Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and
this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 132.
I first encountered the stories, that we are
featuring on our show today,
and the author today as a middle-aged child.
Now if this sounds like a weird framing, consider that I
was always the kind of kid that had a strong literary
streak. For example, I first read Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck, when I was 8 years old, And I cried
like a baby when, that big autistic
fellow died in the book, which made me
weird, by the way. And that's okay to say that I was weird. It's fine.
But such literary interests also made me open and
opened me up to the power of storytelling, the impact of
experience, and the capacity to mash up those two things
in interesting and potentially restorative ways.
Later in school, I formally studied the stories,
from this author today in a little bit of depth. And during my learning, I
was exposed to the, vercilimitude, there you go, I love that
word, of understanding the subtext of context as well
as the power of language, the magic of metaphor, and the necessity
of veracity being and serving as the soul
of wit. In that formal study, I was also exposed to
ideas that I I am certain led via the many winding roads of life
to developing some of the threads of ideas I've been weaving together the last few
months in my mind. As a result of hosting conversations on
this podcast, my extensive book and Substack reading, and,
yes, even observing the stream of doom flow by
via the Internet delivered to me directly
by my phone, I have some questions that this author's
writing in the world served to coalesce into
something, even these comments today.
So today on the show, we will be pulling leadership lessons
for leaders from one of the more unlikely short stories
by a celebrated writer of the gilded age
whose writing has never been out of print since
he died, which is stunning, actually.
Today, we are going to be covering for
our Christmas slash winter season, the gift of the
magi as part of 41 stories
by O'Henry.
Leaders. Sometimes the threads of thoughts come together to form a
patchwork fabric of conclusions, and then you read a story or a set of
stories by an author that confirms, whatever conclusion
you may have independently woven together.
And, of course, today, we are going to be covering these stories. We're gonna be
talking about them with my good friend
and bon vivant of the winter season,
Tom Libby. How are you doing, Tom? I'm hanging in
there, man. I'm living my best life.
Now isn't it snowing in the northeast at this point? Like, you're in the northeast.
Is it snowing today? It's not snowing today. So we have
not to be all meteorological on you. We have this weird high
pressure system right now sitting right on in the in the in the in
right around, like, hovering over the the harbor, like, where Boston Harbor is, stretching
out to just about Connecticut. So any kind of precipitation that's hitting that
bottom half of that is literally just going around New England. It's the weirdest thing
to watch on the radar screen, but, no, it's not rain. It's not snow right
now. Well, that's
good because, where I am at, it is
a balmy 65 degrees. So I
think it's 44 42 or 43 today for for me. We
had we had, we had, like, 2 days of, like,
like, almost 32 degree
temperatures, and everybody locally almost lost their
minds. Anyway. So Yeah. Fun fun fact. I I had I
had to spend some time out in the the forest this, this past
weekend, with, my with my brother.
And, when we showed up to the forest, it was 18
degrees out. It is it
is amazing to me that, like,
human beings don't care about the weather.
Like, if you look at, like, wooly mammoth death sites,
you see, like, little sharp little arrows because, like, people just kill them and eat
them. Yeah. Because they don't care. They're just like, I don't know. That seems like
something we should eat. Let's it's oh, it's 19 below. Doesn't
matter. We're gonna go get that thing. We're
hungry. Then they'll keep us warm. We don't
care. We don't care how cold it is out.
Oh my gosh. Alright. Well, with that, now that we've
covered our meteorological portion of the show,
we're going to pick up today with O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi.
Now this is a short story, by the author William
Sydney Porter, aka O. Henry. It's
only around 5 to 6 pages long. And so what we're gonna do is we're
gonna dip in, dip out of the story, and we're going to talk about a
lot of different areas today. We're gonna talk about the gilded age. We're gonna talk
poverty and pride and vanity. We're going to talk about Christmas.
And, of course, we're going to talk about the life and times of
William Sydney order. So from
the gift of the magi, we open.
$1.87. That was all. And
60¢ of it was in pennies. Pennies saved 1 and
2 at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the
butcher until one's checks burned with the silent imputation of
parsimony that such close dealing implied.
Three times, Della counted at $1.87, and
the next day would be Christmas. There
was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl,
so Della did it, which instigates the more reflection that life
is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles with sniffles
predominating. While the mistress of the home is gradually
subsiding from the 1st stage to the second, take a look at the home. A
furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar
description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the men
the mendicancity squat. Love that word.
In the vestibule below was a letter box into which no letter would
go and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring.
Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name
mister James Dillingham Young. Now Dillingham had
been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was
being paid $30 per week. Now when the income was shrunk to $20,
the letters of Dillingham looked blurred as though they were thinking seriously of
contracting to a modest and unassuming d.
But wherever and whenever mister James Dillingham Young came
home and reached his flat above, he was called Jim and greatly
hugged by missus James Dillingham Young already introduced to you
as Della, which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended her cheeks with a powder rag. She stood by
the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking the gray fence in
a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas day, and she had only $1.87
with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could
for months with this result. $20 a week doesn't go far. Expenses
had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87
to buy a present for Jim, her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent
planning for something nice for him, something fine and rare
and sterling, something just a little bit near to being
worthy of the honor of being owned by
Jim. So we'll stop there for
just a moment. The layers
of gilded
age assumptions, pre feminist, by the way,
gilded age presumptions are layered right there in that first
part of a gift or the gift of the magi.
But we can't understand William Sydney Porter without
actually going into a little bit about who William Sydney Porter is.
He was born September 11, 1862 and
died June 5, 1910. He was an American writer
known primarily for his short stories, though he also wrote poetry,
and he peddled a little bit in nonfiction. Born
in Greensboro, North Carolina, Porter worked at his uncle's pharmacy after finishing
school and became a licensed pharmacist at age 19.
In March 18 82, he moved to Texas where he initially lived on a
ranch and later settled in Austin where he met his first wife, Athol
Estes. While working as a drafter in the Texas general land
office, Porter began developing characters for his short stories. He later worked
for the First National Bank of Austin while also publishing a weekly
periodical, The Rolling Stone. Now
in 18/95, he was charged with embezzlement stemming from an audit of the
bank. Before the trial, he fled to Honduras where he began writing Cabbages and
Kings, which was a collection of short stories in which he
coined the term, quote, unquote, banana republic.
Porter surrendered to US authorities when he learned his wife was dying from tuberculosis,
By the way, a disease that his mother died of and that he was in
he lived his entire life in fear of getting and of
dying of, and he cared for his wife,
his first wife, until her death in July 1897.
As a result of returning and surrendering to the US authorities,
William Sydney Porter, was sentenced to a 5
year federal prison sentence for embezzling, get this, $854.8
in March 18 98 at the Ohio Federal Penitentiary
where he served there as a night druggist because apparently
writing doesn't get you very far in a federal penitentiary in
18/98. While imprisoned, Porter
published 14 stories under various pseudonyms, one
being
O'Henry. I don't think Tom knew much about this guy or knew much
about O'Henry before we started our
podcast today. So you've had a chance a little bit to
hear about this, Tom. What do you think about this fellow,
William Sydney Porter? Interestingly enough, you're you're right. I didn't
really know the depth any kind of depth of his life or who he
was already, but I have I actually had heard of this particular story.
