Creeping Irrelevance

How a war, age, and a move to a new country have pushed me to the brink of being non-existent

Courtesy of Kenosis

“The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation.” ~ Henri Nouwen (Irrelevance Quotes).

The image above this wonderful quote suggests that if you come up against a dead end, seek a higher road around it. This is a beautiful sentiment, too. 

I love these things because they inspire me to fight on regardless of how bleak things may seem at a certain moment. When you are creative, you spend a lot of your time alone, fighting for an idea that others don’t see. 

For the first 22 years of my career, I created winning ideas for Russian companies and products. The ideas were great and effective at quickly building deep market share. Eventually, I grew sick of using my energy to push people to consume more products and things they really didn’t need. I felt guilty because I was using a genuine talent to manipulate my love and interest in life to get people to do things they maybe didn’t want to do.

So I stopped. One fine winter day in Davos, Switzerland, I had an idea and took it to Klaus Schwab. Klaus is one of the world’s most original and effective thinkers whose vision created the economic forum in that snowy valley in the Canton of Grisons. His life has been one that, regardless of his cantankerous personality, was in no way superfluous and not for a second irrelevant. I envy what he has done and continues to do. The annual meeting will soon again be underway in two weeks.

I took my idea to Klaus, and he said the following words: “For the first time since I started the forum 50 years ago, somebody has come to me with an idea that is not only great but one I never imagined.”

I felt more relevant at that moment than any other time in my life. 

The last time I was nearing that feeling was in 1994. I had raised a $10,000 grant, and one day after I graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), I gathered the deans (or their assistants) from the School of Public Health, the Teaching College, SIPA, the business school, journalism, and urban planning. My idea was to create a living “war room” at Columbia, which would be fed information from St. Petersburg, Russia, daily to assist governmental and non-governmental bodies in reviving the city and guiding it through the trials of the country’s collapse. I would be on the ground with my team, working with local institutions. 

The deans loved it. The representative from Columbia’s president’s office loved it and saw how it could help Columbia carve out a lot of attention while gaining student and faculty experience. 

I was flying high as I imagined my career unfolding, not lost in academia, not doing “God forbid business,” but actually “out there” do “it!” Then, one dean removed his pin from an unseen pocket and burst my bubble: “Young man, this is a phenomenal idea, although a bit too ambitious if not naive. You see the people in this room? As nice as we all seem, we are really kind of jerks.” 

Everyone chuckled. “This room is electric with egos, and we will spend more time arguing over what is right for your city in Russia as we each push our individual disciplines and spend less time trying to solve real problems. I don’t have time for those arguments. I won’t be involved.”

It all collapsed. 

Off I went on my own, raised another $150,000, and struggled to carry out my idea for the next six years while taking local jobs so as not to use the money on my own salary (headed up an ice cream factory, built a leading beer brand we sold to Heineken, opened a pizza place that almost killed me and ran a small catering business). When Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1994, funding for my project tapered off to zero by 1998. Great idea — dead. My local director and his wife, the accountant, eventually secretly signed over possession of the Learning Resource Center I created and stole everything I had purchased over the years for our program participants to use. 

Waning relevance 

As you age, you see that your unrealized ideas were really good. However, the younger people, who can’t see what you know because they lack the experience and vision, disregard your “great ideas.” Or, as what happened with Klaus and the World Economic Forum, your ideas threaten too many people who have the experience and can see your vision.

Klaus spent the next six months wooing me to join the forum’s team in Geneva. While I had very mixed feelings about joining something that would certainly crush my individuality, I had a newborn son, and I figured it was time to get out of Russia and get serious about life. I accepted Klaus’s offer. He invited me to China to meet the key executive board members, without whose okay he could not hire me. I met the two main ones. The guy I met, Jeremy, was as nice as possible —  his tactic is to kill people with kindness before he crushes them. He used to date Klaus’s daughter, and Klaus still regarded him as a son. 

The woman I met, Shelly, spoke with me for 3 minutes, then she ran to Jeremy. They saw that Klaus was smitten and feared I would cut into their power. Klaus spoke about me moving to Geneva in September, but after the China meeting, he ignored me — he usually responded within a few minutes when I wrote — and then finally, a letter came from his assistant: Sorry, B, the ship has sailed, and the offer has been rescinded with no explanation. They worked overtime to crush me. 

It hurt.

A couple of years later, I was told by people who worked inside the forum in Geneva how terror-stricken Jeremy and Shelly were about my joining. I took that as a compliment. Eventually, Klaus kind of apologized to me with an email in which he wrote: “It would have been good had you gotten involved with the city’s project back then. Your energy and vision are unmatched.” 

Rebounding 

After moving out of Russia and before moving to Portugal, I worked in a wonderful metaverse company. Then, one of the investors who had never invested in tech decided he needed “his guy” on the inside. He forced the company to hire a kid with no tech experience and no idea how to grow a company selling SaaS. It was a shitshow from the moment he joined, but the investor kept pushing for him to take over as much of the daily operations as possible. In a month, he became the Chief Operations Officer, and everyone but the developers and the CEO were suddenly under him.

One day, he asked me, “So, what do you think of branding?” Asking a professional with 20+ years of experience in successful marketing and brand-building what they think of branding is like asking an assassin what she thinks of wind. After I got off that call, I told my wife my days were numbered. I was let go in May, just a month before we moved to build our new life in Portugal. Nevertheless, my work led to a substantial new investment and considerable press coverage, for which I was let go.

Two years later, one of the owners contacted me and apologized. He told me letting me get pushed out was a huge mistake — the kid who pushed me out wasted 18 months and a lot of money. The company was struggling as a result. I offered to rejoin and try to turn things around, but they are hurting financially.

Tucked away in Portugal, a country where an experienced marketer is needed about as much as snow boots, I write. Some of you read what I write, and some even like it. While not a living, it’s all I have now that keeps me somewhat relevant. 

I watch the posts on LinkedIn from the thirty-somethings who, five years ago, struggled to comprehend my “great idea,” now they toss around those same terms I used then to make themselves seem so progressive and relevant. They have fantastic job titles that mean zero to the reality of the problems they are claiming to address, but for which they are paid astounding salaries. Titles like “Impact Director for ESG Projects” and “Ethics Lead for Climate.” You are probably asking, “WTF?” I am, too, especially because I know many of these people or have met people like them. They are as clueless as a bucket of clams, really.

But you know what, they are relevant because the “system” deems them so.

I am on the cusp of irrelevance and don’t know how to break out of it. I rage here, and I have great ideas. I have great vision. I understand the nuances of most issues before most can even see there is an issue, and yet, none of this is needed because I am in my 50s, living in Portugal, and my sack of life experience is filled with Russia.

I may gain relevance precisely because I am irrelevant, though. The fight for relevance will continue, but it does wear on the patience.