A Death Wish

Chewie is a French bulldog, and every morning she does the math. Squirrel, 20 feet. Street, in between. The math comes out the same way every time: "Go." It's a complete calculation, made with every input she has, and it's wrong, and she can't be argued out of it, because from inside the math there's nothing to argue with. She has done the same math on other dogs, on cyclists, and on landscape trucks with overloaded trailers bouncing behind them. Proverbs says we are like my dog, Chewie, the suicidal Frenchie (in not so many words). The decisions that end badly looked right at the time, with every input true but one.

From where I stand, holding the leash, she has a death wish. From where she stands, she has a squirrel and a plan. You do the same math on a deal, a hire, a plan, and the street is the same street: the maintenance bill that wasn't in the deck, the reference who meant it, the culture fix with a date on it. Most of the time the truck misses. Sometimes the first time is the last one, and either way the fact you were missing cost you the deal, or the hire, or the company, and nobody standing next to you could make you look at it.

Who the warning is for

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.

Two chapters later, at 16:25, it says it again, word for word. Proverbs repeats only a handful of its lines that way, and this is one of them.

It doesn't say there's a way that seems wrong and is. That way needs no warning; it looks like what it is. It says the way that ends badly is the one that seemed right, to a man, at the time, with the inputs he had. Naivete can be deadly. Good intentions can have deadly results. And the verse covers one more man, who isn't naive at all: the one who made a big decision without the one fact that mattered, and had every other fact in hand. You don't have to be naive to take the way that seems right. You only have to be missing one fact.

Why the way seems right

The inputs are real. That's the part that makes the verse hard to use. The street is real too, but the street isn't what Chewie is looking at.

Take an acquisition where every number in the deck was true. The seller's story about why he was selling was, as far as it went, the story. The buyer got a complete set of true inputs and did the math, and the math came out "go," because the input he wasn't looking at, the maintenance that comes due in year two, wasn't in the deck, and he wasn't looking for it. Take a hire whose references were sincere. Every one of them meant it, and none of them had seen her run a team through a down year, because she never had. Take a founder's plan to fix the culture after the close, a real plan with a real date on it, which assumed the three people the culture was built around would still be there after the earnout.

Nobody in those cases was stupid. Each was a dog with a squirrel, and the squirrel was there.

It seems right for a second reason, which is that everyone else on the deal was doing the same math. The banker ran the numbers and they cleared. The partner who was supposed to be the skeptic had the same inputs and got the same answer. When six people with true inputs reach one conclusion, it stops feeling like a calculation and starts feeling like a fact, and nobody on the deal has any reason to look for the street.

The third reason is a track record. A friend of mine hunts whitetail on his own land, and the way he does it isn't sporting. He plants the fields the deer like. He puts out corn and protein blocks. He stays out of the area at the hours they move. By October the deer have stopped reading his field as a place where deer get shot and started reading it as the best restaurant in the county, and they are right, for months. Then he climbs into a stand at the edge of it. Every input was true, and the one that mattered was missing, and a deer that has eaten well in the same field for three months has no reason to look for it. Prey who does not know they are hunted.

Why you can't see it from inside

You can't check the math from inside it. You can check every number and every number checks. What you can't do is see the thing you're not looking at, because looking at it is the one move the math doesn't contain. We can be sincerely and dangerously misguided on our own.

The person holding the leash sees something different because he has a different line of sight. From the leash you can't see the squirrel at all; you see a small dog and a street. That's the value of an outside view, and it's also why it's so easy to dismiss. The person holding the leash can't see what you're excited about, so his warning sounds uninformed. It is uninformed about the squirrel, and it's the only informed view of the street.

Dan Allender, in Leading with a Limp, puts the cost plainly: "For most leaders, humility comes only by wounds suffered from foolish falls." The wound is how the missing input finally gets into the math, from the outside, at full price.

That's the position Proverbs speaks from. It's an older man's book, written for a son by men who had already made the decisions he was about to make and seen how they turned out.

What a death wish is

What that looks like from the leash is a death wish, which isn't what the word usually means. A death wish isn't a decision. It's a want, acted on without the one fact that would have stopped you. Everybody has done that at least once. Most of the time the truck misses, or clips you, and there's a morning after, and then the question is what you do with the want.

W. H. Auden has the line, and Richard Rohr borrows it in Falling Upward for people in the second half of life: "We would rather be ruined than changed." When the truck comes, you don't blame the math. You blame the truck. It was a bad truck, a bad quarter, a bad seller, a bad market, and the squirrel is still there the next morning and the calculation still says "go."

Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.

Fools repeat their folly. They do not learn. They keep going back to their previous messes.

You see the repeat in the next deal. A buyer who overpaid for a company with a maintenance problem buys the next one with a lessons-learned slide in the deck, and the lesson is about the seller. A founder who raised on a plan that didn't work raises again on the same plan with a new market. The math clears again.

What keeps you alive

If that's what we're like, and Proverbs says it is, then the fix isn't to want less. It's to wear something that can stop us.

Chewie wears a harness. She's allowed to want the squirrel, and she does, with her whole body, every morning. The harness does one thing: at the moment the math comes out "go," whoever is holding the other end stops her.

That's a small thing to ask, and it's the one you're least likely to accept, because it looks like a limit on your judgment. G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, found one rule in every fairy tale: "all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one negative." The people in the stories who lose everything are never the ones who accepted the veto. One outside "no," at one moment, is the price of keeping everything else you've built.

The leaders who have come undone in front of me were almost never short on talent. They were short on a harness. A harness, for you, is a person or a rule that can stop you, and that you agreed to in advance: a partner who can kill a deal, a board that wasn't recruited from your phone, a rule written down before the want showed up, a friend with no stake in the outcome. The harness never makes the decision for you. It stops you from acting on the one you've already made.

A dog that never wants the squirrel is sick, or old. The ones who last still want the deal with their whole bodies, every morning. The difference is that they agreed to the harness before there was a squirrel in sight.

The morning after the truck, Chewie still wants the squirrel. Tomorrow morning, somebody has to be holding the leash.