I don't know why this particular story, but this this one I had I
had heard of. I've known about it. I've I've, like, read passages of it
or had discussions about certain pieces of it and stuff like that before
today. But the reality of it was there was this is probably
the I don't know how you were able to pick the only story I've ever
heard of from O'Henry. It's,
it's interesting. But, I you know, when you ask, like, what
do you it's it's funny too because I thought my first thought
coming out of this onto this podcast was gonna be something totally different than what
I thought about his life. Because I read the first couple of passages of this
and was thinking to myself, how do you get a dollar 87 with having
60 pennies? Math I I was so
bugged out by the math here, not realizing that in in at
this time frame, I I think we had I think our
currency had half pennies and things like that. Yeah. Mhmm. Too. So
you could so, technically, you could have that. So my brain was okay after I
had to I I took a step back. Anyway, so but that's
where my first thought went. When I was when I read this, I was like,
you got a dollar 87. What are you talking about? How do you have What
are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. The math doesn't work. Oh, Oh,
Henry needs to go back to school. And then realizing that he was
actually intelligent, you know, intelligent to the point, you know,
of, I mean, a pharmacist at 19, which you definitely could not do today.
No. But I I mean, I know that, you know, the
the the manners and the processes in
which we have to become a license to anything, doesn't even matter. In
insert licensure here, whether it's pharmacist, nurse,
plumber, electrician, it doesn't really matter. But, you know, a 100 years
ago or a 100 and whatever years ago,
or 2 almost 200 years ago. Sorry. You know, they they just
they didn't have the same I mean, you literally could apprentice under somebody from a
certain amount of time and get in that house on your license. So we didn't
have the formal schooling and testing and all that stuff that we have today. So
I I was initially like, my first reaction was, oh my god. This guy was
brilliant, a pharmacist in 19, thinking of what today's pharmacists have to go
through in order to become a and then realizing after the fact
after thinking of it for a second and going, he probably didn't have to do
any of that. He didn't have to do any of that. He didn't have to
do any of that. So He literally poured he literally poured bought poured
pills in one bottle to another bottle, which is it's I mean, that's all he
had to do. Right. And maybe some tinctures and some powders, things like that.
But, like, yeah, whatever. It's fine. I mean, it's not like he was an alchemist.
Right? Like, he wasn't actually mixing this stuff together. It wasn't so,
but, anyway but, you know, some of the things, you know, it's funny. Like,
you think about just the brief description of his life that you just read a
second ago, and you try to think about how you can take lessons
out of it for leaders. I find interesting because of you
like, we we've said this about a 100 times on this
podcast together, Hae san. Right? Like, the more things change, the more things stay the
same. Right? So the guy the guy has a job,
leaves that job to go better himself. Great. Gets married.
Awesome. Gets charged with a crime, leaves the
country, comes back to the country. Why? Because of a girl.
It's like, it's this this story has been written about a 1000
times. Right? Like so, and then, of course,
he faces his punishment, does his time, comes out, and then you don't really hear
a lot more about him after that. Like, you don't really hear a lot more,
of his life after after the prison sentence. Well, he
so one of the interesting shortly after. Right? Like, if you think about it, he
dies 1910, which is Well, one of the things and and by the way,
this this particular volume of O. Henry's stories,
has a great introduction in it that goes really
deep into, into his life. And
one of the things that the writer of the introduction says is
this about the jail. He says, jail was deeply traumatic
for him, though he received favorable treatment as a pharmacist and was given reasonable freedom
to continue writing. No one knows exactly how or why he transformed
himself in those years into what became his internationally celebrated pen
name, O'Henry, nor does anyone know precisely what, if
anything, the pseudonym is supposed to mean. By the way, we have some information about
the pseudonym later on that we'll talk about. Clearly, the important thing is
that it is a pseudonym. The use of the name O'Henry was a way of
separating himself from much of the reality he had no inclination to
deal with.
Yeah. I mean, so we've never talked about
prison on this podcast, but we might as well talk about it
today. So I I've
watched the Netflix show. I'm I'm a little bit of a fan of the
show, locked up abroad only
because the way I run my mouth,
if I I ever get in trouble at a foreign country, I wanna know what
I'm getting into. For sure. Like like, I
know not to run my mouth in, like, Honduras. I just I know you just
shut up. Just shut up. Shut shut shut gut
your mouth. There's no freedom of speech there.
When the man with the nice man with the AK 47 tells you to shut
up, you know what you do? I'm gonna shut up. Shut up
because because because I can't make it in Honduran
prison. There are things I would have to do in that
prison where I just you can't come back from them. Yeah.
Weirdly enough, Scottish prison is also terror. No. Not Scottish. No. No.
Norwegian prison. Norwegian prison, very clean,
very, very white. Almost
livable. Almost livable. But then there's
then there's a Caucasian fellow with, like, face tattoos all over his face. He says
he's gonna kill you with, like, a pen knife tomorrow. And he's very polite
about it, by the way, but he's still gonna kill you with a pen knife.
It's like it's just like, oh, oh, so there's, like, a range.
Continue. Yeah. You, sir. You, sir, have offended me today. So tomorrow, you
must die. Are you
serious? Like, he's he's in here for
killing somebody. He's not joking around in,
like, Finland. Yeah. Which is, like, the most
like, we tend I tend to think of as an American. And my Finnish listeners,
I apologize to you. I'm sure you're, like, living out the wire there. I'm sure
it's, like, West Baltimore everywhere in Finland all the time. That's really
unlikely. But but
but but where I come from, like, somebody tells you
they're gonna kill you. Like, they don't it's not usually in an antiseptic
antiseptic environment, extra fjord where that's gonna happen. Right?
But I guess you gotta put a prison wherever. So I I watched the show
locked up abroad. That way I could see these kinds of experiences. And
so I think of the American
penitentiary experience. And I've known people who have gone to jail.
I've known at least 3 people in my life who have gone to jail. It
might be as high as 5, but at least 3 people for sure that went
to jail. Right? Variety of different things.
Not murder, just a variety of different things.
And one of the things I remember one guy telling me when he got out,
he said, they call it a correctional facility, but they're not correcting
anything. And in 1890,
it must have been closer to, like, the Honduras kind of, like,
experience than what is now, which is
probably a little bit closer, at least in theory, to more of
the Finnish experience. Right?
William Sydney Porter went in to prison after
trying to escape to, ironically enough, Honduras,
and then came out or not came out.
