The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living

by Randy Komisar

  “Three thousand dollars is my best and final offer,” he said. “We can avoid wasting your time and the judge's if you can convince your client to be reasonable.”

  But I'd already conferred with my client and knew he wouldn't entertain a nominal gesture. “No,” I said. “My client won't accept that. It's a question of principle.”

  So we tried the case, and I went all out, falling over myself to right the grievous wrong done my client. The country lawyer, bemused at my performance, conducted himself like an old pro. He even helped me out a bit. When I was unsure how to introduce a piece of evidence, he was ready with advice. When I committed a procedural gaffe, he'd tell the judge he had no objection.

  As the trial neared its end, I was pleased. I'd made my case and had even extracted what I thought was a vital piece of testimony from the defendant, who all but admitted on the stand that he had known where the property line was and had taken my client's trees nonetheless.

  The judge retired to chambers to deliberate. I sat motionless, studiously feigning calm for my client's sake. My adversary across the aisle, meanwhile, joshed with the stenographer and inquired in concerned tones after the bailiff's family.

  The judge soon reentered the courtroom and announced his verdict: “I find in favor of the plaintiff.”

  I won! I smiled warmly at my client, who slapped my back approvingly.

  The judge continued: “I hereby order the defendant to pay to the plaintiff damages in the amount of three thousand dollars.”

  My smile froze. The wise, old counsel thanked the judge, shook my hand, put his arm around his client, and walked down the aisle in pleasant conversation. My heart and soul spent winning some meaningless altercation, I was left wondering whether the law was ever going to take me where I wanted to go.

  IN 1983 I gravitated to a newly emerging specialty, technology law, after having transferred to my law firm's Palo Alto office. Technology law concentrates on identifying, protecting, and transacting in intellectual property—ideas. It is a product of the insuppressible inventiveness of Silicon Valley. It lacked the thrill of trial work, but it was far more stimulating than the tedious rounds of discovery that dominated litigation practice.

  I traded the thrust and parry of litigation for ongoing relationships with byte-sized entrepreneurs, coders. They were creating the real value in the food chain of the PC revolution: software. I became engrossed in working with these inventors, who were assembling new businesses out of Silicon Valley garage shops. They turned out to be people I could easily relate to, more like the artists the Banzini Brothers had managed in the rock and roll promotion business than like my litigation colleagues and clients. They reminded me of my passionate, offbeat high school and college friends. They were talent. I understood them. I understood their art and their art's relationship to business. And I found myself able, by dint of both my eclectic experience and my training as a lawyer, to help them build viable enterprises around their brilliant ideas.

  Perhaps, I thought, I could find genuine satisfaction, some meaning, in practicing law after all.

  In 1985, I approached Lucasfilm, George Lucas's film studio and the home of Star Wars, for some work on the sale of Pixar, its animation division, to Steve Jobs. My firm ended up handling the technology side of that deal—the conveyance of the technology, the protection of intellectual property, and so on. At that time, Pixar was hardly the distinguished company Jobs later made of it, but the transaction was still fascinating: a project with two marquee names from two glamorous worlds, entertainment and technology. I tried to take as much shine from their limelight as I could.

  With negotiations completed, I orchestrated the closing, a legal ritual to seal the deal. The key people from each side attended, smiling, shaking hands, and drinking champagne. It was a happy event for everyone, it turned out, except me. I watched all those people celebrate in the boardroom, while I checked signatures and filled up boxes with documents in some stuffy little closet across the hall. It struck me that no matter how interesting the clients or the case, my work as a lawyer was extremely narrow and routine. I decided at that point I wanted to do what they were doing—write the script, not collate the pages. I wanted to be in the other room. Practicing law wouldn't put me there.

  Soon after that sale was completed, people at Apple approached me about taking a position with them. While the job was in the legal department, it turned out to be largely deal making. I told the partners at my law firm about the offer, and they were horrified. They tried to persuade me that I was about to make the biggest blunder of my life. They played on my Harvard, East Coast, big-law-firm prejudices. The high art of law, they contended, was in private practice; in-house practice was a dead end. I was on the path to partnership, so I needed only to continue doing what I was doing, and the future would be rosy. Plug away, they tried to convince me, and all of it would eventually come to me.

  That was the rational, analytic side of the argument, and I took it seriously. I had bought the prejudice that company lawyers were people who couldn't hack it in a good law firm. Maybe Apple was a step backwards for me. If it didn't work out, would a good law firm still take me seriously?

  Yet everything in my gut told me I should go to Apple.

  Those were the mid-eighties, the glory days of the company Steve Jobs had energized with ideals and values. Though he had been forced out just before I arrived, his influence still bled in five colors throughout the organization. The Apple he created was about making the power of computing accessible to everyone, about freedom from the tyranny of technology and technologists, about changing education, about using technology to help the handicapped cope with the challenges of their disabilities. While Apple clearly had to be financially successful, its more fundamental purpose was to innovate, invent, and lead an entire cultural revolution that everyone there saw leaping from those keyboards and screens with silicon brains. Apple's 1984 Super Bowl commercial, where the free thinking individual charges through the faceless, gray crowd to shatter the tyranny of Big Brother, was gospel, not hype, throughout the Apple organization. All the people I met there, passionate young people, truly believed they were changing the world, not selling computers.

