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This blows my mind: Oprah Winfrey and I have something in common. We are both committed to the belief that − to live a truly happy and fulfilling life − you must live authentically. If you are not clear what it means to live an authentic life, here’s how Oprah explains it: “You can run away from yourself for a very long time. You can be married to the wrong person for decades and pretend it's fine. You can fake it, doing work you only half care about. You can hide behind accoutrements, square footage, and cars, big-screen TVs and fancy vacations. But you will never get away with being a phony.”
Oprah is right on the mark. Sadly, I did not understand the importance of living an authentic life until I was in my 60s. Had this concept been introduced to me as a young man, much grief could have been avoided.
As a teenager, I was one of those shy, grey guys hovering in the background of life. I barely scraped by at school and was poor at athletics. After dropping out of high school, I had a series of menial jobs with an engineering company. Then, through sheer good luck, I landed a junior job at a publishing company. It turned out I was born for this work, and quickly rose through the ranks. Within a decade, I held a senior management position.
At the age of 40, I founded my own publishing business. It was successful beyond my wildest dreams. Within a decade the business was raking in over $4 million per month. People began recognizing me on the street and in restaurants. Invitations flooded in to serve on the boards of prestigious charities. As if by magic, bright beautiful women suddenly found me interesting, and themselves available.
This was a heady time for a socially insecure high school dropout with no experience in coping with success. My first marriage failed because I neglected my wife and children while building my business.
Three years later, a beautiful woman took an interest in me. Her name was Penny, and she was more than good looking. She was highly intelligent, capable, and socially sophisticated. We shared interests in music, theatre, and art. Penny suggested we work together on a publishing project. I was flattered and offered her a job at my company.
Within a year we were engaged to be married, and I felt like the luckiest man on earth.
After the marriage, it was agreed I would focus on running the business. As well as collaborating with me on our publishing project, Penny would manage our household and social life. We bought and renovated a beautiful home in an up-market neighborhood. Penny took the lead in decorating our new home and hiring a live-in housekeeper. Because she was a well-connected woman who got things done, Penny was recruited to manage two important charities. She loved hosting dinner parties in our opulent dining room. To these, she invited leaders of Toronto’s arts and business communities. I was mildly disappointed when my less than sophisticated life-long friends were not invited, but I rationalized that they would feel out of place.
As the years rolled on, Penny arranged for us to socialize with the rich and powerful. We attended glamorous parties and spent weekends in New York, Nantucket, and Palm Beach. We rubbed shoulders with and visited the homes of celebrities including Sargent Shriver, a US presidential candidate, and his wife Eunice Shriver, President Kennedy’s niece. We spent a weekend at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis port. We were invited to dinner parties on a 300-foot luxury yacht owned jointly by a Saudi prince and a US billionaire. We had a condo in LA across the street from Johnny Carson. Our Toronto-based home included a huge walnut-panelled office for me, and my own art studio. Every year, Penny hosted a major party at the Toronto Film Festival.
For the first five years of our marriage, this life in the fast lane was an exciting experience for me. Gradually, though, I began feeling like an imposter. One evening, while sitting alone in my opulent home office, I was overcome by profound feelings of sadness and guilt. I didn’t need this extravagant office and my own art studio. This wasn’t right when people across the globe were going to bed hungry and living in dilapidated shacks.
I began having these feelings on a regular basis but didn’t have the courage to share them with Penny. On one occasion, while chatting with Donald Trump’s recently divorced wife, Ivanka, at a lavish party in Palm Beach, I wanted to escape. All she talked about was her wonderful life. When Ivanka moved on, I slipped away from the party and sat alone in the garden thinking, What am I doing here?
Thoughts exploded into my mind. These were not my people. I would much prefer sitting with an artist, a writer, or a graphic designer, discussing their work and having a few laughs. What a vacant life I was living. I was unhappy. I was not sleeping well. On many nights I would lie in bed thinking, You are a fake, Ron. But I did not have the courage to change what I knew in my heart was wrong.
Then fate intervened to save me from myself. At first, it seemed like the ultimate disaster. The stock market crashed. This, compounded by a cascading series of events, over which I had no control, resulted in me losing the business I had built over the past 20 years.
My life was in shambles. I was a bloody mess, psychologically. Within three years, Penny and I were divorced.
It took more than five years to recover from the loss of my business and marriage. During this period, I ruminated endlessly trying to figure out what had gone wrong to trigger this disaster. I met weekly with a psychologist. With her prompting, the fog began to lift, and I could see clearly when and how and why my life had derailed.
I came to realize that the most important factors in living a happy and fulfilling life are your relationships and friendships, and having true passion for the work you do. I had screwed up in both departments.
During the decade after starting my business, my time was spent with writers, editors, top-gun marketers, and creative people, all of whom shared a passion for working as a team to build a thriving business.
During the next decade, this changed. My time was spent with lawyers, investors, business consultants, and financial planners. With their encouragement, I founded a mutual fund company. This stage of my business life was not a fun experience. In fact, it was the worst decision of my career. I had no passion for building a financial services company, nor did I enjoy interacting with those who managed the business.
People I enjoy spending time with − and cultivating as friends − are artists, writers, and creators. People not motivated by the wealth that may, or may not, flow from their creativity. But they have passion for the work they do and have fun doing it. Fun is a short, three-letter word, and its importance in life is often underrated.
Having come to this realization about myself, and what makes me happy, I spent the next decade rebuilding my life and relationships. In my mid-70s I married a wonderful woman from the publishing business whose passions include theatre and writing poetry. Like me, she has no interest in living life in the fast lane; we spend our time with family and a small group of close friends whose company we enjoy. Our greatest joy comes from spending time together. Every day, we take time to smell the roses. Every day we have fun, laugh, and enjoy our life.
Now, during the last stage of my life, I am living the authentic me. And I have never been happier! Wealth and fame do not automatically lead to fulfillment and happiness. Of course, it’s important to be able to put food on the table, but money must come second. Following your passions is the only way to ensure true fulfillment and happiness.
Ron Hume
Action Plan
If you have concerns that your life is off track, and you can’t pinpoint exactly why you feel this way, answer the following questions to determine whether you are living an authentic life:
Do you have true passion for the work you do?
Are there people in your life with whom you feel happy and easygoing?
Do the people who make you feel good play a big role in your life?
Do you have fun every day?
Do you laugh every day?
Do you make time every day to meditate and smell the roses?
You can’t fix something before you understand what is broken. If you answered NO to most of these questions, you have work to do. If you want to live an authentic life, only you can take the action needed to do so.
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Ron, thank you for being so vulnerable in this piece by sharing such raw and personal history. Quite an authentic thing do to! And thanks for also sharing how you finally found the thing you really never knew you were looking for your entire life.
A personal story with a timeless, universal message. Thank you, Ron. Throughout, I kept thinking, “I would like to write this well.”