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CHAPTER

2

THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME

“Your life is an occasion. Rise to it.”

—MR. MAGORIUM IN THE MOVIE

MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM

ONE DAY, my friend Tony and his five-year-old daughter, Maya, were driving through Northern California when she pointed to a woman standing on the sidewalk.

“Why is that lady standing on the corner with a sign?” she asked.

“She’s homeless and asking for food,” Tony said.

“Why don’t we get her food?”

The question caught Tony off guard. Why didn’t they get her food?

“I told Maya it was important to care about people, and I also thought of myself as a helper. Yet I was far from helping. So I did the only thing I could: I stopped the car and gave her my lunch.”

Gaunt and bundled up under many layers, the woman gave him a big smile. “Thank you, and God bless you and your beautiful daughter.”

“It had been in my face my entire life, so I grew not to see it,” Tony says. “The problem seemed so vast that the question of how to make a difference seemed too complicated to solve. The easiest thing to do was not to respond. I feared that if I gave money, they might use it the wrong way. I had forgotten that they were people. It’s so obvious, but I needed a five-year-old to show me that each homeless person is an individual. Maya knew that, and I needed to be reminded so I could be the person I wanted to be. I can’t look past people because of my fears that they might not use the money the way they should. I need to at least make eye contact with people who are homeless and acknowledge them and see if I can do something to help.”

Hearing Tony’s story made me cringe as I thought about how often I’d passed by homeless people, often with Jack by my side, without even acknowledging them. I didn’t want to be that person. I thought of myself as a helper and I’ve always told Jack how important it is to be kind, but Maya’s question reinforced that no matter what we think or say, it’s what we do that counts.

A MOTHER’S LESSON LIVES ON

Even a single action on a single day can set an example. In the case of former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode Sr., the way his mother responded to an isolated situation when he was twelve years old influenced the homelessness program he established decades later.

When Goode was growing up on a tenant farm in North Carolina, a man knocked at the family’s door at dusk one evening. “He said to my mother, who was cooking supper, ‘I’m hungry,’ and my mother, without hesitation, invited him in and shared our supper with him,” Goode says.

“As a twelve-year-old at the time, I initially had an attitude about him eating up all of our supper. I was struck by the fact that she fed this man and did not even think about the fact that she had eight other people to feed and we had next to nothing.”

But over the course of the meal, Wilson got over his “attitude” and felt his own stirrings of generosity. “I had saved about a dollar in nickels and pennies and dimes and had it stuck under my bed, and as he left I ran after him and said, ‘Mr. Hobo,’ and I gave him all the money I had in the world.”

Three decades later, while Goode was serving as managing director for the city of Philadelphia in the early 1980s, he felt the same stirrings one evening when he got a call from the health commissioner, whose office was in the same building as his.

“Director, look at Love Park,” the commissioner said.

Goode looked out his window at the park across the street. In the dusk, he could see that about fifty homeless men had taken up residence there. Recalling another encounter with homelessness that occurred in the dusk of a long-ago evening, he knew what he had to do.

Goode mobilized his team, and that same night they found a space in the basement of one of the city’s firehouses, equipped it with cots and stocked it with food. Within a few hours, they’d created a temporary shelter and begun the city’s first homeless program. Goode hadn’t even taken the time to run the idea past the mayor.

“It came to my head because I needed to respond to a human condition that existed,” he says. “After watching this man come and beg for food when I was twelve and watching my mother respond, I knew I had to respond to what I saw in front of me without hesitation.”

Today, countless homeless people in Philadelphia have that single act of kindness by Goode’s mother to thank for the help they’ve received. The city’s comprehensive homeless assistance program grew significantly under Goode’s administration and offers services that include homelessness prevention, emergency housing and a personal care home with residential care. Who knew that inviting someone to dinner could have such far-reaching effects?

MONDAYS WITH MAURICE

For Laura Schroff and Maurice Mazyck, a lunch at McDonald’s was the meal that would make a dramatic impact on their lives. And it almost didn’t happen.

“Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change? I’m hungry,” Maurice said on a September day in 1986.

