Praise for Fat, Forty and Fired

‘A very honest, funny book. You’ll laugh out loud – and shed a tear.’

– David Koch

‘This book is “wake up your wife” funny, really funny, screamingly funny.’

– David Vickers, ABC Radio

‘As thought-provoking as it is entertaining.’

– Sunday Herald Sun

‘So brilliant and funny that I neglected my wife and kids for a day so I could read it.’

– Sun-Herald

‘A thoughtful book that considers modern lifestyle options with measured sensitivity.’

– Sydney Morning Herald

‘Highly entertaining – offers a frank insight into marriage, family and the gender divide.’

– Sunday Telegraph

The lines from ‘This Be the Verse’ (p. 202) from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin are reproduced courtesy of Faber & Faber

This edition published in 2009

First published as Observations of a Very Short Man in 2007

Copyright © Nigel Marsh 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Arena Books, an imprint of
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Marsh, Nigel, 1964-

Overworked and underlaid : a seriously funny guide to life/Nigel Marsh

ISBN 978 1 74175 659 3 (pbk.)

Work and family--Australia--Anecdotes.

Life skills--Australia--Humor.

Time management.

646.700207

Text design by Darian Causby

Set in 12.5/16.5 pt Adobe Garamond by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Born in 1964 in the UK, Nigel Marsh moved with his family to Australia in 2001. They have lived in Bronte, Sydney, ever since. Nigel’s first book, Fat, Forty and Fired, has been translated into a number of languages and published around the world. Currently Chief Executive of the communications company Y&R Brands, Nigel is a co-founder of the globally renowned environmental initiative Earth Hour.

Contents

Anthony Robbins

Vertically Challenged

Reality

Pizza

Cooma

Mattie

Reach for the Floor

Because You’re Worth It

Just the One

Genius

Steve Waugh

Earthworm

Chris Whitaker

Heaven

Edamame

iPod

Nelson Mandela

Mrs Marsh

The Seven-day Challenge

Basic Instinct

Packed Lunch

Removing the Plank

Nancy Kline

Marco Polo

Philip Larkin

Tight Pussy

Moshpit

Epicurus

Mr Marsh

What Did I Do All That For?

Dropping Pebbles

Bricks and Water

Advance Australia Fair

Fiscally Underwhelmed

Acknowledgements

For Kate, Alex, Harry, Grace, Eve . . . and Mattie

Anthony Robbins

I don’t feel that I have the right to tell anyone else what to do – why would I? I’m making it up day to day and muddling through life like everyone else. I do feel, however, that I have the right to be honest regarding what I believe and what I see going on around me. And to be honest I’ve got a bit of a problem with people who claim to be offering me the ‘seven steps to this’ or the ‘six secrets to that’. As I’ve got older, I realise I learn more from the people who speak and act gently. Those who don’t think they know it all. Much as I love inspirational stories about people who have ‘discovered’ the secret of happiness or won the Tour de France twenty times, they don’t speak to my life. British statesman Lord Salisbury remarked in 1877: ‘No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome. If you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent. If you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.’ Not sure I agree with all his examples, but I like his general drift.

Which brings me to Anthony Robbins. If you live in the English-speaking world, the likelihood is that name will ring a bell. Whenever I do a public-speaking engagement, be it in the US, UK or Australia, I always ask, ‘Who here has heard of Anthony Robbins?’ I’m yet to witness fewer than fifty per cent of hands raised. In most cases, it’s nearer ninety-five per cent. Robbins is basically the granddaddy of the motivational world. He is also very tall – six-foot-seven, to be precise. He is to self-help what Picasso is to modern art and Marilyn Monroe is to screen goddesses. His books and tapes sell by the truckload. Someone once estimated that fifty million (yes million) people have been to one of his seminars or bought one of his products. I’ve never met him, but by all accounts he’s an impressive chap.

But when anyone mentions Anthony Robbins, I always think of one particular story.

I’m no military historian, but the basic details are as follows. The year was 1880. The country, Afghanistan. A small contingent of troops from the British 66th Foot regiment were marching through the countryside just outside a village called Maiwand. Just as now, a war was being conducted about I don’t know what. On this particular date – 27 July – it was destined to be a bad day at the office. Before the British troops had gone barely a mile, they were set upon by thousands of enemy soldiers. An intense and bloody battle ensued. Actually, more of a massacre than a battle. When there was a lull in the fighting after a few hours’ combat, there were still thousands of enemy troops left – and eleven British soldiers. Two officers and nine foot soldiers. They were lying in a natural ditch semi-protected by a low wall on one side and a couple of bushes on the other. They were totally surrounded.

Now, the British army has numerous stirring examples of heroism against the odds, and back in Afghanistan in 1880 this tradition was alive and well during the ‘Stand of the Last Eleven’, as it is known today. The remaining eleven British soldiers had a quick conference and courageously agreed that the best form of defence was attack. In short, they came to the remarkable decision that they were going to charge the enemy forces. Right into the heart of their ranks. At the very least, they’d have the element of surprise on their side. Solemn commitments were given that no one would be left stranded. A shot comrade-in-arms would be picked up and carried, if need be. After gathering themselves for the inevitable brutal horror ahead, they let out a collective piercing yell and, to the Afghanis’ astonishment, ran headlong into the massed ranks. Guns blazing, half of them full of holes, all eleven of this band of brothers got a full 300 yards. The sun was scorching, they had been fighting all day, they’d just run 300 yards carrying and firing heavy army rifles – they were exhausted. They were now in the middle of thousands of Afghan troops. They stopped running and formed a tight circle, back to back, rifles pointing outwards at the enemy. Then they fired their rifles until every last bullet was gone.

