It’s A Choice

The other day, New York Magazine ran what felt like a post-mortem on Kathy Wylde’s long tenure as the leader of the Partnership for New York City. The Partnership is seen as the city’s preeminent business group. Its high-powered board is comprised of major CEOs from across the Fortune 500 and titans of finance. If anyone should have the power to impact public policy here, it should be them. And yet they haven’t.

I was quoted in the story making the case that the Partnership either needs to completely overhaul its approach or just go away entirely.¹ The quote caused a stir because I said the quiet part out loud. After it ran, I received a lot of texts about it. The texts fell into one of two categories: people who appreciated my willingness to say very blunt things about very powerful people or people who wanted to justify why the Partnership has not accomplished much (interestingly, not a single person made the case that I was wrong about the record of the Partnership itself).

I was struck by the people who, in well-intentioned ways, wanted to explain why the Partnership has failed. The excuses ranged from the board not really caring about New York City because their businesses are global to the impossibility of influencing left-wing elected officials to it all being Andrew Cuomo’s fault.

Here’s the problem: those excuses might be accurate insights. But they’re still excuses. At the end of the day, we only get one shot at this life. Tombstones don’t have much room for excuses as to why the person six feet below didn’t accomplish much. So you might have all the reasons in the world for why you can’t achieve something. You might have lots of people to blame. Your frustration may be very valid. And to be clear, no single person can be responsible for the fate of humanity. But ultimately, I believe there are two types of people: those who create excuses to readily accept failure and those who do not.

Perhaps even more important, I believe that the choice to keep going in the face of difficulty is what maximizes our own satisfaction and well being. While we all understand and pursue the concept of happiness, the serotonin and dopamine bursts that come with specific bouts of happiness are wonderful — but fleeting.

Life satisfaction (the term eudaimonia actually captures it even better) is the result of making specific choices that lead to a sense of purpose and meaning. They not only don’t always correlate directly with happiness, they often co-exist with struggle and failure and frustration. But ultimately, happiness alone cannot be the marker of a life well lived or the ability to feel content on a sustained basis because it is too episodic.

Eudaimonia is the real goal because it produces long-term contentment. But that requires knowing you are pursuing worthwhile things not only if they are difficult but often because they are difficult.

It is rare that the way we envision something goes according to plan. There are too many variables in the world — too many people with too many competing needs, emotions and priorities — to be able to accurately anticipate all of them and see your idea come to fruition without encountering massive resistance, roadblocks and failure. Anything worth doing is usually difficult because if it were easy, it would have already been done. Just ask anyone who’s ever invented or founded anything.

Now, not everyone wants to impact the world beyond their own day-to-day existence, but for those of us who’ve worked in government and politics, the promise of feeling like our lives truly mattered is typically what drew us in. What produces true life satisfaction for many of us often requires feeling like we’re impacting the world on a macro level.

But once we’re there, we then face another set of choices. We can choose to avoid failure by just tinkering around the edges of society. That’s mainly what the Partnership currently is — white papers and events rather than serious engagement in the only thing that actually influences public policy: politics. In that approach, as soon as we encounter hardship, we come up with a convincing narrative as to why the result isn’t our fault and just cling to that. Or, we can come up with a plan to achieve something, execute it as best we can and when things invariably go wrong, lick our wounds, recalibrate, try new things and keep going.

I’ve experienced this more than ever with our work around mobile voting. My time in politics has taught me that virtually every politician makes every decision solely based on how it will impact their next election. Gerrymandering means that the only elections that typically matter happen in primaries and primary turnout in this country (the presidential election excluded) is usually 10-15%. Those tend to be the most ideological voters or powerful special interests, so our elected officials often govern for the extremes at the expense of everyone else. That can only change by radically increasing turnout which, to me, is only possible by meeting the people where they already are — on their phones (this mirrors what we learned at Uber by mobilizing millions of customers politically to overcome a very powerful taxi industry).