Normally, Laura would have just kept walking. It was Manhattan, and it was easy to ignore people asking for money. “They were just so prevalent that most people simply looked the other way,” she says in her inspiring book An Invisible Thread. “The problem seemed so vast, so endemic, that stopping to help a single panhandler could feel all but pointless. And so we swept past them every day, great waves of us going on with our lives and accepting that there was nothing we could really do to help.”

And she did sweep past him. But then she stopped.

He said he was hungry.

She’d noticed he was young, but when she walked back to him, she saw that he was only a boy.

“Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change? I’m hungry.”

Laura didn’t want to give him money and offered to take him to McDonald’s instead. So the thirty-five-year-old advertising executive and the eleven-year-old panhandler in his dirty sweat suit and beat-up sneakers went to the Golden Arches for burgers, fries and chocolate shakes.

After lunch, Laura and Maurice walked through a nearby park, got ice cream and played some video games at an arcade. Then Laura gave him her business card and told him he could call if he needed anything. Over the next few days, she couldn’t get him out of her mind, and when he didn’t call, she realized he probably didn’t have a quarter for a pay phone and went looking for him.

She found him close to the corner where they’d met. He said he’d been hoping she’d find him, so they went to McDonald’s for burgers and fries again.

“Do you want to meet me on the corner next Monday night?” Laura asked as they ate. “I’ll take you to the Hard Rock Cafe.”

Maurice gave a big smile but hesitated. “Could I wear the clothes that I have on? They’re the only clothes I own.”

“Of course.”

When he arrived Monday night, his face was sparkling clean and so were his burgundy sweats. He’d obviously gone all out for the occasion.

They went on to have a great time and decided to start meeting for dinner on Mondays on a regular basis—a tradition had been born.

It was a union of two worlds. Maurice lived in public housing in a one-room apartment filled with a rotating cast of relatives and drug addicts. It was a violent and chaotic home, and he was more or less responsible for himself. Meanwhile, two blocks away, Laura lived in a high-rise building that had a doorman—a true escape for Maurice in every way.

The first time he stepped into her world, though, there was tension on both sides. After about a half dozen get-togethers, Laura thought it was time to invite him for a home-cooked meal, but her friends told her it could be dangerous to allow a street kid into her home. As for Maurice, he couldn’t have been more uncomfortable as he sat at the end of the couch, putting as much distance between them as possible. (Although Laura didn’t know it at the time, he’d brought a box cutter he’d stolen because he thought there was some kind of catch to her generosity and he had no idea what it might be.) Wanting to clear the air and put them both at ease, Laura cut to the chase.

“The reason why I’ve invited you to my home is I consider you a friend, and friendship is built on trust. I want you to understand we’re never going to have this conversation again, but if anything is ever missing from my apartment, we will no longer be friends.”

Maurice looked mystified.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Miss Laura, you just want to be my friend? That’s it?”

“Well, of course.”

His face relaxed. “Miss Laura, a deal is a deal.” Then he stood up and they shook on it.

During their weekly get-togethers, Laura and Maurice would have lunch, bake cookies, watch TV and read. Maurice would also take naps on Laura’s couch and generally relish the chance to do what he wanted to do without anyone bothering him. It was a routine they both looked forward to, and it seemed to get Maurice through the week—until he showed up at Laura’s apartment unexpectedly one Saturday. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m really hungry. Could we get something to eat?”

Laura fed him and learned that he hadn’t had any food for two days. She also learned that this wasn’t unusual—he often went without food. Sometimes he’d be so hungry that he felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.

Laura couldn’t accept this and came up with a plan. “Look, Maurice, I can’t bear the thought of you not eating every day, so this is what we can do: I can either give you some money for the week—and you’ll have to be really careful how you spend it—or, if you prefer, on Monday nights we can go to the supermarket and I can buy all the things you like to eat and make you lunch for the week. I’ll leave it with the doorman, and on the way to school you can swing by and pick it up.”

“If you make me lunch, are you going to put it in a brown paper bag?”

“Do you want it in a brown paper bag?”