But for for he went for embezzlement because he, like,
moved a couple of, what do you call it,
commas around incorrectly in a bank's in the bank's ledgers. And weirdly
enough, the bank in Texas, when you read about this, they
declined to prosecute him. The bank didn't
think it was a problem, but the federal government thought that what he had done
was a problem. Interesting.
Interesting. And so he was traumatized by
this. Well, I mean, that's
especially, I think about it. Embezzlement, it means, like, you're taking the money.
Right? So you're you're taking the money, and you're gonna go live live high on
a a high life on on whatever money you're you're because
embezzlement, for those of you who don't know, is stealing. You're stealing the money from
some but he didn't actually physically take the money. He made a it's an accounting
error. Right? Like, so It's a clerical error. What or a clerical error. It's right.
It's not even an accounting error. It's more a clerical error than a than even
accounting, which is why the bank didn't care. But so why
did the government like, that's the part that I never understood. Right? I
didn't under I didn't understand this. Like, so why did the government
choose to prosecute anyway? Are they trying to make an example out of some guy
who doesn't matter to anybody? Like like, I don't So I I I
will read you from the introduction because I was also fascinated by this.
So here we go. The magazine did not flourish, the the Rolling Stone magazine
that he established in Texas.
The the author here says, Porter slated to a life of dissolution and
illicit borrowing from various bank accounts. His father-in-law repaid
his embezzlement, and the jury acquitted him on criminal charges. Okay. So it wasn't a
clerical error. He was actually, like, moving money around. Okay. But the federal bank
examiners moved for a new trial. The Rolling Stone, his
magazine, died in 18/95. Porter was rearrested in 18
96 and promptly fled, first to New Orleans and then to Honduras.
He stayed 2 years. Roughly a year later, learning that
his wife was near death, he returned. She died a few months afterward.
The next year, 18/98, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to
5 years in the penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, where he, in fact,
served over 3 years. So it wasn't a clerical error. My
bad. I am I was incorrect. I thought it was because this is the other
thing about William Sydney Porter. There's multiple stories about
his life. Like, if you go to the Wikipedia, the stuff on his
Wikipedia article is different than what's in this introduction
here. Oh, interesting. So
he's one of these authors who
He's fascinating to me because
he created a pseudonym to hide
from the shame of going to jail, I think.
Because back then, if you in the 18 nineties,
if you were going to jail, that means you had failed. And by the
way, going to jail in
a country where you just come out of the civil war where you could go
west to escape, like, the federal forces if you needed to. And
we've talked about, you know, Sitting Bull and the the
moving of the movement of the native tribes and all these kinds of things that
were happening to people all at the same time after the civil war. Right? They
were all part of oh, Henry was part of that
massive shifting of America. Right? Well, I mean, let's call it what it is. Right?
It was, like, it was the forming of the wild wild west. Right? So Right.
And and the wild wild west was something that the government had very little control
over and Right. Till much later in history. I mean, like,
wound indeed was 18 90. Right? So you were talking just a few
years, after wounded knee. Is is it so that
the the west was still no man's land for the most
No man's land. Especially when the government came, you know, came to
view it because they they they had no way of wrapping their arms around the
whole thing anyway. So they were just kinda you know, in the way that the
way that local governments kinda just kind of
again, it's the. That's why we use that reference to things that are just going
a little crazy when, like, when you're talking about, you know, starting
cryptocurrency at one point was considered the wild wild west of investment. Right? Like, I
mean Well, it still is. It is still is. It's still is.
Like, we use that reference for a reason. So to Right. Like, so he could
have very easily skipped out, gone to California, New
Mexico, whatever, and never been seen again and not have to worry about any of
this stuff. He would they would never caught up with him. Never. And, you
know, Honduras is one thing. New Orleans okay. New Orleans is a major port. It's
Louisiana. I mean, come on. But but you could
go to I mean, he and and by the way, he had lived in Texas
for the vast majority of his, of his adult life. Right?
And so there's further west than Texas. Like, you can
go to New Mexico. I mean, you go to Arizona. All that's just
unfettered I mean wildest.
Let's be realistic here. Hey, San. It's 2024. If you wanted
to disappear, you could've you can who's going who's chasing you to
Utah? Like Nobody. You know what I mean? Like, dude, we still have states
that if you were just if you just went there and laid low, nobody would
question you and you could just live your life and nobody would go looking for
you. Like There's there's there's a reason
that and and by the way, I I'm
saying this merely as a statement of fact, not a knock on anybody.
But if you wanna be a white supremacist or quite
frankly a black supremacist, actually, why are we being racial here?
Idaho's the best place to do that. I And I'm not knocking people
from Idaho. I'm really not. There are a lot of nice people in Idaho. Des
Moines or not Des Moines, but Boise is great. Des Moines in Iowa.
Boise is great. I've been to Boise a couple times. I've been to Coeur d'Alene.
I almost took a job in Coeur d'Alene. Fine. It's a beautiful country. And,
like, if you wanna disappear okay. So current events.
Right? The guy who allegedly, we have to say
allegedly, shot the UnitedHealthcare
CEO. Right? Which, by the way, my wife works for. My
wife work works for that company. A full disclosure
on the Full disclosure. I knew about that shooting immediately because she got an
email, And we both work from home, so she came running out. She
goes, did you just see the new did you see what happened? I went, how
would I know that happened? Nobody's reporting on it yet. I literally googled it, and
nothing was being reported yet. My CEO got
shot. Like, I can't believe this. Like and I'm like I
was like, wow. I anyway, go ahead. So the CEO So the CEO. Right?
Right. Yeah. So the the the Italian
fellow, the alleged shooter, then you can go
find his name. He probably should have not gone to
a McDonald's in in Pennsylvania. Yeah. He
probably should have gone to the Great Smoky Mountains
following in the example of remember
I know Tom will remember this. The Olympic Park bomber. Not Richard Jewell,
not the guy who was accused of being the Olympic Park bomber, who actually wasn't
and his life got all messed up. But Laddiesel made a movie
about him. The guy who actually did the bombing this is something that's a
little known about this guy. He disappeared for,
like, 10 years Yeah. Into the Great Smoky Mountains of North
Carolina. And the only reason the FBI got him was because
he walked out to get, like, a newspaper or something or,
like, turkey jerky. Went to, like, a gas station.
He just walked out of the woods. And if he never walked out of the
woods, the phippies, the FBI would have never caught him.
Yeah. And this is and this is North Carolina. This isn't the west. This isn't
Idaho. To your point, Porter
could have gone he could have gone and hid somewhere. Could have gone
in the mountains, you know, and still done his writing, by the
way. Okay. So would have so would have been able to, to to write.
And it probably would have, by the way, helped for his tuberculosis, which he did.
Well, that's that was one of the interesting things I found out about him. He
lived in fear of dying of tuberculosis, and eventually, he
died of cirrhosis, heart failure, and
tuberculosis. He was he was pretty young when he died too. Was it 48?
Yeah. He was in his he was in his late forties. Yeah. But he didn't
he didn't hit until and we'll talk a little bit about that too.
