“I’ve had 36 orthopedic operations, have two fused ankles, my knees, hands and wrists don’t work, I now have a fused spine, other than that, everything is great.”
Let me ask you a question.
Through what emotional lens did you read that quote above? Was it through a lens of bitterness or whimsy?
***
Legendary basketball broadcaster and hoopster Bill Walton passed away last week at the age of 71 following a battle with cancer. If you’re a Millenial or Gen Z, you are probably most familiar with Walton’s professional or college broadcasting career as a color commentator. If you’re Gen X, you may even remember the end of his playing days before his career succumbed to myriad injuries. If you’re a boomer basketball fan, then you witnessed greatness.
If you had experienced Walton’s public persona, you would have probably read that quote at the top with Walton’s bombastic cadence, with a smile and a twinkle in his eye. His most quotable Walton-isms are too many to count, but they have been an indelible part of my basketball fandom since 1986. He made watching the game fun because you never knew where his meanderings might take him. He was also one of the biggest Grateful Dead fans who has lived, so do with that what you will.
But he was also incredibly insightful in that crazy but intelligent great-uncle kind of way.
“Success at the highest level comes down to one question: Can you decide that your happiness can come from someone else’s success?”
This is the thought that popped into my mind when I was talking with Amy Butte over the weekend where she shared why she decided to become Navan’s new CFO. She had stepped away from a previous job as finance chief because of a confluence of events: raising her son, shutting down her startup company and losing a number of close friends to cancer. She pivoted to working primarily as an adviser on several boards. To Walton’s point, her professional mission in a sense was to bring others success.
But when Navan’s CEO Ariel Cohen asked Butte if she’d like to switch back, to pivot from adviser to operator, she told me she “I asked myself the question. ‘Do I have one more in me? Would I regret it if I didn’t do it? How much fun would I have doing it? And could I make it work for the things that are important to me today?’”
For a time, Butte said, she “needed a little bit more space to be there for myself and other people in my life.” Today, she’s in a place where she’s excited to return to the CFO role.
Butte (probably) has never publicly pontificated about glockenspiels or whether Boris Diaw was the same as Beethoven and the age of the Romantics. But when she told me that her decision came down to a simple idea: “I asked myself, not just what do I want to do, but how do I want to live?” I could have easily imagined Walton saying that as well while commenting on Robert Horry throwing entry passes to the post.
As Walton once said, “No matter how good you get, there’s always something further out there.”
