Note To Self. Quit Job

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The List, ultimately, is what ended Herb Lurie’s career. Fifteen years ago, shortly after he started a Wall Street job as a mergers-and-acquisition specialist for Merrill Lynch, Lurie randomly began jotting down things he wanted to do before he died.

He was logging brutal hours in those days, sometimes 100 a week, and the List was one thing that helped keep him going. “Someday,” the List reassured him, “you’ll get more than 3 hours of sleep a night. You’ll ride horses and travel and do more to maintain the machine than just swallow food and shower.”

At first it was a few quick scrawls on a Merrill memo pad:

• Learn to play piano
• Sky dive
• Take an African safari

After Lurie began free-climbing through the Merrill Lynch ranks and earning more downtime, the List grew longer and more complicated — much more complicated:

• Research autism
• Get a helicopter pilot’s license
• Go on an archaeological dig in Greece
• Seeing Eye dogs — how are they trained?

What kept the List alive and manically evolving was Lurie’s success. It wasn’t long before he’d broken out as one of the greatest deal-makers of his era. As a brainy tactician, he specialized in big bank mergers; and he masked his sharp eye for vantage points and percentages behind a dough-boyish demeanor and easygoing, storytelling manner. In April 1998, he landed the two biggest bank mergers of all time in the same week: Several days after joining NationsBank to Bank of America, Lurie united First Chicago with Bank One. Either one of those deals would have made his career. Nailing both made him a legend.

By the time he turned 40, Lurie was cruising toward a cushy management position with Merrill Lynch. The List, however, was still on his desk at home and beginning to nettle him. With time running out, he realized there was no way he could accomplish everything on it in one lifetime. At some point, he’d have to dump a few of his dreams.

Instead, he dumped his job.

“I like this guy already!” erupts Pat Croce, motivational consultant, former president of the Philadelphia 76ers, and author of the New York Times best-seller I Feel Great and You Will Too! After hearing only the first half of the Lurie story, Croce can’t contain himself. He’s thrilled by Lurie’s unabashed love of learning.

Here’s what he means: “Do you know why so many guys hit their professional peaks and feel deflated instead of elated?” he asks. “It’s because they’ve lost their ability to dream up new challenges. For years, they’ve accepted society’s definition of the top rung, and once they get there, they’re like, ‘Now what?’” Because they were so focused on the practical next step, Croce says, they allowed their imaginations to atrophy. Then a crisis hit — a divorce, a mortality reminder like September 11 or a good friend’s death — and they feel the urge to make the most of their time. But their “reinvention mechanism” is rusted from disuse.

Lurie, however, was ready for success. He’d unconsciously been preparing for that moment from the day he graduated. “First, he painted a vision,” Croce explains. “He didn’t care how outlandish it was — all options were on the List. Then, when the time was right, he pulled the old Bugs Bunny trick and found a way to step into the landscape he’d painted for himself.”

Practice Quitting
Actually,” Lurie says, “the first time I tried to quit, I failed.” He still loved his work, and his boss jangled his nerves with a few pointed comments: “It’s been 20 years since you sat in a classroom. What if you don’t like philanthropic work?” And then the killer: “Aren’t you going to open the Wall Street Journal one morning and be dying to get back into the action?”

This one really hit home. “I was a serious deal junky,” Lurie admits. “For me, finishing a big deal was euphoria. I had some serious worries that I would miss that.” So Lurie backed away from his resignation plans, but he didn’t abandon them. Instead, it dawned on him that he should apply the same techniques to quitting his job as he had to doing it. Like any other business decision, due diligence was called for.

“I hear from people all the time who spend more time researching their next car than they do their next career,” says Jamie Fabian, “The Career Coach,” whose advice column for JobCircle.com is based on her 15 years as a human-resources executive. “They’re hot for a change, and so they end up making a ‘flee from’ decision instead of a ‘go to.’”

To avoid that, Fabian recommends this essential step: Spend at least 2 days shadowing someone whose career you’re thinking of joining. “Learn if your talents and temperament are truly a good match for the job.”