But he didn't hit as a as an author until he
was in his late thirties. Yeah. So he really only had, like, maybe
7, 8 years of just, like, ridiculous production and
just sort of wrote himself to death Mhmm. In an attempt to escape from
the shame of that, that prison
sentence, you know, being arrested. Alright.
There's some lessons that leaders can glean from the life and times of William Sidney
Porter. Maybe the lesson is this, escape to the west.
Yeah. Well, I think I think part of it is, like, I I
think there there is a slight lesson here too that's a little bit more in-depth,
which is, like, no matter how much you run from something, if the problem
still persists, you're gonna have to face it at some point or another. Right? Like,
that that's essentially what he did. He left and he faced the music, but only
when he had to come back to help, you know, to help his wife. But,
I mean, we've all kind of been there, done that. Right? You and it's it's
that doesn't have to be something this, you know, this this,
the word escapes me. But it it doesn't have to be this this
bad. Right? Like, where you committed a crime that you're coming back to pay for
the crime. Like, sometimes, it's a decision that you just don't make right at the
moment because you don't wanna make it for whatever reason it is. Right. You just
move on past it. If it's still sitting there taunting you,
you gotta come back to it at some point, or it's it's gonna be your
demise. Right? Like, that's we and if you've ever been in the
leadership position, I think you'll understand what I'm saying right now.
Because, like, that, you know, not addressing, the the elephant
in the room, not addressing a problem that's going to continuous like, continue to be
a problem, not addressing things that are gonna be the downfall of your company if
you don't take care of it. At some point, you have to go back and
do it. So I guess I don't know. That I that does a little bit
more to it than There's an old school well, there's an old school word. You'll
like this word because you and I are roughly in the same sort of
area where we un where we we were raised with certain English terms
that have now fallen out of favor. Comeuppance.
Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Like,
you're gonna get your comeuppance. Like, you just are. You
know, long have I feared that my comeuppance would show up, and it did.
You know? Yeah. It always it always does invariably. I was I was
told at very young age, you know, as, you know, as I was going through
the ranks and and starting to become more,
authoritative in in certain roles, somebody much
older than me that was I I actually managed them,
and they they were so they were a subordinate of mine, but they were much,
much, much older than me. At the time, I was probably in my mid twenties,
and they were, like, 58 or 59, the Oh, wow. Closer retirement.
And he said something to me that just stuck forever, and
now I'm understanding it even more. Even though being at
his age level, and I love this guy, by the way. Even though he was
a subordinate, I viewed him more like a mentor even though I was supposed to
be his boss. Yeah. And, but because of that
that age gap and his experience and and,
it it it I anyway, he said to me,
you know, be be nice to people on the way up because you're gonna meet
them again on the way down. And I never I
I always did it because he told me to do that, and it
stuck with me that it's a good it's an it's a good thing to do.
Like, treat people with respect and, like, you know, it doesn't matter how powerful you
get or how much authority you get, like, you know, whatever. And now that I'm
in the back end of my career, I'm thinking of that going, I'm glad I
did that. Like, because there's a lot of people that used to
work for me that were much younger, and now they're now they're on the way
up, and now I can reach out to them for help. I get like, they
don't they don't think twice about about giving me, you know, the time of
day to be helpful to, like I was like and so now I'm thinking of
that advice saying, I'm glad I took that advice.
Like Yeah. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Absolutely. Alright. Back to the short story.
Back to The Gift of the Magi. By the way, you can this is an
open source short story, so you can get this anywhere you
want on the Internet and check this out just in time
for the holidays. Alright. Back to the story.
There was a pure glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you've seen
pure glass in an $8 flat. A very thin, very agile
person may, by observing his reflection in rapid sequence of longitudinal
stripes, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks.
Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly, she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining
brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within 20
seconds. Rapidly, she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now there were 2 possessions of the James Dillingham
Youngs in which they both took mighty pride. 1 was Jim's
gold watch, which has been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair.
Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the air shaft, Della would
have let her hair hang out the window someday to dry just to depreciate her
majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the
janitor with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out
his watch every time he passed just to see him look at his beard
from envy. So now Della's
beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters.
It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her.
And then she did it up again nervously and quickly once she faltered for a
minute and stood still while a tear or 2 splashed on the
worn red carpet, on with her old brown jacket,
on with her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant
sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to
the street. Where she stopped, the sign
read, Mademoiselle Solfournier, hair goods of all
kinds. One flight up, Della ran and collected herself panting.
Madam, large, too white, chili, hardly looked the
Solfournier. Will you buy my hair? Asked
Della. I buy hair, said madame. Take your hat off, and let's have a sight
of the looks of it. Down rippled the brown cascade.
$20, said madame, lifting the mask with a practiced
hand. Give it to me quick, said Della. Oh, and
the next 2 hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hash
metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's
present.
One of the things that jumps out to you about, William Sydney
Porter's writing, and it doesn't matter whether it's Cabbages and Kings,
whether it's, Gift of the Magi, or any of the
stories that take place in New York City.
One of the things that jumps out to you about O. Henry's stories is
that while he is a writer of the
Gilded Age, when everyone is getting rich, off of
oil, off of the back end of the industrial revolution, when
literally people are selling everything they possibly can, even,
interestingly enough, General Grant, in his,
administration, at least his first one and potentially into a second one,
selling even the White House. Literally, anything that was nailed down
between or that wasn't nailed down between
18/70 and, like, 1910 was
literally being sold in America, which is, by the way, part of the
reason why Woodrow Wilson proposed,
the creation of the amendment that
or the proposed the amendment that created the IRS in
1913 and why Woodrow Wilson
proposed that the as his pitch
for the amendment that would create the IRS, I believe that that is the
16th amendment. He also said
that that amendment would never be
used for any more than millionaires.
Because everyone, you know, was trying to become 1.
One of the things that you see in the gilded age, one of the things
that you see during this time of immense avarice and
greed that is driving the country,
one of the things that you see is immense poverty
on the other side of that. And O'Henry's stories
focused on poverty.
We see at least in New York City stories, we see that
reflected in O'Henry's life on the embezzlement charge that he had. O'Henry
spent a lot of his life, pursuing money and trying to
attain, financial security
for himself and for his family.
But there was also a sense of trauma underneath this that o
Henry was able to tap into. There's this idea from Kevin
Hart that you gotta laugh at my pain. Right? You gotta you gotta
find entertainment in my trauma. And
just like there's a thin line between love and hate, there's also a thin line
between tragic the tragedy of trauma, particularly the trauma
related to want and the humor inherent in it.
Most of our stories today and I I just did a shorts
just recorded a shorts episode that you should listen to before this one about why
men don't read literary novels. But one of the or
increasingly men don't read literary novels. One of the challenges of our
time is that our trauma, just like in the gilded
age, is everywhere all over the place all of the
time. We can see our trauma on TikTok. We could see our trauma on Instagram.
