The Art of Being Unreasonable Lessons in Unconventional Thinking von Broad, Eli (eBook)

The Art of Being Unreasonable

Chapter 1

The Art of Being Unreasonable

I am unreasonable.

It's the one adjective everyone I know - family, friends, associates, employees, and critics - has used to describe me.

Occasionally, some of them have also called me crazy or nuts. But they've all told me at some point that I was being unreasonable because my goals were unrealistic, my deadlines couldn't be met, my ideas were far-fetched, or my approach trampled on the conventional wisdom.

But I believe that being unreasonable has been the key to my success. In this book I want to show you how applying unreasonable thinking can help you achieve goals others may tell you are out of reach, just as it has for me.

Over the past six decades I have had four careers: accounting, homebuilding, retirement savings, and philanthropy. I became the first person to build two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up in two different industries. The $6 billion I earned in business is now being used to help reform public education in America, assemble two world-class art collections and make them widely accessible, and provide critical start-up funding for cutting-edge biomedical research.

What gives me the most satisfaction is that all my careers have demanded that I meet people's essential needs - helping them realize their dreams of homeownership and a secure retirement, educating their children, experiencing great art, and living a healthier life. Each has also required me to be quite unreasonable - to have outsized ambition, discipline, energy, and focus and to have the confidence to ignore people who said I couldn't do it. If this book does nothing else, I hope it helps you silence the voice of conventional wisdom that too often keeps people from even attempting to achieve their goals.

Through my careers there has been one constant: a paperweight on my desk, a gift my wife, Edye, gave me some time after we were married in 1954. It sat on the tiny desk in a shared office in Detroit, Michigan, where, as a young CPA, I first envisioned starting the local homebuilding business that would become KB Home. It made the trip to Los Angeles, where it rested in my new office with a view of the Pacific Ocean at my retirement savings company, SunAmerica. Today, Edye's gift sits on the pale wood desk where I oversee The Broad Foundations' wide-ranging philanthropies. My office walls may be covered with art by Jasper Johns and photographs of the interesting people I have met during my career, but time and again - as it has so often over the years - my gaze goes to Edye's paperweight and its inscription, a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."

You could say Edye and I got married because I was unreasonable. After a friend gave me Edye's phone number, I called out of the blue and asked her to dinner. She had no idea who I was and couldn't even remember my friend. She said yes only because her mother pressured her into it. I drove to her house one Saturday night and hoped that she wouldn't slam the door after seeing my big ears and goofy grin. Lucky for me, she didn't. Only a few dates later I proposed, promising her my vision of a great future: our own home, two kids, two cars, and maybe a vacation once a year to Florida.

Edye's yes was my greatest piece of good fortune. Our marriage remains Exhibit A in my case for the value of being unreasonable. In love and in business, if you know what you want, you have to go for it.
Being Unreasonably Unreasonable

I didn't stop being unreasonable once Edye and I were married. Sometimes it made me harder to live with than I needed to be. I hadn't yet rea