Since founding the Mobile Voting Project, we have faced roadblocks at every turn. Cybersecurity experts stuck in the ivory tower, declaring that no electronic voting can ever be safe while ignoring both all of the flaws in the current system and the even greater risk that the status quo is tearing our country apart completely.² Self-appointed good government groups whose highly privileged leaders demand in-person, paper ballots only, unable to conceive that not everyone works in a think tank inside the Beltway and has endless free time to leave work to go vote. And of course, the many special interests and ideologically extremist groups on both sides who currently call the shots have little interest in losing power or empowering others.

They attack and complain loudly at every turn. They did so when we funded elections in seven different states that successfully allowed deployed military and people with disabilities to vote on their phones. They did so after we spent five years and ten million dollars building the most secure voting system ever invented (this is all philanthropic and over 90% has been self-funded). They’re doing so now as we pursue legislation in five different states that would allow municipalities to opt into mobile voting as an additional option for local elections.

I want to give up all the time. I fail consistently at raising money (I am a terrible philanthropic fundraiser). No matter how much work we do to build secure tech, the critics and cynics never waver. But I also know that the Supreme Court has made it clear that gerrymandering isn’t going anywhere. I know that the underlying human nature of politicians certainly isn’t changing. And I know that the path we’re on — beset by polarization, extremism, constant fighting and the inability to cross partisan divides and work together to solve hard but ultimately solvable problems like immigration or guns or climate or taxes or health care or education or dozens of others — is unsustainable. So what choice do we have but to keep taking the hits, keep trying new ideas, keep building support wherever we can, and keep moving forward?

Would it be easier to have my time and money back and just enjoy it? Sure. I could just blame all the factors above for why we threw in the towel. But I’m not doing that because it comes back to the same underlying question facing all of us: what do we want our lives to amount to? As frustrating as the cause can be, working through that very frustration is what produces eudaimonia. The struggle ultimately increases my life satisfaction and my ability to live a life that feels meaningful.

When it comes to my disagreement with the Partnership’s mentality, I don’t know if my formula for how to build a centrist political operation for New York City is exactly right. In fact, it almost certainly isn’t. But I know you have to start somewhere.³ If you truly care about something, you have to know that failure will come again and again and again. And you have to be willing to keep trying new things until something finally works. Because that’s what ultimately is best for us — it’s what makes life worth living.

Unfortunately, the Partnership gave up on that approach long ago. But it’s not too late. For them. Or for any of us.

1. The quote was “Right now the Partnership is a total disaster, and if they can’t become a political force they should not even exist, because right now they are the worst of all worlds — completely ineffective politically and yet because they exist, they deter others from acting effectively. It all stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what politics is. Kathy’s view has always been you sit down with the councilmember from Staten Island and tell them what Jamie Dimon thinks — but as impressive as Jamie Dimon is, no councilmember from Staten Island cares, or cares about the white paper you just released. And so that is why the Partnership is constantly losing.”

2. They also ignore that we built (and then gave away for free) the world’s only end to end verifiable and encrypted voting system that also has biometric screening, multifactor authentication, air gapping and is open sourced — and that we not only followed the recommendations of the U.S. Vote Foundation report but brought in its primary author — Joe Kiniry — to build our mobile voting technology.

3. Or just go it alone. Over the past few years, unable to count on support or competence from groups like the Partnership, our foundation has helped fund and run multiple campaigns on local issues from persuading Albany into appropriating enough funding to expand school meals to 300,000 more kids to pressuring the Speaker to call the scaffolding bill in the Council to funding and helping pass legislation in the City Council to ban brokers fees for rental apartments to working with and pressuring Mayor Adams to launch a real campaign to close around 1,500 illegal weed shops to passing a shield law in Albany to protect New York doctors prescribing abortion meds from civil litigation and criminal indictment in red states to applying public pressure to force CitBike to stop allowing underage users to recklessly ride e-bikes at top speeds and instead verify age — and then again with Governor Hochul to require biometric screening to log into gambling apps to prevent underage usage, especially from boys.