The Single Best Thing A Leader Can Do For His Health

During my senior year of college I started feeling sick. It began with a rough-seas hollow in the bottom of my stomach. Nothing I ate tasted right. Then I began to throw up—involuntarily—on a regular basis. Every day for months I felt nauseous until noon.

The doctors hemmed and hawed. Tests were done. It might be a cyst on my kidney, one thought. I lost 19 pounds.

Finally they arrived at a diagnosis everyone seemed to smile at: an inflammation of the duodenum, the short tube that connects the stomach to the small intestines. Basically, I had the beginnings of an ulcer. How fun. I was 21.

Blame it on the pressure of university coming to an end. Blame it on exams, papers to write, major projects, and the whole whopping life-question of what to do next. Whatever the cause, one thing was certain: the stress, constant late nights, and too-full schedule had caught up with me.

They put me on one medication. It didn’t work. They put me on another.

Then one wise doctor asked a life-changing question. “Tell me about exercise,” he said. “What do you do?”

“Well, I’ve got a 12-speed road bike,” I said. “I ride about once a week. And I go snow skiing a couple times each winter.”

“Yeah, but what do you do for exercise every day?”

I gulped. “Uh. Walk from class to the cafeteria?”

“The problem,” said the doc, “is that your mind is doing all the work while your body is sitting around all day. That needs to change.”

He prescribed a simple solution: each day, go for a walk.

I followed the advice. Each evening after classes, I started by walking around the university neighborhood. I found it pretty easy. Sometimes a friend came with me. Most evenings I went by myself.

That was more than 22 years ago and I’m still following the same simple prescription.

Each day, every day, I go for a walk. It doesn’t matter where or when—mornings, afternoons, evenings, depending on changing schedules. I’ve walked in snow, rain, sleet, sunshine, and on treadmills. In LA, Portland, Bellingham, Kelowna, Vancouver, Kenya, Haiti, Mexico, London and Jerusalem. I’ve carried mace and umbrellas and stuck to well lit areas when walking at night. I’ve walked on dirt paths in nature reserves and on sidewalks in suburbs.

I do other things to exercise, sure. But it all comes back to that one simple activity, walking. It clears my head, reduces stress, and helps put things into perspective. I don’t walk a long time, about 25 minutes usually. Consistency is key. My duodenum healed up years ago, and today at age 43 my health is sound.

Walking: it’s the single best thing you can do for your health.

A doctor recently made a 9 minute video about the proven benefits of walking. The video is creatively done and worth watching.

See the link at: http://youtu.be/aUaInS6HIGo

Question: What’s the best thing you’ve ever done for your health?

What Won Babe Heffron’s Respect

Two summers ago I found myself at a book signing event seated alongside seven of the original Band of Brothers, the men of Easy Company who have become symbols of heroism in World War II.

I sat near the tail end of a long table. The men and I were on one side, and a crowd of well wishers on the other. The line of people in Pennsylvania that day waiting for autographs and to shake hands with the men stretched for—literally—an hour in the hot sun.

To my left sat William “Wild Bill” Guarnere, and to my right sat Edward “Babe” Heffron. To tell you I felt out of place between two legendary WWII heroes as well as with the rest of the men in that lineup is an understatement. But two of my books were there, being frequently passed down the line and signed by the vets. Thus I sat, scribbled my name, and kept my mouth shut.

After a few hours, Mr. Guarnere announced he’d had enough. He doesn’t sit well for long. Wild Bill gathered his crutches and left for beers with a woman half his age. He’s a colorful figure, which you know if ever you’ve seen him. A larger-than-life American hero. 

Babe Heffron signed for the rest of the day, pausing only to debate baseball and curse anyone who wasn’t a Phillies fan. Babe is less flamboyant than Bill, and bluntly authentic, with never a hint of pretense to anyone in line.

We spoke directly a few times, Babe and me.

Babe asked who I was and why I was there. When I showed him my book, he raised an eyebrow. “Well, good for you,” he said, his voice like gravel.  

When people in line kept calling him “Mr. Heffron,” and he kept saying, “Just call me Babe,” I said, “Mr. Heffron was your father’s name.” And Babe laughed. “That’s a good one,” he said. “I’ll have to remember that.”

After a dozen autograph seekers had looked disappointed and asked Babe where was “his good buddy Bill,” I said, “I’m curious if you get tired of being asked that.” And Babe grinned wryly. Bill and Babe are best of friends—(read their book)—but there was transparency in Babe’s eyes, too. You could tell that the same question repeated so many times had irked him.

I left the lineup early and went to secure a wheelchair for one of the vets who’d been having difficulty walking. I had been helping this man throughout the weekend of the event.

As I headed back to the signing table from the holding station where the wheelchairs were kept, Babe was already headed for the street, homeward bound. He was surrounded by well-wishers and he walked with confident, easy strides.

