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Sometime in her late 20s, my friend and then colleague Helen, was earmarked as high-potential in the global consulting firm we worked at and was placed on the ‘fast-track’ to becoming a partner. Broadly speaking, this means that, having been recognised as talent, an individual is given opportunities and development that mean they can accelerate through the ranks quicker - a kind of golden elevator to the management level where people own a share of the firm’s profits.
Helen and I had worked together on a project in the Middle East and I knew from experience that she was an exceptional consultant and people leader. It was no surprise at all that she’d been recognised as a high-performer and earmarked for the most senior levels of the firm.
To make partner in your early 30s is rare. And once you’re a partner in this sort of consulting firm, you’re in a position of high power, high status and high financial reward. If Helen played her cards right, secured a big account or two, she’d be incredibly wealthy by her mid-40s - by which I mean London-townhouse-and-holiday-home-in-Tuscany wealthy.
But before she went anywhere on this golden elevator, Helen quit her job. I was surprised and deeply intrigued, the kind of curiosity I always have about people making a choice that moves them away from the mainstream, one that looks like a renegade straying from the herd.
“I don’t want it” she told me when I met her for coffee. She had been working with a coach for a while and now knew, in her bones, that she simply didn’t have the passion to pursue this path in the long-term.
It was laid out in front of her and she was turning away from it - it was not her calling. She knew that what she really wanted lay somewhere else. Most of her friends and family thought she was mad.
After she quit, she trained full-time in interior design for a year, older than most of her fellow students. She won awards at the graduation, which I was there to witness, and then started her own interior design practice. At the same time, she began to train in yoga more intensively which was also the beginning of a path of spiritual awakening and healing.
The interior design business was working, she had clients and income but realised soon that she didn’t truly love running it. She knew too that she wanted to focus more on yoga, healing and spiritual practice. So she pulled down the shutters on the business after a couple of years.
Once again, most people thought she was mad, although fewer now - some had glimpsed what happens when you’re willing to follow your own sense of knowing.
Fast forward a decade or so to now, and Helen owns a yoga & healing retreat in the Andalusian mountains that she bought and completely renovated during the pandemic. She left London, selling her flat in a coveted neighbourhood to make this dream a reality. It is a beautiful place, the manifestation of a vision she held.
She lives in a nearby house, which she also re-designed and renovated herself. As well as running retreats, she works as a healer and teaches yoga.
Helen was instrumental in my own journey. When she announced she was quitting the firm, I was 30 years old, and coming to terms with my own realisation that I didn’t want to climb the ladder in the firm, or any firm for that matter.
Seeing her walk away from it all, gave me the inspiration to confront the painful realisation that I wasn’t living life on my terms. I found my own coach to work with and that was the beginning of finding out who I really was.
At 30, I felt I had left it late to figure things out. I know now that it is never too late.
“Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing. And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.”
— Khalil Gibran
Most of us are blighted by the sunk-cost fallacy, the idea that because we’ve invested so much in one particular path that it is too costly and wasteful to choose another. In reality, it is too costly and wasteful to remain on a path that we don’t really want.
There is a short story by Mark Helprin called ‘Vandevere’s House’, that I’ve never forgotten. It has a parable-like quality to it as Helprin describes the luxurious and safe life that has been meticulously built by a wealthy former American businessman called Vandevere.
Vandevere is in his mid-50s and effectively retired after an lucrative IPO. This has enabled him to put $50 million in a fund to support his living costs, and “after that he still had $130 million left to live on” although he still rues being screwed out of more in a business deal.
The story describes in exquisite detail the huge renovated house and estate overlooking the Pacific that cost Vandevere $20 million to buy, with more spent on making every tiny detail of the place the highest quality: “Though you could not see them, the things you could not see were flawless. The plumbing, for example, was made of an alloy used in United States naval ships to coat areas subject to the greatest corrosion… The shelves were of woven stainless steel, the baseboards limestone, the floor marble, the moldings from a renowned workshop in Flanders… He made the new pool 105.6 feet long, so that 50 laps were a mile, which is the distance he swam every day. The water shone blue in a foil of white marble set in classical Italian gardens.”
