How to Get Some Perspective on Your Perspective
That quote from Anais Nin (yet again😄) is the start of our journey to learn the specific skills to see and believe in someone. I have touched on several of these stories and concepts in previous newsletters, but for this "series" coming up, I will share personal stories (some not so easy to share) that I hope will bring to life the specific skills so critical for seeing and believing in our fellow human beings. Here goes!
Story #1 - "You're Going"
Sam grew up under the influence of what one might call Version I Michael Maddaus - the "abusive boyfriend that you absolutely adore but can never be sure won't slap you" and the "in some ways he seems almost ruthless in his pursuit to make us strong version (link here to review my children's reaction to those comments).
Before we continue with the story, let's examine the list of "ingredients" in the recipe that produced Version I Michael Maddaus.
(Sidenote: I work hard to never make excuses for anything I have done. I believe and try to live by Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership principle. I do, however, fully embrace the Retrospectoscope to look at events and patterns in my past that will help me understand how things came to be. It is only through this process that one can learn, grow, and change. So, the following ingredient list is not a list of excuses; it is a list of forces and events that shaped me. We all have an ingredient list that shapes us, which is the point of today's newsletter).
Ok, back to it.
Ingredient #1: My world was "different" right out of the gate. I was born out of wedlock in 1954 to a single mother (Lorraine) who, while working as a waitress, had an affair with the owner of the restaurant she worked in. My biological father was married and had three kids of his own when one of his sperm found its way to my mother's egg. The story I was told (and that I told others for years) was that my father died of throat cancer before I was born.
Ingredient #2: Poor and constant money worries. We were poor as hell and lived in one dumpy apartment after another with cockroaches. In my early years my grandmother Peggy (my mother's mother) lived with us and took care of me while mom worked two waitress jobs to support us.
Ingredient #3: On my own and lonely as hell at a young age. Peggy died of metastatic cervical cancer when I was 10, leaving me alone most of the time while mom worked during the day and at night. This meant coming home to an empty apartment and eating Swanson's TV dinners (which I loved, especially the Salisbury Steak!).
Ingredient #4: The shame of being different and a loser. I went to an elementary school that was in the heart of Kenwood, a very affluent neighborhood. We lived on the "other side," literally and figuratively. Hennepin Avenue is the main street separating Kenwood from the poor side, and we lived on the poor side of Hennepin. I had friends from Kenwood, and as I grew out of the mental bubble of my childhood trance, I came to realize just how different my world was compared to theirs.
Ingredient #5: Desperate for a father. Mom had several boyfriends that came and went, and each time I glommed onto them with my desperate desire for a father. My wish was fulfilled one day when Mom brought Ralph home. Ralph was a cook in the Navy for 20 years and had just retired, and the day I met him, he was standing in our kitchen in his Navy uniform. I was elated. Eventually, they were married, and for a while, I even wanted Ralph to adopt me.
Ingredient #6: Life went to hell in an instant. The wheels on the bus came off when Mom and Ralph were sitting in the kitchen one Sunday morning and, unbeknownst to me (I was 10 and still in the magical mental world of a young boy, unaware of the dark forces hiding in plain sight) drinking whiskey highballs. Mom stumbled into the room I was in (I was working on a Frankenstein model) and, with her robe open revealing her bare breasts and panties, put on a record (The West Texas Town of El Paso by Marty Robbins) and asked me, with a slur and sloppy eyes, to dance with her. I didn't dance, but I also don't remember anything after that.
Ingredient #7: Chronic uncertainty, instability, and abandonment. The dance incident was the start of a 14-year nightmare. Mom would drink, slowly stop eating, lose weight, become bedridden, go off to the hospital to dry out, then come back home as a normal mom for 3-6 months, then relapse. Rinse, repeat, over and over (with a gruesome suicide attempt thrown in) until she died when I was 25 years old. It's no surprise that as a teen, I ended up on the streets with the wrong crowd, getting arrested 24 times and in and out of reform school 5 times. I had to drop out of high school and join the Navy to avoid being tried as an adult after my 24th arrest.
