I fancy myself an astute observer of people and life. Some people collect stamps, memorabilia, music, dolls, zippo lighters, bottle caps, happy meals toys, rocks. And too many people just collect bad habits. I collect people and stories. Then express my observations, conclusions, musings as a storyteller, satirist and some think—I certainly hope as a provocateur.
It is the holy grail of leadership to be a thought-leader. To influence what people think. And even more importantly, how they think!
Borrowing some from the bleeding-edge brilliant Charles Krauthammer: “I think that I am betraying my life if I don’t say and write what I think and do that honestly and bluntly.” When you read me, watch and listen to my talks, I hope Krauthammer’s admonition shines through. And I expect that I make proud all the people who have generously shared their wisdom with me.
I am not here to pitch my last book, Pimps Whores And Patrons Of Virtue to you. Of course, I hope you read it. When you do and you enjoy it, you will be in – humbly – some exceptional company worldwide.
You will laugh out loud! Let me boast here that we sell a lot of books on airplanes when people get curious why a fellow passenger is hysterically laughing! Interspeced with some weeping. Frankly, on any such flight that runs over a couple hours, if three people do not order the book from Amazon during or after the flight, I consider that an entirely fruitless flight. I expect that even the most hardened readers may tear up some; spend time in reflection; get angry; get pensive. And, thankfully, pitch others to pick up my book.
With all the afore-written, humbly, I offer my philosophies of life to you. Know that those are always present on my imaginary teleprompter!
LIFE IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL
I was not quite sixteen years old. We were penniless, country-less refugees in Rome. Fresh from our literal escape from Communist Romania. If you want more, drop me an email. Or read my aforementioned book. Sorry, I was unable to resist that. Back to the meat of the story. A rather sad beginning of our lives the Western world, in incomparable Rome. No. No. No. Unlike the fantasy peddled in the old world behind the Iron Curtain, the streets were not paved with gold and the fences were not made of fine Italian sausages. I slept on an army cot in the basement of a decrepit building, in the abandoned elevator shaft. I did have a sky light though, some six stories overhead.
At that age, some of that felt like an adventure. Eating only bread and pasta, for all meals, for many months, our food courtesy of the Red Cross, was not that great. I remember my first meal that included meat, some four months into the great adventure, courtesy of Sr. Orlando Maria Constanza, some ninety years of age, retired head of the customs service. Our miserable landlord. He enlisted my mother to cook for him for a holiday. We were allowed to share in that meal.
One afternoon, sitting on the steps of the magnificent, otherwise entirely useless Vittorio Emanuele II Monument, at the foot of Via del Corso, in Piazza Venezia, just checking out the fine people milling about. Some fine people watching for a teenaged boy. I witnessed three big tourist busses—TWA tours I recall—disgorging their passengers right in front of me. Some 80 people each. Americans, the land my parents hoped we could someday, somehow go to. Struck me odd that 85% of them were women! Dressed well. Lots of jewelry. Appeared they were at least in their late fifties. Mostly women. Hmmm… Where are the men, the husbands, I pondered. Are there no men fifty, sixty, seventy years old in America?
Dawned on me that all those husbands likely passed away after their second heart attacks working themselves into the ground… So, that now, the surviving family can enjoy life?
My adolescent, dreaming, not-yet-formed brain screamed: that will not happen to me!
A couple hours later, I snuck into yet another fantastic opera performance at the Terme Di Caracalla. I saw every performance for the entire summer. Thank you, mom, for the love I developed for Italian operas. Also, saw ten or so dress rehearsals for those operas. Want to know how to sneak into the Terme Di Caracalla when you do not even have bus fare? Drop me an email…
Back to the American tourists. I decided right then that life, my life, will not be a dress rehearsal! I would live it fully and pray without too many regrets.
And I have done that!
Life Is Not A Dress Rehearsal may be my hunmble version of the best line of prose ever written. Perhaps just a wise thought from an adolescent brain, one that at this writing is still struggling for wisdom to catch up with my chronological age.
LIFE IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL
All this, our state of being and all aspects of life, we are living now! This is the big show. This is not a rehearsal. You must figure that this may never happen again.
All that “someday I want to do this or I will do this or that or go there or …”, all that “soft” stuff, you end up with Swiss cheese without the cheese. Life is not a dress rehearsal!
This from Oscar Wilde, one of my favorites to quote: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
A LIFE WITHOUT PASSION IS NOT A LIFE WORTH LIVING
Imagine waking up in the morning and yawning all day long. Not because you are sleepy or tired. Rather, because you have nothing in your life you are passionate about. Tragic.
I can bring the same passion to my breakfast as I do to something that happened yesterday in Somalia or Sub-Saharan Africa or Des Moines, Iowa or Islamabad.
