Independent Study: Personal Renewal by John W. Gardner (Speech)

Jackson Dahl (0:00)

Welcome back to Dialectic Independent Study. John W. Gardner was a public servant, educator, and public reformer who worked under Lyndon B. Johnson's cabinet as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, but also worked extensively across education, public reform, founded Common Cause, worked on public broadcasting, and much more. One of his big ideas that he continued to return to was how people and institutions fulfill their potential. This piece I'm going to read to you today is one of my favorite things I've read, and certainly my favorite in the last couple of years. It's called Personal Renewal, and it was a speech Gardner gave to a group of McKinsey consultants back in 1990 When he, I believe was 78, he ended up passing in 2002, and he spoke to them about who they are and what they might become. A friend, Willem van Lanker, shared this with me back in 2024, and it was and continues to be quite influential. I've shared it with many, many people, and I'm glad to be sharing it with you all today.

All right. This is Personal Renewal, delivered to McKinsey & Company in Phoenix, Arizona on November 10th, 1990, by John W. Gardner.

I'm going to talk about self-renewal. One of your most fundamental tasks is the renewal of organizations you serve, and that usually includes persuading the top officers to accomplish a certain amount of self-renewal. But to help you think about others is not my primary mission this morning. I want to help you think about yourselves.

I take that mission very seriously, and I've written out what I have to say because I want every sentence to hit its target. I know a good deal about the kind of work you do and know how demanding it is, but I'm not going to talk about special problems of your kind of career. I'm going to talk about some basic problems of the life cycle that will surely hit you if you're not ready for them.

I once wrote a book called Self-Renewal that deals with the decay and renewal of societies, organizations, and individuals. I explored the question of why civilizations die and how they sometimes renew themselves in the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives. It's the latter question that I shall deal with at this time. I know that you as an individual are not going to seed, but the person seeded on your right may be in fairly serious danger. Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. I don't want to give the wrong impression on the focus of my reading interests. Sometimes days go by without my reading about barnacles, much less remembering what I read. But this article had an unforgettable opening paragraph. The barnacle, the author explained, is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides, it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.

End of quote.

For a good many of us, it comes to that.

We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in mid-career.

One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You've known such people, feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, perhaps just vaguely dispirited, or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line, they forgot what it was they were running for.

I'm not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We can't all get to the top, and that isn't the point of life anyway. I'm talking about people who, no matter how busy they seem to be, have stopped learning or growing. Many of them are just going through the motions. I don't deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their potential.

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Someone said to me the other day, how can I be so bored when I'm so busy? And I said, let me count the ways. Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience. And if that's true, I know some very busy middle-level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.