. I was 32 years old, had 400 employees. And over the next 25 years became the major shareholder.
We had 10 centers, ran about 6,000 conferences a year with 150,000 executives. And that was my main event, became a company that was owned by myself and some key executives. Where in this journey does the thesis emerge for what became your 50th birthday, if I recall? You did something special at your 50th birthday, which in many ways became the central theme of what we're talking about.
So now I'm into act two, the second 29 years. And so what I never really had as I described in act one were good friends. And so now I was in my same home and I was going to live there for an extended period of time. And so I began to make friends.
I'm not talking acquaintances. I'm talking about people who I had authentic conversations with. And I was so joyful that when I had my 50th birthday that I wanted to celebrate those friends. And so I invited the five of them with their spouses and my family.
There were 17 of us. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was just the opening weekend of Phantom of the Opera. I really spoiled these people for a whole weekend.
And I really, at that time was still limited in my cash. But I knew I was coming close to 53. So it was important for me to celebrate those friends. And so at the reception, I paid tribute to each one of them in front of everybody about how they enriched my life, what they had meant to me.
And like Ricks of Farrah, some of these people didn't even know each other, but they became connected through me. And so that was really my first iteration of this paying profound tribute to people while I was alive. I want to talk a little bit more about that. I mean, a lot of people would say, sure, I could invite some friends over for my birthday and I'll make a toast to my friends.
But this isn't exactly what we're talking about here. This is a bit more profound than that. How deliberate were you in this first rendition or manifestation of say it now? And how much preparation did you put into what you would do with your five closest friends for that celebration?
It began with the invitation. And I mailed out a carton of apples. And in each apple, I planted a flag. And each flag was a representation of another activity during that weekend.
And everybody appreciated the invitation except my son who was going to school at Dartmouth. And he said it was quite something caring that creative apples into snow. But everybody seemed like the idea. In any case, our twin sons played the role of the phantom that came in off of the platform outside the room before with the smoke prior to the reception.
We had some wonderful dinners, wonderful show, rides on the carriage. It was a life event that everybody really thought was extra special. I also created for each of them a memento of a picture and then a summary, which I still have to this day of two lines, two sentences, what each one present had meant to me. And I distributed that memento at the end.
How surprised do you think they were by what you said and how much you made this day, which look for most people when they're celebrating their 50th birthday, it's all about them? You seem to make this more about your friends. Do you think that caught them off guard and can you tell how moved they were by that? Well, it was my first experience seeing how much people appreciate being appreciated and made more so when you do it publicly.
I received within a couple months, I think, a leather bound book. I still read to this day of what that we can meant. Meaning they collectively put this together as a gift back to you. Right.
So did you think at that point that this was a movement that could be larger than just something you did at your birthday? No, this was at the time. You know, I'm thinking about my life. I've never won any academic awards ever.
And yet when I look back on it, I seem to lead most groups. And I began to wonder why is that? I'm never the smartest in the room. I think I began to realize that I am kind of like an experiential learner.
I kind of watch what's going on and I learn from that experience. So for me, though, that left an indelible impression, but for me, that was still locked into this fear that 53 may be done for me. So it had no longer term view than that. I'd never had a longer term view of my life.
I remember attending a seminar when I was in a young president's organization. The woman had an experience where she said, I'd like you to close your eyes. I was, I don't know, must have been less than 50, maybe late 40s. And they said, just close your eyes.
Picture what an ideal future would look like. I closed my eyes and it was black tears ran down my face. I went up to her because she was a psychologist. I said, I don't understand.
I assume this was a positive experience for everybody. This was painful. She said, does that have any to do with how long you think you might live? And of course, that was what it was related to.
So to your question, Peter, this was never the beginning of what happened later on. There were two more. It seems like things happened in threes. That was the first act.
There was a second act when I was 70. That was a different story. Before we talk about that, you alluded to the idea that a part of the magic of this experience was that you didn't just tell these five people how much they meant to you. You did it publicly.
Why did you decide to do that? Even at the time, was that just intuition? Or did you have a stronger belief set that it was more meaningful to do it that way as opposed to tell each of them privately the exact same things that you would have said? No, I love that question.
