SOMETIME ago, Carlos Ghosn, chairman of the Japanese car giant Nissan, had been hailed by the world’s car manufacturing industry. That was because he was able to turn around the ailing Nissan into a profitable company in just a short time. In the process, he became a superstar. He was the cover story in major business magazines and newsweeklies.
In Japan, Carlos Ghosn’s hero status was so big that his life was serialized in one of the country’s mangas (comic books.) In 2011, Ghosn polled No. 7 among the global leaders the Japanese people would like to run their country, ahead of Barack Obama (ninth).
Often referred to by his supporters as a “visionary,” for years, Mr. Ghosn led the life of the archetypal corporate globalist, frequently sleeping on a private jet as he traveled between companies and countries.
Then suddenly, the unimaginable happened. He was dismissed as chairman of Nissan. The media headlined the news of his arrest for defrauding Japan’s tax authorities. Nissan’s internal investigation uncovered substantial evidence of blatantly unethical conduct. Even now, more and more details of alleged misconduct are being divulged.
Ghosn is just one in a parade of mighties and high-profile men and women who have recently fallen from their lofty perches. They have found that global fame is not foolproof when government investigators come knocking, dovetailed by a blistering media backlash and furious public outcry. One after the other, they have fallen like dominoes: Martha Stewart, Lance Armstrong, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, just to mention a few. As we read about the roll of the dishonored, most of us probably take it all with a smirk and a smug shrug of the shoulders. Serves them right. Just their comeuppance. Karma.
It reminds me about an incident that happened many years ago when I was still actively working as a creative director of our small ad agency. We had a client who had an obnoxious and disagreeable character. He would be nasty about any proposals we presented to him. Before he approved anything, we had to go through a wringer. But since the account was substantial in terms of billings, we had to grin and bear it.
Then one day, we learned he was no longer an executive of that company. We all heaved a big sigh of relief.
A few days later, the man called and asked to meet with me, alone. We met in a little coffee shop. Force of habit, I paid for the coffee and snacks, although he was no longer a “client.” He was very chummy, not the arrogant SOB we tolerated. He wanted to know about the company from which he has just been fired and even pretended to be interested in my life. I sensed that he was not in a hurry. In dawned on me that he had all the time to loaf around because he had no job. He intimated that he had not told his wife and kids he had been fired. He still was doing his daily routine of going to the office every morning and coming back home in the evening. It was all a pretense.
What he really wanted from me was if our agency had a vacancy for him. I told him we were overstaffed. We could not pay him. He asked if we could give him a desk from which to work. In return, he said that once he has transferred to another company, he would bring that ad account to our agency. I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t want him to be a client again.
Out of pity, we accommodated him, but only for two weeks at the most. We told a junior account executive to give his desk to this ex-client.
He was a pathetic figure, going to the office, making calls and sending his résumé, but after three days, he never showed up. He never even bothered to thank us or even send a word that he landed a job. Several years later, I learned he had separated from his family and he went abroad and was working somewhere in the Middle East.
But fortune can also go the opposite way. When my wife and I attended her batch’s golden-year reunion, we were surprised to find out that some of the classmates who were at the top of the class and deemed most likely to succeed had only modest achievements while those who were from the lower rung were now the most successful. One of the most impressive was R. who used to dig ditches during his spare time just to be able to afford school. Now he is a top agri-businessman who lives in a posh house and owns many properties. He even toured us around his “hacienda,” eliciting the inevitable sourgraping from the less successful.
Such are the vagaries of fortune, the ups and downs of human affairs. If you have lived as long as I have, you also will have encountered such reversals of fortune in your lifetime.
This is where literature can sometimes be useful. From my English class, I remember a literary term which refers to a tragic twist that leads to a sudden change of circumstances. The word is “peripeteia,” popular in Greek tragedies where the protagonist undergoes a reversal of fortune from state of happiness and contentment toward a catastrophic ending. The hero who thought he was in good shape suddenly finds that all is lost, or vice versa. Nowadays, we call it plot twist.
