The Search, page 23
Mary Scullion, the Sister of Mercy who started a homeless initiative in Philadelphia, quickly found herself in a legal showdown with the city, which tried to shut down one of her shelters after neighbors complained it was lowering their property values. Mayor Ed Rendell called Mary “Philadelphia’s Joan of Arc,” “because so many people want to burn her at the stake.”
But Mary, who spends her one day off a week living among the homeless, fought back. “I believe the people living on the streets are the prophets of today. They’re telling us that something is radically wrong with our society. Everybody told me we would lose that lawsuit. Move on, Mary. But my purpose was to adhere as much as possible to my dignity, and it was through God’s grace that we were able to win the case and show that everyone has the right to live wherever they want.”
Perhaps the most remarkable story I heard of purpose prevailing over adversity came from Richard Miles Jr. Richard grew up in a “spiritually guided household” in Dallas. His single mother was a schoolteacher who married a pastor when Richard was five. As a boy, Richard was allowed to listen only to gospel music; as a teenager, he was allowed to skip church only for a job. So at fifteen, he inflated his age and started washing dishes at a hamburger joint.
Richard enrolled at Texas State Technical College to study plastics. He earned good grades and rented an apartment with a friend. “I was beginning to fly on my own,” he said.
Two weeks after Richard’s nineteenth birthday, a friend offered to drive him to his girlfriend’s house one night. The friends stopped at a 7-Eleven; Richard paid his buddy five bucks to thank him and then set out on foot to his girlfriend’s. Within seconds, helicopters swarmed, police cars screeched, and cops threw Richard to the ground. They read him his rights and shoved him into the back of a cruiser. En route to the precinct, cops stopped at a Texaco. “I’m looking around; I see police lights and ambulances; there’s obviously been a crime. The officers put some stuff on my hands and drove me to the station.”
Richard spent the next seventeen months in jail awaiting trial. His attorney explained that a dispute at the Texaco had left one man dead and another wounded. “The shooter was described as being six-two or six-four, dark complected, wearing a white shirt and shorts,” Richard said. “I’m five-seven, light-skinned, and was wearing a white shirt and pants.”
But that stuff the officers placed on Richard’s hands? It was gun residue.
Despite having an airtight alibi, having none of the qualities of the shooter, and having nine of ten witnesses say he wasn’t the shooter, Richard was convicted of first-degree murder. When the prosecutor was asked why Richard’s skin tone was so much lighter than the alleged shooter, he said, “He faded while in jail.”
“May 15, 1994, is the day that Richard Ray Miles Jr. died,” Richard said. “They took my clothes, my name, my freedom, and my identity. All they gave me was a number: 728716.”
But they didn’t take away his character. Richard spent his first five years in prison picking cotton, yams, and blueberries. “There was a strong slavery vibe,” he said. Through good conduct, Richard eventually landed a job at the infirmary and started taking college courses. But the most profound thing that happened occurred on day one. Richard was sitting in the barbershop sharing his story. Afterward, an inmate approached him. “Look, you might think everyone in here says they’re innocent, but they don’t. Guilty people don’t want to go back into the system. If you really are innocent, I’m going to introduce you to Centurion Ministries, the only innocence organization that does non-DNA cases.”
Richard began a dialogue with the group, who set off doing their painstaking work. Thirteen years later, Richard was lying in his cell one day when the mail carrier delivered a large box. “I jumped out of bed. Centurion had purchased the transcripts and police records from my trial. My family had requested them right after I was convicted, but they couldn’t afford the fee.”
Their cost: $3,000.
Their contents: “The first piece of paper I read was about a phone call that a witness made to the Dallas Police, long before I went to trial, telling them who the murderer was. The moment I read that paper I knew it was a Brady violation. The police had withheld this evidence. Fifteen months later, I walked out of jail. My case is the fastest in history that Centurion ever resolved.”
But now what? Richard Miles was thirty-four years old. No one would hire him, rent to him, or date him. “I had to move in with my mom.” Two more years passed before the state offered him a financial settlement. Instead of spending the money, though, Richard used it to start a nonprofit, Miles of Freedom.
“Our mission is to provide holistic services for individuals and families who are rebuilding their lives after incarceration.” In its first decade, Miles of Freedom helped equip and employ more than two thousand former inmates. During that time, Richard also got married and had a child. He got a side job teaching Sunday school at his church. And in 2021, the state of Texas passed the Richard Miles Act, which requires law enforcement to provide a written statement that every piece of evidence has been handed over to defendants.
“Joseph is a biblical story where a gentleman was wrongly incarcerated for twelve years,” Richard told me. “When he gets out of prison, Joseph doesn’t just save himself; he saves the entire nation. That’s self-sacrifice. My purpose now is not to help myself; it’s to turn what happened to me into a tool to help others.”
Joseph. Moses. Matthew.
The Trumpet of the Swan. Harold and Maude. It’s a Wonderful Life.
Auntie Toothache.
When scripting the stories of our lives, we turn to the greatest stories ever told. In their morals, we find our truth. In their characters, we find our heart.