When he spotted me, he broke away, headed over to me and shook my hand, then kept going without another word.

I’d like to think we connected that day, a military hero and a young author, signing books together in the Pennsylvania summertime.

Yet I doubt if the connection was forged by the books or the jokes or even the deeper question I’d asked and Babe had been gracious enough to field.

Because there’s one more important thing to tell about that day. I think it’s what won Babe Heffron’s respect in the end. It speaks highly of the type of man he is, and the depth of brotherhoods he’s formed over the years.

And I mention this last bit of the story out of tribute to Babe, not me.

The man who helps Babe travel, a man who knows Babe well, pulled me aside and said, “Babe doesn’t do that, you know. He doesn’t shake hands like that with just anyone.”

“I wonder why he did that for me,” I asked, and shrugged.

The man pointed to the wheelchair. “Because you’re taking care of his friend.”

Question: What’s the best thing a friend has ever done for you?

A Perfectly Good Word

Trends come and go in the commercial publishing industry. A while ago, everything was paradigm this and paradigm that. Then paradigm became overused, and any editor today will slash the word with his red pen. I encountered another editor who banned proactive and partnering as evil, bureaucratic words. Special, very and interesting are bland, colorless words that definitely needed to die.

Another despised word nowadays is discipline.

Yet that’s a word that needs to live. And I hope we don’t lose it—either in etymology or in practice.

Its fuller definition involves much more than putting a child in a timeout or sending a teen to the principal’s office. Discipline, in its truest form, is an activity that improves a skill. Success in business requires discipline. A gold medal hockey team is disciplined in its performance.

The challenge as an author is to sell discipline when modern publishers want you to put hip twists on things. Bestselling books are ripe with quick fixes, and, although the benefits of discipline are big, they are seldom felt immediately.

“Discipline—ugh!” an editor e-mailed me recently. “That’s your grandfather’s word. Discipline connotes pain. Can’t you find a better way to say what you mean?”

I pushed back on his counsel. The word might be stodgy, even pejorative, but I’m a fan of the word myself and of the concepts behind it.

Here’s what I mean. Sure, discipline involves pain. It’s not always comfortable or convenient. But pain is inevitable in life. And every man must pick the pain he’d rather have.

You either pick the pain of DISCIPLINE.

Or you pick the pain of REGRET.

There are no other options.

Consider the following:

·         Discipline wakes a man at 6:30 a.m. to go for his 2 mile jog. It’s cold outside and dark, and he’d rather stay in bed. Sure, that’s painful.

or

·         Regret lands him in the hospital at age 52 from a heart-attack.

·         Discipline permits a man to let a stupid driver fly by him unimpeded on the freeway. Sure, it grates on a man’s ego. Hey—that louse needs to be taught a lesson. It takes restraint and a cool head to not floor it, swerve around that muttonhead, and flip him the bird.

or

·         Regret lands both drivers in the morgue.

·         Discipline installs filtering software on man’s computer. It’s inconvenient, sure, and might slow the computer. It might be embarrassing to explain why you want to safeguard your integrity like that.

or

·         Regret sees a man’s self-respect disintegrate and his marriage fall apart.

Catch my drift? In this day and age of lighthearted masculinity and short-range living, it’s not popular anymore to advocate discipline. But you can’t avoid pain. You can only pick the one you want.

One pain is preemptive. The other operates in hindsight.

One pain moves a man forward. The other sets him back.

One is wise. The other is foolish.

Discipline: it’s a perfectly good word. Better than regret.

I say leave it in.

Question: What’s an example of a discipline that seems costly at the time, but in the end actually reaps big results?

An Unimagined Success

How many times have we hoped for a specific type of success, only to have it elude us? We dream of being an Olympic sprinter, a prize-winning surgeon, or a writer of the great American novel.

But try as we might, the specific type of success we long for never comes.

Sgt. Joe Toye, one of the original Band of Brothers, fit this profile. The hardscrabble son of an Irish coalminer, Toye was a promising athlete, excelling at both boxing and football. But Toye’s father died when Toye was in 7^th grade, and Toye needed to drop out of school, go to work, and help feed the rest of the family.

He would never become a professional athlete. That dream was dead.

When WWII hit, Toye volunteered for the elite paratroopers and became a squad leader, a go-to organizer who always got the job done. He dreamed of a long-term career in the military, and he was just the type of man the Army was looking for.

Whenever the company commander needed a volunteer, Toye was first on the list. Volunteering for these missions required extreme bravery, but when called, Toye never hesitated.

Once, his company was pinned down in ditches outside Neunen, Holland. Their British tank support was being annihilated. The commander needed to find out what he was up against. He looked around, spotted Toye, and said, “Joe, I need a live prisoner.” Wordlessly, Toye left his squad, crept into no-man’s land, and came back with a prisoner from the 107^th Panzer Brigade.

