Saturday, June 15, 2013

Pride

Years ago, on the eve of one of our quarterly meetings, one of my many managers sent out an email that was headed with a lengthy quote I recognized immediately. He'd edited it for brevity and for bad language, but it was the speech Al Pacino gives to his team towards the end of the movie Any Given Sunday.

I don't know what to say, really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives. It all comes down to today, and either we heal as a team, or we're gonna crumble, inch by inch, play by play, until we're finished. We're in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell one inch at a time. Now, I can't do it for you, I'm too old. I look around, I see these young faces, and I think, I mean, I've made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make. I've pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who's ever loved me. And lately, I can't even stand the face I see in the mirror.

You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. I mean, that's...that's a part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life's this game of inches, and so is football. Because in either game - life or football - the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don't quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast, and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that's gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing. Between living and dying. I'll tell you this, in any fight, it's the guy who's willing to die who's gonna win that inch. And I know, if I'm gonna have any life anymore it's because I'm still willing to fight and die for that inch. Because that's what living is, the six inches in front of your face.

Now, I can't make you do it. You've got to look at the guy next to you, look into his eyes. Now, I think you're going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. You're gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it you're gonna do the same for him. That's a team, gentlemen, and either we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That's football guys, that's all it is.

Now, what are you gonna do?

Heady stuff for a Starbucks manager meeting, I think you'll agree. But there's a reason it's been on my mind, and it has to do with finding some kind of value in what I do with the vast majority of my time. In many ways, I'm starting to feel like I'm looking at the rest of my life, and I suppose I'm trying to find some way to frame it that doesn't feel like I've somehow failed.

There's time, of course, to do many things, but those opportunities have been there for long enough that not taking them has gathered its own meaning, and that's led me to this line of thinking, this wondering what value the things I've done have when left to stand alone, without the ever-present belief that this is all prologue, prelude to defining acts yet to come.

The Pacino speech is absurd in context, as motivation for a group that - in my memory, at least - was largely unconcerned with the importance of coffee, or not on such an epic scale, anyway. But it did ring true in the sense that everything I've done in the fifteen years I've spent toiling away in retail and service on two different continents has been about teams, about taking them apart and putting them back together, about creating them from nothing or merely fine-tuning them. About winning.

I had reason to consider this in a conversation I had earlier this week, where I suddenly felt compelled, amidst the shrapnel of self-deprecation that usually flies when I talk about my day job, to defend  what I do, to point out the times when I've been a mentor to kids who otherwise had no guidance, the times I've given people who'd never won a thing in their lives pride in achieving something, in being number one, even if it was just in some contest for who could sell the most smoothies, the times I've stood up for people - and one or two of them might even read this - who might not have deserved it for the sake of a second chance.

I haven't cured any diseases or fought for any grand causes. Mostly, I've sold shit. And if I'm honest, I've never been all that great at it. But every time somebody says I'm the best manager they've ever had or that the place where they work hasn't been the same since I left, I feel pride. Pride that I made a difference, no matter how small it may have been. That may not be living and dying and the six inches in front of your face, but it's something. And sometimes that something's got to be enough to keep you going. posted at 11:15 PM ---------------------------------