Life After Triumph

IntheBlack, October 2015

Departing CEOs must face a crushing sense of: “now what?” Having lived and breathed a job night and day for years, the anticlimax can be daunting.

So what can business leaders learn from people who have had to deal with this sense of finding meaning and direction in life after its apparent high point has already happened?

Here are five lessons:

1. You can change direction while still drawing on what you knew before. Alan Bean walked on the Moon on Apollo 12, then decided it was time to follow his true passion: art. But he’s only ever painted one thing for the next 40 years – astronauts on the surface of the moon.

2. Talk, don’t bury. People who leave in difficult circumstances can still build on that ordeal. The captain of the notorious air disaster United 232 developed a talk about the crash – one he has now delivered 2,000 times. The chief flight attendant has devoted the rest of her life to changing aircraft regulations on the transport of infants. Former Lebanon hostage John McCarthy has become a leading journalist on the Middle East, partly because of the unique understanding of the region and its conflicts he gained from becoming a hostage within it.

3. You can take a totally different path and be happy. Ray Wilson was a member of the 1966 World Cup winning England football side. Every other member of that team is a household name in England, but not Ray – because afterwards he turned his back on the game and became an undertaker in Yorkshire instead. He and his wife are perfectly happy and haven’t missed the limelight once.

4. You don’t need to rest on your laurels to be successful. Bill Anders was a member of the Apollo 8 crew – the first to travel to the Moon, the first to see the Earth in its entirety. But he spent most of his laster life slightly irritated about being remembered for Apollo, and today would much rather people remember his exceptional subsequent career at General Dynamics, where he was a remarkable turnaround CEO. To him, that’s the much greater achievement – far from trading on his Apollo history, he’d rather ignore it.

5. Helping others overtake you can be rewarding. Joe Kittinger jumped from the edge of space in 1960, setting a skydiving record that stood for 52 years. And when it was finally broken, by base jumper Felix Baumgartner, it only happened because of Kittinger’s considerable assistance – he was the capsule communicator (the man on the other end of the radio) and the mentor for Baumgartner’s jump. Being part of a mission, even one that erased him from the record books, gave him an enormous sense of well-being.