  I took a mental health day and rode my bicycle mile after mile through the backcountry of Marin county. Seventy-five miles later, I still didn't know what to do. The next morning, I walked into work, puzzling through the options. I can still remember sitting in my office at the end of the hall and looking down the long corridor. In a moment of clarity, I realized my whole future was in that hall, perfectly defined. From my office, I had a unobstructed view of my colleagues in their offices—the junior associates nearest, then the senior associates, the junior partners, the partners, and finally the managing partner at the far end of the hall. A neat and tidy future loomed before me. Sure, the stroll down the hallway could be reassuring and empowering in a way, but it seemed so pat, so determined. In that instant it was if I had already lived all that. Where was the blank piece of paper?

  I could not put off my life any longer. I called the people at Apple and took the job.

  * * *

  TO: lenny@alchemy.net

  FROM: randy@virtual.net

  SUBJECT: A Question

  Thanks for your e-mail. I truly enjoyed visiting your Web site. Your father was quite a gardener.

  Deferring your life on the chance that Funerals.com will hit it big is a huge gamble. The high odds of failure don't justify betting it will buy you the freedom you want. The course of your life and the course of Funerals.com are not unrelated. Figure out what you care about and do that. If you can do it in the context of Funerals.com, do it from the start. Don't concern yourself with exit strategies.

  At key points in my life, I've found it helpful to ask myself a simple question about what I was doing at that moment: What would it take for you to be willing to spend the rest of your life on Funerals.com?

  best

  r

  * * *

/>   Chapter Five

  THE

  ROMANCE,

  NOT THE

  FINANCE

  I WOKE EARLY TO ANOTHER BLUE, blue, cloudless California day, the sweet smell of jasmine sifting through the open windows. I grew up in upstate New York, where sunny days are not to be taken for granted, especially during the gray, dispirited days of winter. It wasn't until I headed off to college in New England that I was able to count on a few sunny days. And that was New England — not exactly a haven for sun worshippers. I started to wonder what a bit more light might do for me. Twenty years after my first trip to San Francisco, I can still remember crossing the Bay Bridge for the very first time after many days and nights on the road from Boston. I knew I was home, instantly.

  I brewed a pot of green tea and sipped it in the garden, as Tali and Tika, like Keystone Cops, scampered off to chase the scent of some long-gone deer or coyote. I completed my morning rituals—meditation, the Wall Street Journal, and e-mail.

  Lenny had already replied at 5:30 A.M. his time. I was curious if he had gone to bed at all. No wonder he'd looked tired in the Konditorei. Driven days, sleepless nights. I could empathize. I had known that exhausting combination.

  * * *

  TO: randy@virtual.net

  FROM: lenny@alchemy.net

  SUBJECT: Re: A Question

  Randy,

  I don't understand “do Funerals.com for the rest of my life.” Nobody commits to anything forever these days. Things change too fast. Of all people, you should be the first to realize that.

  But don't doubt my commitment. There's nothing I want more and nothing I won't do to make Funerals.com a success. If you have any doubts about my dedication to this venture, you can forget them. I wouldn't want you or Frank to suspect otherwise. I just need funding. I know I can make this work!

  Yours,

  Lenny

  P.S. Glad you enjoyed my family site. My dad was a very good gardener. It was his passion in life. We always told him he should start a business so he could devote himself to it full time. He said he'd have his chance when he retired.

  * * *

  I never doubted Lenny's drive. It was obvious from the very beginning, even in the armlock he laid on me at the door of the Konditorei. Drive, commitment—those weren't my concern. I wanted to know what he really cared about. I wanted to know his passion. Lenny didn't seem to understand the question. He was beginning to nettle me.

  The early morning traffic snarled on the only local road that led out of town to the freeway. On the motorcycle, I bobbed and weaved around the grumbling commuters, remembering an episode of the “Twilight Zone” in which the character finds himself meandering through a crowd of stone-frozen people stuck fast in the middle of their daily routines. I cut up the highway one exit, fields of golden grass on both sides, fingers of fog stretching down the pleats in the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west. I scooted across Sand Hill Road to the complex at 3000, the original Sand Hill address. No spaces, so I jumped the curb and popped the stand.

  First up, I sat in on a deal pitch at one of the VC firms where some good friends wanted my opinion. The plan was to sell pet supplies on the Net. The would-be entrepreneurs called their venture PetUniverse.com.

  Lenny's presentation was polished, but this one positively gleamed. Here were three guys fresh out of top-of-the-line business schools, and they had managed to shrink the world, or at least all pet owners, into a four-cell matrix. Their projections found the perfect balance between the aggressive and the impossible. They clearly recognized this as a “Better-Faster-Cheaper” play and understood the implications, which all boiled down to one simple dictum: execute at light speed. A herd of other aspiring Petsomethings.com startups had been making the rounds during the last month, too. Sand Hill Road was in a pet feeding frenzy, at least for the moment.