In their wisdom, we find our why.
Chapter 11
How Is Your How?
The Best Advice I Have for Myself Right Now Is ____________
I had another grandfather, too, besides the one I worked alongside every Saturday, though I never knew him. Benjamin Samuel Abeshouse was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on February 7, 1901. The youngest of nine born to farmers who fled religious persecution in Lithuania, Bucky, as he was called, was the only member of his generation to attend college. He graduated from Yale at a time when Jews were not allowed to live on campus, and then enrolled at the Yale medical school. He married Carrie Kehrmann, moved to Baltimore, and went on to have a distinguished work life as a urologist, pioneering research into renal dyes and kidney dialysis.
Bucky died of a heart attack at age sixty, three years before I was born; the first two initials of my name, Bruce Stephen, pay homage to his.
But Bucky’s life turned out to foretell mine in a more meaningful way. He had a robust side job as a writer. He penned academic articles on everything from infertility to testicles to “inflammation of the bladder due to the presence of a pencil.” He contributed an introduction to a widely read 1936 sex guide. And he wrote a book of popular history, Troubled Waters, that explores the genital and urinary diseases of famous men, including Isaac Newton, Ben Franklin, and Woodrow Wilson. His description of Napoleon begins, “The body was almost hairless, the genitalia small.”
Bucky’s most consuming writing project, though, appears to have been something of a ghost job. Bucky lost his father, Abraham, when he was two; he spent most evenings of his adult life sitting alone in his den, scouring books, journals, and magazines, amassing the world’s largest collection of epitaphs. Filling five volumes and 1,500 pages, the collection now resides in the Smithsonian Institution. Confronting my own mortality after being diagnosed with cancer in my forties, I went on crutches to the National Museum of American History and read every page.
What struck me most was my grandfather’s obsessive interest in the words people chose to be remembered by. Some epitaphs weren’t the deceased’s choice at all; they were causes of death: poisonings, railroad accidents, bee stings, hangings. Some were words at the expense of the departed: “Here lies the body of young Miss Charlotte, / Born a virgin, dies a harlot.”
But by far the largest number were carefully chosen expressions of eternal wisdom:
Don’t grieve, for what we love comes around in another form
Hitch your wagon to a star
Go traveler, and, if you can, imitate one who with his utmost strength protected liberty
There are always flowers for those who want to see them
Love is enough
Was my grandfather quietly grieving his own lost childhood? Was he searching for the wisdom he never heard from his own father?
We’re all searching for something. That eternal longing helps explain why advice is the lingua franca of the modern world. We are awash in guidance. Advice stalks us before we’re born: What to Expect When You’re Expecting. It trails us after we die: famous last words. And it dominates most days in between. Our loved ones offer us advice; our colleagues offer us advice; our devices offer us advice. Entire industries are devoted to financial advice, dieting advice, dating advice, parenting advice. Advice is among the most popular type of newspaper article, social media post, and YouTube video. This book is full of advice.
But the central piece of advice in this book is not to listen to all of that other advice. It’s to seek your own counsel, consult your own past, write your own story.
Follow your own advice.
It’s to decide for yourself—and only for yourself—How is your how?
How is the most practical of the six Kipling questions. It’s how you make it happen. How you get from here to there. How you maneuver from once upon a time to happily ever after. Prosecutors must prove three things in order to convict someone of a crime: opportunity—that’s the when question; motive—that’s the why question; and means—that’s the how question.
How is the means to the end.
How is often the first question people ask in a workquake. How do I get a job? How do I preserve my income? How do I ensure that those around me still see me as a success? But if you ask how too early, you’ll find yourself trapped. The reason: You’ll likely succeed! You’ll find a job. You’ll preserve your income. You’ll persuade those around you that you’re still a success. But you won’t necessarily be fulfilled because you won’t have taken the time to identify what actually makes you fulfilled. That absence of self-reflection is a main reason that up to 70 percent of people regret quitting a job. Soon enough, they’re back where they started, asking the wrong questions and finding the wrong answers.
I put how last because that’s where it belongs. Only after we do the internal work of the meaning audit—exploring who, what, when, where, and why—are we ready for the practical work of how. Only after we settle on what story we want to tell are we truly ready to start telling it.
Only after deciding what advice we need to hear are we ready to start giving ourselves that advice.
Robin Arzón didn’t need any advice; she always knew exactly what she wanted—or at least she thought she did.
Robin grew up in Philadelphia. Her mother was a Cuban refugee who taught herself English by watching PBS and put herself through medical school; her father was a Puerto Rican émigré who sidestepped pressure to become a tradesman and became a law professor instead. “The idea of writing your own story, not taking no for an answer, betting on yourself—that’s what I learned from them. That they sometimes missed my play or my mom didn’t bake cookies—she feels guilt, but I didn’t care.”
As a girl, Robin loved watching her dad grade exams. “I used to sit on his stack of blue books and wonder, How can someone fill up one of these with ideas? I loved argument, so I joined the debate team in high school.” She also cleaned floors in a butcher shop, “which was as grimy a job as you could get,” and made her eager to work in a corporate environment.