I had spent by that time 20 years in the conference business. And one of the focus that I had that was transferable was that I always saw the power of expressing something in a group so that if 10 people told you individually something, it was not as powerful as 10 people gathering to tell that person. In the positive and the negative? Both, for sure.
For me, it's always generally been the positive. So once again, the life experience is Walter. There's power in the group. There's power there.
And so it seemed quite natural to me. Is there anything between 50 and 70 that, I mean, aside from the obvious, which is at some point you're 54 and you realize you did it. At what point is the fear of, well, it's funny. Mortality is 100% guaranteed.
So this idea that we're afraid of dying is a bit misguided. In some ways, we're afraid we don't know when we're going to die. There's probably some fear of not existing as well and understanding that life is finite. But how did you come to grips with that as with each passing year you found yourself alive?
Well, it was a gift that kept on giving. Because I always had my foot down on the pedal, not to the metal, but down on the pedal. I acquired in innate intentionality, people to this day say, how do you do what you do? And they said, one of the big reasons is I'm really good at deciding what I don't do.
It's guided my life. So I knew however long I would have. I was just going to make the most of it. I was very grateful for every year.
And that's a really important point, Walter, at what stage in your career did you go from always incoming receiving, taking every opportunity that comes your way to this more deliberate focus on saying no. Because I'm sure that the day you graduated from college, you would have done anything. I mean, you did anything. But at some point, as a person matures and becomes more successful and they have more and more obligations, the no button becomes a very important button.
How did you discover that and what were your guiding principles? I would say that the fine tuning of that, I always was concerned how much time, but that doesn't give you focus. That gives you just a concern for time. But I attended a program at the Center for Constructive Change when I was in my 30s.
It was taught by Fred Jervis, I may he rest in peace. And it was a process of thinking that has changed every day of my life. I do not think in traditional ways that I thought before that. I always think in reverse.
So when I'm thinking I'm going to have the pleasure of spending time with you. I don't think I'd never would ask you what will we do? I would specifically say it. If this conversation is really successful, what would have happened?
What would have happened by the end of it for us to know that our time was well spent? I asked that question for everything important that I do every day. Including personal interactions? Including personal interactions.
I want to talk about that a little bit because that makes a lot of sense in some context. That makes a lot of sense at a meeting. If you have your senior leadership in for a meeting, it's really important to say what is the desired outcome of this meeting? How do I want behavior to change?
How do I want people to feel whatever? On the other hand, I have a hard time wrapping my head around that. I'm not pushing back on the idea. I'm just thinking through it, which is I'm going away with one of my kids for the weekend.
You're saying instead of thinking through the activities you're going to do, walk me through what you're thinking. I'll give you a real live example. It's actually doing mentoring with one of Jason's friends. He came to see me and he said, you know what?
Jason's one of your sons. Yes. Sorry. So one of his friends he was I think in his 30s at the time.
He just came down to see if he could get some coaching. So I said, well, give me some situations you're dealing with. He said, well, I worked so hard during the day and then I go home and I spent all my energy with my kids. From morning to night at the end of it.
They don't seem very fulfilled and I'm exhausted and then I start all over again. Wow. That's a tough life. I have a question and you might want to ask them.
They're now I think nine and 11 years old. I said, when you get home Friday night, why don't you ask them the question to each of them? If this were a really fantastic weekend, what would you like to have happen over the weekend? They obviously gave them specifics.
He was able to do it in like a third of the time. The kids had a fantastic time and he had two thirds of his time to relax. Now do you always need the input of someone else when you're thinking through that? No.
Sometimes, sometimes not? I didn't ask myself. So if I were even meeting a friend or meeting a mentee, I'd say, well, I'll do if this were really successful experience. What would have happened by the end of it?
To me, it's like saying good morning. It's just so intuitive. There's not a formality. It's a freeing.
Peter, it's a freeing. It is not a limitation. It may sound like too much structure. It's the ultimate of being free because I don't ask myself, what will I do?
I ask, what is it that I'd like to have happen? If I'm meeting with a friend who's going through a difficult time, when I'm done, I would like to figure out sometime during that time that I will help him lighten that load. I'm not sure when, but when I leave, I want to be able to do that. To me, it's very natural.