“Yes, I want my lunch in a brown paper bag. When kids come to school and they have their lunch in a brown paper bag, everyone knows that someone cares about them.”

Two months later, Maurice had no one to go with him to his parent-teacher conference, and Laura stepped in again. In her book, she shares the conversation she had with Maurice’s teacher.

“You should know that Maurice is very proud of you,” the teacher said. “He speaks about you often.”

“I’m very proud of him,” Laura said. “He’s such a special boy.”

“Miss Schroff, I must say something to you. Children like Maurice are always disappointed in life. Every day someone else lets them down. I hope you realize you can’t just come in and out of his life. If you are going to be there for him, you have to really be there for him. You cannot just wake up one day and abandon this boy.”

“Maurice is my friend, and I would never walk out on a friend.”

As Laura and Maurice became closer, Maurice began spending time with Laura’s family, and it was a visit with Laura’s sister, Annette, on Christmas Day that inspired him to start thinking about his future. He was amazed by what he saw—in their home in a New York suburb, Annette’s family had three bathrooms all to themselves, their own washer and dryer and a room just for watching TV. Even more amazing, the whole family sat down for dinner together. At Maurice’s house, no one sat down to eat, let alone together. He’d eat wherever he was when he was handed food. This was a revelation for him.

On the way home that night, Laura asked him what his favorite part of the day had been, thinking he’d say it was riding bikes or playing on the backyard swing set with Annette’s kids.

“I love that room,” he said.

“Which room?”

“You know, that fancy room where we had dinner.”

“Oh, that’s the dining room. Why did you love that room?”

“I thought the food was great, but I loved how everybody was talking and laughing and sharing. And, you know what? Someday when I grow up, I’m going to have a room just like that.”

After having received only two gifts in his life—a teddy bear from the Salvation Army and a joint from his grandmother—Maurice had received many gifts that night. And the most important one was the inspiration to dream.

“At that point, I’d never looked that far down the road,” Maurice says in An Invisible Thread. “I just lived from day to day. I was more worried about what I was going to eat the next day than about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t know if I even would grow up, given the way I was living, but after meeting Laura, I began to broaden my view on my life. I began to think I could actually get a job of some kind. For the first time ever, I could picture myself as an adult, and maybe even see myself working.”

Maurice went on to get a high school GED and graduate from college. He’s now in the construction business, and he and his wife of over twenty years have seven children. He also mentors kids in community youth groups.

It all could have gone very differently if Laura had simply given him a few dollars to get something to eat. “To this day I can still feel the pain of my stomach hurting from not eating for two days. And God sent me an angel. And my angel was my mom Laura. I love her to death.”

The relationship has changed Laura’s life, too. “I was so lucky to meet him. I was thirty-five years old and working around the clock, and all of a sudden one day this kid came into my life and gave me this incredible different perspective and purpose in my life. Maurice opened my eyes and heart to so many things. He taught me one of the greatest lessons a person can hope to learn: He taught me to be grateful for what I have. If we could all walk in Maurice’s shoes for just one day, we’d never complain about our lives again. He taught me about resilience and courage. He taught me the real meaning of lunch in a brown paper bag.”

He also taught her the importance of having a big dining room table where a family eats together and shares conversation—like the one where Maurice and his family eat today.

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN MY FIRST SEMESTER OF COLLEGE

Institutions have a unique opportunity because they tend to reach so many people, whether through consistent kindness or a single action that has an impact decades later. The example that Haverford College set for Howard Lutnick would reverberate eighteen years after he graduated.

When terrorists flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Howard and his wife were dropping their son off for his first day of kindergarten in the Bronx. After hearing what had happened, Howard, raced to the scene to check on his employees at the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where he was president. The firm’s Lower Manhattan office employed 960 people at One World Trade Center.

When he arrived, he approached people rushing out of the building, but he could find none of the 658 employees who had been in the office that day. Before long, he found himself consumed in a cloud of debris as Two World Trade Center collapsed, and he had to flee the scene.

Howard later learned that none of the employees had survived. The plane had crashed into the ninety-third floor, and Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices were above the point of impact. His employees had no way to escape.

