From Success to Significance: When the Pursuit of Success Isn’t Enough

Foreword by Bob Buford

Let me begin by confessing the intent of this foreword right up front. My hope for Lloyd Reeb’s book, which you now hold, is that it will convince you of two things—the first is that the change-of-life season described as Halftime is nearly universal in the developed world and critical to Halftimers. The second is that the transition from success to significance as a central motive force in life’s second half is not at all dependent upon income and net worth.

Lloyd has captured ideas and illustrations that will enable almost everyone who desires it to engage their passions in a life of significance. This can be done either alongside their primary work life in a parallel career, or as a primary career of work, serving others in which money making takes a necessary but subordinate role.

As the author of the book Halftime, I told my own particular and unique story, which happens to be that of a multimillionaire, and the question always comes up: Is Halftime a rich, white, male thing? This question seems to float in the air in conversations at the Halftime Workshops that Lloyd and I have done around the United States.

The answer is No, it’s not, but that always takes some explanation. Mine is a story of having the good fortune of beginning in the right business (television broadcasting, then cable television) at the right time (the sixties to the nineties), in the right place (the US). It is an example of one Halftime opportunity in the twentieth-first century. But my story is only one of millions (yes, millions!). The Halftime stories are many and diverse—as diverse as people can be in an individualistic time and place like ours.

The great creation of the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century has been the middle class. That’s my story and that is Lloyd’s story too. The main difference is that my story of successful commercial activity runs about twenty years of steady and fairly intense compounding longer than his. I’m sixty-four. Lloyd is forty-two. He was and still is in a different form of business than I (senior-focused real estate), and he caught on to the parallel-career idea sooner that I did. But his story shows the path from success to significance just as clearly as mine does. That’s why I encouraged him to write this book. That plus the fact that there’s probably nobody else who has sat across from more Halftimers than Lloyd, and his story at his age is more representative of forty-something stories than mine now is.

Now let me make one more point. There’s a burgeoning new field of research and writing that shows conclusively that there is no connection between money and happiness. None! Not positive or negative. Zero! A terrific new book, The Progress Paradox (2003), rolls up most of the prior research and is currently making its way up the bestseller lists. It, among others, contains these three assertions, which I quote:

1. [There is a] revolution of satisfied expectations, the uneasy feeling that accompanies actually receiving the things that you dreamed of.

2. That society is undergoing a fundamental shift from material want to meaning want, with ever larger numbers of people reasonably secure in terms of living standards, but feeling they lack significance in their lives. A transition from material want to meaning want is not a prediction that men and women will cease being materialistic; no social indicator points to such a possibility. It is a prediction that ever more millions will expect both pleasant living standards and a broad sense that their lives possess purpose. This is a conundrum, as meaning is much more difficult to acquire than material possessions.

3. That new psychological research, which seeks to explain why some are happy and others not, suggests it is in your self-interest to be forgiving, grateful, and optimistic—that these presumptively altruistic qualities are actually essential to personal well-being.¹

Significance is an existential need, not an economic need. Summing up the field: Nearly all well-being research supports the basic conclusion that money and material needs are only weakly associated with leading a good life. The magic number at which money decouples from happiness is far less than you might think. In fact some research suggests it may be as low as about $40,000 for a family of four.

My basic logic and Lloyd’s too, as you will discover as you read his account, goes like this: Why trade that which you can’t acquire enough of (significance) for that which you have plenty of already (success)? All of us will face a final exam when we arrive at Heaven’s Gate for the beginning of our new life. As I visualize it, there will be two questions: (1) What did you do about Jesus? and (2) What did you do with what I gave you to work with?

The book you are about to read is like getting the right answers before the exam. A pretty good deal.

And not a moment too soon.

Bob Buford

Author, Halftime: Changing Your Game Plan from Success to Significance

Founder, Leadership Network

www.halftime.org

Introduction

Ten years ago I made a midlife decision to reorient my life toward significance. Now I no longer have that sick feeling in my stomach of being trapped in a life of busyness, pursuing things that won’t last at the expense of things I value most. Strangely, though I work just as hard as ever, I feel little stress, especially when compared to the gut-wrenching stress I experienced as a real estate developer in the first half of my life. I’m free of the rat race.

