The Significance of the Insignificant

Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys. - Emma Bull

Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. - Albert Einstein

In the middle of a hectic business schedule and planning out a cross-country move, I received this email yesterday from a long time friend whom I will identify as L.M.  L.M. wrote to me after reading one of my posts about 9/11 where I remembered common friends of ours, specifically Narender Nath and Eric Bennett, who were both lost on 9/11.

I am a survivor of 9/11.  I woke up that day with a terrible headache that day that made me 15 minutes late for the ferry. I watched the smoke rise from Tower 1 and stood on the deck of the Ferry and watched as the second plane flying so low we could see people in the windows fly up the length of the tower 2 and fly into the building.

Those 15 minutes saved me. I would have been in the elevator going to my assignment somewhere in a conference room on one of those floors blown out by the plane.

I was doing some strategy work for Lehman at the time through Cap.

I read what you wrote about Narender and I remember Eric's happy smile and I think we survived for them. To give them light.

I only hope we do them justice.

L.M.

Despite a hectic, complicated schedule, this email caused me to stop and reflect on my years on Wall St. as I do from time to time, remembering the great people I have been blessed to work with there.

I started telling the person sitting next to me about some of those people and I bombarded the person with funny stories.  As I told the stories, I named a specific individual and I paused.  His initials are also L.M. (curiously enough) and doesn’t know the L.M. who wrote to me.

Suddenly I felt the need to reach out to him even though I haven’t seen him in 10 years, decided to call him the next day and then realized I needed to call him now.

Caller ID on L.M.’s phone ruined my surprise call to him and we reconnected effortlessly as is often the case with people who are connected on deeper levels than one can often explain or describe.  He said something that I hear frequently when I feel compelled to call someone – “I was just thinking about you. I can’t believe you are calling me at this moment.”

Coincidence?

I don’t think so.

We caught up quickly and then he said something that struck me.

L.M. told me he had just finished a job interview with a prospective employer in N.Y. and interestingly enough, the group he was hoping to work with was being run by a well-known, highly respected man that I know well.

When I worked with L.M. over 20 years ago, the young man who is now running the group that L.M. hopes to join had joined us as a quiet, thoughtful, brilliant new addition to the IT industry.  Myself and a colleague named Bill were assigned to mentor him and as L.M. and I joked yesterday, anyone assigned to Bill and I quickly had any shyness or quietness “beat out of the them” while retaining a respectful, intelligent approach to problems and people.

And now a circle has the potential to be closed as L.M., a brilliant, sensitive, compassionate man in his own right has the opportunity to “close a circle” by working for the man I mentored so long ago.

As we discussed this odd “coincidence” yesterday, L.M. said something else that moved me deeply.  His wife had died in 1996 and he said that my support and guidance then had helped carry him and prevent him from doing something stupid.  I didn’t know my impact on him then until yesterday.

All these years later, L.M. once again found himself in a difficult place that he has an opportunity to lift himself from if he secures this opportunity with the man whom I mentored.

L.M. said to me, “That’s twice your influence has appeared in my Life when darkness was present.  This call has lifted me into the stratosphere.  There is no way this is a coincidence that I have this opportunity to work for someone you mentored and that you are calling me just as the opportunity has appeared.“

We chatted for a while and after we hung up, I sat back and reflected on what I had just experienced.

Twenty plus years ago, he was one of many clients and the man he hopes to work for was one of many colleagues.  At the time, I wasn’t thinking that my day-to-day actions would mean anything for either one of them.  After all, in the busy world that many of us live in, we often don’t realize what a powerful impact (good or bad) we are having on people until we get reminders like the one that I received yesterday.

More than twenty years later, a man whom I admire immensely has an opportunity to work with another man whom I admire immensely, two men whom I have influenced in ways that at the time seemed unimportant.

But they are important to L.M. right now.

L.M. and I talked about God’s providence versus coincidence.

If I were to calculate the probability of the “coincidences” that L.M. and I were talking about, I would no doubt come to a realization that such an event couldn’t happen.

But it did.

How do you explain that?

And so I am reminded of how profound the impact of simple actions can be and that greater things are at work in our Lives than we can understand.

By the same token, the first L.M. who started this whole process yesterday by writing a simple email to me created a profound moment for the second L.M. and myself.  I doubt the first L.M. had any idea that their email would have launched the moments that subsequently unfolded.

Coincidence?

I don’t think so.

What do you think?

It reminds me to be more in the moment because we rarely know what impact we are having and more times than not, will never know.

Unless we have reminders like the one I received yesterday.

Are you cognizant of the impact you are having as you make your way through your busy Life?

