Changing the Definition of Success
I’m closing in on retirement and so I’ve been sitting back a bit and looking at my career and my life overall and thinking about the idea of success. Personally, I feel like I’ve had a pretty successful career. By the most important metric to an educator, which is have I helped students, I believe by that scale I’ve achieved a large amount of success. Out of the thousands of students I’ve had the privilege to have worked for, I can point to a large number of what I consider success stories. No, not the students who went to Harvard or Berkeley. Not the 4.0 students who won scholarship and awards, sure I helped them too, but they would have likely gotten their without my help.
The students that I feel are my success stories are the students that wouldn’t have made it without my help. The kid from Memphis whose family were drug dealers and expected them to be as well, the student who started out by blaming me for their failure and accusing me of racism, but came around a year later to thank me for getting them on a path to success. The student who was date raped and I helped them get the help they needed. The 80 year-old student who was starting college for the first time. Success to me, was when these students graduated, my 80 year-old student went on to complete her PhD at 88. I can think of similar stories over each of the colleges I’ve worked at, over each of the roles I’ve held as a counselor, advisor, teacher, director and dean. I’ve also, as a manager, had success with helping employees achieve their goals as well. Whether it was to complete a degree, become an instructor or manager or even just get a particular position.
But not everyone would consider my career to be a success, because I stopped my career climb at the position of dean. Sure, I’ve been manager of the year on one campus, I’ve been twice a finalist for a national award in community college excellence and even won the award once. But I’m still just a middle manager. Many people would consider me to be only slightly successful because I never became a vice-president or a president.
In America we really define success by title and money, and usually those two are completely intertwined. If you have the big title, you’re making the type of money that people would consider to be at a successful level. But what I want to make a case for tonight, is that we’re using the wrong metric for success in America. What should that metric be instead of title, money and power? I would argue it should be happiness and quality of life. I’ll start specific and then get into a more general discussion.
I think I’ve been incredibly successful in my career. Not because of the students I’ve helped, the awards I’ve won, the grants I’ve been awarded, not because of the title I have or the salary I make. No, I believe I’ve been successful because of the way I’ve cultivated my work/life balance, built my own happiness and established a solid current quality of life and have put myself into a position to have a good quality of life in retirement.
About 25 years ago I wasn’t in a great place. I was dealing with heavy levels of depression, I was significantly in debt, over $200,000. That was a $140,000 in student loans and $60,000 in credit card debt. I was in a great job, living in paradise but I was only making about $40,000 a year. As I started evolving in my career and thinking about my future I really didn’t see a chance at a normal retirement. I couldn’t imagine making enough given my salary at the time, and my debt, to ever be in a position to take a normal retirement. So I started wondering what the hell I should do. The idea of just working my whole life until I died was abhorrent to me. So what to do?
For a while I just worked like a madman, climbed the ladder, made more money but honestly it didn’t change my circumstances significantly. Plus, working massive hours, at one point 80 hours per week was not good for me in any way. So eventually I was making ok money and only working 50 hours a week but it was still too much. I was doing what I could to find balance through hobbies like cycling, Tai Chi, writing and photography but it wasn’t enough, and the long-term outcome still looked the same.
Then I hit on the first bit of genius, taking my retirement in bits. I decided that if I couldn’t retire at a reasonable age, I would take my retirement in bits. You see in my retirement I’ve always wanted to do a few things like hike the Himalayas, the Appalachian Trail, I wanted to travel and cycle and not just see places but really be able to explore them. And if I wasn’t going to retire until my 70’s or ever, I wasn’t going to be able to do those types of things the way I wanted to do them. So in 2010 I took my first retirement leave. I took nine months off to travel and train for a 30 day hike in the high passes of the Himalayas including hiking to base camp at Mount Everest. It was a magnificent trip, to use a cliché, a trip of a lifetime. But it was just the first.
After accomplishing my first retirement bit, I set into a pattern. I would work three years, enough time to thoroughly plan and save up money for the next big adventure. Then I would take a year off to travel and explore. That’s been the pattern for the last 15 years. I’ve played with whales in San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja, photographed Polar
Bears in the Arctic. I’ve visited all 50 states, walked across Scotland several times, cycled around Galway in Ireland, walked part of the Camino in Spain and backpacked around Spain, Portugal and Morocco. I’ve hiked the Great Glen Way, The Western Highland
Way, and 1000 miles on the Appalachian Trail and wrote a book about it, Appalachian Trail Happiness.
