Augie's Quest by Augie Nieto

Author:Augie Nieto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

AUGIE:

In October of 2005, I was asked to give a speech the following August in Chicago. My biggest concern was whether my voice would be able to be heard. I had this big leap of faith for the first time, in that I was able to think more than ninety days out. I said yes.

I get incredible energy from the art of the speech. Most speakers don’t take the time to personalize their message. I’ll spend research time on each person who is going to be in the room. I know where they came from. I know what their parents do, and I incorporate them into my speech. People love to hear about themselves.

I brought my son, Austin. The audience was twenty-two- to twenty-six-year-olds. These were kids of Young Presidents’ Organization members. I’ve been a member of the YPO since the mideighties. It’s a worldwide association for CEOs under the age of fifty. There are probably eleven or twelve thousand members across the globe, and I imagine the YPO represents well over two trillion dollars in revenue worldwide. The organization itself and the friends I’ve made through the YPO have been incredibly significant in my life, so I was proud to be there, particularly with my son.

The program was devoted to life after graduation. The speakers were a Northwestern professor discussing the art of negotiation, a woman who specialized in dressing for success, and a member of the Hyatt family talking about what it was like to be in the family business. My goal was to give these kids a sense of what it’s like to be vulnerable, since at their age they’re fearless.

These kids were well-off and in need of direction, because they’d lived what I’ll call a cocoonian life. Their parents had sheltered them from the hardships that had defined the older generation. That’s something Lynne and I have wrestled with in raising our own children. How do you guide them so maybe money won’t be the only metric of success. Maybe happiness. So I used my personal experience as a parent of our four kids. I had Austin in the front row.

I talked about my life as an entrepreneur. I talked about my business failures. I talked about the diagnosis. I talked about how the most important decision they would make in their life wasn’t the career they would choose but the spouse they’d spend their life with.

You could have heard a pin drop. Fifty kids in the audience, all dead silent. There were tears that came from the girls first, and then everyone started crying, even the tough guys.

As I ended the speech, I used the quote “Life isn’t measured by the number of breaths you take but by the number of times your breath is taken away.” The kids were paralyzed. They couldn’t move. They didn’t know what to do.

They’d been struck by the randomness of life. You can prepare by going to all of the right schools, landing the right job, marrying the right person, and there are still factors you can’t control.

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