The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living (11 page)

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.

Chapter Five

T
HE
R
OMANCE
,
N
OT THE
F
INANCE

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.

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.