  The disconcerting thing about these pet shop boys, all sharp go-getters, was that none of them, they confessed when asked, owned a pet, had ever owned a pet, or—so far as I could tell—had ever wanted to own a pet. I wouldn't have been surprised to discover they were deathly allergic to fur, feathers, and scales.

  So why were they doing this? Why was it worth their time? I am always amazed that venture capitalists don't ask that question. Perhaps at this point everyone assumes it's obvious: to get rich. I tried to look at it from their perspective. Maybe this was their lark, a few years invested on the off chance that they would hit it big. Afterward they could get on with whatever was important to them. Too many times, unfortunately, I had seen this attitude lead to a lifetime of successive bets, all heading away from their original dreams. It is too easy to get lost in the hype and swallowed up by the casino economics of it all. It bothered me to see talented young people give up, or defer, their ideals in the hope of a fast buck that was unlikely to ever arrive. In considering my question, “What would make you willing…,” Lenny thought I was suggesting he should plan his life precisely. That's foolish. As he already pointed out, the one thing we can count on is change. But knowing what we require to be willing to do something lifelong provides invaluable self-knowledge.

  It's not, as I've learned from my own experience, that the deferred life is just a bad bet. Its very structure—first, step one, do what you must; then, step two, do what you want—implies that what we must do is necessarily different from what we want to do. Why is that the case? In the Deferred Life Plan, the second step, the life we defer, cannot exist, does not deserve to exist, without first doing something unsatisfying. We'll get to the good stuff later. In the first step we earn, financially and psychologically, the second step. Don't misunderstand my skepticism. Sacrifice and compromise are integral parts of any life, even a life well lived. But why not do hard work because it is meaningful, not simply to get it over with in order to move on to the next thing?

  The Deferred Life Plan also dictates that we divorce who we are and what we care about from what we do in that first step. By distancing the real person from her actions, all manner of bad behavior is justified in the name of business. “Sure she's an SOB at work, but that's not who she really is. It's only business, nothing personal.” Fueled by ambition, we hope that in the end we will be judged by our accomplishments, not by who we are. Silicon Valley is a place where many people excuse their own behavior as “just business.” I wasn't holding my breath to see the “real” them.

  The distinction between drive and passion is crucial. I had asked Lenny about his passion. He thought I was questioning his drive and commitment. Passion and drive are not the same at all.

  Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can't tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express your passion. But it isn't just the desire to achieve some goal or payoff, and it's not about quotas or bonuses or cashing out. It's not about jumping through someone else's hoops. That's drive.

  In the Deferred Life Plan, drive pushes us through the first step. The second step, the deferred life itself, is the home of passion. We hope and suppose that when we get there, we will be able to resurrect our passions on our own terms. If we get there.

  I had passion in Providence but didn't appreciate it. I drove myself through law school and the practice of law, seeking and hoping and groping for passion but never finding it. Then in Silicon Valley—at Apple, Claris, GO, LucasArts—I discovered passion in my work. But I didn't understand the crucial difference between drive and passion until I found them at war inside me.

  SOME FOUR YEARS AGO, I was CEO of Crystal Dynamics, then a three-year-old video game company. I had been recruited from LucasArts Entertainment, the province of George Lucas's empire that produced games and edutainment for the PC. Our flagship products were based on the Star Wars films. LucasArts was my first CEO position. It was an extremely exciting place to work, rich with talent and creativity. What prompted me to talk, however, when the head-hunter call
ed about Crystal Dynamics, was the prospect of autonomy—the ability to lead an independent company based on my vision for games and storytelling. Autonomy was supposed to have been part of the package at LucasArts, but it looked increasingly unlikely.

  By mid-1995 I had become captivated by a vision of storytelling transformed by technology. For the first time, I believed, computers and their ilk would allow the audience to directly engage and interact with the story. Games represented a primitive stage in the evolution of this medium, like movies in the time of the nickelodeon. I wanted the chance to shape this new medium and contribute to its evolving grammar and vocabulary.

  Crystal Dynamics had been founded to ride the wave of the much-heralded “Next Generation” video games. Crystal's titles were played on game consoles, electronic boxes that hooked up directly to TV sets. “Next Gen” game consoles ran on the then-new, more powerful 32- and 64-bit processors, which provided faster play and sharper images. They were manufactured by companies like 3DO, Nintendo, Sony, and Sega, each of which had its own unique and incompatible platform. Because most console games relied on quick reaction times, they were also known as “twitch” games, appealing mainly to adolescent boys with their muscle-bound heroes, busty women, and plenty of bloody fighting.

  At first, I was troubled that Crystal's video games were toy-like in comparison with LucasArt's more cinematic PC games. But if the “Next Gen” market took off and if Crystal could achieve some early success, I believed we might be able to shift the company's focus toward interactive storytelling.