Coming of Age in A Crisis: Where Purpose Begins
I would be lying if I said that I remembered my first week of college like it was yesterday. I can, however, tell you exactly where I was the moment I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. I was sitting in my dorm room in Boston, MA. It was my first week of Freshman year at Suffolk University’s Sawyer School of Business. I had just grabbed breakfast from the McDonald’s next door and saw crowds of people outside our dorm on Tremont Street with looks of disbelief. I didn’t know what was going on and walked with a small black coffee in one hand and a lonely hashbrown in the other, stepping through the crowd. As I got off the elevators and walked towards my dorm room, someone stopped me and asked if I had seen the news. I hadn’t. That’s when they told me a plane hit the Twin Towers. It didn’t sound real to me. I couldn’t process what I just heard. I rushed into my room, sat down and turned on the news to see live coverage of the smoke rising from the iconic skyscraper. I sat and watched with my freshman peers in shock as the second plane hit the towers. It felt like the screen was playing in slow motion. I can still remember hearing my entire floor erupt in screams. Many of us were thinking the same thing: “What the hell just happened?”
Looking back on my life, certain moments have had a powerful influence on the person I’ve become. Over the last few weeks, I’ve held countless client-calls for the company I co-founded with my wife. We needed to talk about the coronavirus with our clients and help them pick up the pieces after the idea of “business as usual” lost all meaning. My company needed to shift priorities since the pandemic was impacting our clients and our operations as a result. I suddenly had a heavy heart knowing we could be doing more to help our clients and communities navigate uncharted territory in the crisis. I sat down with my wife and recalled my first week of college at the age of 17. I was an entirely different person on September 10th than I was on September 12th. It has taken me decades to understand the impact that day had on my perspective and outlook on the world. We all have purpose, but we are wasting our lives unless we take meaningful action to live with purpose. Action is the conduit of purpose and impact. As a leader, and as a human being, I strive to create an impact in my community.
As I sat and reflected with my wife on the pandemic crisis, I thought about what it meant to be a college student when the way we viewed the world changed forever — when the world itself had changed forever. My early professional career was set into motion with a force I was too young to understand at the time. Humanity shows its meaning in times of crisis because we find ways to help one another through the darkest and most uncertain hours. Compassion, leadership, and courage can navigate us through anything. Without realizing it, these values were planted in my mind on 9/11 and grew with me over the decades of my life — as a friend, a spouse, a parent, and a business owner.
My nephew is 17 years old, as I was when I first moved away to college. He is finishing the last semester of his senior year of high school, which is now being conducted virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. He is about to choose which college he’ll attend this fall. I wonder to myself, “Is this his 9/11?” I hear him tell me about how his life as a young man is changing. I don’t know what it is like to come of age during a pandemic, but I do know what it is like to come of age during a crisis that changes an entire nation. 20 years from now, I wonder what values will have grown in Generation Z. I predict it won’t be un-similar to the values that were instilled in me and my peers all those years ago when we came of age in a crisis as well.
