Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  I thought about my conversation in Bali with Eric and the self-inquiry practice he’d suggested. At times, when my thoughts turned unconstructive, I heard his voice asking, “Is it true? Are you 100 percent certain that it’s true?” And then I remembered his comment about making his life a sabbatical and thought that this was an opportunity to create that for myself.

  When I called Eric to share my news, he said, “Congratulations!”

  I was taken aback. “This doesn’t feel like a congratulations moment.”

  “Oh, please. You engineered this entire situation. It was your choice.”

  What had transpired at work was the inevitable outcome of a decision I’d made to take a break, when I took the very first steps to embark on a new path. It was then that I’d made a choice and claimed responsibility for living fully. There were moments when I succumbed to rumination about the past and wondered if my sabbatical was a poor career choice because I was paying a price with my career. In those moments when I thought about what might have been, I reminded myself that taking the time to alter my circumstances was a deliberate expression of values that changed my family and me. I achieved an inner victory by gaining meaning in my life. My family understood the virtues of intention and courage. And I found love in the relationships with my wife and children. Besides, who knew what the future held? Life was long.

  In the weeks that followed, as we negotiated the precise wording of a written agreement between the firm and me, I approached each of my partners. “All things change, and I’m okay with that.” Rather than balling my hands into fists to fight like hell, as I would have done at an earlier time in my life, I exposed my palms in vulnerability—open heart, open mind.

  When I reframed the situation in positive terms and emotions, the vector and tone of the conversation changed. What could have been ugly became amicable. Instead of fighting the force that was coming at me, I witnessed its momentum and flowed with it. I observed events as they transpired and responded instead of reacted.

  Victoria discovered that the professional world was not entirely welcoming to moms returning to the workforce after a long hiatus. She adopted an entrepreneurial approach and engaged in her own search for a special opportunity to crowbar her way back into the business world.

  When I expressed concern about how we would manage it all, she quoted me back to myself: “Nothing is permanent. All things change. The trick is to lean into it and experience it fully.” We fell into a new groove and struggled like everyone else to balance the demands of work and family. We found moments to reground ourselves, mostly through yoga, our family traditions, and quiet conversation in the same small home office in which Victoria hatched the original idea of our sabbatical.

  The kids mostly slipped right back into their familiar patterns of friends, school, and activities. Just as they started school and with Victoria’s help, they organized a book drive to help the school in Tanzania we’d visited.

  Rita returned to her class a hero. Something about going to Bali made her special. In time, though, familiar social tensions reasserted themselves, and soon school became unbearable again. With our encouragement, she decided to switch schools permanently. We found one not quite like Green School but still progressive, creative, and nurturing. Replanted in more fertile soil, her shoot took root, and she blossomed.

  Sam struggled to retain his sense of peace. In the face of the stress and competition in a Manhattan prep school, he periodically fell into bouts of silence at the dinner table just as he had before we left for Bali. He was a serious and competitive student who responded to the affirmation of good grades. But I found him more curious than he had been. When he expressed an interest in improving his Indonesian language skills, Victoria found an Indonesian graduate student to tutor him. Once weekly, they engaged in a Jewish-Muslim dialogue, in Indonesian, that enriched both of them. Throughout, Sam kept up with his Bali friends on Facebook and steadfastly refused to drink from plastic water bottles as if adhering to a religious prohibition.

  He survived the college admissions process and was accepted to his first-choice school. When the admissions officer wrote to congratulate him, she added a handwritten note to the form letter: “I enjoyed reading about your trip to Bali and your continued interest in the Indonesian language.” I laughed when I saw that and elbowed Sam. “You’re welcome.”

  Nava too was taken with languages and embarked on her own online course to learn not Indonesian but Chinese. It was hard work, but we encouraged her to stick with it.

  As Oliver entered high school, I noticed he was becoming a bit like Sam had been before we went on sabbatical. He began to take his schoolwork more seriously and studied hard for exams and quizzes that seemed to take place daily. I was concerned that the relentless pressure to perform was sucking the joy of learning out of him, just as it had for Sam, and that his desire to get into a good college and the work it involved would crowd out any other educational goal. His gang of buddies, for whom he yearned so intensely when we first left New York, was slipping away as friendships realigned in the transition to high school. Academic performance was becoming his sole focus, and other interests fell away along with his creativity. It distressed both Victoria and me. Before long, we encouraged him to join Rita, with whom he now argued only rarely, at her new school. He switched in his junior year. When Rita helped him clear out his locker, she found it stuffed with plastic bags.

  “What’s this?” she asked him.

  “When I see kids throw out plastic bags, I collect them. I thought I’d send them to recycling. Eventually.”

  At his new school, Oliver again pursued his interests outside his schoolwork, and his general mood turned decidedly positive. He expressed an interest in playing the marimba, and Victoria found a man in Long Island who manufactured the instruments in Bali and imported them. When Oliver’s arrived, it took a central place in our apartment. Once, when he was playing it, he paused and turned to me. “You know, I’m beginning to see it really was a big deal for us to take a sabbatical.”

