The Bittersweet Smell of Success

It was difficult to find the right cinematic metaphor for the feelings coursing through me as I exited my office for the final time at the end of June. Jump cut to several Hollywood prison release scenes and after trying on a few for size (couldn’t wear Clooney’s cool in Ocean’s 11) the best I could come up with is James Whitmore’s parole in Shawshank Redemption not only leaving a place that he had called home for decades but arriving in a world he didn’t quite recognize. It wasn’t quite that solitary. Yes I had the proverbial banker’s boxes but there was a cake from my now former team the previous day inscribed as per the accompanying photo. A gag mug inscribed with “You Are Dead To Us” was included into the tchotchke bag. All in good fun as they tried to capture the last 32 years in one cheesy parting gift. I appreciated it and the hugs as I pointed myself in a new uncharted direction.

This was the final act in a long running off-Broadway dramedy titled Jonathan Sells His Business. Those that followed the previous blog might remember an entry celebrating our 30th Anniversary. You can read it here. I had been dancing around this for some time with a younger colleague in my business who raised the money for the transaction last year. I had a number and he met it. Once accepted we got into a prolonged second act of due diligence and since I will never be lecturing at the Harvard Business School anytime soon, it took some time to clean up my books and square things. And so I signed, knowing I could have put in another couple of years but by then there’d be no offer. Catch as catch can. I could get into a long winded essay on my thoughts about the film business now and how someone at my age just doesn’t fit into the narrative, but there comes a time in man’s life where the thought of traipsing around LA or New York on yet another scavenger hunt has little appeal right down to the schlep to the airport. I was tired and had done whatever I could short of taking on a partner but as my kindergarten report card said, “Johnny doesn’t play well with others.”

So the deal closed April 1 (Joke hopefully is not on me) and I completed a short consultancy contract at the end of June. And although I have things I want to do, most of it involves passion over profit so I have to think I am more retired than not. If I had to add another cinematic metaphor, it would be the pretty good Jack Nicholson effort About Schmidt which tracks an insurance salesman from the brink of his retirement at a sad little farewell dinner. What follows is a cringy unsolicited return to the office a few days later only to be informed that he is clearly not needed. As he leaves, Schmidt sees his files neatly piled by the trash bin in the garage.  If he didn’t get the memo at the retirement dinner he got it right then.

So the phone has stopped ringing and I’m getting more emails from Donald Trump looking for donations than anything else. The first couple of weeks were completely disorienting although it had to be much worse for the millions in the boomer demo who were suddenly downsized after a bad quarterly from the CFO. My story arc has a decent ending and I do have some pride in the achievement. My Uncle Benny continuously reminds me that it’s incredible that I could, at my age, sell the company. Privately I struggle with the idea that perhaps my time could have been put to better use but that is for another entry. Or ten. 

How do I feel about it? I am using professional help to capture and rationalize my emotions because they are more life driven than business derived. I have to face the fact that my anxiety isn’t due to some overdue receivables or a ‘cease and desist’ letter. I have to start making sense out of my life and not just my day.

Bill Maher had the great humorist Dave Barry on his HBO show recently in an effort to promote his new memoir. Maher challenged Barry that this kind of reminiscing in hard cover speaks to an end game and even though Maher is pushing 70 he doesn’t feel like his life is over. Barry countered wryly with, “Actually it is.” There is some truth to that if you follow Facebook and my contemporaries who are still sitting shivah for parents they lost decades ago or posting ticket stubs from concerts from fifty years ago. Mea culpa there during a particularly nostalgic season in Instagram a ways back. I subscribe to a thread on Quora in which contributors ask questions about aging and why it sucks so much. It’s a hard read but is occasionally broken up by a duffer that has accepted his limitations but without letting it interfere with his plans and opportunities whatever they may be.

There is so much more past than future to be sure but – this might not strike you as a great example – Trump is 79 and in the first year of his second presidency and although others would like his life to be over, he is writing perhaps his own story’s most important chapter: win, lose or draw. 

So POTUS is a counterpoint to what Barry was saying. And there are a lot of other seniors who show no signs of going away. So the challenge is to stay with the story and to stay healthy enough in mind, body in soul keep yourself in any arena of your liking that gets you out of bed in the morning with a smile on your face and some purpose in your step.

My personal challenge is doing something about my ADHD. I was tested and confirmed but my doctor said I don’t have the blood pressure to handle the meds and now, with time on my hands, and no excuses like schedules, meetings and intrusive phone calls, I can address that and therefore provide a structure within which I can use my time wisely. Because I am running out of it.

Somebody smarter than me said that had I done something about this decades ago, life might have been a little easier than I have had it. That I managed a business over three decades is a miracle in itself. Being self-critical is constructive, self-hating not so much. I can’t fix the past but I can dial in a decent future.

How much future? Well there is a new app that can predict your death date. I had a girlfriend a few years ago who wanted her check out time to be no later than 86. I’m hoping for a little more. I imagine by then there will be no restrictions on the MAID option and given the state of Canada it might be literally unlivable by then. But that’s another screed.

So what am I going to do? There’s a screenplay that has to be finished and two more that have to be started. Travelling is ruining travelling but I am taking a few weeks in Italy later this year. There’s also a major physical move coming that is appropriately inappropriate which I will document in these pages which will stand, hopefully, as a companion to the last blog.

You’ll notice less cynicism and more resolve if anything. I have this theory that if you are truly alive in any given moment you are neither younger nor older than anyone experiencing that exact same moment. It’s like going to a concert and sitting next to a couple half your age. As an example I had the pleasure of seeing the beloved Jeff Goldblum with his jazz group in a concert a few weeks ago. I might have been sitting next to people thirty years younger but while being immersed in Goldblum’s charming patter and splashy piano work, I felt neither older nor younger than those around me. Live your movie like it’s just thirty pages in.

The great heavy metal rocker Ozzie Osbourne passed away this summer just weeks after Black Sabbath’s incredible farewell extravaganza which raised many tens of millions for Parkinson’s research. It’s amazing Osbourne could live to see his own celebration of life. Himself in what was obviously the very late stages of the condition, Ozzy said after the show that in order to actually perform he had to get off all the meds and that he “would rather be in pain than numb”.

No matter what the consequences.

I hope I can live as well as Ozzy died. Hang in there with me.