Very powerful, very intentional, very focused, and very gratifying. Say a little bit more about what you learned or how you developed your palette around saying no to things. Well, that's a larger question. So this process of asking about what success would be for an individual one for probably over 40 years, I asked myself the question.
If my life is successful over the next three years, it used to be five, now it's down to one, but it's far enough out that I'm not thinking about what I did last year. If I had an ideal life in the next three years, how would I know it? What would be happening? And I would go from my personal relationships, my family relationships, my financial relationships, my health, every key area of my life would have an indicator, and that would be like my ideal outcomes.
And then I would kind of what I think backwards, well, if I want to be my cholesterol under 100 and I'm at 110, what would it be each six month period? So each one of them have benchmarks. They're maybe getting into too much detail here for you, Peter, but each benchmark is to me powerful because it says to me at six month intervals, if I make it, I'm on track. If I don't, I haven't failed.
I just tell myself, well, whatever you're doing isn't sufficient. So what are you going to do differently? Wow, is that powerful? That's how I've been leading my life.
So to your question, it is so easy for me to say no when it isn't consistent with the outcomes and the indicators that I've been committed to. Yeah, that takes a bit of discipline, doesn't it? The first time I was seeing awkward after 44 years, it's awkward not to do it. Yeah, but I mean, the discipline is in the ability to contemplate something that in the moment seems enticing.
People talking are familiar with the idea of fear and missing out. Someone comes to you and says, well, I've got this great opportunity for you and on the surface, it sounds pretty interesting. But then you have to say, wait, how is that aligned with the goals that I have? One of the tools that I've learned for that, and it's been very helpful for me.
I've been in a very concerted effort for the past five years, approximately, of trying to be more disciplined about that is forcing myself to never say yes to anything when asked. So even if I'm really leaning towards doing it, just asking for a couple of days to think about it. And if I just commit to that one rule, that's literally the only rule that is absolutely black and white, which is this sounds very interesting, Walter, let me think about it for a couple of days and get back to you. And then it just buys me the time to try to do my own version of that.
I still think I probably say yes to more than I should, but that one step has probably saved me 80%. That's great. We all have our own techniques for me. I have to say, when you say it's a lot of structure, my structure provides free.
It provides a built in discipline and it allows for a lot of creativity because I never talk about how I'm going to do it. So I am completely free to figure out how. You mentioned something at 70, the second phase of insight. Say a little more about that.
Now I had this experience when I was 15, and so Stell being sensitized to the 50s, thinking, well, my father never worked out and I've been working out since I've been 30. So I've got a few more years over him. So my adjusted age is 58, 59, 60. So it's still present.
Well, they have these moments. It was Tim Russert's funeral that I saw. It died about what? 2008, 2000, 2008, 2000, and he was in his early 50s.
I thought he was brilliant with me to press never been a moderator. In my view, this has been better. And at his funeral with former presidents and astronauts and celebrities, the tributes were unbelievable. And it occurred to me.
He never got to hear it. He's never going to hear a word of it. That registered, I thought, that doesn't make sense. And I briefly mentioned I'm reading challenge.
So reading books are very difficult. They can be done in small chapters with no recall of the previous chapter. I was able to read Tuesdays with Moray that had been written where in his final years, he got very authentic and very deliberate. And I remember reading part of the last lecture, which a professor at Carnegie Mellon, I think.
And he wanted to do one last lecture because he was dying from cancer and he wanted to leave a message for his kids. I think, wow. And then the KPMG chairman in his 50s got brain cancer. I believe his brain cancer had four months to live.
And he wrote a book called Chasing Daylight about what he wanted to do in the last four months. Experiences, experiences, experiences. It's either too late or it's almost too late. I don't want that to be my life.
That may be customary, but sometimes customary is not good. It's just usual and common, but not smart. And I made a commitment and it was in my late 50s when I had those four or more impact that I was going to do it differently. And I was coming on 70 and I thought, oh, I did my 50 and I asked Lola, I said, you know, I have an idea for a gift for my seven years.
She said, what is it? I said, I want to spend as much time as I need in the coming year to sit down with everybody that had been important in my life. I wanted to go visit with them. I want to sit with them.