I remember those sleepless nights, rolling around in bed, wondering if the bank would fund my next deal and whether demand for my seniors’ housing project would be as strong as I predicted. I remember the anxiety of thinking I was wasting my life chasing illusions, secretly asking myself if this is what I was created to do.

Sure, I still worry from time to time—when the stock markets fluctuate or unexpected family expenses emerge. But it’s a different kind of worry. I still enjoy working hard, reaching goals, and taking risks; but today I do it out of a sense of calling rather than some unexplained inner drivenness. I do it with the confidence that I’m in the sweet spot of what I was created to do. And I’m having the time of my life. I wake up every morning feeling lucky to know what I’m passionate about. I know the things I’m good at, and I’ve been given the gift of being able to focus my life on them.

I made that Halftime transition in 1993. I pushed the pause button in the middle of the game of life so that I might look back on the lessons and accomplishments of the first half, to reflect on what will really matter in the long run, and then to redirect my life in the second half. Specifically, I wanted to pursue the possibility of moving from success to significance. But without millions of dollars in the bank, I knew it would take creativity and intention to discover how to pursue significance.

How I made this transition, mistakes and all, is the subject of this book. Hundreds of thousands of people have read Bob Buford’s book Halftime and felt touched with a longing for the kind of significance he describes there. But many readers—regular, everyday people like you and I—have said, That’s great for Bob, but how can I do that without being wealthy?

When I first met Bob, I described my own difficult transition. Without hesitation he looked me in the eyes and said, Just maybe God pulled you through that knothole so that you could invest your life in helping others avoid it. And that is what I am dedicating my life to now.

Each day, between ten and twelve thousand people in the United States turn fifty. One in four Americans are over fifty, and the fifty-to-sixty-four-year-old age group is expected to grow by 50 percent by 2015, making the mature consumer market one that demands attention. But how many of those people focus on their longing for significance?

Of the millions entering midlife, a growing number are charting a Halftime course, choosing to swim upstream in our culture, away from the temporary toward the eternal, simplifying their lives so they can focus on the things that really matter. This book recounts my own life story as well as the experiences and insights of others who have also made this journey. This book will ask tough questions and point you to resources that will enable you to redefine success and pursue significance—and chart a new course for your second half.

I didn’t sell my business or quit my job. Instead, I redefined success, reallocated my energies, and re-prioritized my family’s spending. I cut the time I spent doing business, found a niche as one of the pastors at a large church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and help high-capacity business people find their second-half calling. As a result, my wife, Linda, and I have had more time over the past decade to spend with our three kids as they grow, time to spend together playing tennis and sailing. I have enjoyed getting back into good physical shape and building a few close friendships. By allocating part of my week to ministry, I’ve had the thrill of being a part of many men’s and women’s spiritual journeys as they pursue God and explore their personal faith, and I have traveled around the world on mission trips. I feel blessed to have had the freedom to invest a good part of my life in things that I believe have eternal significance.

Do you know the most interesting thing about all this? What makes all this possible is not that I’m rich, smart, or lucky. What makes my life today so different from the lives of typical forty-something executives has been choices, not chance. It’s about options, not affluence; about availability more than ability. I’m not downplaying the thrill or value of success. Instead, I’m recommending that you build on the success of your first half of life and transform it into significance.

At times I wanted to forget all about making a difference and simply go back to making money. I knew how to do it, and I could measure my effectiveness in dollars and cents. At times I was angry at the apparent lack of urgency within the nonprofit organizations I was trying to help. After all, intensity and urgency were keys to my success in real estate development—and that was done strictly for the money. So, since this new work was all about helping people, changing their lives and perhaps even their eternal destinies, why did these nonprofit organizations seem so unfocused? Why did they seem to have far less urgency than my partner and I had in our business? Why did some of the staff saunter out of the office at 4:30 p.m.?