  I took time to let the fractured bone in my foot heal and considered carefully the opportunities that came my way. Instead of saying yes to many of them, I was highly selective. Like the meditative wisdom that every wandering thought is an invitation to reorient, center, and restart, I decided to begin again.

  At first, I mentored and coached CEOs as they built their companies for themselves and their investors. I was attracted to the creativity and energy of high-growth enterprises. I relied on my expertise and experience to help young technology companies grow. Periodically, in introductory meetings, my sabbatical story came up. It didn’t connect with everyone, but with those it did, I developed a quick and easy bond that was deeper than usual. It was like a secret handshake with men and women who were curious and sought meaning beyond success and winning at all costs. When Steve Christian, the entrepreneur from Java, asked me to invest in a venture of his in Indonesia, I jumped at the chance. What excited me was not just the nature of the opportunity or the off-the-beaten path angle but the ability to be in business with creative people I liked and admired. And I wanted to keep a business toehold in Asia.

  In the course of my mentoring, one of my people asked me if I would talk to a fellow entrepreneur who needed some guidance in an acute situation. The business was an online company that trained companies and individuals to excel in digital marketing. The co-owner told me that the relationship between her and the other primary owner had deteriorated to the point where they were suing each other. She had decided that the only way to protect what she had built was to put the company through bankruptcy. The company was a start-up that was just beginning to generate revenue, and Chapter 11 bankruptcy is rare in that world.

  Victoria immediately came to mind. She had a background in marketing, technology, and start-up operations and was trying to stay involved in education after her time building the downtown school. She was looking for an entry point into business that would utilize her skills a
nd not penalize her for the time away from the corporate world. This situation looked like an affordable entrée into a business that could leverage her skills and meet her interests. I ran it by her. She dug in, found out as much as she could about the company, and decided she wanted to be involved.

  I went back to the entrepreneur. “We can play this one of two ways,” I said. “I can advise you, which I’m happy to do, or I can bid for the asset because I think it’s a pretty interesting opportunity. But I can’t do both. You tell me which you’d prefer, and we’ll do that.”

  “I’d like you to bid for it.”

  After weeks of due diligence, Victoria and I hired a lawyer to show up in a courtroom in San Francisco. We listened on speakerphone, me in our apartment, she in a taxi heading uptown for an appointment. The judge opened the auction. Two other bidders were in the room, one being the other shareholder. The bidding went a few rounds, and the gavel banged down. The judge declared the victor.

  Victoria’s cell connection was going in and out. “What did he say? Did we win?”

  I said, “We won. It’s yours.”

  Forgetting she was still on speaker in the courtroom, she let out a victorious yell. Muted laughter bubbled in from the other end.

  Over the course of the next weeks and months, I did what I do—behaved like the CEO and, in her opinion, “mansplained” things to her. At first I was probably helpful in setting things up, mostly with the details around closing the sale, but soon she started straight-arming me out of the way. “Back off. I got this.” I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut and offer advice only when she specifically asked for it. Other than that, my role was to listen without trying to tell her how to run things. She and the business were off and away. And just like that, Victoria entered one of the most creative and engaged phases of her career, devoting even more energy to the endeavor than she had to the community center.

  As she got more and more into it, she wasn’t always home to cook dinner for the kids and would ask me to deal with it, which I did. I also learned a lesson. The fact that I made dinner didn’t mean I was taking responsibility for dinner. She still was the person who made sure there would be food in the house and dinner on the table every single day even if I was occasionally the one standing over the hot stove. The same applied to making sure someone walked the dog, dealing with the dry cleaners, shopping for the kids, and changing the bulbs. I had always understood this concept of responsibility in business but had never extrapolated it to the household or the family. It is an ongoing learning experience for Victoria and me as we test and evolve our traditional roles in the home.

  I followed Julia Cameron’s advice in her powerful book on creativity, The Artist’s Way: I devoted two hours a week to go on an “artist date,” time spent taking a solo expedition to explore something that interested me (I focused on the art galleries in Chelsea).

  I also wrote “morning pages,” three pages of stream of consciousness designed to clear the mind and chase away the self-critical voice that was so disruptive to creative flow. After a few sessions, I realized I wanted to add structure and direction to the exercise and write a book. This book. If others learned something from it, good. Besides, trying something new and creative, without regard to success or failure, would be applying directly the lessons I had learned on sabbatical.

  As I engaged at work, my animal spirits stirred again. One day, I came across an opportunity that had all the markings of the original Take-Two situation. It was a large public company in the internet services sector that I thought was terribly managed. Investor sentiment was decidedly negative. Since its CEO had taken the helm eight years earlier, the stock price had collapsed over 80 percent. I dug in, analyzed the company, and developed a plan for change. I approached a board director whom I knew with a long-shot proposal.