I want to have an experience with them after I talk with them. And I want each one of them to know how important they've been in my life. Lola has been either the creator or the supporter of everything important in my life, said, if that's the gift you want, you should take it. And that's what I did for the following 11 months after I was 70.
I visited with 44 people, brought me to Kenya, to Mexico, to Canada, many places in the United States. It was a remarkable moment of my life. Give me an example of what such a meeting was like, obviously, if you're seeing 44 people across the globe in 11 months, we're talking about only days that you're spending with each person, right? Oh, literally a day.
So you would fly into Mexico City? Yeah. So most of them were domestic. In fact, some of them, I was able to do two in one trip or three in one trip.
I had a few in Florida, so I would combine them. So it wasn't like I had 44 trips somewhere from Southern California, which is where I live. Didn't require traveling. I don't want to make this seem like this was an extensive travel, whatever.
But I want to highlight the simplicity of it. First of all, I hesitate to typically tell the story about 44 people because people and your listeners are probably saying, oh, I don't have 44 people. You have one, at least. And that's all I'm trying to inspire.
So for me, the journey was my personal journey. Had nothing to do with inspiring anybody for anything. It was my personal journey. And I said, well, what process will I use?
Took out a legal pad and I wrote the question, what difference did this person make in my life? And I would put bullet points down underneath it. Sometimes it could be two pages, but typically one. I've got to go see them or her by the product of that process.
I took that legal pad with me and it was I had four bases that I covered in every conversation. So yeah, there's some systemization to this, but each one was so different, but they followed a similar pattern. And what was that pattern? Well, the first base was just how did I have the good fortune of meeting you?
How did that happen? Then we talked about next base was all these shared experiences we had. Wow. Amazing.
Third base was the major one. I had my pad and I said, this is for me to express to you how important you've been in my life. And I want to tell you why, because to me, the specificity never do say that word too easily, was where the richness of the conversation. It wasn't, I love you.
It wasn't, although I did tell them, I love them. It wasn't a general remark. It was a specific remark. So third base was the big one.
The fourth one was kind of for me, which is that I had known these people over a thousand years. And I said, this is my only opportunity. Incidentally, I recorded every conversation. And because it's so hard to take in acknowledgement appreciation, at the end of this year, I mailed each one of them a picture, a 120 word letter summarizing it and the CD which summarized our conversation and framed them and mailed it to 44 people.
But the last piece of it was that I wanted to learn something about myself. And so I said, listen, I would appreciate it. If you could give me one piece, I'd like to create a mosaic about who I am. Would you be good enough to share with me what would that piece have been from your perspective?
And that was my fourth base. That's the whole experience. That's the whole process. What was the most interesting thing you learned in that year about life, not necessarily about yourself, but just about life and the richness of it?
First thing was how blessed I was. Relationships are interesting in the sense that I equated like I put a flashlight in a dark room. Those qualities of the friends were always there, but I just brought them to light. And when you bring them to light, it's an extraordinary feeling.
I mean, if you had one or two or three, it matters not. I mean, here's a guy who never had a friend until he went to high school. Come on. So I felt such a richness from the experience.
Actually, towards the end, I was in Kenya on actually another mission, actually building a school over there. And the founder of this nonprofit heard what I was doing. And in fact, was on a journey and he said, well, would you tell the story of dinner about what you're doing? And they all broke into applause at the end.
I said, you know, maybe the story has to be told more. Maybe it shouldn't just be a personal story. And so once again, I was, I guess it was about right during this time, had lunch with an acquaintance, told the acquaintance about what I was doing. The acquaintance that I'd like to hear the story turns out she was the editorial director of A House.
And three days later, I had a contractor write the book and that became another platform. It's called This Is The Moment, a one man's year long journey captured the extraordinary power of gratitude. It's interesting. You talked about how some people might hear that 44 people made this list.
And that's a pretty selective list. You were very deliberate in saying these are not acquaintances. These are very close friends. These are people who, I mean, these are big questions, not how did we meet?
Not what are the shared experiences, but telling them with great specificity, the impact they've had on your life. That's not a big group of people. The fact that it's 44 for you is probably not surprising to anyone who's listening to this conversation or to anybody who knows you. And it probably speaks to how deliberate you are at cultivating relationships.
