Authors: Colin Powell
It Worked For Me (4 page)
I will never forget my fear the first time I came under fire. In 1963 I was the advisor to a Vietnamese infantry battalion. We were walking in column down a forested trail when we were hit by small arms fire from an enemy ambush. We returned fire and the Viet Cong enemy quickly melted back into the forest. It was over in a minute; but one soldier was killed. We wrapped him in a poncho and carried him until we found a place to bring in a helicopter. That night, as I tried to sleep on the forest floor, I was filled with the realization that the next morning we would probably be ambushed again. And we were. My body was filled with the gut feeling that I could be the next one killed. I was taller than the Vietnamese, and as the American advisor, I was a more valuable target. I stuck out.
That morning, and every morning, I had to use my training and self-discipline to control my fear and move on—just like all the Vietnamese, just like every soldier since ancient times. Moreover, as a leader, I could show no fear. I could not let fear control me.
Naysayers are everywhere. They feel it’s the safest position to be in. It’s the easiest armor to wear . . . And they may be right in their negativity; reality may be on their side. But chances are very good that it’s not. You can only use their naysaying as one line in the spectrum of inputs to your decision. Listen to everyone you need to, and then go with your fearless instinct.
Each of us must work to become a hardheaded realist, or else we risk wasting our time and energy pursuing impossible dreams. Yet constant naysayers pursue no less impossible dreams. Their fear and cynicism move nothing forward. They kill progress. How many cynics built empires, great cities, or powerful corporations?
13. PERPETUAL OPTIMISM IS A FORCE MULTIPLIER.
In the military we are always looking for ways to leverage up our forces. Having greater communications and command and control over your forces than your enemy has over his is a force multiplier. Having greater logistics capability than the enemy is a force multiplier. Having better-trained commanders is a force multiplier.
Perpetual optimism, believing in yourself, believing in your purpose, believing you will prevail, and demonstrating passion and confidence is a force multiplier. If you believe and have prepared your followers, the followers will believe.
Late one winter’s night in Korea after a very tough week of field training, my battalion of five hundred soldiers was waiting for trucks to take us back to our barracks at Camp Casey, twenty miles away. Word came down that we had a fuel shortage and no trucks were coming. We had to march back that night. The troops were exhausted, but we saddled up and started marching cross-country, with some grumbling in the ranks about higher headquarters.
After we launched, my operations officer, Captain Skip Mohr, reminded me that we had an outstanding requirement to make a forced twelve-mile timed march to qualify our troops to participate in the Expert Infantryman’s Badge competition. He had plotted it out on the map; we would be twelve miles out in about half an hour. “Let’s pick up the pace and go for it,” he told me.
“Will that be pushing them too hard?” I wondered out loud.
“You know these kids,” he answered. “They are tough as hell and will do anything we ask of them. They can do it.”
I knew he was right.
We paused just before the twelve-mile point, took a ten-minute break, loosened our winter clothing, and then went for it, over some terrible hills. It was tough going. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with these younger soldiers. But I pushed it, and so did they, magnificently. At the last mile, we could look down at the lights of Camp Casey. We fell into step and marched into camp in the middle of the night singing out a cadence and waking up everybody in the camp.
It was a great night. We had demanded a lot from our soldiers. But we had prepared them, we believed in them, they believed in us, and we had the confidence and optimism that they would succeed.
Always Do Your Best, Someone Is Watching
B
ack when I was a teenager in the Bronx, summer was a time for both fun and work. Starting at about age fourteen, I worked summers and Christmas holidays at a toy and baby furniture store in the Bronx. The owner, Jay Sickser, a Russian Jewish immigrant, hired me off the street as I walked past his store. “You want to make a few bucks unloading a truck in back?” he asked me. I said yes. The job took a couple of hours, and he paid me fifty cents an hour. “You’re a good worker,” he told me when I’d finished. “Come back tomorrow.”
That was the beginning of a close friendship with Jay and his family that continued through college and for the next fifty years, long after Jay had died. I worked part-time at the store a few hours a day during the summer and long hours during the Christmas season. I worked hard, a habit I got from my Jamaican immigrant parents. Every morning they left early for the garment district in Manhattan, and they came home late at night. All my relatives were hard workers. They came out of that common immigrant experience of arriving with nothing, expecting that the new life ahead of them would not be easy. Jamaicans had a joke: “That lazy brute, him only have two jobs.”
After I’d worked at Sickser’s for a couple of years, Jay grew concerned that I was getting too close to the store and the family. One day he took me aside. “Collie,” he told me with a serious look, “I want you should get an education and do well. You’re too good to just be a schlepper. The store will go to the family. You don’t have a future here.” I never thought I did, but I always treasured him for caring enough about me to say so.
When I was eighteen I became eligible to get a union card, which meant I could get a full-time summer job with better pay (I continued to work at Sickser’s during the Christmas season). I joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ Local 812, the Soft Drink Workers Union. Every morning I went downtown to the union hall to stand in line to get a day’s work as a helper on a soft-drink truck. It was hard work, and I became an expert at tossing wooden twenty-four-bottle Coca-Cola cases by grabbing a corner bottle without breaking it.
After a few weeks, the foreman noticed my work and asked if I’d like to try driving a Coke truck. Since I was a teamster, I had a chauffer’s license and was authorized to drive a truck. The problem was that I had never driven a truck in my life. But, hey, why not? It paid better.