Identify Your Purpose
The first items Lurie wanted to tackle on the List after quitting his job were to earn a master’s degree in psychology and to try to contribute to the treatment and study of acute autism. Lurie had no personal connection to the disorder; he’d simply been intrigued by a documentary he’d seen, and he began reading research performed by one of the top scientists in the field, Bernard Rimland, Ph.D., at the Autism Research Institute in San Diego.

“One day, I received a phone call from a fellow I’d never met,” Rimland recalls. He was initially somewhat skeptical about the caller because ever since the movie Rain Man, strangers with a highly romanticized notion of autism would call to see how they could get involved. “They don’t understand that it’s a tremendously debilitating disorder, an excruciating ailment for the victims as well as their families,” he says.

Lurie, however, was different. “He was direct, purposeful, and very rational, and I could tell he was highly motivated,” Rimland says, and he was so impressed that he put Lurie in touch with David Holmes, Ed.D., executive director of the highly respected Eden Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

As a psychologist, Holmes feels he understands what pushed Lurie to switch careers. “I think he was very lucky to learn a profound truth at a relatively young age — what ultimately brings us peace is not how much we get, but how much we can share in terms of spirit, knowledge, and encouragement.”

Stimulate Your Brain Through Change
Gandhi understood that every time you make a change, you discover far more about yourself than you thought was possible,” says Brian Biro, a former U.S. National Swim Team coach who is now a life coach, helping people work toward goals, and the author of Beyond Success: 15 Secrets of a Winning Life.

You can make these discoveries because unfamiliar circumstances stimulate the brain’s “reticular activating system,” which ordinarily blocks out anything that’s not a threat or of value. “It’s like a junk-mail filter,” Biro explains. “When you’re in a comfortable routine, your brain allows only the perceptions that are necessary. But when you’re out in the woods, your brain goes on heightened alert.”

This primitive consciousness, he says, kicks in whenever you take on a new challenge. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself drawing on hidden talents, Biro says, and discovering resources around you that you’d never noticed.

Somehow, Lurie intuited that he would need a lot of challenges, not just a few intense ones. Besides his helicopter lessons, his graduate classes at Columbia, and his work with Eden, Lurie joined the board of the U.S. Equestrian Team, and he and his wife became volunteer dog-walkers at the Seeing Eye Institute in Morristown, New Jersey.

But one man wasn’t so eager to receive Lurie’s attention. “I was skeptical of him,” says Herb Terrace, Ph.D., a Columbia psychology professor and one of the world leaders in nonhuman primate research. “Lots of people say they want to work with monkeys, but they fall by the wayside.” Lurie, however, had an interesting idea — he wanted to see if he could combine his work with autistic children with studies in primate communication. This caught Terrace’s attention: If Lurie could help link the two disciplines, it could lead to some truly groundbreaking advances.

Still, Terrace was reluctant to give a highly prized seat in his lab to a novice. Finally, one thing won him over. “We were standing outside on a freezing February day,” Lurie recounts. “Professor Terrace was still undecided, so he says, ‘Look, I’ve got scientists from all over the world who want time in my lab. Why should I give it to you?’”

Lurie looked around at the miserable Manhattan weather and tightened his coat. “Professor, I could be in the Grand Caymans right now, lying on a beach,” he said. “What does that tell you?’”

The professor laughed. “You’re in,” he said.

Epilogue: Herb Lurie finished his first year of graduate school. He has been promoted to the Eden Institute Board of Directors and was elected vice-chairman of the U.S. Equestrian Team. He has nearly all the air miles he needs to qualify for his helicopter license, and he went on safari to Africa last October. But he’s proudest of one thing: “He did such a great job in our study that we included his name on our research paper,” says Jessica Cantlon, a team leader in the Columbia primate lab. “It’s amazing,” she adds. “He came out of nowhere, and now he’s a major contributor in the field of nonverbal cognition. If there are other men like him on Wall Street, send them to us.”

By: Christopher MacDougall - Best Life Magazine