Understanding Your True Character as an Entrepreneur

Why do we do all that we do?

Is it for the money? The recognition? Is work a part of life and life a part of work? Is it just the next rung in the ladder after we finish college and join the next grouping of people we’re tied to for a brief period in time?

These aren’t generally the thoughts of 20-year-olds. That is the age where you do more than think. “Of course I work!”

They aren’t often the thoughts of 30-year-olds. You finally accumulate some amount of money. You’re no longer entry-level. You think of coupling, of family, of work/life balance and you begin to feel the weight of a responsibility in the world you never had.

I think the “why” often begins in the 40’s. You’ve had enough ladder climbing alongside peers to form some sense of human motivations. You’d seen enough set backs in lives and careers to take it all a bit more seriously. Often you’ve gotten through the drowsy years of diapers and playgrounds and set the basic trajectory for your children if you chose to have them. Most of us party less often, almost never cart off last minute to some island for frolicking and almost definitionally become less narcissistic. We are too surrounded by responsibilities to others for pure narcissism.

The 40’s are the beginning of “sandwich years” in which many begin caring not only for children but also for parents. It is the beginning of not being able to live with reckless abandon but with the weight of knowing life has finality and beginning to understand your own mortality. One doesn’t necessarily decline into a depressing or fatalistic panic so much as come to a realistic sense of one’s place in history and the fleeting nature of our most precious moments.

You can see the years you have left with your children and measure them on your hands. You are often nearing the peak of your career arc and while you have many productive years ahead of you, you begin to understand that there actually IS an end.

I can’t say what the 50’s bring. I’m not there yet. I imagine that for many — if you are fortunate enough to stay healthy — it’s the beginning of truly feeling comfortable in your aging skin and accepting the course of your life.

In my 40’s I think a lot about relationships. My 20s and 30s were about meeting lots of new people and always willing and wanting to engage in new relationships and dialogs. Call it the “wedding party years” when you constantly met groups of people and friends. My 40s are more guarded. I care a lot more about the time I have with my true friends than superficial openings of new ones. Don’t get me wrong — I open the door to new relationships all the time. But I’ve become more adept at filtering out who will likely be a lifelong friend and who is likely to be transactional.

It turns out that most people in life are transactional for you — and that’s ok. I’ve become much more adept at developing a sense early in my relationships whether they are likely to ephemeral or lasting. You develop a sense of some people entering your life almost like family and that these people won’t merely be “business transactions” even though likely that’s how you’ll initially interact with many of those people since you meet in the workplace.

I recently attended the 50th birthday party of my friend Ynon Kreiz and you could feel around him the love of friends who have known him for 30+ years. He was also surrounded by business colleagues: Maker Studios employees, Disney leaders, YouTube leaders, VC investors and so forth. And you could tell that even though his Disney relationships were formed in business there is a close mutual trust and respect of all of his colleagues.

I have observed that many who transcend business life and personal life tend to be more successful. I am always reminded of that old saying, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” People who break down these barriers form longer-lasting and more impactful business and personal relationships.

I often think about business and life but seldom write about it because it’s not a sound-bite or a nugget of knowledge one can apply immediately to businesses so it generally doesn’t feel blog-worthy to me.

This week I was forced to reflect on it more fully. I had a board meeting for NextPlus and I heard from one of the board members that Nanea Reeves (President & COO) was losing her husband to cancer. I immediately reached out to Scott Lahman, long-time friend and the CEO and asked him to cancel the meeting. It made no sense to me that Nanea should be dragged away from time with her husband Vic Anderson to attend a board meeting. There was no amount of work that was more important than her husband’s remaining life.

Nanea’s response surprised me. She did not want her husband’s illness to affect her other life’s priority — NextPlus — from succeeding. She spent many hours in hospice care with her husband and getting into the office was actually a nice mental break and a chance to reenergize for the difficult moments of dealing with thy dying, with the burden of facing loss and the monotony of sitting in room for hours on end. These are my words so I don’t know if they adequately represent Nanea’s feelings. But here are her own words

“My work is my life. I have loved every second of it, even on those days when I hate everything about it…

However, if you ask anyone who knows me personally, they will say that my relationship with my husband is the greatest achievement in my life… All I want to do is make the end of his life wonderful. To surround him with everything and everyone he loves and let him know he made a difference in my life as well as the lives of so many other people he has helped throughout the years…

Vic said to me one night, “Listen. You can’t let this thing going on with me distract you from making Nextplus a hit. It is important for you to do that, Nanea. The most compassionate thing you can do for me is to make sure that your life is filled with success so you can use it to help others. And so, I keep going to work. And what I found was that the people at work were there for me.”

Nanea wrote all of this in her beautiful, heartfelt, human and crushing blog post “Work/Life Balance and What That Means When Things Fall Apart.” It is such wonderfully human blog post that describes in reality many of the emotions that I only ponder philosophically in knowing the inevitable future we all face. I can’t recommend reading it enough.

In it there is one small ask — a small donation to Vic’s cause — which is helping build a school in Tibet to educate young girls. There is a short description of the website of the goals and also a 3-minute, very moving video of Vic’s previous accomplishments. If you feel as moved by it as I did I’m sure even $50 would help.

I have had the great pleasure in working closely with Nanea Reeves in the past 18 months. She joined TextPlus at a moment in the company’s transition. She breathed new life and energy into our entire team and if I could say so — even into our board. She is a natural leader who charts a strong sense of direction in world filled with hard choices and engenders tremendous loyalty in her team members to achieve extra ordinary goals.

If you want to see an interview where she espouses many of her leadership theories and traits I think we captured that well in this hour we spent together.

I never knew through all of our work that she was playing for a higher purpose. She’s had business and financial successes before. But this time it’s for Vic. She is driven to make NextPlus a hit for her team, for her shareholders and as a commitment to the philanthropic efforts of her one true love in life — Vic Anderson.

Nanea, I wish you peace, strength and courage in the weeks ahead. We are all here for you in any capacity you need or want. Thank you for being an inspiration to all of us in tough times. And know that I, too, am now playing at NextPlus for your higher purpose.

I’d like to leave you with her final, most touching words that brought a tear to my eyes …

“My husband is dying. He is a man who began his journey in this lifetime with a rough start, stumbled and fell quite a few times before ultimately transforming himself into a quiet compassionate force of nature. He is also the only man I have ever loved with all of my heart. The others just got little pieces of it.”