My future was now blank. I would have to write my own narrative. From now on, my story wouldn’t be so traditional, or perhaps so elegant, or simple. But that was the point. It was becoming clearer to me that the fullest lives were lived by people not afraid of complication, mistakes, or imperfection.
* * *
—
I threw myself into my work. Basking in my recently acquired publicity job at NBC’s Washington news bureau, I began to assert my ambition and test my boundaries.
GE bought NBC the month I started working there. I was hired as a publicity coordinator—a far cry from the globe-trotting television journalist I had wanted to be, but at least I was in the newsroom. (Way in the back, in a micro-cubicle near the filing room, where few people journeyed, but it was just perfect to me.) I had found my way there after a series of jobs, as administrative assistant in a cable television association and as a programming coordinator for cable access community television, like Mike Myers’s Wayne’s World but even wackier. With GE at the helm, things changed quickly. NBC started to employ GE efficiency, and there was a rash of layoffs. Before long I was in charge of the publicity department—actually, I was the department. My bosses recognized me as a quick learner, efficient and willing to take on and manage many projects at once, and someone with a growing portfolio of small accomplishments on which to stand. I put out a behind-the-scenes newsletter to share updates across the bureau; I organized new photos so that the journalists looked more contemporary; and after attending the morning editorial meetings, I pitched ideas to the few reporters in DC who covered media, building relationships that NBC hadn’t had earlier. For all my shyness, pitching reporters was now my job. That, and the fact that I could do it over the phone, gave me a much-needed dose of courage.
I began traveling to the New York NBC headquarters once a month. After spending time in New York, all I could think about was how much I wanted to work there.
In early 1988, I got a new boss, an ambitious former lobbyist named J.R. He had landed in the New York mothership, handling corporate communications. He knew that I wanted to be on a bigger stage as well and started to prepare me for the jump. Then, in December 1988, after the first of what would be many annoying negotiations with J.R., I was officially offered the job.
I suppose the decision to move to New York should have terrified me. I was leaving a place I knew, two hours from my parents’ house, for one of the largest cities in the world, where I had few friends, no family—and no increased salary to pay for my new life. I would have to get permission from Dave to move our daughter out of state. I was racked with guilt that would shadow me for years. But determined to look forward, I leapt off that cliff.
I’ve since come to understand that charging into the unknown, optimistically and courageously, with all flags flying, is a skill, one that needs to be developed and nurtured, rather than quashed.
By the time I left for New York, I had learned to listen to that inner voice that encouraged me to imagine the future that I could create. The price was to uproot my daughter and start a new life—our life, but also for once, my life.
Ignore the Gatekeepers
A few years ago, I heard the fashion designer Marc Eckō give an amazing talk in which he distinguished between the Gatekeepers in his life—the “thought leaders,” the press, the critics—and what he calls the Goalkeepers, the ones who actually matter.
Gatekeepers are those looking to keep hold of the little power they have. They see divergent thinking and action as threatening. They bank on our desire for approval. The worst thing they do is to create and police the standards that the rest of us accept and internalize. You will find gatekeepers everywhere, in every job, in every classroom, in every family. And sometimes, I discovered, we invite them inside our own minds. When I moved to New York with NBC, I got a PhD in Gatekeepers.
Bias for Action
Most people have the notion that only people with real power, those who don’t need permission from others, have the ability to act. It’s natural to think, “That’s the work of ‘leaders,’ and I’m not that.” But once you accept that you’re a change-maker, you give yourself the right to confront the unasked questions about whatever work you do—even PR kits. Embracing such a mentality is crucial for anyone who wants to effect change: a parent intervening in her child’s school, a mother who demands clean water, an office worker who questions the point of doing reports…any one person who steps forward to make a difference on the path to better.
My own success is a testament not to an improbable succession of good decisions—I’ve had plenty of failures—but to a bias for action. Steven Pressfield, the author of The War of Art, once said that our enemy is not a lack of preparation or the difficulty of a project. “The enemy is our chattering brain,” he wrote, “which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.”
I’ve realized you can’t worry so much about making the right decision. What is more important is to develop a habit of acting decisively. It’s not that I have less doubt—as with most people, my insecurities run deep—but that I act in spite of it.
I was still working my way up at NBC, and the opportunities were proving plentiful. The work was intense in the years after GE bought it. Jack Welch had promoted Bob Wright, a GE plastics and finance veteran, to be NBC’s president. Bob was a slight man, with nervous energy. Educated as a lawyer, he peppered everyone with a string of questions. I even got a few. As a corporate communications manager, I was now dealing with upper-level NBC executives—and was making small creative moves. One of my “big” ideas was getting varsity sports letters to glue onto the covers of press books as part of a campaign to attract media to a briefing about how great NBC was at reaching college students. It wasn’t much, but it was just a little different, and a little edgy and creative in its own small way. I purchased the materials, including fabric peacock icons, with my own money, afraid to ask if it was okay. It was an example of giving myself permission, of not waiting for the office gatekeepers to tell me I could or couldn’t do it. But fear meant that I paid for the items myself, as if to inoculate me from potential failure.
