Episode 90: Podcast 100 - The Chinese Farmer and Self Realization

Welcome to another edition of "Around with Randall", your weekly podcast making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

Thank you again for joining me, Randall, right here on "Around with Randall." Today's episode of the podcast unique for me, special maybe for me, this is number 100 of the podcast, if you include the Great Philanthropists and the regular "Around with Randall" more tactical philanthropic issue-type pod. Today we want to talk a little bit about the Chinese farmer and how it affects, if you look at it the right way, life. You might be asking what Chinese farmer?

There's an old parable coming two thousand plus years ago about the Chinese farmer. The Chinese farmer one day had his horse run away and the village people came to him and said this is such a terrible thing and he said maybe. And the next day the horse came back and he had brought with him 10 other horses. And the village celebrated and said this is such a momentous wonderful thing! We now have so many more positive things we can do in terms of farming and living and the farmer said maybe. And then the next day his son who was helping to tame these wild these ten wild horses that had come back fell off the horse and broke his leg and the village leaders came and said, we are so sorry, what a tragic day. And the farmer said maybe. And then the next day the army came to recruit volunteers, not really volunteers, to fight in the war and they couldn't take the farmer's son because he had broken leg. The parable is a wonderful story of life, particularly when there's really deep challenges, big ups, big downs, because you don't understand what the value of something truly is that happens to you without some type of retrospective. A sense of perspective as to the value that the experience has had. And in this hundredth episode of "Around with Randall" I would like to take a few moments to talk about this concept on a very personal level and what it means from a leadership perspective.

I get a lot of people who ask me, you know, how did you get to where you're at? You know, you seem like you kind of are blessed enough to have it all. And in some ways kind of think I am. How did you get here? What does it mean? And it's been the Chinese parable that I think that perspective has caused such great drive in me to do what I do every day. Whether it's on the personal front or the professional front, the last several years have brought an immense amount of challenges to our world and we can look at these in a whole lot of different ways, but I'd like to throw in a couple personal ones as well.

So if I go all the way back, for some who know me more personally, know that it was a little more challenging for my wife and I to have a child. It's like in the Chinese parable, that's the negative, the down. We were blessed enough to finally have him and he had immense health challenges for the first 18 months of his life. In that exact second you might think well oh poor Randall. Maybe.

It's given me two fabulous perspectives on life. Number one is is that it changed my career. I left active, engaged fundraising to become a consultant and it's a term but I think of myself as a teacher based on the fact that we struggled to say thank you and have our gratitude appreciated when we were going through this journey with our son. The second thing is that I hear from parents all the time time has gone by so quickly. My wife and i have commented time is a constant so it just it's perception our time has gone by very slowly with our children in part because the first 18 months were so challenging and that appreciation of each one of those moments is a blessing that's hard to describe.

Certainly if we, I look into Covid and the terrible issues that this has brought to our world, and nothing in a personal level is ever going to offset the the the tragedies of having lost loved ones, but for me Covid took me off the road of traveling. I've had more dinners at home than I did for the years, three, four, five, six, seven years before that. Covid might be seen as, in a moment, that negative and yet I'm home more often and yet I still have found ways of developing amazing relationships with my clients individually, collectively.

For those who know me both just before covid I had a really strange situation with my thyroid and they gave me a drug to kind of slow it down so we could figure out what's going on. Never did figure out what the problem was but that drug took away, killed off, stopped however you want to put it medically, my bone marrow. It took two plus weeks to restart my bone marrow as her trying to figure out how are we going to get his thyroid out in surgery with no white blood cells, no immunity. What a terrible you know almost three weeks straight in the hospital in isolation. But yet the positive was I got to do at just before my 50th birthday a mid-life review. Really unusual to stare out at the lights of Omaha, Nebraska and think about your life, your relationships, your accomplishments what you haven't done, what you failed at. I got a chance to do something most people don't get to do and realized gosh do I love my wife. Gosh do I love my my life. Gosh am I lucky for the parents I have, my sisters, my career, my friends, and also chart a course of doing more things that I like.

My father-in-law went through Hurricane Laura and basically lost a property. 15 acres had to go in the, right in the middle of it, and go get him and it's a terrible situation in that moment. A very long, large negative, but what's happened from it is that he's moved closer to us out of Louisiana to just outside of Omaha, and now he's in our house twice a month and with his grandchildren and with his daughter and even professionally, when I left my job at another consulting firm and had to start my own, I learned that I love the intricacies of building a company and that I get to do what I want how I want it and that I can be successful at this.