Many people think that is intellectually and emotionally exhausting. Perhaps Shakespearean “sweet sorrow” you say? None of the aforelisted. Rather, I opine it is expansion of intellect, knowledge, spirit, humanity and morality.
I eliminate people from my life who are not passionate about events and people because those are not about them or “so what: there is nothing I can do about it.”
I feel the same about people I associate with in business. Simply, I cannot relate to people who are not passionate about their work.
Some years ago, as I was walking through one of the bullpens in our offices, I came across a group of people gathered around outside the door of a senior executive’s office. Joined in for a couple minutes; just being a people person… People were talking about looking forward to their weekends. And their weekend plans.
We all get tired. We all need and enjoy time to recharge. We often covet those weekends.
That particular Friday afternoon, I was looking forward to an overnight round trip from Los Angeles to New York, starting that evening at ten on the “red eye.” Literally for a two-hour coffee meeting at JFK. Back to the office midday.
That senior executive said to the assembled crew that he was tired after a difficult week, and happy that he did not have to come back to “that place” for a couple days.
Really? “That” place that offered him great compensation, respect and a future?
In my view, that was so very wrong, for so many reasons. First, to say that in front of other hard-working staff? Then, in my presence? I mean the guy who routinely worked seventy-five-hour weeks. Headed shortly to the airport for a literally overnight cross-country trip for a brief meeting. Finally, how sad for him.
Now… Most people do not roll out of bed earlier than they want to and dance about the bedroom happy because they must go to work. However, there is a great chasm between just ordinary perspective on that and loathing of the very idea of having to do that.
I requested his presence in my office along with our CFO. I offered just one piece of limited wisdom and advice. Life is too short for him to work there, if he was so happy to not come back to ‘that” place for a couple days. I than gave him the opportunity to better his life by dismissing him. He left fifteen minutes later, with a final check and a promise to return the company car the following week.
Hmmm. The news of that “firing” spread around the entire company in minutes. Most interesting that nobody called me to ask about it. Also, all my fine readers, I hope you accept this in the spirit that it is being offered: I am not aware of anybody in the organization ever saying anything about their weekends other that those were great to re-charge their batteries for the weeks to come.
SEEK KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM ALL THE TIME AND EVERYWHERE
Knowledge is ubiquitous. Endless. It would require multiple lifetimes to just put a dent into gathering that.
Nearly 100% of knowledge is absolutely accessible starting with that incomprehensibly massive library in the sky. All of that just two finger taps away! You want to know about the mating habits of wallabies, in the month of April, no sweat! You want to know much about you or me, just tap away for one or two minutes.
You want more? There is that purportedly “new” and amazing AI stuff. Balderdash! Nothing new about AI! We were doing that in the ‘80s! Just not smart enough to give the gig a cool name. We had massive databases with billions of data points—real and inferred and dreamed about—that we crunched the heck out of to produce really slick predictive models! What we did not have, yet, were the now ordinary enormous computing power and nearly endless bandwidth playpen.
Since I do not anticipate coming up with the conclusive paradigm in curing an obscure orphan disease or harnessing more atomic power, I KNOW that for me there are no definitive answers to most questions. Rather, just testable hypothesis.
Thus, best heed my admonishment: always ask the next question and the next and the next. And become a shameless researcher as am I.
I will talk to everybody who will talk to me, including some folks who would do well being institutionalized.
You find that people are absolutely willing to share and educate you; just ask. And maybe offer some quid pro quo; often, just expressing thanks will do. That includes the best of the best, the top business operators, and legitimate academics.
Please… Please… Please… Ignore all those talking heads who spew endless word salads, glorious prose, elegant and equally useless theories. If you are not buying into the last phrase, please take the best of those and your favorite boxes and arrows presentation to the supermarket. Try to pay for groceries with those…
WISDOM I LIVE BY, AND THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE!
If at the end of any given day I cannot identify two things that I learned that day, things that became clear to me for the first time, even if just new to me I wasted the only commodity that is truly perishable: time. That is an absolute for me! Try it. It will engage your conscious all day! You will not ever fail! How rewarding is that!
How original will your thinking process be? Entirely irrelevant. And as you now know from reading the introduction to this book: to a newborn, every joke is new.
THE REAL CHORE IN LIFE IS TO FIND ONE’S PLACE IN THE WORLD.
The world is an elaborately staged tragicomedy! Some “ouch” that is.
To be successful in this world, you must find your role in it. Script and direct it yourself. And live it fully and honestly.
©2025. Steven J. Manning. All rights reserved worldwide. Any reproduction, in part or whole, storage in a retrieval system or transmission in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning or other— except for brief quotations in reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher are strictly prohibited. For media inquiries: sjmanning@fymc.com.