Are you sure?

How do you know?

It matters.

Create a great day for yourself and others, because merely having one is too passive an experience.

You are not just creating a great day!

You are creating the potential for a great future.

In service and servanthood,

Harry

Mastering the Art of Coincidence

Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys. - Emma Bull

Choice, not chance, determines your destiny. – Aristotle (attributed)

A long time ago at the tender, naïve age of 17 and with my first post secondary education behind me (long story), I found myself working as an IT architect for a medium-sized, family-owned insurance company in Newfoundland.  The President and owner of the company was a man that this impressionable graduate looked up to (I almost wrote worshipped) for his discipline, focus, knowledge and wisdom and many of his personal practices, including Quiet Hour (the first hour of every day being reserved for planning and reflection), are things I still practice to this day. 

Fast forward many years to the early 2000’s ….

I had driven up to Providence, Rhode Island from the NYC area for a stamp collector expo and while there, I had the opportunity to buy a number of Newfoundland covers.  A cover is a common item created by stamp collectors whereby they mail an envelope to themselves with a stamp on it that is mailed on the day (and preferably from the location) that the stamp is issued.  The postal cancellation serves as  official identification of the date the stamp was issued.

When I got home, I held the covers up to the light and noted that each one had an index card inside it, a common practice to prevent the envelope from being bent as it journeys back to its sender.

However, one cover had no return address and seemed to have a letter in it.  I thought, “Hmmm … I only paid a dollar for this – why not?” and I carefully slit the envelope open to remove the letter.

It was a letter with investment advice that had been written in the early 1940’s to a woman in St. John’s, Newfoundland from a man who signed himself as “Art – The Insurance Man” (he signed his full name, I have changed it for privacy reasons).

This envelope wasn’t a cover. It was in fact a letter that had never been delivered.  Curious about the coincidence that the last name of the person who sent the letter and the man who had mentored me early in my career were the same, I contacted my mentor’s son and asked him, “Do you know of a guy by the name of Art in your family?”

“Yes”, he replied, “Art, the insurance man.  He was my grandfather.”

After the goose bumps had settled, he and I explored the letter. It turned out that it had been written by his grandfather, my mentor’s father, and I had stumbled upon it in another country “by coincidence” more than 60 years after it had been mailed.  Subsequent efforts to return it to my mentor resulted in him telling me that he was glad that I had found the letter and that he would appreciate it if I kept it.

Ohhhhh the odds

As a strategy guy who works with data, facts and predictable outcomes, I knew it would be impossible to calculate the odds of this letter making the journey that it did only to end up in the hands of the person who bought it.

And yet I can’t deny the reality as I see it in my collection today.

We are surrounded by coincidences … but ….

When I think of this letter, I am reminded that coincidences are a funny thing, often being dismissed as fate, God’s hand, serendipity, luck or a manifestation of quantum physics.

Even when our Life is filled with coincidences, we often shrug them off in a self-referential way, saying that all those coincidences are merely a coincidence.

The difficulty with this is that as we get older and we are honest with ourselves, we see that the best, the worst and the strangest things in our Life all arrived “by coincidence” even though they fit perfectly in our Life.

Of course they would fit perfectly – without them you would have taken another Path and be analyzing a different set of perfect coincidences. :-)

What I find fascinating about coincidences and unforeseen opportunity is that in my line of work as an objective observer, I often see people surrounded by them – a harvest of abundance waiting for someone to seize them.

However, they are so often so busy focused on creating their future as they define it that these coincidences flow by in a never-ending stream of unharnessed opportunity.

My theory

Based on many years of such observations, I have a theory.

I posit that coincidences are not magical or rare at all.

What is rare and magical are the people who see them, embrace them and run with them.

Coincidences are always perfectly timed.

But their potential is lost forever unless we bring them into reality with good timing and an openness (audacity, maybe?) to dare to embrace them.

And that, I believe, separates many (not all) of those who seem to live Lives of luck and success (however it is measured) and people who do not.

That’s not to say that we must over analyze everything.  Some things may happen for no apparent reason or for a reason that is not meant for us to know (at least for the moment) and so to over analyze everything is to move into a Life of execution paralysis.  However, too many people with the intention of not over analyzing things move to the other extreme and decide to examine nothing for more reasons than I care to get into here, leaving nuggets of gold to remain buried in the dust of Life or for someone else to discover.

I also posit something else.

I think that it is not a coincidence that you are reading this right now.

What do you think?

