The Process Is The Reward
“If you don’t believe this is a great country and that it has a lot of great people, all you’ve got to do is [listen to] that podcast [and it will change your mind].”
One of the more interesting moments at this year’s Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting came when Warren Buffett and Greg Abel discussed Pilot CEO Adam Wright.
While singing his praises as a leader and a manager, both Buffett and Abel recommended that everyone listen to a podcast interview of Wright that perfectly sums up his unique outlook on the intersection of business and life.
“He’s got a podcast that will just blow you away,” said Buffett. “If you don’t believe this is a great country and that it has a lot of great people, all you’ve got to do is [listen to] that podcast [and it will change your mind].”
There was just one small problem.
Neither Buffett nor Abel actually said the name of the podcast — and provided no further clues to help us track this unnamed podcast down.
Nevertheless, I think I’ve found the interview that garnered such praise from Buffett and Abel. (And it really does live up to the hype.)
At some point in 2020, Wright appeared on an episode of the Love Leadership Podcast — “The Power of the Process” — hosted by Pastor Todd Doxzon and Mike O’Connell of Love Church Omaha. For nearly an hour, Wright laid bare the many highs and lows of his professional and personal life — including his pivot from playing in the NFL to reaching the highest levels of the energy industry.
Plow the ground beneath your feet
Charlie Munger once said, “The best source of new work is the work on your desk.” Meaning that if you do a good job on the work in front of you, the right people will notice and give you more opportunities to impress.
That simple maxim is pretty much the story of Adam Wright’s life.
Wright started out as an intern at MidAmerican Energy — back before Berkshire Hathaway even owned the Iowa-based utility. And, as an intern, he was often asked to do the grunt work that no one else wanted to do.
For example, MidAmerican purchased Northern Natural Gas from Dynegy in 2002 and all of the company’s operating manuals had to be updated to reflect its new parent company’s name. This meant thousands of pages of tedious reading, striking out every mention of Dynegy or Enron and replacing it with MidAmerican Energy.
This job fell to Wright.
While I was doing that, I was reading the standards, I was reading the operating manuals, and I started asking questions like, “What does this mean?” or “How does this work?” or “Do we still do this?” I started to learn how we operate systems.
And, from there, when new programs had to be built, they’d ask me, “Hey, you know the procedures and standards. You’ve been through them all. How about you write the new ones?”
After immersing himself in the Northern Natural Gas manuals, Wright moved over to that company’s operations group and eventually rose to vice president of marketing before re-joining MidAmerican en route to becoming CEO.
If you just simply plow the ground beneath your feet, you will unearth all this value, all this opportunity. If the land that you’re standing on isn’t producing fruit, nine times out of ten it’s because you’re not plowing the field. You’re not tilling the soil. You’re not getting up early. You’re not doing what you have to do to plant the seeds to reap the harvest later. If you would just stand there and do that — work hard in that area — there will be opportunities in front of you.
The story of Wright and the NNG manuals reminds me of Warren Buffett poring over every page of Moody’s manuals as a young investor. He absorbed so much information about so many different companies and industries — and that encyclopedic reservoir of knowledge paid off in spades over the ensuing decades.
So, too, did Wright internalize a great deal of information about the energy business — and Northern Natural Gas in particular — by doing the reading that everyone else desperately wanted to avoid.
Build a eulogy, not a resume
Warren Buffett dropped this banger at last year’s Berkshire Hathaway AGM: “You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it.”
In the podcast, Wright offered a similar sentiment.
I heard this from one of my favorite teachers, he said, “We have to spend less time trying to build our resumes and more time trying to build our eulogies.”
To do this, Wright asks himself these questions:
How do I impact my circle of influence?
How do I contribute to the people around me?
How do I live out my purpose that God has for me?
One day at a time
When Wright took over the top spot at MidAmerican Energy, he reached out to other CEOs for advice. One conversation, in particular, made a big impression.
[I asked], “How do these companies like Amazon become what they are and then how do companies like Enron crumble the way that they did?”
He was like, “One day at a time.”
