Anthills, Alcohol, and Crossing to Safety
I have loved the book Crossing to Safety since I first read it in the late 90’s.
Having reread it a few times now, I find every instance feels a bit like a mix between a meditation retreat and an authentic AA meeting — not the kind where everyone exclusively talks about alcohol and its ruinous nature, but the kind where people talk about life on life’s terms. The real stuff that applies to all of humans. The quiet heartbreak, the ordinary miracles, the missed chances and many more second chances.
For a long time, I believed I had it in me to “make an impact.” And for almost as long a time, the recognition I received seemed to confirm that story. Awards, press, invitations, the stuff I saw my parents get over so many years that made me feel like I was keeping up. People telling me I was doing important things. I tried very hard to believe them. I will admit I always had doubts.
It took walking away from my business in 2013 — or more accurately, from Boloco’s investors — for a couple of years to begin the journey of gaining perspective. And then another five years to finally put down alcohol and slowly let go of my incessant search for “more” before I could really start to understand this powerful quote from Crossing to Safety:
“Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs. Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.”
When I first saw this, years ago, I probably nodded along like, “Yeah, yeah, all we are is dust in the wind, love the song, got it.” I didn’t even underline it in my original copy. Maybe I believed it, but as always I went right back to trying to prove I was different and I certainly wasn’t a speck of dust.
It’s funny how long you can “agree” with an idea in your head and still live like you don’t believe a word of it.
The Business of Being Important
In my working life, I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to build things that would “outlast” me — maybe not the restaurants themselves, but certainly the ethos of the brand, its culture of putting people first, the reputation that would follow, all of that. And maybe I did believe the restaurants themselves – many thousands of them in my dreams – would long outlive me too. I told myself it was about purpose and impact – and to be fair, a lot of it was. We paid people better than the industry and doubled and tripled down as time passed, we tried to do right by guests in all instances, we experimented with B Corp initiatives, we took substantial risks using a good, but not great, business model.
Mixed into all of that was a quieter, stickier desire: I wanted to matter. I wanted to be different. I wanted my “anthill” to be the anthill people pointed to and said, “Now that one… that one’s special.”
Institutional investors who support businesses like Boloco, by the way, love that energy. The part of you that’s always hungry for more. Whether it be profits, growth, power, or fame, they’ll take it all as part of their own insatiable appetite for more. They don’t usually ask if it’s also the part that’s slowly killing you.
When I stepped away from the company and the investors for those two years, the noise dimmed pretty quickly. Nobody was sending emails asking for updates. Nobody cared what my weekly sales numbers were and I was moved aside quickly. The scoreboard went dark. I had to sit with the uncomfortable possibility that maybe I wasn’t all that important in the ways I’d been chasing.
Spoiler: I wasn’t.
Sobriety and Shrinking the Universe
Later, nearly 5 years after buying back the company on the cheap, came the alcohol part.
I didn’t have some famous rock-bottom story, at least not that I can share. But really, there was no dramatic last-scene collapse with paramedics and flashing lights. Just a slow dawning realization that my life, as it was going, wasn’t quite… mine. Too many nights fuzzy around the edges. Too many mornings, let’s call it once a month or perhaps two which I thought was pretty damn healthy for decades, promising myself I’d do better. Too much restless searching for the next thing: the next deal, the next restaurant, the next award, the next drink, the next version of me that would finally feel “enough.”
When I stopped drinking, the universe shrank.
I mean that in a good way.
Instead of obsessing over whether I was building something that would be remembered in 50 years, I started noticing whether I was being kind to the person in front of me in the moment or possibly the next five minutes. Instead of wondering if my “legacy” would hold up, I started wondering if one of the team on the closing shift during a snow storm had a way to get home. Instead of worrying about where I ranked in some invisible hierarchy of successful people, I started trying—very imperfectly, even sober—to show up for my wife, my kids, my team, my friends.
The quote from Crossing to Safety stopped feeling like philosophical wallpaper and started feeling like instruction. At some point on my Kindle I highlighted it. And now, every couple of months or so, it pops up on my daily Readwise email as a reminder not to forget. Not to forget about humility, gratitude for what is today, for the moments we have in front of us today.
If our works are, at best, anthills—and if we’re really lucky, the coral reefs I try so hard to avoid when out on the water—then the goal isn’t to build a monument. The goal is to participate in the reef – today. Every day. To be one of the tiny, almost invisible organisms that make it possible for life to flourish.
Every Day Counts (But Not Like I Thought)
The old version of “every day counts” in my head sounded like the Franklin Daily Planner productivity seminar I attended back in 1992:
maximize your output
optimize your schedule
crush your goals
These days, “every day counts” looks different.
Every day counts because it might be your one chance to:
really listen to the person across from you, especially when you don’t like what you are hearing
tell your kid you’re proud of them without adding a list of suggestions, and feeling it deeply
give a second chance to someone who screwed up, or maybe a third and fourth.
quietly help someone who can’t pay you back, and committing never to make them worry about that.
apologize, without explaining or justifying
Yes, of course, take care of yourself and your family. That part matters. But keep your own success in perspective. Your advantages. Your assets. Your carefully curated LinkedIn story (ugh, I so struggle here, even today obviously). As they say, you can’t take any of it with you.
What you can leave behind are small, almost unremarkable acts of decency that ripple through other people’s lives long after you’re gone. Most of them won’t have your name attached, especially not on buildings or perhaps even a bench. Seeing others get those things can be hard, and if I’m honest, at times I still feel “less than” when I see others continuing to climb. I’ve met many who also had big aspirations and whether because they couldn’t achieve them or saw them through a different lens, who feel the same way. Thankfully, the feelings of less than are less often today than years ago. I hope it keeps going that way. It doesn’t happen naturally, it takes work – quiet work, mostly, but work nonetheless.
This post, like all other posts I've drafted, isn’t a grand conclusion. I still have plenty of ego. I still care too much what people think. I still catch myself comparing my anthill to yours.
But I’m starting to accept the possibility that being “just another person” in the vast geological and biological story isn’t a demotion. It’s a relief.
It means I don’t have to carry the burden of being extraordinary. I can focus on being useful. Kind. Honest. Sober. Present. One of millions, doing my small part.
Every day counts—not because it will secure my legacy, but because it might be my only chance today to do a good deed for someone else, and to let that be enough.