I think it's a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason that richness in life is much more about relationships than other successes, whether it be success in victory, success in material or monetary means. Do you find that one can realize that without some suffering? In other words, how much of a role did the pain that you experienced in the first 29 years of your life paradoxically become the greatest asset to allow the second and third 29 year periods to have this degree of richness? That's a wonderful question.
Clearly I was at an advantage because of my deprivation. But I think there's a level of consciousness and then I have, there have been thousands of people who have since acted on this message. And there have been, I remember I knew it was going to be good because it was an acquaintance and he's a motorcycle, cigar smoking, really tough dude. He said, that's a hell of a message.
He said, there are some people I need to speak to. And so the wide range of people that realize we are not self-made, everybody really knows that. The question is, are we going to acknowledge those people that help make us while they're here? It's not complicated.
It's not complicated. What I find incredible and why I'm really excited about this latest movement and we can maybe get into more of that in the discussion. But I think my contemporaries and even people in their 40s and 50s, they've been so focused on the traditional measures of success, that relationships don't have the focus. And at the end of the day, another couple chapters I read of a book called How Do You Measure Life or something like that written by Professor at Harvard.
Now these are all these bright guys who graduate from the business school, go out and become financial hoo bahs and five or 10 years they made a fortune. They come back for a reunion and they're miserable. He said there's something wrong with this picture and he changed his focus to have them look at what successful life looks like, not how much success you may have in business. And I think there is an enormous opportunity, missed opportunity in really placing education around what's really important.
And I don't know about you, but to me, there's nothing more important in my marriage. I have 60 years, over 20,000 days, my children, the grown twins, my good friends. What did they ever teach me about that? Where did I ever learn about what it is to be a compassionate, loving, caring husband or father or friend?
What do you do when your friends are struggling? How are you helpful? How do you show compassion? Show me a school and that's where I'll go.
One of the things that I want to understand a bit better at Walter is I know a lot of people who are surrounded by people that are supposedly friends and they have world-class experiences constantly, but deep down, they don't seem particularly enriched by them. And I don't want to sound judgmental because one can never know from the outside, but my appearance is that both these so-called friendships seem superficial and the experiences maybe seem too hedonic and not relationally rich. It's also clear that when you talk about these 44 people, that that's not what it was about. I suspect that when you talked about the experiences you shared with them, it wasn't when we went to Vegas that weekend and gambled all this money away and partied really hard as I'm like, I suspect that some of the experiences you talked about sharing were very subtle.
How do you think that you naturally gravitated towards that? And why do you think that is not necessarily a natural thing for people to do? Yeah, wonderful. I think a lot has to do with our life experiences.
I don't have much time to waste this urgency from literally the fear of death. I don't have the fear of death. It's the realization that somebody wasted an hour of my time this week. It was a pure waste.
I really resented it. They didn't do it intentionally. It just turned out to be a wasted hour. I would have rather written out a check.
I can't get that hour back. So I tend to not have a lot of time. It was I have to laugh because one of the fellows I've been in these, what we call forums, there are groups of 10 or 12 presidents when I've been in for 37 years, one for 20 years, another one for 22 years. I've been to like 800 of these sessions.
Well, they're all authentic. They're all about life. I've spent probably 4,000 hours talking about present is issues as deep as you could be. So that's where I spend a fair amount of time.
All my mentoring. I'm entering is about real life issues. It's not about entertainment. And friends that I hang with are typically ones where I can have meaningful conversations.
So I really think it's how you normally relate in your life. I think it's getting to the point where people are more comfortable being open. I also find when people get older, they're getting a little bit more comfortable. I myself was very secretive in my twenties.
I'm not secretive now. They're all lessons. So it's kind of interesting in these men's groups, I would not be the smartest for sure. I would not be the first one I would call to go have a beer with.
I don't drink it, but they wouldn't ask me anyway. Not the bantering kind of person, but the moderator of the group said, Well, I don't know if you know, but this is the person who was on the journey. He said of all the members of the group, you'd either be the first or second person that everyone would come to if they hadn't issued. Why do you think that is that innate?
Is that deliberate? Meaning is that a skill you are cultivating? Is it simply part of your personality? I mean, let's be clear.