We could see everybody else's trauma too. And the
trauma that would have been tragedy in the past,
is no longer fodder for story, particularly not at a
mass entertainment level, which is why most of the stories that
we see in our mass entertainment, and I'm talking about movies or
even streaming television shows, most of the entertainment
these these days, at least in my opinion, doesn't even rise to the
level of a William Sydney Porter short story. Most
of the things that we see are flat, boring, derivative, are
remarkably unsurprising and uninspiring.
And by the way, I think that's a shame. I think it's a shame because
the uniqueness of trauma is now no longer being used as
fodder for story the way o Henry did.
I think this is a real challenge, but I also think it's a
challenge for leadership. And so
this is going to put us in mind of a particular colleague of ours. It's
just when I wrote this, I was like, oh, he's gonna think about this person
when I bring this up. A particular co shared colleague of ours. But let's talk
a little bit about storytelling, Tom.
Well, I mean, it's interesting. So I I went back and listened to a bunch
of our episodes that we've done together. We haven't actually ever directly addressed
storytelling. We've we've gone around it and inside
it and underneath it and through it, but directly the the
directly talking about the actual act of storytelling itself. Like, how do you structure
a narrative? What is the thing that feeds that narrative underneath? Is it trauma? Is
it tragedy? Is it humor? Is it triumph? Is it drama? We
we've talked a lot about the things around it, but the actual,
like, act of putting together a story, we've never we've never talked about, like,
the the nuts and bolts of that. So how can leaders
leverage let's start with this question. How can leaders leverage personal trauma the
way O. Henry did to put together a compelling story?
Well, that that's, that's an awful lot to unpack there, Hayes. It is.
It is. I I think I I think before you even get
into that question, you need to understand
some dynamics first. Right? Me meaning,
I think one of the I was I was a probably I don't
know. I was 18 or 19 years old. I was driving, and I saw this
billboard that said and it it read this quote
that that nobody was ever be able to prove who exactly it
came from, but everyone believes it came from,
Albert Einstein, which was, perception
is greater than reality. One of the reasons I think that one of the
thing one of the reasons that I think that you're you're feeling the
way you are about about narratives and storytelling and the lack
thereof compared to 18, you know, the 1800s and the gilded age or
whatever. I I think that we forget, and sometimes
we forget that 2 people
can view the exact same situation and walk away with it 2 completely
different perceptions of how that situation impacts their life.
Right? And Mhmm. And so so to what so
somebody who decides to look at a tragedy and
turn it into entertainment because my pain can be laughter,
and what I suffered through could if I if
I if I present my suffering in the right
way, I could potentially prevent somebody else from suffering from the same
thing because they they they then will take the lighter side of
that, of that of that scenario. Right? Somebody's
a a death, a a car accident,
cancer, drug addiction, whatever that whatever that
trauma is that you've experienced, there are people that can
take those traumas and turn them into great stories, and there are people that
internalize those traumas until it turns out to be something
disastrous. Mhmm. And in that case, I think of somebody with for the sake
of argument, somebody like Robin Williams. Right? Sure. Okay. He he
externalized so much of his internal pain. But because it
was internal and nobody ever saw it, it it was the end of it.
He he took his own life because of it. Right? So it was like Right.
So I I think when you start understanding the dynamics of people and
you start understanding how those those things
how you perceive those things are going to impact your narrative or how
your storytelling is. Right? So all that being
said, if you're talking strictly about the structure,
then, sure, you need an intro, and you need a this, and you need a
sure. I mean, all that stuff is is is pretty simple, and and and the
audience can go look it up. There's there's nothing brilliant about
about the structure of how a story should be presented.
But when you start talking about the underlying tones and the narratives and the context
and all that stuff and how you how you want it to be
received, I think you have to go
start backwards. I think you have to start with your audience. Start with the
audience. What are you trying to convey to them? What
emotional state are you trying to get them to feel when you when they read
whatever it is you're writing? Your storytelling is going to
be again, so
storytelling seems to always come from a place of a couple of
things. Trauma is absolutely one of it, one of
them. Adventure is another like, you
you you just had this wild adventure that that you deemed a success
because of x, whatever the hell that happens. So now you wanna write a story
about it. It like, so there's a handful of
things like that, whether it's trauma or adventure or success
or overcoming adversity, like, some sort of
adversity. Any of those things can be the foundation of the story,
but none of them matter unless you know who you're telling the story
to. So Right. Yeah. The the you know? And, again, we
we can we can bounce in and out of,
literature versus marketing. Sometimes they're the same. But
literature versus marketing versus just I mean,
in our culture, storytelling was a verbal thing. You didn't write any of these things
down. It was just how could you tell the story and and the
mannerisms and the and the the the the verbalization
and how you how you accentuate certain words
mattered. And, like, there's even from even from a a verbal
storytelling perspective, there's ways to tell the story that
that you wanna make an impact at at certain points so that you get
a a particular message conveyed. Right? So but, again,
that still goes back to knowing your audience. You need to know
Right. Telling the story to a bunch of 5 year olds is very different than
you could probably tell the same exact story to a bunch of 5 year olds
and a bunch of 50 year olds, and it would sound like 2 different
story. It'll sound like 2 different 2 completely different things, but it's the same it
it's based on the same act action or activity or or trauma.
Right? Right. It's again, I I I
I think it's I think personal
trauma first of all, none of us are going to escape it. Let's just get
that right out out of the question. Like, get that right out of the Yeah.
No matter how well off you think you are, no matter how great a childhood
you had, no matter how none of us will escape personal trauma. You
are going to face some sort of personal adversity in your life
regardless of who you are and where you are in the, you know,
economic, socioeconomic scale. It doesn't it doesn't matter.
Money doesn't protect you, neither does, title or,
or any other factor that you can think of that you're do you think of
somebody else's life is better than yours or yours is better than somebody else's?
Personal trauma is going to happen in one way, shape, or form. So taking that
into consideration and how you leverage that as, you know,
as a leader, I think,
again, knowing your audience, knowing your subordinates, knowing your the the
people that you are leading, knowing your followers is going to be
really drastically important when you come
to how you're gonna leverage that trauma to motivate
them, move them to do whatever that whatever that is. But I definitely
think it's possible. I think you just need to know yourself and know your audience
really well. Well, there are there are only 5 stories. Like,
we've known this since Shakespeare. I say this all the time. Well, not all the
time. This is the first time I'm saying this on the podcast in this sort
of form. But I say it I used to say it a lot in trainings.
Right? When I would do training on, or deliver training content on,
leadership development and storytelling and leadership and narrative or conflict and
narrative. Right? There's there's only 5 stories. Right? So to
your point, there's a quest story, which is always an adventure story. Right?
I went off and did something. I discovered something. I I, you know,
I discovered fire and brought it back to people. Okay. So there's a quest story,
you know, that, you know, went out and picked up that,
branch that was hit by lightning.