Maybe you might say, what can one do? That’s life, fate or destiny. Gulong ng palad, iginuhit ng tadhana, as we say in the vernacular. Life is not fair and that you will not necessarily be dealt a fair deck.
But then you’re missing the point.
For there is another element that goes hand in hand with peripeteia. It is called anagnorisis, the moment of self-discovery for the protagonist of the story, a discovery in which the truth of a situation becomes known to the character.
This, to me is what is more important than just a change in external circumstances. The fact that a person experiences a reversal of emotions in his interiority, a change from ignorance or pride (the Greek hubris) to knowledge and as a result, a transformation occurs. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle states: “A man cannot become a hero until he can sees the root of his own downfall.”
So the bottom line is not the sudden change of circumstances or what fate does to you. What matters more is how you deal with a given situation. Does it make you or break you?
Viktor Emil Frankl’s famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, tells the story of how he survived the Holocaust by finding personal meaning in the experience, which gave him the will to live through it. He argued that life can have meaning even in the most miserable of circumstances, and that the motivation for living comes from finding that meaning. As he puts it: “You can overcome any how if you have a why.”
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. Frankl believed that when we can no longer change a situation, we are forced to change ourselves. Meaning can be found through the value of all that we create, achieve and accomplish or through a change of attitude.
Fortune favors the brave, says the old maxim. Fortune also favors those who are aware of the vagaries of fortune and prepare themselves for it. An unexpected shift in our lives can come at any moment. Are you ready? Take care you don’t dissipate what fortune gives you today. Anticipation is the key. Those who poopooh social security will later find that it could save them from a lot of misery later in life.
One elderly widow was able to save an enormous amount of money. Wisely, she did not spend it on material things. She never bought a big house or a fancy SUV and later on she was proved prudent. When she got hospitalized, the cost ran into millions. Her savings relieved her children from the burden of having to pay for it.
They say the Filipino is inherently fatalistic. Our attitude to fate is expressed in the phrase bahala na. But it should not be taken as a passive resignation.
Anticipation is the key. My wife and I have taken the attitude of always expecting, preparing and accepting the worst. When you expect and accept the worst, it reduces the power it has over you and you enjoy a kind of independence from the vagaries of fortune.
However, life can always have meaning, even in the worst of situations. Remember that you are always free to make meaning out of your life situation. Nobody can take that away from you. Try to focus outside of yourself to get through feeling stuck about a situation.
If you are going through something bad, try to find a purpose in your suffering, your humiliation, misery, pain. Even if this is a bit of mental trickery, it will help to see you through.
When our home was devastated by typhoon Ondoy, we consoled ourselves with the fact that our lives were intact and that we did not lose any valuable documents. We also realized the foolishness of cluttering our place with so much material stuff given the fact that it’s prone to floods. We now live a simpler lifestyle.
One more thing. Develop relationships especially during happy and fortunate times. Don’t treat subordinates like doormats. They are the people you might run to for help should the table get turned. Guard against pride and greed, the tandem that usually leads to the downfall of the mighty. Express sympathy to those around you who are suffering. It is a way of building up a bank account of goodwill. When you suffer a misfortune, those persons would repay the investment made in them when they were down.
When our daughter-in-law Irene was going through the last stages of her terminal illness, it was a trying time for the family as she was taken in and out of the hospital many times. Our collective network of friends helped buoy her spirits, as well as ours. When she died, we were not only flooded by the expressions of sympathy, but also by money donations from friends and colleagues that enabled us not only to pay for the funeral services, but also for the medical expenses incurred during her hospitalization.
Nowadays, my wife and I never hesitate to empathize with friends and colleagues who are in dire straits. Not because we want to build a bank account of goodwill, but because we know how it feels to be in a state of pain and suffering.
“Someday, it will all come to an end, when all your riches, and beauty, power and fame will not matter,” wrote Fr. Jerry Orbos in one of his columns, “What will matter then? Not what you bought, but what you shared; not your success, but your significance; not your competence, but your character; not your popularity, but your sincerity; not your words, but your shining example of a life well lived.