The Business Lessons from People Who Move On From Greatness

HQ Asia, September 2015

There are a handful of people in the world who will always rest in our collective imagination for a single moment, achievement or ordeal. They might be moon-walking astronauts, record-breaking Olympic athletes, plane crash survivors or former hostages, but they share the same characteristic: no matter what they do for the rest of their lives, they will always be remembered for that single moment.

But life didn’t stop for them when they’d reached that pivotal incident: they had to move on from it, sometimes with considerable difficulty but usually with determination and aptitude. So what can we learn from these people and apply to business, to our own personal development and leadership?

The first lesson, and the most obvious one, is that it is fruitless to think of any achievement as a pinnacle in life: one can always do more.

Bill Anders was one of the crew on Apollo 8 in December 1968. It remains one of the most pioneering voyages that human beings have ever undertaken. Anders and his colleagues were the first people to leave Earth orbit, the first to travel to (but not land on) the Moon, the first to see our Earth in its entirety – a ball of colour, hanging there in the nothing. Their broadcast on Christmas Eve that year was the most widely-heard transmission in history at the time; the photograph Anders took, known as Earthrise, is said to be the most widely distributed photograph of all time.

But it wasn’t enough for Anders. “To me, what came next was the greater achievement than Apollo,” he says, sitting in his home on Orcas Island, about three hours north of Seattle.

After NASA, Anders led an extraordinary subsequent life in the corporate world. He became the head of the US nuclear agency at 40; rose through the ranks at GE; served as the US ambassador to Norway; and finally became CEO of General Dynamics, masterminding a stunning turnaround in the middle of the worst conditions for the defence industry in memory. Warren Buffett was so impressed by Anders that he handed over all of Berkshire Hathaway’s voting proxies to him. Shareholders during his three-year spell in charge made more than six times their money in an investor-driven strategy that Harvard now publishes case studies on. “That,” he says, “makes me especially proud.”

Truly impressive people not only refuse to rest on their laurels but will not allow themselves to be defined by a moment. Don Walsh was, with the now-deceased Jacques Piccard, the first man to visit the deepest point in the world’s oceans, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, in 1960 – a feat so daring and complex that it was not repeated for more than 50 years. But he was only 27 then. After the ticker-tape parades, what happened next? “Well,” he says, “a lot of people think I died.”

What he did next was anything but die. He commanded a submarine and served in two wars. He gained three graduate degrees, worked in the Pentagon, founded the Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies at the University of Southern California with the rank of dean, and built a successful marine consultancy. He visited the Arctic and Antarctic so often – more than 50 times – and did so much there that there is an Antarctic ridge, the Walsh Spur, named after him. Has dived in Russian Mir submersibles on the Titanic, Bismarck and the North Atlantic Ridge.

In his house in the tiny town – more a collection of ranches, really – of Dora, Oregon, one finds hardly any commemoration of his descent to the bottom of the sea in the Trieste bathyscaphe all those years ago. “It was 50 years ago,” he says. “You do a certain thing, and that was it.” Instead, Walsh is deeply passionate about the ocean, and exploration of the depths, something he knows will long outlive him. “What we do, one minute it’s there, the next minute it’s a cloud of bubbles,” he says. “It’s not very exciting. But it’s very important.”

Another lesson we might learn from these people is that it is possible to change direction without losing sight of what made your name in the first place. Another Apollo veteran is Alan Bean, the fourth man to set foot on the Moon on Apollo 12 in 1969. After that, he stayed in NASA for some years, setting a record for time in space on the second Skylab mission, but then decided to follow his true dream: art. But there’s a catch. He has, indeed, spent the rest of his life painting, but only one thing – astronauts on the surface of the Moon.

Speaking in his Houston studio, he recalls preparing to train for the Space Shuttle before having a change of heart. “When I was training to fly, I began to say: wait a minute. There’s young men and women here who can do this, but I’m the only guy who’s interested in art, who can celebrate this great human achievement in paintings. I said: if I can learn to paint better, that’s what I need to do.”

His paintings are unique: he mixes moondust from his mission patches into his paint, and uses a cast of his moon boot to add texture. Consequently, they cost a fortune: one painting, The Spirit of Apollo, is on sale for US$344,700. Bean has become far more wealthy through his art than his career in spaceflight – but he never quite left one behind to achieve the other.

Having said that, no change of direction is too much if it’s what you want to do.

Ray Wilson was a member of the 1966 side that lifted the World Cup for England – still the country’s most celebrated and venerated sporting achievement. But, while fans of the game could probably name many of that side – Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton, Geoff Hurst – very few remember Wilson.

That is chiefly because, not long after the World Cup, Wilson turned his back on football and instead became an undertaker in the Yorkshire town of Huddersfield. Think of that: he went from a hundred thousand people chanting his name, to choosing a career whose only working relationships are with he dead or the bereaved.

For Wilson, it simply made sense. He thought about entering football management like his peers, but “I just hadn’t got the commitment for it,” he says, in his home in a Yorkshire village.  His father-in-law had an undertaking business and needed someone else to take it on. “I was happy to give it a go,” he says. It was never more than a small enterprise – it needed, in the cold economics of the business, one and a half deaths a week to be viable (“I don’t mean there was half a body”) – but it made him and his wife happy, which they unquestionably remain.

A final lesson: it is possible to turn negatives to positives.

United 232, a plane crash in Sioux City in the 1980s, is both a terrible tragedy and one of the most revered achievements in the history of aviation. The plane, a DC-10, suffered a supposedly impossible complete hydraulic failure, a situation that was not believed to be survivable. But, through a combination of remarkable skill and equally remarkable luck (a flight simulator specialist and qualified captain happened to be a passenger on the plane and went to the cockpit to help), they got the plane down, saving almost two thirds of the passengers but losing over 100.

Captain Al Haynes was a hero, but also believed himself a villain. “My job was to get my passengers safely from point A to point B. I didn’t do that,” he says, at his home near Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport. And to move on from it, he talked about it. Again, and again, and again. He built the experience into a detailed presentation, which now includes video of the plane crashing. “I always think the tape’s going to end differently,” he says. “It never does.” He has now given that talk 1700 times, and it has helped him to recover, while also giving inspiration to thousands of people. “You have to talk. You have to talk.”

The chief flight attendant that day was Jan Brown. She was mentally scarred by one part of her job in particular: that her training at the time told her that the safest place for an infant was to be placed on the floor. There were four infants on that plane; three lived. The mother of the one who did not confronted Brown, and blamed her for it.

Since that day, Brown has devoted pretty much her whole life to changing the laws around the way infants are carried on aircraft. She was won some significant successes, and probably saved lives. But she won’t stop until every child has their own seat, in something like a car seat.

The last thing these remarkable people can teach us is this: that life is long and will not be defined by a moment, but by everything we do with it. These people have every reason and justification for a life of quiet reflection. But not one of them has spent the long suffixed years since their moment of fame looking backwards.

No More Worlds to Conquer by Chris Wright is published by The Friday Project, a HarperCollins imprint, and is available on Amazon