In service and servanthood,

Harry

The Difference Between Bad Luck, Coincidences and Poor Choices

“Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.” - Emma Bull

“Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.” - Joseph Heller

America and its leaders have been fraught with a lot of “bad luck” these days.

When American citizens were attempting to get to the bottom of the Benghazi affair, then Secretary of State Clinton was suddenly overcome with a series of illnesses that continued until the clamour for justice died down and then suddenly she was well.

When people were wondering about what was going in Egypt and were calling Secretary of State Kerry’s focus into question, his wife was suddenly ill with an unknown illness that dominated the press until people stopped asking questions about Mr. Kerry’s choice of priorities.  Suddenly his wife was much better.

Yesterday as the President prepared to conduct a press conference to announce that our economy and its recovery still remained as mysterious and elusive as our ability to convert lead into gold, we had the tragedy of the Washington Naval Yard and amidst the focus on that, the President held his little-covered press conference anyway.  Few people heard the news of continued uncertainty regarding our economic situation or questioned why this important press conference wasn’t delayed out of respect for the event that was unfolding at the Naval Yard and so that more people could hear what was being presented.

Enter the conspiracist

Conspiracy people like Alex Jones and others cry foul over such things, saying that such events are intentionally orchestrated at the right moment to hide things from the American people.

For the third of my three examples, this would be a deep stretch unless one considers technology such as that which I wrote about in Experiencing the Voice of God.

We can accept that all of these events are pure coincidences.

We can take the conspiracy side and say they are all related and be swallowed up in the resulting paranoia.

Or we can admit that our world has gotten so complex, with so many events going on at once and with so many moving parts that it becomes impossible to connect the dots in the right order and with the appropriate inter-relationships …. if some dots should be connected at all.

It also becomes difficult to attribute the events to things that we have done … unless one steps back and looks at them in absence of the ill-informed propaganda that our news media presents as “information”.

Our world has outstripped our ability to understand it

The events of the world have assumed a life of their own and have exceeded the ability of their creators (us) to control, guide or predict them.  It is driving towards its own end point oblivious to our desires and actions to direct it elsewhere.

Don’t believe me?  Ask any politician what the impact will be of signing “legislation du jour” and they won’t be able to answer you outside of sharing their PR shtick.

And while people proclaim that gun control will prevent events such as yesterday’s tragedy in Washington DC or that bombing Syria will solve that “problem”, I suspect that things will continue to get more complex and not less when one discovers that much of today’s legislation and diplomacy are more of a best guess than a calculated strategic initiative with known outcomes.  The fact that the shooter in yesterday’s tragedy had weapons charges in his past and was also known to have psych issues when he passed an FBI background check in order to buy the weapon he used in the shooting and when he passed the Navy’s background check shows that more process and legislation doesn’t automatically fix anything.

Expecting things to get more difficult seems especially apparent when considering the adage “you get / attract what you focus on” and considering that the brunt of our government intellectual / financial focus is on military expenditures and the use of force domestically and abroad instead of improving ourselves in the areas of:

• education
• healthcare including in the area of mental health and disease prevention
• the poverty divide
• climate change
• clean water
• human population sustainability
• the technology singularity
• sustainable “clean” energy
• healthy food
• ** insert your own concern here **

I left one thing off the list, that being the ever-increasing surveillance that is taking place around the world.

Our leaders tell us that we need additional surveillance in order to be safe and to provide ourselves with an opportunity to focus on the detailed list above.

I think those leaders have their cause and effect backwards … intentionally in order to justify the military expenditures.

And there’s a reason for this.

If we had focused on that list almost exclusively, we wouldn’t have enabled or created many of the situations where we now need increased surveillance for our own safety.

However, the list of challenges I described has no easy solution or even a solution at all in some cases.

And so we stick with the one thing that we do very well and which we can control.

We build weapons.  Of all the things in the world, that is the one thing where we can predict the outcome of our actions and we are willing to invest the money to prove it.

For the rest of the items, we distract people from the fact that we are not solving them by producing feel-good studies that prove nothing or we actively seek opportunities to use our weapons, highlighting a “success” (and a justification for their use) while distracting us from the fact that more important things are not being solved.  Some have suggested that certain individuals will sometimes seed both sides of an argument so that people will be distracted, consumed or exhausted by the debate over how to fix things, eventually giving up or concurring that the problems are unsolvable.  Sadly, I have witnessed the latter technique being used successfully by some people.

Even when responding to Putin’s comment the other day that Americans shouldn’t be told that they are exceptional, a member of the US Senate responded by citing American victories in two world wars as proof of American exceptionalism.

I posit that Americans are exceptional in MANY non-military ways – why is our only response to Putin’s taunt tied to military victories (and old ones at that)?