But I soon realized that part of the burden was with me. I hadn’t yet learned how to measure effectiveness in the nonprofit arena of helping others.

Yet, despite all this, I would never want to return to my old life, to the time before my midlife transition when I pursued success with little regard for eternal significance.

PART I

FINDING THE FREEDOM TO DREAM AT MIDLIFE

Chapter 1

My Two-Minute Warning: A Life-Defining Moment

The shadows casting down the brick wall created the warmth and richness of a building that I felt sure seniors would love to call home for many years to come. The Georgian-style building overlooked a beautiful bend in the Tay River and incorporated all the conveniences of comfortable, modern living. We named it Huntington Green. It was our most beautiful housing development to date, and it represented the culmination of months of intense planning and work.

Like a sculptor, I stood back and reflected on this finished work, which had once been nothing more than a vision in my mind. It was ribbon-cutting day, but for me it was so much more. It was the confirmation I needed that I should invest my life in something more significant than simply creating beautiful buildings and making money.

I had just returned from five weeks in Albania, where I not only saw poverty and despair everywhere I looked but had the opportunity to work side-by-side with people who brought hope and help to this country in turmoil. With the fall of many communist governments in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, Albania remained the most staunchly communist country in the world, as well as the most isolated. The country’s communist experiment had left it impoverished. Its three million people depended on ancient farming methods, resulting in a tragically inefficient agricultural industry that was unable to compete in a global economy. After decades of centrally planned farming, the Albanian farmers had no idea how to plan their own crops, assess costs, set prices, or market their product.

Finally, the old regime fell. Within months, the new Albanian government recognized the critical importance of retraining the country’s farmers. Creative, entrepreneurial leaders with SEND International, a nonprofit missionary agency, rose to the challenge and offered to send dozens of successful American and Canadian farmers to Albania, to volunteer their time to help Albanian farmers one-on-one. SEND International asked me to lead the project.

I felt underequipped to lead such a project. After all, I didn’t even know where Albania was, and I knew nothing about farming. But I did know that my leadership skills had proven themselves in the marketplace and that I desperately wanted to find an avenue to make my life count for something more than making money—to be a part of something bigger than myself.

So, at the invitation of the Albanian government, we took more than seventy farmers to teach the Albanians the basics of farming in a market economy. As they hung out together over two weeks, the Albanians wanted to learn more about our Western farms, our families, and even our faith in God. For me, this project was a first step toward answering the deep longing of my heart for significance.

Each team spent two weeks in their assigned village, working with every farmer that showed any receptivity. They lived in the farmers’ homes—cement-block houses crowded together along mud roads, with no phones and animals everywhere. Farmland surrounded each village, and each morning the farmers walked out to their fields carrying their rustic tools with them. They did most of their work by hand. Their homes were cold and dirty, with no indoor plumbing. The typical Albanian farmer owned just a handful of acres, a few chickens, and a cow.

Our Canadian and American farmers, by contrast, owned hundreds of acres and had huge tractors, trucks, and harvesting equipment—and yet they humbly built a bridge of trust with each Albanian family, opening the door to deeper conversation. Often their discussion moved beyond farming to family, politics, and even spiritual topics.

The Albanians’ hearts overflowed with spiritual questions. After all, for more than seventy years they had been told that God did not exist. But even as they looked around at the beauty and complexity of nature, they questioned that idea.

I will never forget how this experience affected one sixty-year-old hog farmer from Tennessee, named Burress Nichols, as well as a fifty-year-old turkey farmer from Vancouver, named Ron Heppel. These busy, successful farmers had paid their own way to Albania to give two weeks of their time. Even while they recovered from jet lag and culture shock, they worked day and night to help dozens of farmers rethink their farming strategies. They slept on old, musty beds, used smelly outhouses—and, at the end of their time, openly cried as they gave their host families good-bye hugs. The entire village came out to say farewell. Burress and Ron had fallen in love with these people and felt awed by the real help and hope they were able to bring.

Burress and Ron had everything in life: loving families, the latest farm equipment, large homes, nice cars, respect in their communities, deep relationships with God—and yet