The Bold (Legacy is Generous)
A recent trip to Ft. Myers, Florida taught me an important lesson in work, vision, and legacy. It is possible to be so blinded by our own definition of how a project should unfold, of what success entails, that we miss opportunites that would require us to slow down, hand off, and inspire others to finish the work when we are no longer able to do so.
The Whisper (Where is your focus?)
In January, I visited the Edison & Ford Winter Estates, a museum and botanical gardens in Ft. Myers, Florida, where Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built homes to enjoy the Florida alternative to Northeast winter. Our enthusiastic and informative tour guide informed us about the last big project of Edison’s life–finding a domestic source of rubber to ease potential crisis when (and he did believe it was a when, not if, possibility) another world war broke out.
Edison experimented with a variety of possible sources, planting over 17,000 species of plants to test. After extensive experimentation, he settled on a giant variant of the Goldenrod plant. It could provide a source of material to make the needed tires on which an army would roll, on which airplanes could land, and with which mechanical devices could be cushioned.
Unfortunately, the goldenrod solution was not really viable. The plant only provides a 10% yield of the chemical needed to manufacture plant-based rubber.
There is an impressive banyan tree on the property. It was a four-foot-tall, two-inch diameter twiggy sapling when Edison planted it in 1925. It was a gift from Harvey Firestone, who acquired it in India, and who gifted it to Edison to encourage his fledgling ideas about developing a domestic source for rubber. Currently, it is the largest banyan in the continental US and it occupies a full acre. That single tree populates a 400 foot diameter circle of ground between the laboratory Edison used for his rubber research and the parking lot that accommodates visitors. The only reason it isn’t bigger is that the staff regularly prune the suckers that drip down from the branches seeking to take hold and grow new sub-trunks for the tree. An acre is sufficient and there is no need to sacrifice historic buildings or necessary pavement.
That banyan tree is an emblem of an old man’s short-sightedness and need for control and of the dangers presented by only responding to the tight time frame of crisis. You won’t see it characterized as such on any of the glowing descriptions on the museum website or in the banter of the enthusiastic tour guides. However, if what the tour guide told our group is true, it is an accurate role for the tree to play.
Banyan trees, when tapped like a rubber tree, produce a form of latex that could have been developed into a substitute for imported rubber. The vitality of the Edison tree proves that they thrive in the Florida climate. The tour guide explained that tapping a ten year old banyan produces a useful yield but shortens the life of the tree to only about 30 years. Even a twenty year yield from such massive trees, which could be grown in rotation, presents an interesting proposition. When asked why Edison didn’t pursue this option, the tour guide said the following:
Edison didn’t pursue the banyan because there wasn’t time. He was in the last four years of his life when he started the research in earnest, at the founding of the Edison Botanic Research Corp in 1927. The tree was only 2 years old at the time and it would take too long for it to mature. He abandoned it as a source because he didn’t have time to work with it.
That’s it, isn’t it? He could only see a course of action that utilized his direct supervision and activity. Consequently, an interesting possiblity was abandoned.
Further research, undertaken on the oh-so-reliable internet, has revealed an even more distressing aspect of this peroid in Edison’s life. At the same time that he was sacrificing his waning health to the pursuit of plant-based rubber, there was extensive research being done elsewhere in utilzing chemicals to synthesize a different alternative. Edison dismissed it. He believed it would take too long to develop these alternatives and a war was looming.
The man who was working day and night to try to beat out his own clock dismissed the alternatives as too slow to arrive. In doing so, he culminated his life with a failure. (A failure is an event with undesireable outcomes from which you do not derive a lesson. This stands).
I ask you, then, what is your banyan tree? We have our projects, our plans, our products in development. If they are as important as we say they are, then we must think past our own efforts in developing them.
The contributions of Edison, Ford, and Firestone were massive. This, however, is not a project that belongs on the list of beneficial contributions. Edison, a tireless self-promoter who saw his title of genius as central to his value and status, set up a project where the only successful outcome was one where he delivered the solution and received the direct credit. He succumbed to end-of-life pressures. And the project failed.
It is possible to be inspired by his lengthy list of accomplishments, his determination to overcome obstacles like his hearing loss (he had only 10% hearing in one hear) and his tireless commitment to invention and innovation. It is also possible to derive important lessons from his mistakes and blind spots.
This, then, is my take away from a beautiful afternoon spent wandering about the envions of the great men who went before. Legacy should be more than a list of what we’ve done. It should be a list of what we started, enabled, inspired, and planted knowing we’d never see the fruit.
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