Eric Liu - Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Our Purpose in Life

CONTENTS

For my teachers

OVERTURE

Let me tell you a story.

Its a story of a young man. His life was as stable and steady as a continent. But beneath, the plates were shifting; the drift had begun. Between what he was and what he wanted to be, a gap opened. He felt it: his possible self was starting to slip away, as a dream escapes our consciousness when we wake. He didnt know much, but he knew he wanted someone to guide him across. He needed a teacher. He searched for thousands of miles and dozens of months. He traversed arid canyons and icy cities and wooded hills. He met fools and sages, children and elders, each striving to resemble the other. He listened and watched and asked questions of everyone he encountered. He slept beneath unfamiliar roofs and was visited by unfamiliar visions. Teach me, he said. They saw him. They touched him. No one saved him. When he came home, he did not think he had found his teacher. He sat down to record his travels, and that is when the teacher appeared.

This is a true story. It is my story, in part. But listen closely. It is, on some wavelength, your story too.

One day I was speaking with a group of doctors who teach in medical residency programs. I asked them who their most significant influences were. Their answers were wonderful: My mom. My grandfather. My first boss. My husband. My swim coach. Franz Kafka. My residency director. My freshman econ professor. Bach. A family friend. My hometown physician. Virginia Woolf. My piano teacher. My eighty-seven-year-old neighbor who taught me how to live.

If you were named not only for your ancestors but for your teachers, what would your full name be? If you were to give your name not only to your children but to all those you have taught and influenced, who do you think you would find in this extended extended family?

This book is animated by a simple and powerful idea: We are all teachers. Every day, in every setting and social role we play, we are teaching. Teaching is at the core of our humanity. Teaching is to behavior what sex is to genes. It literally is what life is all about: passing it on. As parents or leaders, managers or mentors, coaches or instructors or neighbors, we are constantly teachingsometimes intentionally, sometimes skillfully, sometimes neither. We teach to transmit a culture. We teach to impart facts and skills. We teach to instill a conscience. We teach to articulate for ourselves what on earth matters. We teach to be sure that we have not lived in vain. We teach to learn.

Coupled with the idea that we are all teachers is an equally powerful faith: We can all become better teachers. And it matters that we do. Understanding how we teach is a crucial way of enhancing the way we live and growas individuals and as a society. By listening and watching, by entering the lives of the guiding lights all around us, we become more effective in how we reach and shape others. We change the nature of our relationships. We change peoples lives. We change our own lives.

I know this because I lived it. I came to this book at a time when I was deeply uncertain about what kind of life to make. I had recently become a father. I became newly aware of the absence of my own father, who had been gone nearly a decade. I was writing, teaching, managing people. But what I was really doing was wandering. I was searching for a calling. For purpose. I was hungry for someone to show me the way, not only in parenthood or career but in life. No one showed up. No one descended from a mountaintop. So I decided to go to the mountain. I decided to write this book, and to make it a quest. I set out to gather up as many examples as I couldof what, exactly, I wasnt even sure. I knew I wanted to meet people who, regardless of circumstance, were pure and powerful teachers. Beyond that, the journey was inductive, intuitive: the gathering, I trusted, would reveal the what.

It did. The journey transformed me. The people I encountered expanded my capacity for empathy. They gave me the courage to see myself more clearly. They made plain the nature of our obligations. They made me realize how Id let down the people I had managed and taught in my life up till now. They gave me models for being a better father, husband, son, leader, follower, and learner. They gave me a good way to plumb the heart of any other human, which is to ask this question: Who influenced you? And together, though they didnt know it or mean to do it, they became, in composite, the mentor I had been seeking.

To write this book, I spent more than two years finding interesting teachers, coaches, mentors, and guides from every walk of life and every corner of the country. I interviewed hundreds of people and spent time at work and at play with several dozen of them. Some were well knownworld-class educators and artists and CEOs and athletes and directors and scientists. Some were not. I got to know them all, and their students as well. They came from schools and homes poor and rich; from hushed high-rise offices and union job sites; from playfields and studios; from the officer corps and the clergy. You name it. I started out thirsty for stories. The challenge, I found, wasnt finding water; it was drinking from a fire hose. Everyone I talked to had an idea that I should see this guru or that program or this school. At the urging of my wise editor, I focused. I looked not simply for gifted teachers but for relationships between gifted teachers and their learners. Relationships in which the question might be: who changed whom? I looked for stories of how one or both confronted a challenge and got past itor didnt.

You are about to encounter some remarkable people. The ones you will get to know best are a Hollywood acting coach, a major league pitching coach, an inner-city teacher of entrepreneurship, a deprogrammer of Juilliard musicians, a corporate executive, a senator and college president, a master clown, a jazz legend, a painter of public murals, a homeboy priest, an unorthodox rabbi, a fabled chef, a Marine drill instructor, a champion high school debate coach, an orchestra conductor and leadership guru, a flight instructor. You will also get to know many of the people they have touched and taught. But as remarkable and unique as they are, what is most important about them is the universality of their stories. The songline that runs through each story is this: Their lives are yours. Their lessons are yours.

It took me a while to hear that songline, but I did. So can you. What it requires is the willingness to take an idea from one place to another. In these pages are numerous stories set in workplaces of many kinds. These stories will speak to you directly if you are interested, as a leader or manager, in developing the human capital of your organization. There are stories about persuasion and influence that will speak directly to you if care about marketing an idea or product to the public. There are stories in these pages set in schools and on campuses. These will speak to you directly if you too are in a classroom. Finally, there are stories here about parents and children. These will speak to you directly if you are interested in creating more mindful and humane family relationships.

At work, at school, at home: youll find something here that speaks directly to you. But let me be straight. If youre going to filter the experience to take in only those stories that speak