Five Years or Five Lifetimes?

I Can't Tell the Difference

Last week I caught up with a former student on Zoom. The two of us met at a small group dinner that included eight students and a faculty member (me) on Friday, March 6, 2020.

The dinner was extremely memorable.

Not because of the food (takeout Chinese, I think), nor because of the conversation (I can’t remember anything special we discussed). Rather, as we said our good-byes that evening, all of our phones simultaneously went off: Stanford was moving to virtual instruction the following Monday for the last week of the academic quarter. The strange new virus coming out of China was spreading globally and was about to change our lives in ways we couldn’t imagine.

As the two of us discussed that dinner, we recalled many of the things that had happened to each of us since that meal.

For her: the lockdown, graduating from Stanford after taking a leave of absence, working at two different companies, starting a new business, moving across the country (twice), a romance turned relationship turned breakup, the death of her grandfather, a major health scare, and so much more.

For me: the lockdown, teaching over 800 Zoom sessions virtually, leading instruction of seven unique courses, taking a sabbatical, one cancelled high school graduation for our youngest child, one cancelled college graduation for our oldest child, all three of our children graduating from college, writing two books, and a tremendous number of overseas business trips.

My brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and my uncle passing away.

Putting our family dog to sleep…

And that was just what came top of mind.

So Many Lifetimes and So Much Change in Such a Short Time

The conversation made me think about some of the guests that have come to my classes at Stanford over the years. The average tenure of a global S&P 500 CEO is less than five years. After the conversation with my student I went back and looked at two of my courses, The Industrialist’s Dilemma and Systems Leadership, and calculated the number of CEOs still in their positions today versus when they came to class. Even though I am familiar with the data about CEO longevity, I was surprised to find that only 36% of CEOs in the former course and 61% in the latter course are still in their roles. Given that I started the second course two years after the first, the percentage of CEOs who came to Systems Leadership that will still be in their jobs is likely to drop in the next 24 months when the comparison will be apples-to-apples.

In a world of increasingly rapid technological change and constant crisis, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Yet, when I look at photographs from those class sessions, the moments feel like they were only yesterday.

Researchers have documented why humans feel that time seems to go more quickly as we age. Broadly, when we are young, we have experienced less actual time in life, but as we age we have more memories to look back upon. As such, a week, a month, or a year when we are older is a smaller portion of our life, and we have more memories to compare at any moment at time.

What was striking about the conversation with my student is that we both had this overwhelming sense of how much we had been through in the last five years. Even this young person, in her early 30s, was surprised by how much had happened to her in such a short window.

Time had moved quickly on the one hand, but it also seemed to have been immensely eventful on the other.

Time Stand Still

I write this while in Southern California as our family prepares to celebrate a milestone birthday for my wife. Our family lived in this city for eight years when our kids were little, and it is also the town in which I grew up. We will celebrate this weekend with family and friends, and again next month with more family and friends back in the Bay Area. Milestone birthdays mark the passage of time and allow us to reflect on the events that have comprised our lives.

As I thought more deeply about the conversation with my former student, additional details came to mind of the last five years: two of our children living at home during the pandemic and having family dinners together for the first time since they were little kids, starting three new courses, ending four different courses, looking at my business travel which included three trips to Asia, six trips to the Middle East, 10 trips to Europe, five trips to Canada, and eight domestic business trips (striking since travel was limited/nonexistent for ~18 months).

On the personal side we had multiple visits to our kids’ homes around the United States, flights to see my parents in Southern California, traveling to my sister’s new home in Phoenix, journeying to Africa on safari, and a side jaunt to Liverpool to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” with 45,000 of my closest friends.

The sheer quantity of memories feels like a dam that overflows.

I’m sitting in my parents’ backyard looking at the view as I type this:

The same view I grew up with as a child. Always so beautiful. So much has happened since we moved into this house when I was just 11 years old.

So many lifetimes lived in the last five years.

The lyrics from a song run through my head…

I'm not looking back

But I want to look around me now

See more of the people

And the places that surround me now

Freeze this moment

A little bit longer

Make each sensation

A little bit stronger

Experience slips away

The innocence slips away

Summer's going fast

Nights growing colder

Children growing up

Old friends getting older

Time Stand Still

- Neal Peart

Time stands still for no one.