Leadership: Moving from Success to Significance
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it… Life is long if you know how to use it. Seneca
Gregg’s Reflection
Even though I was baptized as an adult into the Lutheran theology of ’the priesthood of all believers’, I didn’t hear a good sermon on the theology of vocation until I had left the business world. No one taught me that I could live out my calling in my business.
Soon after I was baptized, I felt a sense of call in my heart. I was working in the family business, working with Genie to make a home for our two kids. I was experiencing what I would later come to know as Holy discontent. I asked myself, “Is this all there is?” Every pastor I talked to about feeling called said I should quit my job and go to seminary. That did not feel like the right path to us.
I had worked in the family business five years when we took t ime to decide if I would continue my career there. We got married young and had our two kids early. I realized they would be out of the house by the time I turned 45.
So, when I was 28 we set a goal, a vision I’d call it now, to stay with the business while we reared our kids. At the same time, we set a goal to achieve financial independence by the time I was 45 and walk away to pursue our passions.
By the time I turned 40, we had seen several close friends in their 40’s and 50’s die suddenly and unexpectedly. We knew we wanted more from life, and redoubled our efforts to live into our vision.
I was driven in my 25 year business career, and did not have time for many close friendships. By the time I was 45, I was yearning for deeper relationships with family and friends. Just after I turned 48, twenty years after naming our vision, we sold the business and walked away. I had success, now I yearned for significance.
Our first investment was to buy 40 acres of Colorado wilderness and build the off grid log cabin we had dreamed of for two decades. It would be a home place, where family and friends would gather in.
Genie let go of her career teaching small children, and pursued a calling as an environmental educator. She became a volunteer docent and animal handler at Zoo Atlanta. In the six months a year we were in Atlanta, she went to the zoo several days a week. Some of her best friends today came from the zoo community.
I had a bit more trouble discerning my calling. As I reflected back on my 25 years in business and my EMBA, I thought God must be preparing me for something. I later realized God was pretty silent during those times because I was in a time of preparation.
I didn’t think God would gift me for ‘A’ and then expect me to do ‘B’. I had been on a trajectory for 25 years learning administration, then sales, then management, then leadership as we grew an organization of 325 people in three businesses across 11 locations.
As I prayed and meditated I out here on our mountain, I got an image. I was standing with one foot in the secular world of leadership and one foot in the Kingdom. I was holding a pipe in my arms, and saw that my calling was to bring the best I had learned of management and leadership into equipping next generation leaders for the Kingdom.
Bill Plotkin helped me see that discerning calling was only the first step. You’ll see several quotes from him below. Once I discerned my calling, I spent the next ten years finding the vehicle for my calling. It took crashing and burning in a Lutheran project I founded and led for five years for me to find a home at City Church-Eastside in Atlanta.
There I developed my mentoring and structural coaching practice. I created a Discover your Design course, hosted the Manmaker Men’s Retreat and coached dozens of men and women into deeper self-awareness. I have monthly calls with many of them six years after moving to Colorado full time.
During this time, I read Bob Buford’s book, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance. I realized I had been in that movement since I left the business world a decade before. I went to the Halftime Institute in 2011, one of the last events Buford participated in himself.
Halftime Journey: I made my move to significance upon leaving the business world. We accumulated enough wealth in my business career to find financial security, but the most valuable work I‘ve ever done is my mentoring and structural coaching with next generation leaders.
In his book, Buford describes the loneliness that came with my success, and the yearning I felt for significance. He has helped thousands of men and women navigate the mid-life shoals to move from success to significance. When I went to Halftime, I thought, “I wish I’d found this a decade ago. It would have saved me spinning my wheels.”
Genie articulated a four word mission statement for the second half of our lives: Have Fun and Do Good. We have done that well, splitting time in Atlanta and Colorado for two decades, then moving here full time. Living out my calling has been the most rewarding work of my career. I have now spent 25 years in my second career to equal the 25 years of my first. I am so glad my life was disrupted by that soulful question: Is this all there is? Finding the answer led us for 53 years together on God’s Faint Path.
As I reach the fourth quarter of life, I can say what Saint Francis said to his brothers on his deathbed, “I have done what is mine to do. I pray God shows you yours.” Wade in with us and contemplate what a journey from success to significance would look like in your life. What are you waiting for? Blessings.
Journaling Prompts
Where have I experienced “success” in the eyes of the world? How has it satisfied—or not satisfied—my deeper longings? What holy discontent is stirring in me right now? What does significance mean to me? How is it different from success? What vision might God be inviting me to name for the next chapter of my life? Am I holding on to anything that no longer serves my deeper purpose? Who are the people I long to invest more time and presence with? What’s keeping me from doing that?
Scripture
Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Psalm 90:12
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding… and He will make your paths straight.
Proverbs 3:5–6
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth… but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.
Matthew 6:19–20
What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?
Mark 8:36
I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
John 10:10
Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace.
1 Peter 4:10
Ancient Writing
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, §1
As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 76.3
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
Epictetus, Discourses, Book IV, ch. 1
Don’t you know that a good man does nothing for appearance’s sake, but for the sake of having done right?
Epictetus, Discourses, Book IV, ch. 8
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles, as quoted by Plutarch, Lives: Pericles, §11
He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI, §16
Act as if every action were your last.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book II, §5
I have done what is mine to do. May Christ teach you what is yours.
St. Francis of Assisi, early Franciscan sources (The Assisi Compilation, § 162)
Modern Writing
If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” p. 33
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde, Commonly attributed in posthumous compilations such as The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, edited by Ralph Keyes
The things you own end up owning you.
Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Your soul purpose is not something you choose. It’s a seed planted within you at birth. Your task is to uncover it, to grow into it, and to live it out in service to the world.
Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, p. 40
A true calling comes not from what the ego wants, but from what the soul knows.
Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, p. 233
Your soul’s purpose is not to serve yourself, but to serve something much greater — the world, the Earth community, the unfolding story of the cosmos.
Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries, p. 31
Until you find your soul’s purpose — your ecological niche in the great web of life — you are like a seed that never germinates.
Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, p. 17
By the end of early adulthood, the soul-infused person seeks or creates a work or livelihood that effectively delivers their soul gift to their people.. Soul initiation eventually leads to a conscious, committed life of sacred service — a vow to embody your deepest truth through a particular work in the world.
Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, p. 393
In the second half of the journey of soul initiation, you choose — or craft — a professional or creative life that is aligned with your soul work, a vehicle for your sacred gift.
Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, p. 400
The first half of life is about success, but the second half is about significance.
Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance, p. 17
Halftime is about reevaluating your life’s priorities and aligning your work with your values, purpose, and legacy.
Bob Buford, Halftime, p. 21
I had spent years building an impressive resume. Now I wanted to build a legacy.
Bob Buford, Halftime, p. 26
What we hunger for is meaning… a sense of calling, of being part of something bigger than ourselves.
Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, p. 12
There comes a time when the life we have built for ourselves must be examined to see whether it still honors the life within us.
Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years, p. 44
Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p. 95