Everything changed one wintery day in Bastogne. During a barrage of intense shelling, Toye was hit badly. He was evacuated to a hospital in London where his leg was amputated below the knee.

His military career was over. Another dream was dead.

After Toye came home, life was never the same. Toye was a big-hearted family man, but he also floundered in life. He drank too much. He fought. He struggled with nightmares from the war. He divorced and remarried. He drew some disability because of his missing leg, but not enough to support a family. He found work sharpening bits in a steel mine, where he stayed for more than 20 years until he retired.

Once, Toye remarked to his son that he didn’t feel like he had done much with his life. None of his dreams had ever come to pass.

Along the way, however, something unforeseen began to unfold.

Toye’s youngest son, Jonathan, was born with a severe birth defect. The son was mentally handicapped and couldn’t walk, talk, or feed himself. The boy’s condition hit Toye hard. There was no way a working family could care for the boy on a daily basis, so the son was placed in a home for special needs children, about an hour away from where the Toyes lived. Toye tried hard. He visited his son every chance he could.

After Toye retired from the steel mill, his handicapped son became everything. Each day, Toye spent hours with Jonathan, feeding him, cleaning his messes, talking with him, telling him he was proud of him.

Caring for his son became Toye’s life.

Jonathan wasn’t supposed to live much longer than childhood, but Jonathan had tough blood in him. Years passed. Toward the end, Toye’s goal became simply to outlive his son.

Jonathan died at age 32, three times longer than anyone thought he would live.

A year and a half after his son died, Joe Toye died too.

How strange: although we strive for a specific kind of success, it may never come. Instead, unexpected opportunities appear in our lives. Call these chances for unimagined greatness. Windows for living well.

“The point of life is not to just get by,” wrote St. Paul of Tarsus. “We want to live well, but our foremost efforts should be to help others live well.”

Using that criterion, I’d say Joe Toye was a tremendous success.

Question: What does it mean to be successful in life?

Big River

At the start of a new year, your next 12 months are always unknown.

That’s why your next 12 months can be an adventure. As well as scary.

Will you win the lottery? Or will your house burn down?

You don’t know.

So what do you do? You plan. You leap boldly. You keep going forward. And you buy insurance.

Even then, with all your best planning efforts, the future is always unknown. Anything can still happen.

So what helps?

Consider Adam, the first man. In Adam’s beginning, all of his future was equally unknown to him. The one great thing Adam had going for him at the start of something new was an unparalleled connection with God.

At first, it was just Adam and God and a new world. A big river flowed through Eden, blue-brown and washy, and God and Adam walked alongside the river. They talked about fishing, I suppose—both marveling at the way the silver underside of a trout flashed when it jumped out of the water, caught the sunlight, and disappeared. It was a great connection to have: God and man both hiking beside the same big river. Walking. Talking.

The rest of Adam’s story is part drama, part dark comedy, part thriller. At first, Adam enjoyed everything a man could want. Then forbidden fruit was digested, and the universe crapped out a curse upon the world.

In the end, Adam traded life with a lithe, always-naked woman for an aging spouse clothed in grimy animal skins. He swapped a perfect job—animal namer—for the job of stump grinding and rock picking. Tragedy struck, and one of Adam’s sons murdered the other.

It wasn’t the best life, but even outside Eden, life wasn’t utterly horrible for Adam. One of his descendants, Jubal, was the first maker of music. At least there were songs around the campfire, stories in the night.

Ask yourself: what sustained Adam throughout the rest of his days, through good experiences as well as difficult?

Could it have been Adam’s memory? Any time the man wanted, Adam could think back to the beginning, to his walks alongside the river with God.

Because of that close connection, Adam was able to be truly grateful in the good times. He could be happy for all he worked for and gained. He could be thankful for what he’d been given and didn’t deserve. Correspondingly, in the bad times, Adam could cry out to Someone who listened. He could ask for and receive the favor of Providence. He could sing to God the Blues.

A similar invitation is ours—and it’s not to join a particular religion, denomination, or cause. Rather, it’s to consider the big river. In other words, whatever the next 12 months holds, it’s to connect deeply with God.

This connection is possible today, because God is closer than we think.

Faith presents the idea of another man who makes everything new—a child in a straw ox manger. He’s sometimes called “a second Adam.” Instead of a man who destroys relationships, this man makes all things right. Through this other man, a close connection with God is possible again for us.

Here’s the bold invitation this year: No matter what happens in the next 12 months—good or bad—remember what Adam remembered. Once there was a big river where God walked side by side with a man. That big river still flows today, in a manner of speaking. Through another means, the same God is still close.

May this be a year where we get our fishing poles, lace up our boots, and go for a walk.

Question: What do you look forward to most this upcoming year?