Cancer Woke Me Up

I might outlive my resources but that's better than hoarding my resources at the expense of living.

It’s a cliche that being diagnosed with cancer causes a change in perspective, and that cliche proved entirely true for me.

I’ll start with a story of my early career in pizza delivery.

As a teenager in Eugene, I was a delivery driver for a Little Caesar’s Pizza in Eugene, Oregon, run by a very unscrupulous family.

I experienced various abuses, including flagrant wage theft when I was informed after running the store without management from opening to closing for 37 days in a row my hourly wage would be paid out in straight time for well over 80 hours and a meager 10 or 15 hours would be paid out at the legally mandated time-and-a-half overtime rate.

The son who inherited this pizza empire from his father (bootstraps, amirite?) waved my objections off with, “You just don’t understand accounting,” before he chided me for coming in 4% over expectations on my food cost. I pointed out to him that I had no training in managing food costs whatsoever, and I hoped his wife and he had a lovely vacation in Tahoe while I ran their store for them as a delivery driver for minimum wage.

I didn’t feel I had the power to argue about my stolen wages since I needed to keep my job to pay my $200 monthly rent.

Months later, when a manager I was training offered me a dial to the safe so I could help him by making the Monday deposit, I said I’d only agree if the dial were handed to me personally by the owner or his son. The manager, who was suffering from lymphoma at the time, said the owners would not agree to me having a dial to the safe, but he would not tell them if I didn’t.

I refused the offer and said I’d not accept that responsibility unless it were knowingly bestowed upon me by the owners.

Months later, I appeared to open the store, and the regional manager was already there. She angrily demanded my store key, informed me that I was being fired for poor performance, handed me my final check, and escorted me out the front door.

Shortly thereafter, one of my team informed me that the owner’s son had to work my shifts, and when asked by my regular customers about my absence, he told them that he’d fired me for stealing.

I later found out that the manager who tried to give me a dial to the safe was stealing from the drop, and even though I refused the dial, he told the owners that I’d accepted it. Unfortunately for him, he kept stealing after I was gone, and it became evident I wasn’t the culprit.

I won’t go into more details about what went down next, but I can tell you that 17-year-old me walked into my apartment, signed my entire check over to my roommate for my final month of rent, and gave my 30-day notice of homelessness. The check was exactly $200.

I had no food, and I had no source of income. I was already hungry.

One evening at a friend’s house, she asked if anyone wanted this bag of steel-cut dry oats. I raised my hand.

I grew up destitute and have been on my own since I was 16. I’ve stared into the abyss of hunger, and that’s informed my worldview on money for most of my adult life.

When I started my consultancy, I had a call with Dale Emery, a successful consultant, to ask for his advice. He said, “You took that sailing trip with your wife, so I am confident you’ll be a successful consultant since it tells me you can go long periods without money.”

No one wants to hear this when they’re changing careers, but he was spot on. It’s the advice I give others who ask me about “going independent.”

During my 13-year consulting business, I lived a fairly austere lifestyle. My then-wife was obsessed with buying a house in Seattle, which, these days, costs a million bucks. We didn’t want to amass debt, so we saved aggressively.

The consulting business is marked by periods of feast and famine. In my experience, famine was the far more common condition. I began to view money as optionality. When you have money, you have options; when you don’t, you have none.

I used to describe it as analogous to living where there’s a treadmill moving away from my family, and on the treadmill, some distance away, was Abraham Maslow with an axe running at a full sprint toward my family. If he ever got to us, he’d axe us all to death. Billing clients sped the treadmill up, but not billing slowed it down.

This and my wife’s million-dollar ambition made for fear-based living.

If we could only weather the draughts, maximize retirement contributions and 401ks, and save as much as possible, we might later be able to provide that stable home for the boys. It was a miserable way to live. I have so many stories of executive psychopaths abusing me without me walking out because I felt I had no choice.

When I wasn’t billing a client, I applied for every job. Every entry-level Scrum Master job, every project, product, or portfolio manager role. I’d built an amazing global network of brilliant colleagues whom I still consider some of my closest friends and spoken at dozens of conferences in three countries on how to do these things.

I got roborejected almost exclusively, and the tiny percentage of callbacks I got resulted in nearly 0 interviews. I’ve had maybe five job interviews over those 13 years, and they often went well at the line level. Still, then I’d be deemed overqualified and escalated for a director-level role where I’d have to interview with some psychopath who hated me the moment I walked in the door. Naturally, I could no longer pursue the entry-level role for which I’d applied and interviewed well.

I had crippling self-doubt and was always fearful of what the future would hold. I have no meaningful credentials I can use to prove my competence, just loads of people who were impressed by me but had no power to hire me. I used to joke, “My superpower is I can impress the hell out of agile coaches and people who don’t have any ability to hire me.” It's not a very profitable superpower.

Anyway, flash forward to being diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. With two oncologists apologizing to me, “I’m sorry, your cancer is diffuse and inoperable, being stage 4, there are no treatments that are curative in nature.”

Staring down the barrel is a 15% probability of living five years and a 50/50 shot at 32 months, I was relieved. I didn’t have to worry about my long-term prospects anymore. My boys would finally be okay, thanks to my life insurance, decent retirement savings, and social security. I could breathe a sigh of relief. My then-wife disagreed at the time, but that’s a different story for a different time.

While saving for the future and fearfully pushing Maslow’s axe away, I realized my boys were getting older every year. I was afraid of how they would eat and be housed but now I realized this futile march towards housing debt and house-poverty combined with unstable income was costing my boys their best lives. More importantly, I was teaching them to make life decisions out of fear and not enjoy their lives in the present.

There’s a slight chance I’ll live longer than the retirement savings I’m spending through now, but that my boys will be adults soon is a guarantee, and I’ll never get these years back.

I wish my soon-to-be ex-wife could have seen things as clearly as I now do, and she could be part of our lives of love, adventure, and joy, but that was not meant to be.

Ultimately, getting what is tantamount to a death sentence was the biggest relief of my life. I no longer worry about how I’ll retire at 65. I don’t stress out about how I’ll build the next stage of my career. Living this final 3-5ish year chunk of life is liberating. I am now focused on being an example of a balanced existence to my sons.

Don’t live for the hoarding of capital, make decisions that consider the wellbeing of your community and choose a life of service. Enjoy your life while you still have it because next year is not guaranteed.

The next stage of my career will be service. I started this substack because people who are still on the treadmill can’t speak about the current inequities that are causing these kinds of fearful lives. We can’t openly discuss the wage theft, corporate abuses, and intentional inequities driving sickness, death, and poverty.

I want my boys to remember that our most valuable resource is each other and that love and care are the most important things always. Give love and care fearlessly; if you aren’t receiving love and care from your people, find people who appreciate you and love you for who you are. Life is quite short, and I’d rather die broke than die, regretting not having shown my sons how to actually live.