At last my life was palpably moving forward. Katie was doing well with the change. We moved to a suburban New Jersey neighborhood with four girls her age on our block. We drove back to DC regularly for her to see Dave. I was in a good relationship with a man who I really cared about, an Australian journalist named Chris. I had a good job in media. And I now worked in New York City. Yet, riding the 5:45 p.m. DeCamp bus home to Bloomfield, New Jersey, through the Lincoln Tunnel, always in a mad dash to retrieve Katie from daycare before they closed, I was often dissatisfied, and sometimes miserable. And the reason was J.R.
I’d begun to hate working for J.R. An odd character who always dressed in brown, paneled three-piece suits that might have been hip today if worn with irony, J.R. was a bureaucratic custodian for the Way Things Were Done, a hall monitor who made everyone stay in line.
J.R. had his human side, of course—he loved his wife and their daughter, who was going blind. But he somehow managed to make all of us hate him. He kept his door shut at all times, squirreling himself away, barking out orders through his assistant and enforcing the small rules of the office with oversized demands.
With J.R., I was never insubordinate—I was quiet. At most, I rolled my eyes, a mildly disrespectful display of body language. To let off steam, I’d gossip about J.R. to a few colleagues. Our commiseration provided a release valve for my sanity, but it didn’t really make things better. We could gossip all day, but that didn’t change anything. He was still there, still our boss.
And then, a year into my new job, Betty Hudson—the head of the department whom I likened to a movie star (the rumor was she had appeared as an Amazonian beauty
in a sci-fi thriller once)—called J.R. and me down to her office on the sixth floor, where the senior executives sat. I remember it was a slice of corporate heaven, beset with orderly desks, marbled shelves adorned with brass tchotchkes that never tarnished, and gloved waiters serving steaming hot coffee from silver trays. J.R. didn’t let me in on what was coming, but he knew.
I had been quoted on the front page of the New York Times, where I’d given our standard statement on a piece of media industry regulation. But we hadn’t cleared it with Betty first. When Betty came to J.R. angry about the quote, he sold me out.
As Betty started to lecture me, walking me through NBC’s procedures, J.R. gave me an enigmatic smile. “We don’t do that here,” he echoed. “What were you thinking?”
I stared daggers at J.R. It was my job to talk to reporters, and the statement had been approved. And then I thought, “I’m not going to take it!” I don’t need to listen to the hall monitors anymore. I’m not going to give myself an alibi for not standing up and making things change.
Betty had hired a management consultant, a smooth-talking southern guy named Jimmy. I marched into Jimmy’s office to lay out J.R.’s management failings. After talking with our team—Bonnie, me, and a few others—Jimmy made the ultimate bureaucratic suggestion: “Why don’t you write up a report, make some recommendations?”
Fine, I thought. So I threw myself into the “report,” and in October 1989, I presented J.R. with an “NBC According to Me” dossier: eight pages on the disappointments of working in our department—including a lack of creative thinking and aversion to new ideas at the top, and an unwillingness to let employees stretch.
While not in so many words, I essentially said J.R. was a jerk and accused him of not knowing how to write. (He had an annoying habit of elongating words to make himself sound more corporate and sophisticated—“cross-pollinate” became “cross-pollinizationalize.”) Reading the report, J.R. got very defensive. “What do you mean? What did I do?” he said, as if we had really surprised him.
And then nothing happened.
That was when I decided that I had to leave NBC. I was never going to get ahead as long as J.R. was in place. I didn’t have a voice and never would. Hall monitors attack any attempt to weaken their power. My letter hadn’t loosened J.R.’s grip. If anything, it turned down the volume of my voice even more.
Ignoring the gatekeepers and giving yourself permission to advance your ideas is almost more frightening than the path-clearing that follows. To tell yourself, “Permission granted!” you have to find the strength to deny the voice inside your head screaming, “No, it’s too dangerous!” And you have to be prepared to face the “Are you crazy?” you’ll hear from peers or friends or family.
One of the things I’ve discovered over the course of my career is that people who effect radical change have to exhibit an uncompromising faith in experimentation, a radical impatience with the default, a bias for novelty and action, and a sense that disruption is something you engage, not observe. We have to give ourselves permission at times to embrace work as a kind of joyful insurrection. Giving ourselves permission allows us to hack rules that don’t make sense rather than follow them; to take ideas and stories apart that aren’t working; to go around the gatekeepers, bullies, and bureaucratic bottlenecks that would stifle change. Developing a habit of self-permission will instill in you the belief that you are in control of your career and your life, regardless of what is going on around you.