Kind of awesome. We're gonna be able to cook our food now. Then
you have after a quest story, you have,
a romance. Now it's interesting. We almost never tell romantic
stories at work, obviously, because we all wanna avoid sexual
harassment. But romantic stories at work or
in a leadership context are always the kinds of stories that begin with I like
this or I like that or I had a passion about this or I had
a passion about that. Anytime as a leader or a follower
you're using the word passion to describe something that's happening, you're talking about a
love story. Then you have, your 3rd kind of
story is your, is your,
your kinda your to the point that we're talking about your tragedy. Right? Now
tragedy could be an adventure too. Right? But tragedy
is usually a or or we can sometimes call I sometimes call this a conflict
story. But, tragedy is I hate this
person or this person hates me, particularly at
work, or I was right about this project, and now these people are
gonna get there, to use the word we used in the last segment, these people
are gonna get their comeuppance, and I'm gonna laugh shouting Freud. You know?
Then the the next kind of story you have is a
is sort of a combination of the quest
story, the conflict story, and the romantic story. Right? But it's more of a
persuasive story. It's the to your point about motivation, it's the kind of story that
you tell with all of those elements that's trying to push people to do something.
And then the 5th kind of story, which we tell the least often,
but we only ever tell it when when we ourselves are new to a
role, is the stranger in a strange land story.
I don't know what's happening here. I'm a stranger. This is all
weird. And why am I here?
Like, I'm glad you brought fire, but, like, I was in the cave, 2 caves
over. I never heard of you. Right? Why am I here?
I don't know why all we always turn into cavemen when we do this. We
always turn because there all 3 all 3 caves
down. I I was I heard somebody had fire. I can't really see what it
was. What's this fire thing? It seemed like it's still like a good idea to
show up at the time. Well, you know what? And it's funny. These are these
are story styles. Right? And I think Right. So what what are the things that
that motivate people? And you can make there's there's
so many books about, like, motivational factors and what motivations
are. They all get boiled down to 2 things. It's it's
self preservation or the preservation of others. Like, that that's really
that's it. No matter what else you could say oh, no. No. There's people are
motivated by money. No. No. No. But what does money give you? Money when you
get a lot of money, you have self preservation. Like, you're Right. And you have
the ability to help your family and friends, which is the preservation
of others. Right? Like, it's it it it just what
motivates us as human beings is is are basically
those 2 things. It, like, it so all of those stories,
usually, if you read them well, if you read them and you read enough of
them, you'll start seeing underlying tones of where the self preservation comes
in or the preservation of others. Right. And so so,
again, when when you're talking about storytelling and and what the components of it
or how you how you start to master it, it's
you have to determine to your point a few seconds ago,
what style is the story going to be? Yeah. What is going to
be the, you know, what do you know your audience well
enough that you know to face them with one of those styles
in in one of those motivating factors, either self preservation or
the preservation of others? So those those are the component. Like I said earlier, I
was joking a little bit, like, the structure of it. Like, you know, you have
to have an intro. You have to have this. You have to have an outro.
Like, oh, yeah. Like, anybody can look that up. That's easy porn. Right?
Triangle. Exactly. But
but, like, the the the true, like, the true mastery of
that Venn diagram, right, which is, like, the the the style overlapping the
motivation, overlapping the the the delivery piece of it, and
perfecting all three of those things, that centerpiece of the Venn diagram.
There's I think
everybody has the capability of hitting it. I think everybody has the capability
of hitting the mark. It's just a matter of
where we are like, what we're what our our goals are trying to hit
with it. Think about your think about a 5 year old trying to convince you
to take him to the store to get candy. If he
tries and fails at that often enough, he's eventually gonna master that. He's
gonna get it. He's they're gonna get it. And they I I'm telling you.
They'll figure it out eventually. Well, one of the things one of the things I
always tell folks is the best person in the
history of the world at sales is a is a 5 to 7 year
old. Absolutely. I agree. Best person in the history of the world at
sales. Because all they have to do this is all a 5 to 7 year
old, all things being equal, of course, in a in a in a
robust situation where they are free to pursue themselves. Okay.
Cool. Not talking about traumatic situations or situations of,
like, criminal danger or anything like that. Okay. Yeah. Middle
class. Right? 5 to 7 year old middle class kid in America
is the best salesman in the world because all they have to do, this is
all they have to do, is watch you all
day. They got nothing else going on. They literally have nothing else going
on. They go to watch their target all day because they know you have something,
and they know that you are the thing in the way to get it. And
all they have to do is just watch you. That's it. Just all they just
observe. And they and they learn, and they know their audience.
That's it. That's right. They know their audience. They know their audience, and they know
that and they know that they don't have to come up with complicated
concepts or ideas or complicated questions to get the answers
that they want. No. That that can we go to the store to buy me
candy? No. Not right now. But why? I I'm a little busy right now. I
don't have the time. But why are you busy? Well, because I have to do
this. Like, they they ask the simplest questions until they just beat you down,
and you don't have a good enough reason to say no anymore.
Their their discovery process is ruthless. Exactly.
Exactly. Uh-huh. Well, the other piece is they have and this is the thing
that, like, adults in sales or adults who are telling
stories forget. That 5 to 7 year old has literally
nothing to lose. Right. They've already done the cost
benefit analysis ratio. Like, if I can get this person to say yes,
I'm gonna get candy or watch TV or play video games or whatever the heck
it is that I want. And if they say no, well, I'm just stuck
in the same situation I was in right now, which is I have no candy.
I have no video games, and I and I have no TV. So, like, how
is this how's what's the downside to me? Right? It doesn't set them
backwards. It does not no. And they have a good understanding of time
because for them, on a longer I mean, time is infinite. It's never
I mean, there's no there's no hurry. Time's
infinite. They have all the time in the world. Yeah. They're gonna live forever. What?
You're the one that's got a problem.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I
always used to say with my kids, like, particularly my 2 youngest, like
actually, my 3 youngest. My oldest child is a little bit different, but my 3
youngest always used to say that is the most I mean, like, if I could
have bottled that, my god, like, I would ruth I could
have sold anything. I could have sold anything. I could have sold water to a
well. Yeah. And and most of that is to your to your point, most of
that is just the the the lack of fear of failure.
Right? They just they don't None. They don't have the fear of failure, so they
just they just go. They just go, and they do, and they go, and they
ask, and they think that they don't they don't over they don't overthink anything. Nope.
They don't they don't, there's no, you know, there's no hesitation.
There's no like, that's the that's their biggest strength. It is
the the the lack of fear of failure. They just don't have it.
Well, why would they feel failure? Nothing bad has ever happened to them. Of what?
That's the exactly. That's my point. That's why they make salespeople
because, you know, the salespeople that you hire, that you say by the way, if
you don't hit your quota, you're fired. They have a fear of failure. Right
out the gate, you get a fear of failure.