Making the situation especially heartbreaking was Cantor’s policy of encouraging employees to hire friends and family—the company believes hires should be people the team would love to work with. So the survivors lost not just colleagues but friends and family. That held true for everyone from the CEO to the security guard: Howard lost his brother, security guard James Hopper lost his brother-in-law and both lost their best friends. Some siblings died together—twenty-seven sets in all. The loss could barely be comprehended.

In the wake of the tragedy, with no way to contact the employees who hadn’t been in the office, the company asked media sources to announce the details of a conference call they could join. That call turned out to be pivotal.

“What I said was, ‘If we are going to go back to work, it sure as heck isn’t for money,’ ” Howard says. “ ‘Because Lord knows I really couldn’t care less about going to work and I couldn’t care less about money. What I want to do is crawl into bed in a ball and just hold my family as tight as I possibly can. But if we are going to go to work, there is only one reason we are going to work, and that is we have to help the families of those we lost.’ We ended up with a unanimous decision by all those who were on the phone that we were going to rebuild the company and try to have the company survive for one reason and one reason only: to try to help the families of those we lost.”

After being abandoned by his own family as a college student, he knew exactly what not to do in this situation.

“My mother died when I was in eleventh grade, and Dad was killed my first week at Haverford College. My extended family pulled out. We were three children—my twenty-year-old sister, eighteen-year-old me and my fifteen-year-old brother—and they thought we’d be sticky. My uncle thought that if he reached in and he touched us and we came over for dinner, maybe we’d never leave. So they chose not to ever invite us for dinner, and I knew what it was like when people pulled out.”

The administrators at Haverford, who had known Howard for only a week when he lost his father, set a different example. The president of the college called Howard immediately to tell him the college would pay for his education. The university his sister attended, on the other hand, told her that she should get a job as a waitress if she couldn’t afford tuition—making Haverford’s offer even more meaningful.

“Haverford College showed me what it meant to be a human being,” Howard says, and he went on to demonstrate the same humanity in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. Besides committing to being present for the families of his deceased employees and helping them financially, he personally called them and wrote thirteen hundred condolence notes by hand, to both spouses and parents. He also set up a foundation run by his sister to provide information, support and advocacy for them.

When it came to restarting the business, though—the vehicle for carrying out the financial commitment to the families—there was a low likelihood of success. The firm lacked sufficient employees and infrastructure. It also had a secure computer system, and many of the passwords had been known only by employees who had died. The off-site backups containing the password information had been in the basement of Two World Trade Center.

Howard says the company never asked for help but got it anyway. “Microsoft flew in fifty people to break into our own systems. Cisco brought in twenty 18-wheelers with every piece of hardware known to mankind and parked them as far as the eye could see [at Cantor’s temporary site in New Jersey]. So if we asked for a piece of hardware and it was in Truck 12, they took a dolly and got it off.”

Unfortunately, while Cantor was busy trying to rise from the ashes, competitors saw this as a great opportunity, and on Thursday, September 13, a competing bond market was opened. Civilian flights had been grounded in the U.S. for two days and the NFL and Major League Baseball had cancelled their games out of respect for those who had died, but a new bond market was opening.

Besides wanting to hold on to their customers, Cantor somehow needed to settle billions of dollars’ worth of trades made on September 10 even though the records had been destroyed. So Howard’s team went into overdrive. They worked around the clock in a backup data center on the site, trying to get the company’s electronic trading platform for bonds online. They took naps on cots, in chairs or in their cars. And they hired more than thirty new employees that weekend.

“If they could start on Monday and they were breathing and we thought they knew what they were doing, we hired them,” Howard says. It was a sprint.

Members of the London office also worked all hours, taking over jobs from their late New York colleagues and calling customers to try to keep the business going. And bankers loaned the firm $70 billion so it could settle trades.

It all paid off. On Monday, Cantor Fitzgerald was open for business with its electronic trading platform. It had no way to let clients know, though, so Howard did a media interview.

