From a few years ago

"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011), Stanford University commencement address, June 12, 2005

I originally posted this quote about a year ago. As many of you know, we had to close our business, Mastercraft, after 50 years. At that time, everything was still very much undecided as far as what would happen. By now, a year later, it pretty much has happened. The plant equipment was sold, the building was taken, and, as best we can, we have moved on.

There is still a part of me, a larger part than I care to admit, that is still hanging on. Not the part that wants to keep Mastercrafft going. We got to a place that there was really no return. It's the part that wonders what could have been if I had been a better time businessman, the part where I left a lot of people down, the family and the many good employees we had accumulated over the years, the part that, God help me, really likes building furniture.

While I wasn't fired from Apple, I was fired from Mastercraft. Strange, I'd never really thought of that before. I wasn't fired by a person, but I was fired by the Boss, the market, which it really is for all businesses. Even Apple. I failed to adapt, I failed to correct the problems. I failed.

Steve Jobs had the "heaviness of being successful" but I have a heaviness from what might have been. But we really were similar in our position in life. We both had a clean slate, a chance to start over. Of course, even thought he was fired, he had a few million in the bank to play with where I had a hat in my hand. He started an new company, returned to Apple, and performed one of the greatest business turn around a ever. Me, not so much.

While his creativity resulted in the wildly successful resurrection of Apple, my creativity may still resurrect my psyche. Is it too boastful to feel that there is a reservoir of creativity I have not yet tapped? I hope not. If there is anything that can pull me out of this strange blue funk I feel I've been inhabiting, the only possible answer lies there. What will it take? Courage to go places I'm not sure exist. Courage to drop any pretense about who I thought I was and embrace who I have become.

Courage. And a friend or two, pointing the way.

Note: I wrote this shortly after we closed the business. It was a little too painful then, but after a few years of “Putting it Behind Me”, I feel a little more comfortable and in many ways, it is still true. The pain has been mixed with a couple of new beginnings. Carpe Diem.

Locusts-Oops! I mean Cicadas.

 I am four years old. Well, cicada years at least. When I was 17, it was a cicada year and I did the math. I was born in a cicada year. It was the cicada symphony that got me thinking about the relationship, and for all those reasons you cannot understand, I remember when I made the connection. Sunday school of all places. It was in the summer and we took our class outside into the picnic woods. But the symphony was loud that day as it is as I write this. 

The early part of my life, my mother and I lived with my grandparents on the family farm while my Dad served in the Army. My house was built on the same family farm, just down the hill. As a baby,  must have been serenaded by the progenitors of the same cicadas I hear today. Can’t say I remember, I was 0 years old. But the connection I feel with the song I hear was formed back then as I lay in the crib, or when my great grandmother held me, as I probably wasn’t allowed to cry very often.

So I have survived through 4 cicada life cycles. I can only hope I get to see the fifth. Every appearance is welcomed by a vastly different world than the last. Let’s hope the next one is greeted by a better one..