In the wake of my meeting with J.R., I reminded myself that I was the boss of my story—and I had to chart my own course. I gave myself permission to ignore the gatekeeper and find a different route. Late in 1989, I took a job at a pirate ship, a place whose raison d’être was to banish the old corporate hall monitors. The ship was CNN, the pirate Ted Turner.
Ted Turner’s Wet Hands
From my school days, people often didn’t know how to take me.
I can come across as aloof, although I certainly don’t feel that way on the inside. I am a natural introvert, and I struggle to this day with my habit of at first keeping people at bay. With my reserved nature, combined, in the early years of my career especially, with a relative lack of confidence, I could be hard to get to know.
I remember in college someone saying to me, as we were rounding a path on tricycles we had “borrowed” and were riding with wild abandon, “Wow, I had no idea you could be fun.”
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my innate curiosity and something I call social courage can help me compensate for the confidence and extroversion that are not part of my nature. The best I could find was a work-around. The issue came to a head while I was at CNN. Oddly, it had much to do with Ted Turner’s wet hands.
I arrived at Turner Broadcasting just before CNN became famous with the first Gulf War in 1991. The network was a little down-market from NBC (Turner owned a wrestling league) but fascinating, giddy, and unstructured.
I was leading PR for those pirates of TV news, overseeing people—my first time in management—and running Turner’s New York PR machine. At NBC, I had built good working relationships with the largely New York–based reporters who covered the media, due to my just-the-facts manner. They took my calls; they counted on me for fast answers. Now it was my job to pitch reporters to write stories about the Turner machine—getting people to tune in and become familiar with the various Turner branded channels.
While I was working as CNN’s liaison to the public, the Gulf War turned CNN reporters into stars. As I was walking in Times Square with “the Boys of Baghdad,” Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw, people erupted with spontaneous applause, giving them high fives and calling out their names. They basked in the adulation and attention; I was happy to be on the sidelines.
Part of my job was handling PR for Ted Turner when he came to New York, which he did frequently to accept awards or make a speech. Ted was a superstar, a swashbuckling media darling. He had created the first “Superstation” in the 1970s and by the early 1990s had launched CNN as the first all-news cable network. It was a huge success. And of course there was Ted’s famous wife, Jane Fonda.
When I wasn’t pitching stories about him, my role was to accompany Ted to his endless stream of speeches and media appearances. But did I take advantage of this incredible opportunity for exposure and advancement? No, I receded. Sure, I managed the schedule with professional zeal and competence, but then I made myself disappear into the background once the public-facing part began. I intentionally went out of my way to be invisible. I don’t think Ted even learned my name.
The turning point came at the United Nations. Ted was getting an award, and I was there to run point. It was one of those moments when I thought to myself, “I work with this powerful guy, and he doesn’t know who I am.” I needed to do something. So when I saw him burst out of the men’s room, I stuck out my hand and said, “Hi Ted, I want to formally introduce myself, I’m…”
At least I tried to say it. I barely whispered. After saying, “Oh, hi,” in his country baritone and giving my outstretched hand a quick shake—his hand was still wet—Ted paused to see if I had anything to add. I looked down. Ted then casually walked away, zipping his fly.
I slunk off, kicking myself.
When I got home at the end of the day, I was furious at how I let my timidity take over. Why are you letting this opportunity pass you by? I chastized myself. What do you want? Spending time with Captain Outrageous, as the media called Ted Turner, had forced me to look for “Beth Courageous.” I realized I would have to start dealing with my lack of social presence.
As a vast array of research has shown, success correlates as closely with confidence as it does competence. This is particularly true for someone who intends to be a change agent. So I made a plan. I would push myself outside of my comfort zone and do what scared me most: connect with other people. With my introvert personality, introducing myself to s
omeone new was awkward, even painful. Every day, I vowed, I would make one new connection: I would engage with a colleague or someone in my industry, at the coffee machine or over lunch. My strategy would be to ask him or her a question—about their work or what interested them—to get a conversation going.
I would use the strength of my natural curiosity as a tool to open doors.
Genuine change first starts with a mind-set. I needed to psych myself up, the way an athlete does before a big game. Before an event, I would map out what I was going to do, what I was going to say. I became just raw energy. I would introduce myself by saying, “Hi I’m Beth Comstock. I thought the speaker was excellent. I particularly liked her point about teaching more art in schools. What did you think?” Or whatever. The point, I realized, was just to get out of my own head, out of my own way, and engage.
While you’re freaking out worrying what the other person thinks about you, they’re often doing the same thing. And so we’re stuck in our own heads, trying to come across as smart or clever, rather than revealing ourselves to be the awkward, insecure beings we are. We miss our moment to connect.
I realized I had to make the encounter about them, not about me. I knew I had to turn off that internal critic. I had to act more like an anthropologist: “Tell me what makes you tick.” I would ask myself, “Is there something new I can learn from you?”
Imagine It Forward Page 3
