Clifford Hudson - Master of None

I dont believe Ive ever had the patience to master anything.

Have you?

While the thrill of being perceived as an expert is attractive, the way I see it, lifes too short and too fascinating to focus on one area for too long. There are too many other things to see, do, and be.

Plus, I imagine it gets plain boring staring down the same path every day. I wouldnt know from experience, thoughIve always been a bit all over the map. Its the main reason I arrived at the helm of Sonic, a public, multibillion-dollar company that serves 3 million customers daily.

Frankly, getting there was one unplanned journeyI was handed the job in the midst of boardroom shock when my predecessor quit mid-meeting and said, Theres a plane waiting to take me to my new job. While I might have been considered next in line by some, I hadnt ever planned to be a CEO of Sonic or any other company. But the position was offered to me right then and there, and I said, Sure, why not. (Truth was, there were plenty of reasons why not, but none were more compelling than a new experience.)

Staying in the position I was given for more than two decades was another unplanned journey. You cant really plan what you never saw coming. But the reality is that both getting there and staying there for the length of time that I did was the result of a fondness for variety and a continuously extending curiosity. Some might not consider my approach a legitimate strategy. They might even call it being easily distracted, impulsive, or preoccupied. I call it being versatile. It really doesnt matter what you call itthe results speak for themselves. As youll see in the pages to come, theres been no shortage of adventure, opportunity, or enjoyment in my life. The business returns havent been too bad either.

I wasnt anything special as a kid so I cant say I saw my career coming. Maybe you can relate. I was raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, which is equidistant from Oklahoma City to the north and Dallas (where I was born) to the south. It wasnt a town known for anything, and even today it shares features with the Midwest, South, and Southwest. Thats another way of saying it was a typically indistinct American town and my family fit in. I was the little brother of four siblings, with one older brother and two sisters, one of them my twin, three minutes older than me. In our first house that I can recall, my brother and I shared a bedroom above the living room that was accessed via a narrow staircase flanked by high walls. It was the attic disguised as a bedroomthe only room those stairs led to, and back then I never considered it odd that we ascended into a dark windowless box to sleep. However, climbing those stairs each night and peering down them into the house below each morning is all I remember about that house. It is also my earliest memory. I was three or four when we moved across town. The image of that narrow staircase into the ceiling and that view from the top stuck in my mindI can still see them todaywhich has led me to conclude that there was something about the staircase that piqued my young instincts.

At our new home, some early scenes have also remained stuck in my mind. The first is of me sitting outside our house on a sunny spring morning. My siblings were at school and I was playing on the white gravel between our driveway and front yard while my mom tidied up inside. As I rolled my small toy car over the rocks, the milkman pulled up to our curb. I watched intently as he retrieved a metal basket holding two glass bottles from his truck and delivered them to our back door, just off the kitchen, but in the carport. To this day, I can still feel the rising sun warming my neck and the thrill of being alone outside and the curious appearance of the milkman. There was a new world outside our home that Id never imagined before.

The second scene that sticks with me is of my first fistfight. I was four years old and a boy my age who lived at the end of our block had decided to duke it out with me for reasons that are still a mystery to me (back then it seemed you didnt need a reason beyond proving yourself tough). I wasnt going down without a defense. Fists flew in dog-paddle fashion until I got him and his flailing arms pinned to the ground. Thats when he somehow managed to stretch his neck enough to reach my butt... with his teeth. He clamped down like a small, angry mutt. I can still remember being unable to sit down in the back seat of my mothers old Chevrolet that afternoon. Fortunately, I was still small enough to stand on the floorboard and hold tight to the front seat. One might say that boy was my first real pain in the ass. If anything, he taught me that not everyone is agreeable.

Another memory was my mothers pursuit of incremental financial support for our family. She sang beautifully and was known for her voice but had detoured her academic and musical careers to raise four kids. When my twin, Beth, and I were somewhere around four years old, our mother would take us with her downtown to a Wichita Falls funeral home, slide in a back door, put on a robe, ask us to sit quietly, and, at just the right moment, slip across the hall to anonymously sing at some souls last service for a nominal fee. She would then quickly collect us and her cash, and we were on our way.

A psychologist could probably tell you what those memories mean, but as far as I know they paint a fairly clear picture of my early life. I enjoyed independence, mystery, and new discoveries and as a result was constantly involved in a smorgasbord of activities that didnt fit any particular pattern. I enjoyed sports and singing in the church choir. I socialized a lot, but also sat alone with a book quite often. I got into an inordinate number of fistfights through junior high, due less to my temperament than my convictions and the general culture of fighting at our school. I then spent my high school years uniting schoolmates through student government positions.

I wasnt an eccentric kid. I was just a curious one who seemed to lack any sense that I was supposed to choose a path or focus. My parents didnt make me. My teachers never taught me to or, if they did, I wasnt listening. I suppose I was never told I should have a supposed to. Of course, like you and every other kid, I thought about what I wanted to be when I grew upprofessional baseball player, politician, famous musician. There was just never any pressure to decide.

Instead, I was left to the one device that was most effective at getting me what I wanted: variety. Multiple pursuits kept things interesting and earned me storytelling credibility, a couple of good girlfriends, and a diverse group of comradesblack, brown, and white, jocks, band buddies, nerds, and leaders.

There were narrow, focused, and life-changing days too, like when I was eleven years old and learned of my parents bankruptcy and felt the unwelcome upheaval for our family life that followed. I was later told that my fathers business partner had embezzled funds from their company in order to support the lifestyle of his mistress. When the economy turned down in the mid-1960s, the embezzlement was painfully apparent. The business failed and my parents lost everything, including our new four-bedroom, two-bath home. As much as anything, the experience branded a lesson in my mind about the importance of doing business with good people you could trust.

As I entered the real world, I discovered that my taste for variety didnt play as well in grown-up environments like the legal profession with its old-boy networks, and the world of business with its unspoken expectations. I had to learn the new rules and the consequences if I broke them. For a stint, I fell in line as I thought a career-minded adult should; I paid more attention to protocol than better possibilities around me. It seemed necessary, especially when the oil bust of the mid-1980s hit the Southern Plains region where my wife and I lived. Bank closures, home foreclosures, job losses, and, sadly, even suicides were the weekly news. The notion of being open-minded felt a bit irrelevant. And yet, while I was grateful to remain employed throughout this season, I couldnt numb the childhood sense of possibility still inside me.