For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them. No matter how much I liked my clients and my colleagues, delivering for them could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.
Once I understood this, I knew it was a matter of time before I had to find another career. I did find ways within the Firm to work more on issues that I considered intrinsically important, like energy efficiency research to help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and war-zone economic development work to help grow private sector employment in Iraq and Afghanistan. But every few months the project and client changed, through the natural rhythm of the consulting business, and then it was time to study and care about something and someone new. The churn, which at first had been stimulating, now made me feel unmoored.
Not that I had ever truly expected management consulting to become my life’s calling. I was in it for the education, and McKinsey had delivered on its promise as a place to learn—about industry, about project management, and about myself. Now it was time to seek work that linked whatever skills I had gained to the things that mattered most. Meanwhile, even before resolving what would come after life at the Firm, I began looking for ways to use personal time for causes I cared about, such as volunteering on campaigns. I also began researching military service, especially the possibility of being a reserve officer, which meant I could serve without necessarily making it a career. Unexpectedly, it was a campaign trip to Iowa that shifted my attitude on military service from curiosity to reality.
4
The Volunteers
“You boys are not dressed to be out in this cold,” was how Farmer Daughton introduced himself as he stepped out of his truck and looked the three of us over.1
It was nearing midnight, and he did not appear to be in a very good mood, but we were as glad to see him as if he had been a long-lost friend. We had tried everything to get our little rental car out of the snow—pushing, pulling, rocking, revving. A clipboard from the back seat was used as a shovel, pick, and ramp, to no effect, until we finally gave up and decided to trudge toward the only light we could see, a farmhouse maybe a half mile away. So much for the shortcut.
The homeowner, an elderly lady in a nightgown, did not meet us with a smile and did not invite us in. Not that we were complaining—we felt pretty lucky that she hadn’t greeted us with a shotgun, three twenty-something men ringing her doorbell in the middle of the freezing January night. After we explained ourselves, she went to fetch a cordless phone and returned to the door, eyeing us as she reported to her son, “There’s three fellas here say their car got stuck in the snow.”
She listened for a minute, then looked at us and said, “He wants to know who you are.”
I explained that we were campaign volunteers, not from around here, just trying to take a shortcut, and couldn’t get our car unstuck. She studied us silently and then spoke back into the phone with her revised assessment: “It’s three campaign fellas say they’re stuck in the snow.” She listened for a moment and hung up. He was on his way; we could wait outside.
So we were apprehensive but happy to see Farmer Daughton rumble up in his pickup truck and drive us back to the car. He didn’t say much, other than that the temperature on the thermometer at his house read exactly zero and that we really should have had better gear for the cold weather. The Carhartt-type coveralls he was wearing seemed to do the trick for him; we did have winter coats on, but it wasn’t much against the deep freeze. It was the kind of cold where you feel the hairs in your nostrils start to stand on end, the kind of cold where after ten minutes or so you don’t feel cold at all, but just kind of woozy and weak-headed.
After a short drive we pulled up alongside our ditched car, its hazard lights still blinking, making me think of a half-sunken ship. He produced a towing chain and stood holding it for a moment; we weren’t sure what was supposed to happen next. To clarify things, he asked a rhetorical question. “One of you boys gonna hook this up to your car, or am I going to get down on my hands and knees and do it for you?” Message received, we quickly got on all fours, racing to try to figure out how to attach it to our vehicle before he changed his mind about helping us at all.
I’d like to think that we won Farmer Daughton over, or at least that we parted on fairly good terms once the car was safely back on the main road, which is to say one that was actually paved, somewhere in the general vicinity of the town of Murray, Iowa. We thanked him profusely, even tried to pay him, but he would have none of that, and before leaving he had warmed up to the point that his grudging curiosity moved him to ask a question: Who we were campaigning for, anyway?
I think we were all dreading that question. This was as rural and white as any county in the Midwest: not Democratic territory in general, and if it was going to favor any Democrat at all, it would be John Edwards of North Carolina. Still, he had asked, and we weren’t about to lie. After a moment studying our shoes, one of us finally coughed up that we were knocking on doors for Senator Obama. “Well . . .” He paused. “He’s my second choice.”
Turns out Farmer Daughton was a Bill Richardson man.
IN A WAY, MY MILITARY CAREER started that week, with my friends Ryan and Nathaniel, knocking on doors and canvassing local Dairy Queens in three of the lowest-income counties in the state of Iowa: Ringgold, Decatur, and Union.
Immersed in my business career at McKinsey but feeling like I couldn’t just sit out the 2008 presidential campaign without being involved in some way, I had decided to take a little time off in January to do something to help the campaign of Barack Obama, who was still considered unlikely to overtake the juggernaut of Hillary Clinton but was showing increasing strength. I’d become aware of Obama when I was a senior in college and he was running for Senate in 2004; someone sent around a video clip of him speaking in a church, and it sounded different from any political rhetoric I’d heard before:
If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen on the West Side of Chicago who can’t afford her prescription medicine . . . that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent.
Inspired yet analytical, he seemed a welcome alternative to the bravado of President Bush, and yet, unlike most running for Congress or Senate that year, he was able to campaign with very little reference to the Republican side at all. Importantly, he had also opposed the Iraq War at a time when most Democrats were afraid to say what they truly believed.
I started following his campaign, and as a graduating senior briefly entertained a job offer from his race for Senate, before deciding to go to Arizona instead for the Kerry campaign. My reasoning, idealistic if not the most career-savvy, was that Obama was highly likely to win his race in Illinois anyway, and so I could make more of a difference in a battleground state on the presidential effort. It was there, on a thirteen-inch tube TV in my office cubicle in Phoenix, that I watched the convention keynote speech that made Obama famous. By 2008, it was clear to me that this candidate was not like the others, and worth supporting for the presidency.