On Rebounding from a Major Setback
Nov. 16, 2010
In August, I wrote a piece on Coach Wooden. Of anyone I can think of, Wooden never had a major setback. From the day he started on the high school basketball team that made it to the Indiana state finals three times and won it once, his setbacks were minimal and common to man. His wife died. His knees got old. That was about it.
In that article, I mentioned some fast starters I knew in high school who were cut short, for one reason or another.
Yesterday, I received word that another one of that crew died of a stroke on Sunday. I had not mentioned him in my original article. I did not want to cause hard feelings.
His name was Dan Lund. At the end of his life, he was a pollster in Mexico City. Search for "PBS," "Dan Lund," and "Mexico," and you will find several articles. I recall watching one of those PBS shows and seeing him interviewed. He got his 15-seconds of fame, more than once.
In 1958, he won the lieutenant governor's post at Boys State. He had calculated early in the week that he could not beat the guy who eventually won the governor's position. Dan planned to go to Boys Nation. He planned to be elected President of Boys Nation. So he settled for the #2 position. The top two always went to Boys nation. At Boys Nation he was elected President. He defeated the guy who had won the governor's position.
Even Bill Clinton was not elected President of Boys Nation, althoigh he went. Only 100 boys do each year.
So, Dan was calculating. He was also very skilled and very smart -- high school valedictorian, as I recall.
In our senior year of high school, we were friends. He was a hero to me. We went to college together.
I was also calculating. I planned to be elected student body president. I knew before I walked on campus that I could not beat Lund. So, in the second semester, I transferred. He eventually was elected president. At the new school, I has spotted who I would have to beat within two weeks. I spent two years boxing him out. But I decided not to run in my junior year. The political bug left me, never to return. The man I had spotted as a freshman ran unopposed. He said later that if I had run, he would not have run.
So, there are scheming people with big plans. Sometimes, their plans work out. More often they don't.
We went off to Presbyterian seminaries: he to Princeton, I to Westminster. We both dropped out.
We both went back to California for grad school. Sometime in the late 1960s, I read a newspaper article that he had been arrested. Why I read that Los Angeles paper (I lived in Riverside) is a mystery. I was in my landlord's house that day, and I just picked up the L.A. paper. Lund was involved in a campus protest against the war.
He had been a law student. I gather that he did not graduate.
I lost track of him until the Web. I tried to communicate with him, but he only replied once. I had written to him about the 2006 election in Mexico. He sent a brief reply.
When Hollywood Walk of Fame broadcaster Dan Avey died in August, I sent Lund a note. He had defeated Avey for lieutenant governor. Avey took it well. As he told me, "If I had gotten half of Lund's votes, I still would have lost." I sent that remark to Lund. No answer.
I got the impression that he wanted no contact with those who had known him before he got sidetracked by the Vietnam war. A lot of Americans got sidetracked -- 55,000 permanently.
I think Lund had big plans. He had them young. Like Joe Faust, who started planning for the Olympics at age ten, he achieved his early goals very early in life. But then he got sidetracked. His first marriage broke up.
He was hardly a failure. When PBS interviews you as an expert, you are not a failure. But I don't think he satisfied with what he had achieved. I could be wrong, but that was what I sensed.
The rebound is more important than the setback. There are lots of setbacks in life for most people. Some of these completely derail some people. Other don't.
Successful entrepreneurs usually have had a major failure before they hit it big. Some have several. But they rebound. Few are like Bill Gates or Michael Dell, who got into a booming field early and rose to the top overnight. Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple. He went on to start Pixar. I would call that a rebound.
My setback was in 1975 to mid-1976. I lost my job. For six months, I struggled. But I had Remnant Review, so we ate. Then Ron Paul hired me in June. He lost in November. The hob ended on January 1, 1977. I was hired by Howard Ruff within two months. So, I rebounded. It was scary at the time.
Had I not stumbled in 1976, my life would have been very different. Had Paul not lost by 268 votes out of 180,000, I might still be on Capitol Hill. But things have worked out.
When I lost my job in early 1976, a woman who had been my mother's peer told me that her husband had gone through such an experience. "It's normal," she said. I think she was right. John Wooden was not representative.