Yeah. Okay. So you need by the
way, the the the the story about money is a 6 story. It's either a
rags to riches story or riches to rag story. Yeah. Right.
Those are those are those are your those are your 2, those are your 2
stories those are your 2 story or 2 variations of that of that story there.
Okay. Back to the book. Back to the short story here, the gift of the
magi. Gonna pick it up here.
Gonna kinda move move quickly through this because we wanna get to the denouement
here, and we have a, oh, we have a window here that's
rapidly closing, but it's okay.
So Della's ransacking the store for Jim's present. She found it at last.
It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other
like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside
out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chaste in design, properly
proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by mereutricious
ornamentation as all good things should do. It was even worthy
of the watch. As soon as she saw it, she knew it must be Jim's.
It was like him. Quietness and value. The description applied to both.
$21 they took for they took from her for it as she hurried home
with the 87¢. With that chain on its watch, Jim might be
properly anxious about the time at any company. Grand as the watch
was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather
strap that he used in place of a chain. When Della
reached home, her intoxication gave way to a little prudence and reason. She got out
her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made
by generosity added to love, which is always a tremendous
task, dear friends, a mammoth task.
Within 40 minutes, her head was covered with tiny, close line curls that made her
look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her
reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically. If Jim doesn't kill
me, she said to herself before he takes a second look at me, he'll say
I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do? Oh, what
could I do with a dollar 87¢? At 7
o'clock, the coffee was made and the frying pan was on the back of the
stove hot and ready to cook the chops. Jim was never
late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat in the corner of
the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard her step on
the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white just for a
moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest
everyday things, and now she whispered, please, god, make him think I am still pretty.
The door opened, and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and
very serious. Poor fellow. He was only 22 and to be burdened with a
family. He needed a new overcoat, and he was without gloves.
Jim stepped stopped inside the door as immovable as a setter at the scent of
a quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in
them she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not
anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had
been prepared for. He simply stared her fixedly with that peculiar expression
on his face. Now I'm gonna
skip one thing here
and go down to this part. You've cut off your hair, asked Jim, laboriously,
as if she had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest
mental labor. Cut it off and sold it, said Della. Don't you like me,
Jim? Just as well, anyhow? I'm mean without my hair, ain't I?
Jim looked around the room curiously. You say your hair is gone,
he said with an air of almost of idiocy.
You didn't look for it, said Della. It's sold. I tell you, sold and gone.
It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the
hairs of my head were numbered, she went on with a sudden serious sweetness,
but nobody could ever count my love out my love for you. Shall
I put the chops on, Jim? Out of his
prance, Jim seemed quickly to wake. He unfolded his Della. For
10 seconds, let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the
other direction. $8 a week or 1,000,000 a
year. What is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong
answer. The Magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them.
This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table. Don't
make any mistake, Dell, he said about me. I don't think there's anything in the
way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like
my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package, you
may see why you had me going a while at first.
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper, and
then an ecstatic scream of joy. And then, alas, a quick
feminine change to hysterical tears in Wales, necessitating the
immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat,
for there lay the combs, the set of combs side and back
that Della had worshiped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure
tortoise shell with jeweled rims, just the shade to wear in the beautiful
vanished hair. They were expensive combs she knew, and her heart had
simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And
now they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned to the coveted adornments
were gone. But she hugged them to her
bosom, and at length, she was able to look up with dim eyes and smile
and say, my hair grows so fast, Jim. And the dolla leaped up like a
little singed cat and cried, oh. Jim had not yet seen his beautiful
present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull
precious metal seemed to flash with the reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
Isn't it a dandy gem? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have
to look at the time a 100 times a day now. Give me your watch.
I want to show you what it looks like on it. Instead of
obeying, Jim tumbled down the couch and put his hands into the back of his
head and smiled. Dell, he said, let's put our Christmas
presents away and keep them a while. It's too nice to use just a present.
I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And
now suppose you put the chops on.
To our point earlier, by the way, O'Henry was once
asked by a humorist named Irvin Cobb, an
unreconstructed southern humorist in,
oh gosh, in the in the 19 tens in a restaurant just before he
died, where he got his stories from. And
O'Henry infamously said this. He said, oh,
everything. There are stories in everything.
And then he proceeded to pick up a menu, according to the story
as it goes, and he created a story out of the menu in the
diner he was having breakfast at with
Erwin.
Connection is what we chase in the Internet era, and connection is what we
chased and have chased preview in previous eras in this country. Connection is
nothing new. But it used to be person to person connection, person to
person connection through stories.
O'Henry's stories have never been out of print, and I mentioned this already,
since his death in 1910.
He only attained fame, by the way, and he'd been writing short stories since he
was 19. But he only attained fame for writing short stories at the
age of 39, and, literally, he worked himself to
death, worked and drank.
However, the year before his death in 19 09, he gave an interview to the
New York Times in which he talked about,
the pen name o Henry, and this is directly from his words. He
says, it was during these New Orleans days that I adopted my pen name
of O'Henry. I said to a friend, quote, I'm going to send
out some stuff. I don't know if it amounts to much, so I wanna get
a literary alias. Help me pick out a good one.
He suggested that we get a newspaper and pick a name from the first list
of notables that we found in it. In the society columns, we found the
account of a fashionable ball. Here we have our notables, said he.
We looked down the list, and my eye lighted on the name Henry. That'll do
for a last name, said I. And now for a first name, I want something
short. None of your 3 syllable names for me. Why don't you
use a plain initial then letter then, asked my friend. Good,
said I. O is about the easiest letter written, and o
it is. A newspaper once wrote and asked
me what the o stands for. I replied, quote, o stands
for Oliver, the French for Oliver. And several of
my stories accordingly appeared in that paper under the name
Oliver Henry.
This story, The Gift of the Magi, has, as Tom mentioned
all the way at the beginning of our episode, is one of his
more memorable stories. It has been turned into
stage plays. It has been turned into movies. It has been a part of
other stories. And, again, has never been out of print since his death
in 1910. Matter of fact, it's become so much
a trope. The woman who cuts off her hair to
buy combs or sorry, to buy a to buy a watch fa or watch chain
and the man who sells his watch to buy combs. And, oh, they don't talk
to each other, And, oh, hilarity ensues. This is
this has become a trope of comedy. It's become a trope of
tragedy, and it's become a trope of drama because O'Henry,
William Sydney Porter, realized initially
that there was a story inside of this trope.
There was a story that was worth telling that needed to be
laid out. O'Henry
was also a social part of the part of the movement of the Gilded Age.
He was a I wouldn't say he was a social justice crusader. He
wasn't. He was a probably he would probably would have classified himself as a
fairly progressive individual, not the way we think of progressive now, but
progressive in terms of social reform. Right? And many of his stories,
as they reflected the poverty of the time, they also reflected the growing
consumerism of the time, which we can see in The Gift of the Magi
and which is particularly ironic for it being
a story that is focused around the Christmas season.
