Janet and I had a conversation last night about an interesting phenomenon we both happened to observe.
People can self-destruct or at least derail their careers in any number of ways. However, there is one particular way that appeared to have a common thread to us that I’d like to share with you.
Let me start with a few examples.
About 10 years ago, we had a lecturer working for us who took the slides he used, changed the name on the slides from our name to a competitor’s name, and, on a Monday morning left a note on my desk indicating he was resigning. By the way, the lecturer was relatively new, having worked for us for only about nine months, and had made more in that nine-month period of time than he had ever made in any two years working any place else in his entire life. We found out later, when we were called by one of our graduates, that he had actually begun working for another organization in the country—a competitor—with whom, we found out later, he had been negotiating for several months while he was traveling for us.
He was eventually terminated by that organization, went to another organization and got terminated there. Shortly thereafter, he filed bankruptcy and divorced.
An acquaintance of my mother’s was operating as the maître d’ of an Italian restaurant owned and operated by someone with whom she had a longstanding relationship. While working as a maître d’ at that restaurant, she was negotiating with the chef of that same restaurant to open up a restaurant of their own. Eventually, the two left the restaurant and opened up one on their own.
Several years later, the chef ended up squeezing her out of that restaurant, and keeping it for himself. She was left in her mid-50s with virtually nothing to show for her very had work over a number of years. And, about a year after that, the chef ultimately closed the restaurant and went bankrupt himself.
Janet and I had met a recently married couple bout five years ago who had apparently known each other for some time; in fact, we discovered later, they were having a longstanding affair even though both of them were married to other people. Needless to say, both of their marriages crumbled when the truth inevitably came out, and the two of them then got married. We just found out last night that the wife left her husband after starting an affair with her yoga teacher.
Needless to say, I could go on and on.
I’m sure each of you has come across story after story of a similar nature, whether it’s happened to you or you’ve simply observed it. But the interesting issue, in each of those cases, is that it is a rare instance, if at all, that a betrayal of any type is ultimately rewarded by life. Life has a tendency to give back what you’ve put out. Some people call it karma. Other people just simply call it the law of nature.
I remember seeing a movie called something like Dead Again where the karma was so strong that it actually came back in another life. Whether you believe in another life or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is there is enormous power in the simple principle that you reap what you sow.
It appears to me that of all of the negative defining moments in a person’s life, the ones that are most significant somehow involve betrayal. Whether you are betraying a friend’s trust, a business associate’s confidence, or your own spousal vows, somehow, in some way, life isn’t prepared to allow us to necessarily get away with it.
Now, I know there are ways in which we can cleanse ourselves of the things we have done.
However, I must say that in so many instances I have observed (and in Janet’s recollection too), the participants never seem to ultimately overcome the betrayal. It might be because it is their own character that created the betrayal to start with, and they don’t understand what impact that has had on their lives. Or it may be that it has set into motion some power they ultimately can’t control. But what I do know is that in these three instances as well as dozens more that Janet and I were talking about, it always seems to work the same: the betrayal became that defining moment they never were quite able to overcome.
Ethics is not necessarily just about rules. It’s more importantly about how we show up in life. Being mindful of the standard conventions of what to do and what not to do takes us part way. But if we also recognize that each time we make a decision it has the possibility of being a defining moment for us, we can end up taking those decisions far more seriously and the impact far more significantly.
Original writing date: October 2003