Ingredient #8: All-out determination. After the Navy (where I cleaned toilets and chipped paint), I got my GED and enrolled in junior college. I had to start from scratch: how to write a sentence, add fractions, and stuff like that. Eventually, I clawed my way to academic success with the help of many people and sheer effort and determination (and by hiring private tutors for calculus and physics) and miraculously ended up getting into medical school.
Ingredient #9: Don't complain. I loved medical school, yet I remember feeling like an imposter and as if I did not fit in, which I certainly didn't in some ways. Most of the students were from "normal" families (whatever those are) with financial resources, and from my perspective, most of them did not really understand what a massive and tremendous opportunity they had been given. I hated (I repeat - hated) it when any of them complained about the work or the teachers or any of it. For me, it was a miracle that I was even there.
Ingredient #10: Being "protocolized" by surgery residency. Bear with me if I sound a bit geriatric with this statement, but here goes: when I was a resident, the brutality of the process was for real. Working 100-120 hours a week, being treated as if you were "nothing more than a grabastic piece of amphibious shit" (a line from the drill instructor scene in Full Metal Jacket). It was hard as hell, but I learned in the most profound way just how much resilience I had and that I could endure and weather much more than I ever thought myself capable of.
Ingredient #11: I can't do it? I'll show you. I finished training in thoracic surgery in Toronto (the mecca of thoracic surgical training at the time, and I was accepted over a guy from Harvard, which delighted me no end😏) and returned to the University of Minnesota on faculty. The department had been decimated just before I started on staff. John Najarian, the chair, had been removed and was on trial for selling Antilymphocyte Globulin (ALG) without FDA approval, and managed care had just ridden into town, and overnight the University hospital looked like a western ghost town with empty beds and almost no patients. When I was interviewing for the job, the interim chair told me that I would never be able to build a practice at the University hospital and that I should focus on the Veterans Administration hospital. I can still see him, the room, the chairs, all of it - and I remember what I thought - f%$# you, I will do it.
Ingredient #12: My personality traits: extraversion - 94%, nurturing - 86%, leadership - 91%, composed - 99%, determined - 87%, energetic 94%. I did not sign up for these traits, nor did I seek them out. They've been there all along, and they help explain why I was arrested 24 times and all of my friends just a few times. Note the nurturing trait high percentile. The "he is like an abusive boyfriend that you absolutely adore but can never be sure won't slap you" was imbued with this trait because I really, really did care about my children and the residents succeeding and learning how to deal with life.
The end result of this Version I Michael Maddaus "recipe?" I climbed the ladder of "success" and became a world-class minimally invasive surgeon with a busy practice, formed my own division, became a full professor with an endowed chair, and was the program director of general surgical training.
So, from MY PERSPECTIVE, the recipe worked like gangbusters. Until it stopped working, but more on that later.
Ok, back to Anais Nin's quote - I saw the world and others, not as they really are, but as I was. Which meant - work like hell, don't complain, don't feel sorry for yourself, get over shit, and be the best you can be at things. As one friend and colleague said of me when he visited me in Hazelden after my downfall: "You were a force to be reckoned with."
But, in my mind, when he said that, I was like "are you serious?" Sure, I knew I was very energetic and driven, but I also thought I was a very patient, understanding, and warm man. I see now, through the Retrospectoscope, that I had no perspective on my perspective.
In other words, I was living in the trance of my perspective. It was my mental normal since, after all, I had lived with me for so long that me became normal, to me.
I believe that nearly everyone lives in a trance of me, just like I was. I still live in it, but I now have the mental swimming skills to get out of the water to catch the fresh air and sunshine from a different perspective.
Ok, back to Sam, who grew up with Version I Michael Maddaus.
As a young boy, Sam was quiet. I don't mean quiet as in calm. I mean, he hardly talked at all. He would sit in his room alone with the door closed with his toys and monsters for what seemed like hours at a stretch. I remember cracking the door open to check on him periodically because it was so quiet in there.
Turns out Sam is one of the more introverted people I have ever known. Recall my extraversion percentile of 94%. My extraversion did not mean that I loved to chat with anyone anywhere that would listen to me. But it did mean that I love to engage with people I like and to talk about concepts and ideas. Whenever Sam and I would ride together in the car, I would be yacking away while Sam just sat there in silence, nodding occasionally or saying, "Yup."