He describes the exceptional health and lifestyle that Vandevere enjoys: “Although 54 years of age, he was in perfect health except for a slight deafness on one side, the consequence of having been a rifleman without earplugs. Early that morning he had run six miles, done calisthenics, lifted weights, and swum. His exercise clothes, washed and ironed, were back on the polished blond wood shelves of his airy closet. He had read the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, an article on naval operations in narrow seas, and an essay by Friedrich Hayek. At a breakfast table set with Copeland china, George III sterling, and Austrian crystal glasses, he had dared eat a peach, some fat-free yoghurt, and a piece of dry toast.”
And yet throughout these descriptions of his pristine life, we also learn about his wife, a woman he fell in love with at first sight at university. We hear of their intense compatibility, her beauty, intelligence and verve. But we also learn that his wife is now his ex-wife, she has left him.
We learn that his obsession with perfecting his life, of seeking a pristine and flawless existence in this way was part of what had driven his wife away. To her, these traits “seemed always to freeze things in place, and were like death, which is why she left.”
We learn they still love each other but she cannot live in “what she considered an all-consuming tyranny.” So Vandevere has everything a man could materially wish for except that which is most valuable. He is deeply lonely.
And then, at the very end of the story, as Vandevere sits in his manicured garden overlooking the pool, he slowly realises that his house is on fire behind him. There is a sudden horror that hits him and then… nothing.
He takes no action; there’s no reaching for his phone or sprinting across the lawn. Instead, he slowly turns his chair around and watches, noticing in himself a deep and growing relief as he watches every expensive and carefully crafted thing he owns destroyed as fire begins to ravage the house.
We are left with these lines: “He felt this heat, but did not move. Nor did he want to move even as all he had built and worked for over so many years vanished before him at great speed.
For he had already left it behind, and his spirit had been unlocked, and his soul freed, in a gift that had come on the wind. All that Vandevere could think of now, as white smoke swirled around him like snow, was his wife as she had been at the quarry, and her face, and the water running off her hair as she had bobbed up in the foam.”
I spoke with a friend a little while ago and shared with him an idle musing about what I would do if my life burned to the ground. In my case, this would mean some awful tragedy taking my wife and son from me. It was an unpleasant but revealing thing to ponder.
I would be unspeakably distraught, certainly never the same person again. Without them, what would I do?
The answer, I suggested to my friend, is that I’d pack a rucksack and take off. I don’t know where. Maybe I’d just walk endlessly, hitchhike, or catch a boat somewhere.
I’d respond to that deep longing for pilgrimage, the part of me that is pure hermit. And not solely out of grief but more out of somewhere that has always existed in me.
For even in the worst circumstances I can possibly imagine, the most loved and important people of my life taken away, something essential would be revealed. The urges and desires that lie underneath my everyday existence. Fortunately, and without too much difficulty, I know these longings and ensure that they are given space every now and then.
It is very easy to trap ourselves in what we have built, however safe, precious and gilded it might feel. It is easy too, to keep telling ourselves that this life we have is what we truly want because we’ve put so much work into it, when some wiser and quieter part of us is whispering something different.
We ignore that whisper at our peril. Helen didn’t ignore it, Vandevere did until he had no choice.
What if you burned it all down now? What would that look like?
What would you really do in the aftermath?
If it all burned down tomorrow, what would you rebuild? And what might emerge from the ashes?
Released from the bondage of your possessions, relationships, roles and routines, what might you discover, old or new? What desires and needs might you finally pay attention to?
Do it. Imagine torching it all. It is a cathartic exercise, revealing in ways that might both surprise and delight you.
“The phoenix must fall and must allow the fall into the flames and into the ashes in order to find in those unseen depths the archetypal energies of renewal and re-vivification that gives it wings again. If we resist the falling into dissolution that is required by the archetype, we lose our wings. We lose our sense of the spirit of our own lives and we lose the possibility of becoming conscious agents of a recreation that is waiting to happen.”
— Michael Meade
Tipping Point: navigating collapse and crisis.
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
— Henry David Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
Contact me to:
Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.
Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group dialogues, workshops and strategy sessions.
Understand your organisation and its culture as if it were a person, through The Human Organisation framework.
Have a real conversation.
At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.
You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.
Great piece! Thank you. You remind me to commit to things wholeheartedly but hold on to them lightly.