The next morning, I got behind the wheel of an ancient, stick shift, circa 1940 truck with a supervisor riding shotgun. We carried three hundred cases, half on open racks on one side of the truck and half on the other. I asked the supervisor where we were going. “Wall Street,” he said, and my heart skipped a beat as I imagined navigating the narrow streets and alleys of the oldest, most claustrophobic, and most mazelike part of New York City. I took off with all the energy and blind optimism of youth and managed to get through the day and somehow safely delivered the three hundred cases . . . in spite of my often overenthusiastic driving. My supervisor was white-knuckled with worry that I would deliver 150 cases onto the street as the old truck leaned precariously at corners I was taking much too fast. Though I delivered every case, my driving skills did not impress the supervisor, and my truck-driving career was over (they still kept me on as a helper). Nevertheless, I proudly took home a $20 salary that day to show my father.
The next summer, I wanted something better than standing in a crowd every morning hoping for a day’s work. My opportunity came when the hiring boss announced one morning that the Pepsi plant in Long Island City was looking for porters to clean the floors, full-time for the summer. I raised my hand. I was the only one who did.
The porters at the Pepsi plant were all black. The workers on the bottling machines were all white. I didn’t care. I just wanted work for the summer, and I worked hard, mopping up syrup and soda that had spilled from overturned pallets.
At summer’s end, the boss told me he was pleased with my work and asked if I wanted to come back. “Yes,” I answered, “but not as a porter.” He agreed, and next summer I worked on the bottling machine and as a pallet stacker, a more prestigious and higher-paying job. It wasn’t exactly the Selma March, but I integrated a bottling machine crew.
Very often my best didn’t turn out that well. I was neither an athlete nor a standout student. I played baseball, football, stickball, and all the other Bronx sports, and I did my best, but I wasn’t good at any. In school I was hardworking and dedicated, but never produced superior grades or matched the academic successes of my many high-achieving cousins. Yet my parents didn’t pester me or put too much pressure on me. Their attitude was “Do your best—we’ll accept your best, but nothing less.”
These experiences established a pattern for all the years and careers that came afterward. Always do your best, no matter how difficult the job, or how much you dislike it, your bosses, the work environment, or your fellow workers. As the old expression goes, if you take the king’s coin, you give the king his due.
I remember an old story told by the comedian Brother Dave Gardner about two ditch diggers. One guy just loves digging. He digs all day long and says nothing much. The other guy digs a little, leans on his shovel a lot, and mouths off constantly, “One of these days, I’m gonna own this company.”
Time passes and guy number one gets a front-end trench machine and just digs away, hundreds of feet a day, always loving it. The other guy does the minimum, but never stops mouthing off, “One of these days, I’m gonna own this company.” No, guy number one doesn’t end up owning the company, but he does become a foreman working out of an air-conditioned van. He often waves to his old friend leaning on his shovel still insisting, “One of these days, I’m gonna own this company.” Ain’t gonna happen.
In my military career I often got jobs I wasn’t crazy about, or I was put in situations that stretched me beyond my rank and experience. Whether the going was rough or smooth, I always tried to do my best and to be loyal to my superior and the mission given to me.
On my second tour in Vietnam, I was assigned as an infantry battalion executive officer, second in command, in the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal). I was very pleased with the assignment. As it happened, I had just graduated with honors from the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Shortly after I arrived in Vietnam, a photo of the top five graduates appeared in
Army Times
. The division commanding general saw it, and I was pulled up to the division staff to serve as the operations officer, responsible for coordinating the combat operations of a twenty-thousand-man division. I was only a major and it was a lieutenant colonel’s position. I would have preferred to stay with my battalion, but wasn’t given that choice. It turned out to be very demanding and a stretch for me, but it marked a turning point in my career. Someone was watching.
Years later, as a brigadier general in an infantry division, I thought I was doing my best to train soldiers and serve my commander. He disagreed and rated me below standards. The report is still in my file. It could have ended my career, but more senior leaders saw other qualities and capabilities in me and moved me up into more challenging positions, where I did well.
Doing your best for your boss doesn’t mean you will always like or approve of what he wants you to do; there will be times when you will have very different priorities from his. In the military, your superiors may have very different ideas than you do about what should be your most important mission. In some of my units my superiors put an intense focus on reenlistment rates, AWOL rate, and saving bonds participation. Most of us down below would have preferred to keep our primary focus on training. Sure, those management priorities were important in principle, but they often seemed in practice to be distractions from our real work. I never tried to fight my superiors’ priorities. Instead I worked hard to accomplish the tasks they set as quickly and decisively as I could. The sooner I could satisfy my superiors, the sooner they would stop bugging me about them, and the quicker I could move on to my own priorities. Always give the king his due first.
By the end of my career in government, I had been appointed to the nation’s most senior national security jobs, National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State. I went about each job with the same attitude I’d had at Sickser’s.
During my tenure as Secretary of State, I worked hard on President Bush’s agenda, and we accomplished a great deal that has not received the credit it deserved. We forged good relationships with China, India, and the Russian Federation, all major powers and all potential political adversaries. We did historic work on disease prevention in the Third World, including HIV/AIDS, and we significantly increased aid to developing countries. In the aftermath of 9/11, we made the nation more secure. We got rid of the horrific Hussein and Taliban regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the residual problems in those countries exposed deep fissures within the national security team. By the beginning of 2004, our fourth year, the Bush national security team had in my view become dysfunctional, which has been well documented. Since it was obvious that my thinking and advice were increasingly out of sync with the others on the team, the best course for me was to leave. At that time I strongly believed that for his second term the President should choose an entirely new national security team, and I gave that advice to President Bush, but he chose not to take it. I left the State Department in January 2005. President Bush and I parted on good terms.
In the years that have followed my government service, I have traveled around the country and shared my life’s experience with many people in many different forums. At these events, I always emphasize, especially to youngsters, that 99 percent of work can be seen as noble. There are few truly degrading jobs. Every job is a learning experience, and we can develop and grow in every one.
If you take the pay, earn it. Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don’t disappoint yourself.