Along the way, a really amazing thing happened. Although I had many opportunities to leave, staying in California and in the State Teachers Retirement System has put me in the position to have a very good retirement. And not at 65 or 70, but at the end of this year a few months after my 60th birthday. But these breaks were just half the battle.
The other side of this was actually much harder. As a middle manager in higher education, my job can easily become all encompassing. There is easily 50 or 60 hours of work you could put in as a dean every single week. Additionally, the job is 90% dealing with people and politics, it’s not easy to wind down after a nine, ten or twelve hour day. You’re on call 24/7, the emails come 24/7 and since the pandemic the phone/text messages come every day and at all hours, if you let it.
That was the second bit of genius that came to me and it happened during the pandemic. You see as that 50 – 60 hours suddenly exploded to 70 hours, part at home, part as one of the few people on campus, things were becoming unmanageable. The added responsibility of also needing to check in with all of my people (all 70+ direct reports), of having to redesign how we do everything, having to create safety protocols and find ways to bring programs back to campus, it was overwhelming. There was no extra pay, no support, just more and more piled on your plate every single day for months at a time over an 18 month period.
As the emergency portion of the pandemic wound down, and there was some semblance of normal returning, the job didn’t let up. Now it was masking protocols and PPE distributions, modality changes, paperless processes and a whole new paradigm in doing business, while the powers above pushed for the status quo to return, tomorrow. It was at this time I finally learned something I wish I had learned much earlier in my career, that I actually could choose. I don’t need to spend 50, 60 or 70 hours a week to do a good job. I realized that I have some control in the reasonableness of my job. The fact is, that there are things in every job that if they don’t get done, they really don’t matter. Sure, someone wanted it done, but if it doesn’t get done the institution moves on and everything we have to get done still happens. It was the moment when I truly realized that my life/work balance was more important than what the institution wanted to do.
I still serve students, I still serve my staff and faculty, but I learned to truly put off, that which was truly not that important. I should have learned this lesson a long time ago from a woman who was a legend, her name was Wallace Mayo. Wallace was one of the earliest tenured computer science professors at the University of Tennessee. When I got to know her in the late 90s she was the chair of the department and winding down her career. One day she told me how she kept up with the eternal piles of paperwork we all faced. She said, that every Friday at 5PM, she swept whatever was still on her desk into her garbage can and if it was important, it would come back. I of course thought it was hyperbole, until one Friday afternoon, months later, when I found myself in her office. The week is over she said, grabbed the garbage can and swept the papers on her desk into it. I was amazed and she’s been one of my heroes ever since.
The lesson was there, but I missed it. There is a portion of what we do, that does not matter to us responsibly doing our job and meeting our obligations. We can let those things go. We can also push our institutions to do things in more reasonable ways. Each semester we used to do this insanely complicated reporting. It involved taking information from two systems and having to fuse the data into a single report, with little to no exaggeration this report would take 9 – 12 hours to complete. Then it needed to be printed in triplicate, oh, and if there was a change, and there was always a change, it had to be redone. So sometimes you’d have to do it two or three times each semester. All to verify that the schedule matched what was in the payroll system. After throwing a fit about this and proposing solutions for two years we finally moved to a simple spreadsheet that takes 45 minutes to resolve and can be done electronically and updated in minutes. And it serves the same damn purpose.
So now, most weeks, I work my contracted hours. Sure, there are weeks when things arise that absolutely need my attention and I work more. But 90% of the time now, I work my contracted hours. This means trusting others to do what they are supposed to do, scary I know. This means you take the responsibility and lose some control. But two things happen, your people feel empowered and they become more responsible, in general. The other piece is, when others don’t meet their responsibilities, you need to make sure there are consequences. And finally, you just have to let things go. I’ve become fond of giving people choices, you need this by Friday, well I can do one of these three things, which would like done by then? As long as you deliver on what’s most important, by their true deadlines, and serve your students well, you’ll never put your job in jeopardy.
So I put to you that the metric for success that should be used for higher education administrators is as follows. Someone who first and foremost serves students, maintains a reasonable work/life balance, and normally works close to their contracted hours should be considered highly successful.
Work/life balance means putting that which is truly important at the priority it deserves and not short changing those things for the institution. So that means prioritizing your mental and physical health, your family and friends at least as high a priority as your job.
Having a balanced life, where you give the appropriate amount of attention and time to your physical and mental health, family and friends should not only be a measure of success for you. If institutions truly care about their employees, it should also be a metric for them. We hear a lot in our businesses about caring campus initiatives, wellness initiatives and campus climate. But how do any of these mean anything, if the institutions we work for push us ignore our personal priorities for the benefit of the institution?
Higher Ed Mentor 