Luck – good or bad based on perspective

People who seem to experience good luck constantly do so because they have sown the seeds that produce such luck.

Conversely, many people and companies who appear to have bad luck all around them discover upon closer examination that they have sown so much complexity and “bad karma” in their lives that bad luck is bound to return with seemingly greater-than-normal frequency and intensity.

And just as in classic accounting where we balance liabilities against assets, the truth is that one person’s bad luck is someone else’s good fortune.

So with the bad luck that America has experienced lately, it in fact is someone else’s good luck and is not entirely unpredictable.

Whose good luck it is and whose decisions are producing the “bad luck” are the questions that merit a closer examination.

The difficulty now is that we have passed the point of no return, where “the people” no longer have the means or even the right to question the priority of the people they elect and the seeds that they are sowing.

Since it’s no longer the elected official that make many of decisions, chasing after them for answers will not produce much satisfaction anyway.

And the sad truth is that pressing for such information may produce bad luck for the querent.

But that’s only coincidence, isn’t it?

In service and servanthood,

Harry

Addendum

A friend of mine who has served as a senior advisor to multiple Presidents of the US indicated to me some time ago that the events that are taking place both domestically and internationally cannot and will not be stopped and that what we should prepare for is the transition through the coming difficult times.

The difficulty with this analysis is this.

Transitioning through difficult times is only possible when one knows what the difficult thing is that needs to be navigated through.

Otherwise, we are likely to experience a LOT of bad luck.

Or is that also just a coincidence?

Greetings from Greenwood, South Carolina

When I was younger, I loved to collect postcards from different places that I had traveled to and for some reason, I particularly loved the images of postcards like the “Greetings from …” series.

It’s not the places so much as the people that fascinate me in the many places I have been blessed to travel.

I was reminded of this this morning when I received an errant fax on behalf of a business in Greenwood, South Carolina.  I contacted the business to inform them that their fax had gone to the wrong recipient and I had a brief albeit nice chat with the owner of the establishment before hanging up.

Having not been to Greenwood before, I looked them up and came up with a few tidbits.

They have a beautiful Festival of Flowers.

They have what appears to be a fun weekend of food, music and more at their annual Festival of Discovery.

They have a renowned hospital system.

Their population as of the 2010 census was around 23,000 or so.

They have the unfortunate distinction of being the hardest hit county in the United States according to poverty statistics.

And based on the one person that I spoke to today, they appear to be fine, friendly folk. :-)

Why do these statistics matter to you?

They don’t …. not one bit.

Or maybe they mean everything to you.

Whenever I get an errant email, fax, call or such, I always make sure to reach out to the sender to inform them that their communication intention hasn’t worked, especially if the content is of a privacy or time-sensitive nature.

If the sender is from a place that I have no knowledge of, I always like to take a few minutes to understand a little bit of the world that that person exists in.

When we spend most of our time immersed in our own world, our own journey and our own context, we lose sight of the journeys of the other 6.5 billion people riding around on the rock that we call “home”.

And when we lose sight of the other journeys in progress parallel to our own, I think we lose sight of the “collective coolness” of the human experience.

Media of all forms will try to convince us that the world is coming to an end.  Even people like myself occasionally have to deliver bad news to people to wake them up personally, professionally, politically, societally, financially, spiritually or some other “ly” word.  Whenever you see me tag something with #1206, it is one of those cranial defibrillator notifications.

But let’s not forget to take some time when we have the opportunity to take a peek over the wall into someone else’s world to explore beauty and “coolness” that one may not have been aware of otherwise.

You will both be better for the experience, perhaps in ways unknown to you now but which will at some point make sense to you.

I think everything happens for a reason, even an errant fax from Greenwood, South Carolina.

What do you think?

In service and servanthood,

Harry

Coincidence, Messages From Beyond .. or …?

I had a very restless night last night, dreaming about all sorts of people from my past – friends, family and clients from many years ago.

One series of dreams that kept recurring concerned a friend of mine whom I have known for over 35 years.  My friend Christopher is a great guy with a huge heart - a talented producer and director who shares interesting musings every weekend from “the shed”.  The shed is in his backyard and from it emanate thoughts and ideas that inspire thoughtful introspection, dialog and sometimes just a good laugh.  I often checked into Facebook on a Friday night to see what would come from “the shed”.

I kept dreaming that people were telling me that he had passed away and that we were saddened by the loss of his kind heart, his friendship and his musings from “the shed”.

When I awoke this morning, I learned that “Big Tom” Fitzgerald, a well-known radio personality for K-Rock radio in the area where Christopher lives, had passed away overnight.