You're talking about the most important things in this world. At least to me you're talking about a child who is sick and the positives of how you enjoy every moment, and Covid and how I am now home more often but still get to do what I love. And whether it's the aspect of a hospitalization and then I have the opportunity to evaluate who I am and what I believe in, and, or the fact my father-in-law was devastated from a physical structure in terms of of the property and yet now he lives very close and is more part of our lives and part of his grandchildren's lives, or me leaving a job and starting over in the middle of a pandemic, the key to the Chinese farmer is realizing that the negative moments of our life, the ones that we think of that are the most serious but not positive may actually turn out to be positive in other, themselves.

It's not until time goes by that we realize the lessons and things we learn from them. The toughest things in the world that we go through actually become the most rewarding and that. I look at the, what the world I live in, my world, and look back in those 50 plus years and including these hundred podcasts of Hallett Philanthropy and "Around with Randall" and realized this is of great joy. Even the trials and tribulations. I believe it because I think it's true. But I say it often and people kind of shake their heads. I tell people that I make more mistakes every day than most people do in a month. The key is learning from them, and I'll come back to this here in just a moment, but I love sports. I love football and it's kind of like your two and two is into the season. Let's take the NFL and it's the goal is to win the super bowl. It's not the factor two and two they're still now today 17 game season there's still plenty of games left. The question is did you learn anything from the two losses? Did you change your behavior? Did you adjust to become better? Did you admit your mistakes?

Each one of those five situations, I didn't get them all right. I need to live with that and admit that and be okay with that. But at the end of the day learn from it.

In the Chinese farmer parable there's also the positives or the perspective that they were positive. We have to take those positive moments when we think that we're on top of the world and do a couple things with them. First I think you need to enjoy those positive moments. Enjoy them because they don't come often enough. In some ways that joy has to be shared with the people that are part of that journey, the people that you'll love. You need to enjoy the moment as much as possible. But the other side of it is that you also take these positives with a grain of salt. Ask the question, when these incredibly positive things happen what is it that got me there? What were the small steps that allowed me to find the success? And instead of concentrating on the outcome and people who know me, probably you're tired of me saying this on a regular basis, but I talk about the process of almost anything the process is what got you there can you replicate, the hard work, the timeliness, the dedication. You don't have to be the smartest or the most gifted to be successful at anything. What you have to be is the most determined, the most willing to do whatever it takes within legal, ethical, and moral bounds to reach that goal. Can you look back at the successes and find what that determination was and what those steps were in that process and replicate them to experience more?

I am obsessively demanding of myself because it's the only way I know. It comes from my parents. What more can I do with the gifts that have been given to me that I really don't deserve? How do I utilize them? How do I not waste them? And how do I, in some ways, share them with others that need that assistance? Asking yourself those questions gets into the heart of the Chinese farmer, that parable that talks about the ups and the downs and realizing that it's only when we have time to look back that we realize the value and what we did with those moments and learn from those moments. And when great things happen, celebrating the people that were with you on this journey. That, at the end of the day, is the only thing that counts. Because in a year, five years, ten years or maybe just a day, nobody's gonna care except the people that love you and the people that you love.

The Chinese parable, and I'll throw in the two and two football season, you're four games into a 17 game schedule what is it you can learn? How do you get better? How do you take these lessons to improve the next series of circumstances, to create options and then share those options, share those knowledge, share that knowledge, share those gifts with others? Because you should never be satisfied with where you are. It's always about what else can I do, but enjoying it along the way.

These hundred podcasts, in different ways, I purposely don't know who listens. I don't know when they listen. I don't know how many people are listening. I have designed kind of the process I go through to do this with the direct intent that no one tells me so if this is your first, your last, or somewhere in the middle podcast, I just want to say thank you for listening. This is the classroom of the 21st century. For me it's an ability to teach.

Today's tactical is very personal. It's really not about fundraising. It's more about leadership and just self self-actualization, self-growth. And you need that to be a good leader. But I'm appreciative for you listening along the way. Don't forget my favorite saying some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, then there are those who wondered what happened. We live in a world where at any one moment that we're breathing we're in one of those three categories and what the great thing is about leadership about in particular I think nonprofit and philanthropic work is we are people who want to make things happen for the people, the things that are wondering what happened. At the end of the day, I can't imagine, after 25 years of work ,coming out of law school almost to the day 25 years, I can't imagine a better way to spend a professional career.

And the Chinese farmer for 25 years has given me perspective on the pluses and the minuses and how I can be better. And I hope maybe today gives you a perspective on what you can do, no matter where you are in your life professionally, personally, to be all that it possibly can be for you and the people that you love. I thank you for today. Thank you for joining me at any time on "Around with Randall" and as we like to say, don't forget make it a great day.