“I went on TV because I had no salespeople, had no way to tell people we were in business, and told my story and I started crying because, as it turns out, at that time when you said ‘658’ to me I couldn’t not cry. I thought, of course, I could keep it together, but whenever the number 658 was said, I started to cry. But we had to try to take care of our families.”

So they were up and running, but their problems weren’t over. “We were so short-staffed that when we opened for business, we had a rule that we could only do one trade per client because we didn’t want to mess things up. We were a company held together with glue and bubble gum and string.”

But there was a client who wouldn’t take “one” for an answer.

“The woman on the other end of the phone, who works for one of the biggest money managers in America, says, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. Our investment committee got together this morning. We decided we’re doing all of our business with you.’ We said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t understand. We don’t have anybody. We can’t do it. We’ll do a terrible job. We can’t do it.’ She says, ‘I don’t have a choice. I was ordered to do this. If you don’t do it, I’ll lose my job. I’m sending you by fax everything we want to do. You need to take care of it. Do the best you can. We’re okay with it,’ and hung up.”

That day ended up being the busiest in Cantor’s history. “We’d been killed with kindness,” as Howard puts it. “We announced to the world that we were hungry, and everybody in the world reached out and took a little piece of bread and stuck it in our mouth.”

Howard was concerned that his decimated firm would fail under the volume of trades, but the team managed to hold things together. There was even a chance that they would fulfill their mission to help the 9/11 victims’ families. It had been decided that 25 percent of profits would go to the families for five years and that their health care benefits would be covered for ten years. Day One seemed to hold out hope for the mission’s success.

Then Howard got a call from his Los Angeles office. All sixteen staffers were planning to attend the company’s upcoming memorial service. Although, on one hand, this was a touching show of support, something told Howard that trouble was looming. Those sixteen salespeople were the best in the company’s equity sector, and in a sense, they were the key to everything. If they weren’t on board with the sacrifice that all the firm’s employees were making for the sake of the affected families, if they weren’t comfortable with the risk that the firm wouldn’t recover—in other words, if they were going to turn in their resignations—it would be the beginning of the end for Cantor.

When the LA contingent got to town, they arranged to meet with Howard at his home. All he could think about was how valuable these people were to the firm.

“They were incredible. They were huge producers of revenue. They could get a job anywhere. We were a broken firm, so they could easily go across the street and make more money.”

When Howard walked into the meeting room, everyone stood and gathered around him. He braced himself to hear the worst: “Howard, we love you but we’re sorry—we have to leave.”

But that’s not what they said. What they said was “We’re never leaving.”

“It still gets me,” Howard says. “It’s unbelievable.”

And yes, all sixteen are still with the firm today.

In the five years after the September 11 attacks, the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund donated $180 million to the families of the employees who died at the World Trade Center. And every September 11, the firm donates 100 percent of the day’s revenues to charity, which has amounted to about $159 million globally and over $12 million in 2018. The relief fund now assists people affected by natural disasters and emergencies, direct service charities and wounded members of the military. In total, it has distributed $336 million.

People often ask Howard what drove him to do so much for his employees’ families.

“Haverford taught me what it was to be a human being,” he says, “and September 11 opened the door for me to express how to be a human being.”

Besides spearheading Cantor’s donations, Howard has become the largest donor in Haverford College’s history, having given more than $65 million. His contributions have taken the form of endowed scholarships and buildings named for his brother and two close friends who had worked for Cantor.

The way he sees it, it’s nothing compared with the invaluable lesson he learned in college. “Each of us will have the opportunity to change the life of someone else. If you see it and you grab it, you can do what Haverford did for me. Haverford taught me a fundamental lesson, and there was no chance I’d miss it.”

WHAT WE CAN DO

My dad taught me to be a good person. He’d lend a hand or an ear to anyone. I’m not sure he could hammer a nail, but we had an awesome collection of tools in our basement because Dad, an accountant, did a neighbor’s taxes for free, for which he was given a new tool as a thank-you every year. A soldier and his family visited our house because Dad had sent him encouraging letters through a Gulf War letter-writing program. I’d be in the grocery store and people would stop me and say, “Are you Joe Aronson’s son?” When I said yes, they’d say things like “Such a nice man” and “Your dad is wonderful.”