“I thought, OK, law school it’s going to be.”
Robin attended NYU, then law school at Villanova, and soon got her wish—a coveted job as a corporate litigator on Park Avenue. Her story was the classic immigrant American Dream. Only her story wasn’t done.
In Robin’s junior year in college, she was in a bar in the East Village when a gunman carrying three pistols and a sword took forty guests hostage, randomly shooting a few. After dousing everyone with kerosene, the shooter grabbed Robin by the hair, held a lighter to her head, and used her as a human shield. The standoff continued until two patrons tackled the assailant from behind, allowing police to enter the bar and subdue him.
“That incident spurred me to start running,” Robin said. “I literally had to run the trauma out of my body.” Having never been an athlete, Robin became a superathlete. Over the next decade, she ran 10Ks, then marathons, then ultramarathons; she ran a one-hundred-mile race from Key Largo to Key West and once ran five marathons in five days to raise money for multiple sclerosis.
“It was grueling. I was billing eighty hours a week during the day and running twenty hours a week at night. A bunch of us would show up at 10:00 p.m. on a Wednesday and just run bridges. There were artists, musicians, drug dealers; I was the only one with a corporate job.” Robin began training some of those runners and building a reputation as a coach. “I’d show up at races; there’d be a bunch of forty-year-old men in short shorts, and here I was in lipstick, gold necklaces, and earrings. There was swagger with my sweat.”
Finally, the firm sat her down: “Do you want to become a partner or a fitness guru?”
“I chose the latter.”
But how could she make her choice a reality? How could she make the giant leap from corporate litigator to—well, she didn’t know exactly?
Here’s how.
How number one: set aside time. “I began blocking out ten minutes a day—eight forty-five every morning. My executive assistant and teammates had no idea what I was doing. But in those ten minutes I sent emails; I made informational interview requests; I googled What do sports editors do? I literally had no idea.”
How number two: set aside money. “I started saving money. I was living in a walk-up apartment, no luxuries. I didn’t travel. I was planning financially long before I was planning intellectually.”
How number three: social media. “I started a Tumblr for my marathon training; it was an online scrapbook, but it helped me hone my storytelling.”
How number four: a sabbatical. “I eventually took a three-month leave of absence and really ramped up my training and my posting.”
How number five: the big leap. “Finally, two years in, the London Olympics were approaching, and I thought, I have to be there! So I quit. I bought a plane ticket that cost more than my rent; I stayed on a friend’s couch; and I hustled. I met PR agents and athletes; I met the CEO of Nike. ‘Wow, you have great style,’ he said. ‘You should start a blog.’ ‘I already have one!’ I said. ‘Here’s my card.’ ”
How number six: a vision board. “I got hired as a social media coordinator for Nike Women. I opened my own website, Shut Up and Run: For Athletes Who Think Medals Are the Highest Form of Bling. I got certified as a yoga instructor, then a running coach, then a fitness trainer. And just because I was bored, I started a vision board using cutout images from magazines. It was a way of manifesting who I was and where I wanted to go.”
How number seven: the cold call that changed her life. “One of the companies on my board was Apple; I knew I was interested in disruptive technology. Then I read an article about a man named John Foley who was opening a company that offered online spinning classes. I sent him an email. ‘I want to work with you.’ Two days later I had an audition at Peloton.”
Two months later she had a job. Two years later she became the vice president of fitness. Three years after that the company went public. The following year, when the pandemic supercharged stay-at-home fitness, Robin became a global phenomenon, with a million Instagram followers, two bestselling books, and a brand as a brash, inclusive spokesperson for the power of personal transformation.
As she says in her rides, “Chin up. Crown on. If you give up now, what was it all for?”
“To me, the mind of an athlete is all about story. Like this morning, when I had a barbell on my back that weighs more than my body, when I’m nine months pregnant, when I’m finishing a book, my story starts always with my body as the embodiment of confidence and ends with my mind asking what my mother always told me to ask: Why not me? The best advice I give to myself is the best advice I give to my riders: Do epic shit.”
Four years.
Seven hows.
One reminder: doing epic shit requires lots of fits and starts.
Here are three questions to help you determine what advice you need to get that shit done.
Past: What’s the Best Advice You Ever Received about Work?
Near the end of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, a giant pink gumball descends on the Emerald City, and Glinda, the good witch, emerges in full, poufed regalia. Wearing a baby-pink taffeta gown and a birthday cake–size crown, Glinda sashays over to Dorothy and the motley crew she’s collected along the Yellow Brick Road. Dorothy curtsies and pleads, “Oh, will you help me?”
“You don’t need to be helped any longer,” Glinda says. “You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.”
“I have?”
The Scarecrow, who allegedly lacks a brain, asks the eminently sensible question: “Then why didn’t you tell her before?”
Glinda responds with a piece of wisdom that echoes back to Delphi and echoes forward to Yoda: “She wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”