As a matter of fact, when I was reading this, and Tom and I talked
about A Christmas Carol, it is the anti Christmas Carol
story. It's an anti Dickens story. Even
though I would say O. Henry probably got us close in an
American context to capturing
the, the Dickensian
aspect of being an American
in the gilded age.
Short story, short episode today. Don't can't really do a lot
with this. Tom, final thoughts on o Henry,
on the gift of the Magi, what leaders can learn from all
this before we close out. Well, I think
the biggest lesson to me here is
the like, I got I feel like it's
broken record here. But, like, as a leader,
knowing your audience is important. Right? And in this case, knowing
like, being able to you know them by talking to
them, talking through problems with them, getting understanding from them, things that you
like things that if this this couple had done in the first place, they
wouldn't had this major, you know, swap off as you
would speak. Now, by the way Right. I'm still thinking the person that got out
you know, really made out in this deal is is, is Della because
she's right. Her hair will grow back, and she will use the combs. He
sold the watch. That chain is useless to him from now forever. Like
so, I mean, you know, I think, again, if you
look at if you're going to if you're going
to make a decision based on your gut or based
on lack of information, make sure it's a decision you can come back
from like she did. She cut her hair, and she which, by the
way, I also thought selling it for $20 was
where did that number come from? Because I think it's the same today. I think
if a woman sold her a a length of it, they're not gonna get more
than $20 for it either. So I I just thought that was interesting on a
side note. But, anyway But the the prices of hair are immune to
inflationary pressures. But her decision making
process, in my opinion, was better than his because she was
only impacting, first of all, something that was gonna impact only
her and only impacting something that she
knew would was gonna be a short term disadvantage or a short term
short some some sort of short term,
impact that that it was going to her hair's gonna grow back. He
Right. Made a decision based on no factor, no data, no information, no
he went on his gut and had nothing to show for it in the end.
Right. So I so, again, what leaders are taking out of this,
god only knows. I'm just trying I'm pulling I'm literally, you know, pulling at straws
here. But, you know, but I didn't think of it in that in that perspective.
Again, 2 leaders, same situation. I have to make a decision based on my gut.
I have to make a decision based on my gut. Can I make a decision
that has an a short term impact
enough that we can come back from it without anything else
happening? Am I gonna make a short term impact that I
can't pull back and I can't come back from? And I'm just gonna run with
it and live or die. I'm gonna live and die by my own. I'm gonna
I'm gonna follow my own sword. I'm gonna live and die by it. And if
I fail, company fails. We go and we move on. It is what it is.
It ends. But you see what I'm saying? Like, I Yeah. Yeah. No. Well enough.
But I think that that this does tell us a little something about how you
think through, how you think through a process matters.
I think that that is reflected in Jim's reaction at the end
there where he's just like, right. Gonna lay back
on the couch. Hands behind his head. Yeah. Behind his
head. I'm gonna live with my decision.
Well, and sometimes as a leader, like, I think about this
often. Right? So hindsight is always 2020.
Always. Always. And one of the failures we have
in our current era over the last 25 years
because of the Internet. Right? Because nothing ever dies and is allowed to
sort of fall into a space of forgetting. We're constantly second
guessing leaders' decisions of the past
based off current information that we had that leaders didn't have access
to. The biggest example of this is
George Bush and 911 and,
you know, making the decision to go to war in Iraq and weapons of
mass destruction and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Right?
And we judge him harshly, and we judge people who are in his administration
harshly, right, wrong, or indifferently. We judge them
harshly because we have information that we
claim they should have had access to, but we have absolutely
no certainty that they did. We can speculate. We can say they
should have known. We can say they absolutely did know. My favorite
conspiracy theorists always say, of course, they knew. There's no way they could possibly
have not known. But that's all speculation on our part
based off of after action reports and after the fact
information. It's just like with COVID.
I don't fault anybody who made a who made decisions
between, like, quite frankly, February of 2020
and June of 2020. Because you're making decisions in real time in
that little that little gap of 90 to a 100
days, you're making decisions in real time, and you have no clue
what is happening. Now after that, it gets into a little bit of a different
gray area there. But for that one spot,
I really I mean, now did
they not release all the information that they've had to the public?
For sure. And even whether it's 911 or
COVID, even the quote, unquote hidden information that the
public should have known, whatever that may mean, is still
I hate to say this. You may wanna pay attention to this. Mark this. It's
still limited information. Yeah. It's still limited. And
so, again Agree. Went back on the couch. Subject to interpretation too.
It's subject to interpretation. That's all. If if you if it if it's
not just having information doesn't make it factual.
Right. Right? Like, having information, you still need to digest
it or dissect it or verify it,
validate it. All kind of like, you can't just say, I I have a phone
in my hand. You guys can't see this because it's blurry. I have a phone
in my hand, and you could for all you it could be it could be
a brick. I don't know. You don't know anything.
I I don't know. Again, to your point, I I think it's easy to
vilify people after the fact. It's easy. Yeah. Yeah. And I and and it's some
it's something that we've done throughout history, by the way. This has nothing to do
with the in the, the Internet error. We've done it throughout history that
we've vilified people after the fact because we just you
know, to your point, I I think everything you said was absolutely absolutely dead on.
It's easier it's easier to be critical when you have more information than the
person that made the decision in the first place. That's right. It's very easy to
be critical. What's not easy to do is take it from
their perspective now knowing what you know Mhmm.
Doing the same like, you're you're gonna make the same decisions. Like, that's
the other thing. If you can if you can honestly look back at somebody and
say, now that I know what I know, if in
the moment, I probably still would have done the same thing that you do,
then then you can't vilify them, but we continue to do that. We continue to
vilify people for making decisions based on information they they currently have and not
information that we have. It's it's Right. Bizarre. It is it's a bizarre
kinda natural thing that we do. Well, it's a fundamental lack of,
it's a fundamental lack of humility, I think. And I think it's a a
species of hubris and
narcissism Yeah. That we Yeah. Because we're all perfect when we have the right
information. Oh, yeah. Everybody. Yeah. Like
Well, and this is what we're gonna do. I I have I have a strong
suspicion that we are going to outsource our decision making to our a our
coming AI systems because we are looking for the
perfect decision that will always work out everywhere
across all time and will have no downsides at all. Particularly in the
west, we're looking for this, in America in particular. Other
places, your your level of looking for perfection will vary based on
your cultural your particular cultural things. But we are we are
desperately searching for that perfect decision with
no downsides. And tragically, to your point
earlier, in the segment, we were talking about stories, we live in a
fallen world. It will never happen. There will
always be a downside. And our
our our machine learning tools, which they are only tools just like that fire in
the cave I mentioned previously, our machine learning tools
will only ever be as good as the human inputs who are
putting the information in.
And I think that's a I think that's a good spot to end for today.
Merry Christmas, happy New Year, and happy holidays for
us here at the Leadership Lessons from the
Great Books podcast. And with that, well,
we're out.