It’s the same thing in your marriage … or whatever it might be as an employer or as a leader. How do they become great and how do they fail? It’s the exact same denominator: One day at a time.
Just that consistency and that daily discipline and just putting in the time and putting in the work and putting in the effort.
For Wright, every day is a new opportunity to put his five-point compass into balance.
I’ve got this five-point compass. It’s my faith, it’s my fitness, it’s my family, it’s my finances, and it’s my vocation. I look at those five things on a daily basis and go, Those five things have to be in balance. They’ve got to stay in balance.
Every day, I try to get them as balanced as possible.
How does he do this?
The power of the process.
The process is the reward
Adam Wright does not like to waste time.
His daily schedule can best be described as ambitious — packed from one end to the other with an early morning wake-up call, time at the gym, long hours at the office, dinner with his wife and family, and then more work before bed.
The key, though, is that Wright lives out this process without any expectation that it will lead to a particular reward or accomplishment. It’s about the process itself.
“It’s the participation,” he said. “The process is the reward.”
Fulfillment is not a place, but a direction.
Creating and executing the right process is a reward in and of itself.
Plugged in (and out)
Wright’s one big non-negotiable in life is taking enough time to plug himself in each night to recharge. “I will shut it down at 9 o’clock,” he said.
You have time and energy. Those are the two commodities that you really have to manage in a leadership position. You [need] a balance. You might have the energy, but you don’t have the time. You might have the time, but you don’t have the energy. So I don’t play when it comes to plugging in.
Think about your phone. Think of how you freak out if your phone [runs low on battery]. People will have chargers in their bag, they’ll make sure they charge their phone at night, they’ll put their phone on the charger in the car. They keep that thing plugged in and charged.
It’s the same thing with your body. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. So 9 o’clock — [snaps fingers] — I’m asleep.
(Bonus points for the Benjamin Franklin quote there. Wright is a true Berkshire man.)
But — and this is a big but — he rubbished the idea that anyone should give up time with family in order to advance his or her career. A balanced life will take you just as far up the corporate ladder as someone who grinds, grinds, grinds themself into dust.
Here’s the perfect example. Do it while you’re driving home. Watch the person who’s zipping by you, speeding past you, cutting in and out of lanes, running through all the yellow [lights]. And then watch how you just kind of follow traffic laws and the next thing you know you’re right next to each other at the stoplight.
You’re like, “Dude, you’re stressing yourself out, you’re taking all this risk, you’re putting your life in jeopardy and other people’s lives in jeopardy. You’re zipping around the city and here we are. We’re in the same spot. I had less stress, I didn’t break any laws, and I drove safely.”
Life is iteration
“The world is going to disappoint you,” warned Wright. “You’re probably going to fail more than you succeed — in anything. That’s just the way it works. Life is iteration. It is, by and large, trial and error. No one has ever lived your life before.”
And, since so much of life is trial and error (with emphasis on the error), it can be a fatal mistake to wrap your identity up in external trappings that you do not control. If Wright had built his identity around football, what would have happened when his NFL career came to an abrupt end due to injuries? Nothing good.
If you’re not careful and you put your identity in that next thing that defines you, more likely than not you’re going to fail at some point in time at that and it will devastate you if you don’t know who you are. If you’re not solid in how you’ve been defined … you will be disappointed and it will be hard to come back from that.
For me, the NFL was an opportunity. It was a blessing. I was privileged. It was exciting. But let’s be honest — how long was I really going to play? Two years? Three years? Six, if I was lucky? Then what?
Wright chose a better path.
By relentlessly carrying out his process day after day — with no expectation of any particular reward or destination — he successfully pivoted from professional football to the business world and is set to make his mark on Pilot (and Berkshire Hathaway) for many years to come.
Awesome write-up, enjoyed the read!
There’s a lot of Charlie Munger in this statement, and it is very true:
“The world is going to disappoint you,” warned Wright. “You’re probably going to fail more than you succeed — in anything. That’s just the way it works. Life is iteration. It is, by and large, trial and error. No one has ever lived your life before.”