“Big Tom”, who like Christopher is known for a heart larger than Life, was well-known for his live broadcast every Saturday from a mobile studio known as “the shed”.  The live request program was known as “Saturday in the Shed with Big Tom”.   I’ve met Big Tom – his gentle heart was obvious to me and to everyone who met him.

I found it unusual that I dreamt of the passing of a friend over 6000 kilometers away who is famous for his “musings from the shed” and on the same night, another personality in a similar industry in the same part of the world who broadcasts from “the shed” on Saturdays actually passed away.

As a long-time corporate strategy guy, I don’t believe in coincidences.  Everything in the world happens with purpose behind it.  However, as a long-time pragmatic, often sceptical, observer, I wrestle with things that appear to have a supernatural flavor to them and so I tend to write such things off as coincidence or the product of overactive imaginations.

But then my brain returns to my personal belief that there are no coincidences.

So I’m left to wonder what, if anything, this means.

Is there a message for me here?

Perhaps there is a message for Christopher in this.

Maybe there is no message and it’s all a coincidence.

Ah yes .. maybe.  But have I told you that I don’t believe in coincidences?

In the meantime as my brain ponders this unusual event, I offer my deepest condolences to the Fitzgerald family.  “Big Tom” had a big heart and will be missed by many who were blessed to meet him and who enjoyed his weekly broadcast from “the shed”.

In service and servanthood,

Harry

Addendum – April 30, 2012

Big Tom is being buried today.  I was surprised to hear that he is being buried at St. Michael’s Church on Bell Island, the parish that my ancestors attended.  Rest in Peace, Big Tom.

When In Doubt, Ask - The Answer May Surprise You

I found myself in a difficult situation over the weekend, wondering how to respectfully, professionally resolve an impasse that was holding a project back from its true success potential.

As I was mulling over this impasse, I received an interesting email.  I’ve changed the private information.

Hi Harry,

My name is “C”, I live in “State” - last September 11th, our daughter and my mother went to see the San Francisco Giants play in SF. As a tribute they gave each person at the stadium a 9/11 Remembrance Poster with someones name on it that was killed on 9/11. My daughter received Narender Nath's. I've been doing some digging and it appears that you knew him. I'm hoping you could help me find an address for his sister, who has posted several messages on various websites.

We framed the poster and it has become a permanent picture on our wall in our mountain home. I had taken some pictures of the poster and was hoping to send those pictures to his family (from “State”). Not only is it hanging on the wall, but I've printed off his obituary, etc. and it is a conversation piece for all who visit. I guess it's our memorial from 3000 miles away.

Thanks you for your time.

Sincerely,

“C”

I have written about Narender many times, including in this blog entry.

The timing of this email intrigued me.

Narender was a man of high ideals who believed in the power of doing the right thing, even when it was painful or difficult.  He believed that corrective action delivered with respect trumped ignoring the need to do so just because one didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or make waves.  He knew how to deliver such action in a way that was respectful to all, with an eye towards long-term win/wins above short-term pain avoidance.

As I contemplated this email, my thoughts turned to Narender, replaying many of our shared times in my mind and as I did so, I could almost hear Narender counselling me about what I should do in my current situation.

I followed the advice I believe he would have given me.  Who knows where it will go but I did the best I could, with respect to others and with a mutual long-term win as the center of my proposal.

Some people will think that an email like the one above is creepy or inappropriate.  They may wonder why someone would bother to frame the poster of a complete stranger on their wall.  They might also think that the idea that this email could trigger a solution to my problem would be absurd.

Others might see it differently, thinking it intriguing or moving that someone who is no longer with us can impact a complete stranger in such a powerful way or help someone solve a problem without actually being here to help solve it.

Personally, I believe in the latter.

Narender always had a positive influence on everyone around him.  Even more than 10 years after he was taken from us, he continues to have such an influence, a testament to the legacy of a man known for the hearts he touched.

At a moment when I was asking no one in particular about how to deal with a difficult situation, an answer appeared. In addition to that answer, two strangers have been connected and have an opportunity to positively influence each other.

That’s just like Narender – always looking for a way to help others.

Which begs the question …….. was this email:

coincidence or random chance?

a supernatural connection?

a result influenced by the Divine?

Do any of us really know?

More importantly, does it really matter?

Or is it more important to be cognizant of our Life legacy and the impact that we have on others, including those we have not seen in a long time or may never have met at all?

I know what Narender’s answer would be.

In service and servanthood,

Harry

Here is a copy of the poster that “C” is referring to.