I think it's interesting to me that the straw that broke the camel's back in your own mental breakdown was one born of empathy. I mean, it was that you couldn't stand to take this older man's job. And while I'm sure many people would be disheartened by that proposition. And even if someone just chose to say, Well, I'm not going to go back to work, it impacted you in a way that was so much deeper.
If someone's listening to this thinking, I would like to be a person that at a minimum, my friends could come to when there's a problem. Not necessarily everyone would feel that way who knew me, but those who know me well, but it's not happening. I can't tell you the last time someone came to me because they have a problem. What do they need to do to cultivate that skill?
And let me ask you a follow up question in a moment, which is why should one want to have that? Well, first of the question is how do you develop that skill? I think it's based on authenticity and empathy. And compassion.
And I think we all have it. I don't know that we all use it. But I think deep relationships, you mentioned earlier, the people who have these wide range of friendships and say, I want to correct these are not all good friends of mine that were on the list. These are all people who had significantly impacted my life.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they were my good friends. I see many of them were good friends. The primary selection criteria was these people altered the course of your life. Exactly.
Some of them might have been a professor in college. Exactly. Well, the blind man in New Hampshire who taught me how to think I might have seen him 30 times in my life. He would not be someone who's a friend in terms of why would someone want to be more authentic?
That's an individual choice. I think there's a natural aptitude to show and tell. And for me, authenticity transcends show and tell. I find it very rich.
I find a lot of these apparent friendships were really just we were in the same organization together and they were very friendly. You leave the organization and you don't see them again. That's not a friend. That's just an association.
And I think sometimes it gets confusing. And sometimes as you elevate yourself in the world, people will befriend you in ways that you actually think they're a friend. But they're really in some cases just because of association. So let's go back to Tim Russard's death circa 2008.
This has a profound effect on you. Right. You see all of these people coming to say the most amazing things to him that he never got to hear. What else crystallizes for you there?
That was one of three or four that came right at me and it followed a real memory of my 50th and the fact, oh my God, I'm going to make 70. I think those compounded at the 70th experience in which I wrote the book. I spoke about the book. People wrote me about what the message meant to them because the book was structured in three ways.
One is how did I come up with this idea? Where did it come from? It's absolutely unbelievable to me. And now I'm seeing more research come out because mental health is becoming so much more of an issue.
They're now coming out with studies that are done five and 10 years ago about the power of gratitude makes you feel better. It's less depressed and none of mine was based on any study. It was all experiences. So the feedback I got from speaking on the subject matter really elevated by appreciation of the power of the message.
It has been gaining and then really a decade after the book was published, it still had legs. I heard from a girl in a Philippines who had picked the book up in a library and she wrote me an email and she said, I just wanted to know I was thinking of killing myself. First of all, I had no idea how the book was in a library in the Philippines, but she said I had been abused in my family and I was so angry, I wanted to end it. She said, but I saw an average book and I realized there are a number of people who have actually helped me in my life.
And how can I forget that at this moment? We had one or two exchanges, a decade later, I heard from her. She's married living in I think Denmark or Sweden. There are many of these stories had elevated to me the importance of thinking about maybe there's a more powerful way to do it.
Most of my life has been spent one on one in small groups. All my mentoring is one on one. All my small groups is 12 people or less. The conference business was 25 people or less.
Typically, the book was the first time that I have influenced thousands of people. And during the pandemic, I thought, oh, this is going to make this group get together. And actually I was having a conversation with myself. And he said, you know, you could do it by zoom.
I said, really? And so three days later, we did the first of the living distribution system on using me and brought my mentees together. And that evolved into what became the say and now movement today. And this may be my biggest legacy.
How does a person go about doing this? Well, first of all, this is not a business of mine. I'm invested in it. There's no royalties and no rewards.
There's nothing. I want to make it really simple. This is not complicated. Once again, I will tell you of the thousands of stories that I've heard over the years.
I've never heard one that the person said, I'm sorry. I just got a card from someone this past week. He sent me a say, I just want you to know, you inspired this. The card was printed 70 for 70.
And he proceeds to say he has written to 70 people on his 70th birthday. He outdid me. So I dropped him a note, asked him what the experience was like. Very similar experience.
Oh my God, it was so easy to do. It felt so good. It reconnected me with people at levels I haven't been at. It's not complicated.