We set an example simply by the way we live. Often, we’re not even conscious of it—we have no idea that we’re helping someone, let alone that we’re sharing a moment that may change their perspective.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount from examples that people have set for me. Here are a few takeaway ideas that have helped me to become a better person and made me more likely to make a difference through my daily interactions:

Be aware

If you have kids, assume they’re watching everything you do. They are.

Make better decisions

There are times when we can rationalize doing or saying something that we might not be proud of. A friend of mine tries to avoid that by assuming that the entire world will know every decision he makes, and another friend asks his employees to assume that all of their decisions will appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I imagine my family will know every choice I make. Who can you imagine knowing every decision you make?

Make people believe you can levitate a table

“If you do your job well, within six months you’ll be able to convince the kids that you can levitate a table.” When my supervisor said this during a training session for mentors for at-risk youths, I thought it was crazy. The youths had been in trouble with the law, but they were far from stupid. It took me until the end of the session to understand what he meant. Very few people keep all or even most of their promises (even being on time). So if you become the person who keeps every commitment you make, you’ll truly stand out, and if you say you’re going to do something crazy—like levitate a table—people are likely to think you might actually know how to pull it off. After all, you’ll be that rare person who delivers on what you say you’ll do.

Tell the truth

A couple were suing my wife and me because we’d backed out of an agreement to purchase their home. It’s legal to back out of a house-buying agreement, and I was furious. The husband was in real estate and knew the law, so why was he suing us? I called my friend Jon to vent and ask his opinion, and after listening, he asked a few questions. Then he told me that although I wasn’t legally at fault, the situation was my fault and he explained why. I appreciate Jon’s honesty. He’s the guy I go to when I need advice. He tells me the truth even if I don’t want to hear it. Now I try to be the person who tells friends the truth even when it would be a lot easier to just tell them what they’d like to hear.

Wave

I was waiting to cross the street one day when the driver at the intersection gave me a friendly wave to signal me to go. Usually, people signal for you to cross with a quick flick of the wrist, and I appreciate it, but it makes me feel like I should hurry and that they’re letting me go because they think they have to. When this driver gave me a friendly wave, I didn’t feel rushed. I felt like he was happy to give me the chance to cross and it made my morning. So I’ve started doing that when I stop to let pedestrians cross, and almost everyone gives me a smile and a wave back.

Be sensitive to limitations

My cousin Lianne’s son Josh has a nut allergy and is usually served a dessert that pales in comparison with the other kids’ dessert at birthday parties. But one day Josh had the same dessert as everyone else, and he talked about it the whole way home. And while he did all that talking, Lianne had a good cry. Dessert isn’t a big deal to many of us, but when you’re the kid who can never have the dessert everyone else has—or that kid’s parent—it is a big deal. Lianne also taught me about other challenges faced by kids with food allergies: not being able to take part in the team snack at a Little League game or being told you’re the reason that your entire group isn’t allowed to eat a particular food. I wish I’d thought about this earlier, but now when I’m coaching a team or throwing a party, I don’t wait for parents to contact me. I ask all of them to let me know about any food allergies, and I get food everyone can enjoy together, even when parents tell me not to worry because they can bring their own child’s snack. And for Halloween, in addition to candy, we’ve started giving out vampire teeth and other small toys. Of course, the principle is broader than food allergies. It’s about being considerate of each individual’s limitations, whether it’s a dietary restriction or a physical disability or something else.

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We’re setting an example all the time and usually we’re not even thinking about it—the mom who chose the dessert that Josh could eat certainly had no idea her example would reach me, considering I was a hundred miles away at the time. But sometimes, setting an example is exactly what we have in mind. When you have that in mind, just look around for opportunities. They could be as close as your workplace, your neighborhood or even your home.

TAKE FIFTEEN MINUTES TO . . .

Take out a pen and paper or your phone and answer these questions: Who do you want to set an example for? What example do you want to set? What actions can you take to set that example?