Then, as a teen, his physical side surfaced like a giant whale breaching the surface of the ocean. Before we knew it, he was swimming for his high school and went to state. He was on the football team. He wanted to start lifting weights, so I took him to my gym, Los Campeones, a small free-weight gym with a real gym atmosphere that I loved.
Sam loved it. He loved lifting so much that I hired the owner, Ben, to train him. Sam took to Ben and lifted like an animal when he worked out, so much so that Ben told me that he had never trained anyone who could take such a beating and who worked that hard before.
Then, one day at Los Campeones, Sam met Shane, a tattooed, edgy young man who had started teaching boxing lessons downstairs in the dungeon part of the gym. Sam took to him, and the boxing, as if he had found a calling. Because both Lea and I were working, I arranged with Shane to have him pick Sam up at school, bring him to Los, and teach him to box.
You have to picture the situation. Sam is in a small, private Episcopalian college prep school where talking about something like boxing could lead to being labeled a Neanderthal. Then up drives Shane in a black Dodge Charger with his tattoos to pick up Sam and take him to the gym for boxing lessons, and then drive him home. Unusual.
Sam loved boxing so much that I soon found a real boxing gym (Upper Cut) in Minneapolis and then hired a professional boxing coach - Alfonso Vasquez - to coach him. Soon he was fighting in the ring in formal matches and winning.
Meanwhile, at home, Sam and I are watching the National Geographic DVD series on Navy Seal training and hell week. We must have watched each episode at least 5 times, so no big surprise when Sam tells me that he wants to join the Navy after high school and become a Seal.
Now being someone (at that time, 14 years ago) who always knew what was best for everyone, I pushed him instead to apply to the Naval Academy, become an officer first, and then become a Seal.
Here, I have to acknowledge another very powerful influence on my thinking besides all the Ingredients listed above. I had the privilege of training three surgical residents who were graduates of the Naval Academy and West Point. They were over-the-top, competent residents. They worked like hell without ever complaining, they prepared for everything with intensity, they were staggeringly efficient, they treated people well, and they never seemed stressed. Everyone loved working with them.
So, package up all of my Ingredients and my experience with Academy graduates, and it makes sense that I worked to convince Sam that if he goes to the Naval Academy, not only can he be an officer and a Seal if he wants, but that he will also be set for life. The subtext here, of course, is my past really driving me to want him to be set for life, just like I finally felt the day that I pulled the medical school acceptance envelope out of the mailbox.
Sam went along with my project for him and was accepted, I think to his surprise. His grades were good but not straight A's, but he boxed, and the Naval Academy loves boxing, so this must have played a role.
A few days after he was accepted, I was sitting at my desk working when Sam came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said "Pa, can I talk to you."
I turned around and Sam was standing there with his hands in his pockets and glancing down at the floor when he said, "Pa, I don't think I want to go to the Naval Academy."
I felt this massive surge of irritation well up inside of me. After all he was being given the opportunity of a lifetime, and now he is telling me he doesn't want to go. No way I thought, so I stood up, put my hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eyes, and said "you're going."
Sam said Ok, and he turned around and walked back into his bedroom.
To this day, that moment haunts me, and I have regret, for reasons that will come to light in future writings in this series.
One reason is that Sam gave his high school graduation speech about me, so you can imagine the pressure he must have felt to not disappoint me.
Another reason I regret that moment is because of this small story. After my 24th arrest, I was sitting in the front seat of my probation officer's Chevy, staring out the windshield at the cold, grey Minnesota fall day and the drizzling rain, listening to the squeak of the wipers going back and forth, when he said:
"Mike, I talked to the judge. You have two choices. Drop out of high school and join the military, or be tried as an adult and maybe end up in prison."
I remember like it was yesterday, how alone and trapped I felt. What I regret is that Sam may have felt the same way when he went back to his room.
The lesson here is that we all are in this trance of me, and that we do see the world and others as we are, and not as they really are. The first step in learning to really see and believe in another person is to break out of the trance of our perspective and, with a liberated mind, really see another person with curiosity and interest.
Feedback with a thumbs up or down is greatly appreciated, or drop an email to me michael@michaelmaddaus.com.
