52 Cups of Coffee: Inspiring and insightful stories for navigating life’s uncertainties (10 page)

Vince Foster

Starbucks in East Lansing, Michigan

Grande Americano

Surround yourself with good people.

Academic advisors
are supposed to provide support for students working toward their goals. That wasn’t the case for Vince Foster. It was an advisor, who told him he
couldn’t
achieve his goals that motivated his career as an accountant.

During Vince’s undergraduate career, accounting was considered the toughest major within the business college. When it came time to declare his major, Vince decided on accounting to challenge himself.

His academic advisor thought otherwise.
This was back when the drinking age was 18 and, well, let’s just say he had enjoyed his first few semesters of college. The advisor wasn’t afraid to tell Vince exactly how he felt. He took one look at his transcript and concluded he didn’t have the grades to be accepted, let alone survive the program. That wasn’t what Vince wanted to hear. He left the meeting with a silent resolve to prove he could get into the accounting program.

And he did. He was accepted, earned his degree, and took a position in Houston with Arthur
Andersen.

* * *

It was amusing to listen as Vince relived his college experience—everyone loves an underdog story—but what had me captivated was the story about how he left Arthur Andersen after 19 years (long before the company dissolved due to legal issues) to start his own venture: Main Street Capital Corporation, an investment firm for small-to-medium sized businesses.

Starting Main Street Capital had been a risky decision.
Vince had a wife and three kids relying on his success, in addition to the friends and family who were willing to invest their savings into his company. With so many interests at stake, failure wasn’t an option. But, with 20 years of experience and a strong business plan, he had the confidence to make it work.

* * *

12 years later, Vince’s company is a success. Main Street Capital now has several dozen employees, manages a portfolio of 40 businesses, and has big growth plans for the future.

I asked him how he had made it successful
. Vince told me, “I hire people smarter than me, who are more talented than me.” Vince has figured out where his own strengths are and that allows him to identify employees whose strengths balance out his weaknesses. Due to his hiring philosophy, he has surrounded himself with good people.

It’s not
the first time a group of good people has led to his success. While getting into the business college was a step in the right direction for Vince, the real magic happened when he joined a business fraternity, where he quickly became good friends with many of the members. It was a group of ambitious students who worked hard and still managed to find time for a social life. It was a transformative group for him. He had always had close friends, but there was something powerful about surrounding himself with supportive, motivated, and bright students, all interested in the same topics.

I could relate—in a big way. My transition to college had been relatively easy. I joined the cross-country team, which meant I had a ready-made group of friends the day I started
school. I also had two coaches keeping an eye on me (a comforting feeling when 1,000 miles from home). I still had to find my place within that group, but instantly surrounding myself with good people had been a nice way to get college started on the right foot.

I took that
support for granted. It wasn’t until I left the team and found myself without the support system that I realized how important it had been in my life. I still had great friends on the team, but I no longer had a three-hour block of time I spent with them every day. Suddenly, I felt lonely and entirely unmotivated. The loss of a social network made for a rough sophomore year.

Then, during my junior year of college, I stumbled into a group of students who had a transformative effect on me. It was a much less formal setting than Vince
’s fraternity; we were just a group of student entrepreneurs getting together once a week to have a beer and talk business. However, before we knew it, the group started to grow. There is something magical about getting a bunch of passionate, like-minded people in one place. And 30 years from now, when I reminisce on my time at Michigan State, it will be this group of people that I talk about.

Stefan Olander

Cafeteria at the Nike Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon

Medium Americano

Don
’t work so hard that you stop loving what you do.

I got my first pair of Nike running shoes in eighth grade—back when it was a feat to finish
a five-mile run. By my senior year of high school, I had a dozen pairs piled in the corner of my closet, worn from countless miles traveled along the familiar streets of my hometown.

My interest in running continued to grow; in 2008, I took a road trip out to Eugene, Oregon to watch my roommate compete in the Olympic Trials. While there, I bought a book called
Out of Nowhere: The Inside Story of How Nike Marketed the Culture of Running
—a book that chronicled how the company had begun with Bill Bowerman making shoes with a waffle iron in his garage, then grew into a sportswear giant that significantly changed the world of running.

As a runner and marketing major, I had a lot of respect for Nike, which I had mentioned to
Bill Ward, Cup 9, while carpooling to a conference in Detroit. He asked me the dreaded question I’d been hearing a lot, “So, what are your plans for after college?”

