My boss at Arthur Andersen asked me a question in 1996 right after we stepped out of an elevator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in St. Paul.
We had walked into the building behind a crowd of people, all of us piling into the elevator together. He faced the door.
I faced the people.
By the time we reached our floor, I had talked to most of them.
When we stepped out, he looked at me and asked:
“Do you always talk to people on elevators?”
I thought about it for a second.
“Most of the time,” I said.
He seemed genuinely puzzled. I didn’t think much of it then.
But I’ve thought about it since.
There is a difference between remarkable and remarkable. Some people aim to do remarkable things. Since my mother died when I was twenty, I have tried to aim at something slightly different.
To live a remarkable life.
The distinction, I’ve found, is everything.
My boss was focused on business and the remarkable project we were about to face. That’s why he faced the door. I was trying to live a remarkable life. That’s why I faced the people.
Same elevator. Different orientation.
He noticed. That’s why he asked.
A few years earlier, on a Friday morning flight from Baltimore to Boston, I was one of two people sitting in first class. I was probably still slightly foggy from a meeting the evening before. The other passenger sat across the aisle reading a newspaper, wearing a ring whose stone appeared approximately the size of a baseball.
I asked if it was a college ring.
He said: “All-Stars.”
I said: “Really? What school?”
He lowered the paper slightly and smiled.
“Major League All-Stars.”
That was the moment I realized I had absolutely no idea who I was talking to.
His name was Cal Ripken Jr. At the time, he was in the middle of what would become the most celebrated consecutive-games streak in baseball history — 2,632 games without missing one. He was one of the most recognizable athletes in America.
I just saw a man with a very large ring on a morning flight.
We ended up having a genuinely good conversation. Two people on a plane talking about life before eight in the morning.
I think he appreciated it.
A few years after that, flying home from Atlanta after attending the Masters, I was seated in the fourth row of first class when a man boarded with an entourage. They continued toward the back, but the main man stopped beside my row.
He needed seat 4A.
The window seat next to mine.
I stood up to let him in. He sat down. Then, he introduced himself as Marty.
As in Martin Luther King III.
We talked for the entire flight to Boston.
Robin and I were living in the Los Angeles area in the early 1990s. One evening we were at Trader Vic’s at the Beverly Hilton — the night the Golden Globes were held there. When the ceremony ended, the afterparties moved into Trader Vic’s.
I found myself at one of two urinals in an unusually small men’s restroom when the door opened and Gene Hackman walked in and took the urinal to my left.
I recognized him immediately and congratulated him.
Then the stall door opened and Clint Eastwood stepped out, walked to the sink, washed his hands. I smiled and said hello. He smiled back and walked out.
Gene turned to me.
“You should have congratulated the big guy. He won for Best Director.”
I talk to people at urinals, too.
I am not telling these stories to impress anyone.
I am telling them because of what they have in common.
In each case, I had no agenda. No awareness of who I was talking to, or what they represented, or whether the interaction might someday matter.
I was simply doing what I’ve always done — on elevators, on airplanes, at renovation sites in the Caribbean, at Rotary Club dinners, in offices where dying men hand you papers they’ve been holding onto for decades.
I talk to people.
Not because I’m particularly gifted at it.
Not because I calculated that connection might become useful later.
Because it seems like the obvious thing to do when you’re sharing a small space with another human being who also has somewhere to be.
My boss at Arthur Andersen found this puzzling.
A lot of people do.
But here’s what I eventually came to understand.
James Ronald Webster handed me his papers and his promise because forty years of showing up had demonstrated something no credential could establish.
That I was the same person every time I walked off the plane.
That I treated the men working with me to rehabilitate a hotel the same way I treated the man who built their nation.
Cal Ripken Jr. relaxed into an ordinary conversation because I didn’t know he was Cal Ripken Jr.
Martin Luther King III talked to me for an entire flight because I stood up to let him into his seat and then just — talked to him.
Gene Hackman told me I should have congratulated the big guy.
None of this was strategy.
It was simply how I was raised to move through the world. And how I have tried to live since my mother left it too soon.
Treat people the way you want to be treated.
Face them in the elevator.
Ask about the ring.
Stand up when someone needs to get past.
Wash your hands in the bathroom.
It sounds simple because it is simple.
What I didn’t understand until much later is that this same quality — this instinct to show up as exactly myself, without performance, without agenda — was what the island had been testing all along.
Anguilla watched me for months in 1984 before it decided.
I passed the same test I always pass.
I just talked to people.