  “Here’s the way I see it,” I said. “If the company doesn’t make a serious change now, the train will leave the station, and the enterprise will be unsalvageable. On the other hand, if the company acts now, I think the upside could be really exciting. I can turn this company around, create a vehicle for growth, and add a ton of value along the way.”

  I wasn’t expecting a resounding reception. Boards of directors tend to be weary of outsiders with novel plans.

  “That sounds like a breath of fresh air,” he said. “Let me run it by a few other directors and get back to you.”

  Two weeks later, he called me back. “The thing is, the sitting CEO still has the board’s confidence.”

  I felt my indignation rise. If management wanted to run the company into the ground, then the current CEO was the man for the job.

  I wasn’t about to give up. I called some hedge funds I knew and set up some meetings. We talked about possible courses of action. I was back in activist-shareholder land. Inevitably, proceeding would require waging an expensive fight, and any fight had the potential to turn nasty.

  This time, I paused. This may have been a situation where a nasty fight was required, but did it have to be me to enter the battle? Did I really want to be hostile if I didn’t need to be? Perhaps I would re-engage later in that sort of activity, but with my Bali experience so fresh, I knew the answer. I called the funds I had been talking to and dropped the matter.

  Throughout that experience, I noticed that the character of my ambition and aggression had changed; it was no longer an overbearing imperative. My well-being did not depend on the next achievement. I realized that to compete, I needed to draw more on the wisdom of my experience than on the brute force of the mettle I’d developed in earlier years. The ethos of intention, presence, and creativity was as important to me as the culture of material success and accomplishment. Now when I needed to be tough in a business situation or negotiation, an appropriate aggression came naturally, though the edge had softened. I felt that I had become a better leader, entrepreneur, and executive. It was as if I had rewired myself into a certain kind of professional grace.

  As I went about my days, I strove to strike a balance of surrendering to what the world had to offer while fighting to tear opportunities from it. I sought to integrate the parts of me that wanted to engage, be effective, and compete with those parts that sought meaning, gratitude, and presence. I realized it was the intention to synthesize, not the synthesis itself, that motivated me. Like the peaceful warrior, my attempt to simultaneously engage and surrender would be ceaseless. The practices I’d cultivated in Bali, which by now had become routine, centered me.

  I meditated daily, sometimes for three minutes, other times thirty and longer. I made yoga practice a near-daily part of my routine. When I got the call or message that business executives inevitably receive, the one that could ruin their entire day, I rolled with it better. When unhelpful thoughts conspired to commandeer my mind, as they still did periodically, their currents didn’t carry me off. Instead, I stayed on the banks and watched them float past. I created space and recognized they were only thoughts that I didn’t need to believe. By regularly taking time to fall back from fierce engagement, I had opened myself to a strength I had not previously known.

  I found a studio in SoHo that, like Pranoto’s, attracted artists to life drawing sessions. When I could afford the time, I drew to clear my mind, now in charcoal instead of graphite. Charcoal had depth, mood, and character that were absent in graphite, and it didn’t leave a sheen on the page the way graphite did.

  On Father’s Day, Victoria’s gift to me was a few sessions with a painting teacher who introduced me to oils. Alex Shundi was part painter, part chef, and part philosopher. And a gifted teacher. On weekends for about three hours, Alex and I talked about art history and painted on canvas. He followed my interests, wherever they led. At one session, we looked at early twentieth-century revolutionary art in Mexico; at the next, the meditative and impermanent art of Andy Goldsworthy; at a third, we spent ninety minutes discussing different hues of the color red.

  In just the way drawing opened my eyes to line and edge, paintin
g opened them to color. Color became vivid to me. I could see its complexity just walking down the street, my mind breaking down colors to their components, like factoring numbers. It was as if parts of my brain were lighting up for the first time.

  I still found my own drawing and painting difficult but enjoyed the challenge and deep concentration the work required. I recognized my inner critic and greeted it like a friend. When that inner voice peeped, I noticed it and deliberately shifted my thought pattern. I took a beat and reminded myself that almost any complex creative work looks wretched in its early stages. With enough practice and the proper intention, I knew my eye would get keener in its observations of light and edge and my hand would become truer in its production of image.

  Still, meditation, yoga, and art were not a cure-all. One morning, I woke to a news story from Indonesia. Two of the Bali Nine had been sentenced to death and executed. Just when I was taking in the dawn of a new day, I felt as if a dagger had ripped through my heart. All the meditation practice in the world could not protect me from the anger and grief that I felt for men and families I had never met.

  One day, I received a call from a professional friend who was a cofounder of one of China’s most successful and, I thought, exciting technology companies. He pitched me on joining the company. “It doesn’t get any bigger than this,” he said. And the role he had in mind was a hand-in-glove fit with my interests and skills. More important, the company had a collaborative culture that openly promoted a positive optimistic outlook and a long-term orientation. Demanding without being threatening, patient without being foolish, it became successful, I concluded, not out of pure ambition but from an interest in exploring new areas and a willingness to try new approaches even if failure was a realistic possibility. It was the corporate version of Dweck’s open mindset.