It was a well-intentioned question I fel
t I should have had a good answer for, but I didn’t, so the question always created stress. I settled on telling Bill that I liked Nike, and he mentioned that his friend Stefan Olander worked on the team that developed the Nike+ running system, and he’d be happy to introduce me. I was heading to the West Coast for Thanksgiving, so the timing was perfect. After a few emails among the three of us, I had a meeting setup with Stefan at the Nike World Headquarters in Oregon.

* * *

The meeting was on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It was a frosty morning, and, despite the Nike campus feeling deserted due to many employees being gone for the holiday, the place was as impressive as I had expected. I met Stefan in the Jerry Rice building, and we walked across the street to the cafeteria. Bill had told me Stefan had been born in Sweden, so as we stood in line to order, I asked how long he had been in the United States. “Six years,” he said as he began to explain the series of events that had led to his current position. By the time we had our drinks and found a place to sit, I’d learned that the Nike Headquarters hadn’t even been Stefan’s anticipated destination.

He had originally wanted to be a ski guide in the Alps; a
fter earning a degree in engineering, he hit the slopes, leading tours while working at a ski store on the side. His boss at the shop had taken a job working with a then-young company called Nike and convinced Stefan to follow suit.

After a few years working the Nordic division, and a few courses in marketing, Nike moved Stefan and his family to Holland, to work with brand management for a five-country region. This
happened when the Internet was just starting to gain traction, and Nike had one website it used for all of its regions. The strategy hadn’t made any sense to Stefan. He understood how Europeans had different tastes than Americans, so he and his team had taken on the task of rolling out customized websites for each region.

Stefan
’s success with the new technology helped him build a reputation as a leader in digital marketing and landed him his current job in Portland: Vice President of Digital Sports. That included work with Nike+, Ballers Network, and Nike’s latest installment of digital awesomeness: Nike Grid in London. It wasn’t where he had expected he’d be when he left college, but he had followed his passion and ended up with a job he loved.

Stefan had a laid-back disposition, a healthy perspective on life, interesting background, and clearly a creative mind.
I knew his rise through the ranks inevitably taught him a lot, so I asked him what advice he would give the 22-year-old version of himself.

It took him a minute to answer the question. I got the i
mpression he appreciated both the good and bad in life as necessary steps of his journey, and that he didn’t have many regrets. But he finally decided on an answer, and I will never forget what he said, “I am certain I could have achieved the same level of success without working so hard.”

He explained he had never minded working hard—that
’s a prerequisite; he was talking about pushing himself and the people working with him
too
hard—like a radio dial turned a few notches past the prime spot. If he could have adjusted the dial to find the right balance of effort, he would have been more focused, more efficient, had more fun, and ended up just as successful.

* * *

The thought echoed in my mind. It’s the opposite advice you typically hear, but I knew exactly what he meant.

Preparing for the Nike meeting had me reminiscing on my cross-country days
, and as I sat there with Stefan, something clicked: I had had the most success running during times when I was relaxed and having fun. I wasn’t having fun
because
I was succeeding; I was succeeding
because
I was having fun. The summer before my high school senior year, my passion for the sport had engulfed me. I had looked forward to daily runs—once willingly leaving an energetic wedding reception to run eight miles in the dark. I loved the pressure of challenging workouts; I counted down the days until big meets. That passion and work led to success.

But as that success escalated, so had the pressure to co
ntinue succeeding. Somewhere along the line, the stress had turned my passion into an obligation. Continuing on to a Division I cross-country team in college definitely hadn’t reduced the stress. I told myself I
had
to work harder,
had
to hit a certain time at practice,
had
to run more miles.

My ambition had worked against me. Instead of getting better, I got
worse.

I quit the team after one year. I said it was because there were other opportunities at Michigan State I wanted to e
xplore—which was true—but the other factor, the one I couldn’t admit for a long time, was that I was burned out.

I had done just what Stefan had said he would tell his younger self not to do:
I had turned the dial way past the optimal setting. I became so serious about running, I started looking at fun as a distraction I didn’t have time for—something that just got in the way of the hard work I had to do.

Stefan showed me that s
uccess isn’t about working as hard as possible; it’s about finding the right balance and having fun along the way.

I should have known from my running experience that I would be more successful if I kept life fun,
but it wasn’t until I heard it from someone with a career I admired that I believed it.