And then the enemy troops killed them.

I tell this story not to mock. In fact, I think it is one of the more poignant stories I’ve heard. Rather, I tell it because those eleven men had a clear motivating goal, excellent communication, self-belief, high standards, faultless teamwork, positive thinking, proactive urgency – basically, all the self-help golden rules – and they all died.

One of the bedrock tenets of the self-help movement is summed up in the phrase ‘there is no such thing as failure, only feedback’. Ummm . . . not so sure any of the Last Eleven would describe their grisly end as ‘feedback’.

Anthony Robbins himself writes, ‘The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.’ Again, love your work, Ant, but not so sure.

Of course, I’m being unfair – Anthony Robbins has nothing to do with the Stand of the Last Eleven.

But there is a serious point here. I feel the self-help movement grossly oversimplifies the mechanisms of success. Indeed, grossly oversimplifies life, full stop.

Just maybe, if your father is diagnosed with a terminal illness (as mine has been), it is not appropriate advice to imply that imagination and commitment are going to sort things. Or that positive thinking is the answer. Maybe what’s more appropriate is loving, supportive and empathetic acceptance of the reality of the situation. We seem to spend far too much time looking for evidence that life is both fair and controllable, when the obvious truth is that life is blatantly neither. Shit happens, as they say.

This is not a charter to simply give up and stop trying to improve your circumstances or the circumstances of those around you. It is instead a plea for some more honesty. I love thinking positively and consistently striving towards a worthwhile goal. I also believe that Robbins and his like have dramatically helped thousands of people to improve their lives. And yet . . . and yet we need to keep a grip on reality else we start believing a whole heap of bollocks that can actually be extremely damaging.

I believe it’s potentially disastrous to give ourselves over to experts or gurus completely. It’s important to retain your independence of mind. If you think a ‘leading authority’ is talking bollocks, it’s just possible that they are. Irrespective of how successful or eminent someone is, if they are talking crap, it is still crap.

Four years ago I picked up a small card in an AA meeting. It features the famous prayer: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.’ I realise it wouldn’t help me survive a Maiwand, but to my mind it would be a damn sight more useful than the unrealistic hyping of hope that the self-help movement’s rhetoric perpetuates.

Not that I’m criticising Anthony Robbins, mind you. Think of the above as merely ‘feedback’.

*

My intention here is not to write yet another self-help book. Instead, I would simply like to share some observations I’ve made. I’ve learnt a number of valuable (and sometimes painful) personal lessons about change, relationships, parenting, work–life balance, communication and happiness. I don’t offer them as answers. I recount them in the humble hope that at best they may be useful prompts for reflection or discussion – and at worst they may provide entertaining solace for people struggling with the same issues that I have struggled with, and continue to struggle with. Certain motivational books can unwittingly make you feel bad about yourself – especially if deep down you suspect you’re never actually going to win the Tour de France or awaken the giant within. It’s my sincere wish that what follows makes you feel normal and more okay about yourself. If it does, it won’t make me an expert but it will make me happy.

Vertically Challenged

In my dream, I was being hit repeatedly on the end of my rather large nose. As the beating continued, it gradually became apparent that I actually was being hit on the end of my nose. And that it was still rather large. As I raised my arms to defend myself and prised open my eyes, I saw that the perpetrator of this irritating and painful crime was my younger son, Harry – and that it was 5:15 in the morning. He had been hitting me with what looked like a piece of sparkly cardboard.

‘Daddy! Daddy! Wake up! It’s Father’s Day, and I’ve made you a card!’

Harry is eight and, with my other three children, Alex, eleven, and our six-year-old identical twins, Grace and Eve, he goes to the local public school around the corner from where we live in Sydney. It’s a lovely place and the staff do a great job with the pitiful amount of money the government gives them each year. The parents tend to be quite involved, which gives it an important role in the community and a friendly feel. One of the many cute things they do each year is ask the younger kids to make a card for their dads for Father’s Day. When I say ‘make’, what I mean is that the school pre-makes a card for the kids to complete. It’s basically a laminated piece of paper with a wiggly black border and the words ‘My Daddy is . . .’ printed at the top. The children finish the sentence with a heart-warming message like ‘my hero’, ‘my best friend’ or ‘full of hugs and cuddles’ in the space below and take it home to give Dad on the day itself.

Hence the rude awakening I was receiving on this particular morning.

After a momentary pause, I dragged myself up. ‘Made me a card have you, sweetheart? That’s lovely of you. Come here and show your old dad.’

I pulled Harry up into the bed next to me and rubbed my eyes, looking at the little mite before reading the words written on the bit of card. Harry is always so cute in the mornings. Hair sticking up, big alert blue eyes, invariably he is wearing one of my running tops inside out, all of which are far too big for him. This morning was no exception – he looked like one of those olden-day kids you see in films, wearing a nightshirt. Despite my weariness, a huge smile spread across my face.

I put my arm around him, gave him a kiss on his forehead and turned to read.

‘My Daddy is . . .’ went the headline.

Then underneath, in Harry’s big, wobbly handwriting, were the words ‘. . . a very short man’.

There was nothing else on the card. Either side.

Harry was looking up at me expectantly.

‘Err . . . That’s wonderful, mate . . . Thanks so much,’ I said.

‘No worries, Dad. Luv ya,’ he replied before bouncing out of the bed and rushing downstairs to the sitting room to turn on the TV far too loudly. The jarring sound-track to the Japanese cartoon completed my waking-up process.

Thing is, the little bugger wasn’t trying to be funny or cruel. It genuinely was the first thing he could think of to complete the sentence.

I’m not sure five-foot-seven qualifies as ‘very’ short, but then again, to be fair to Harry, I’m pretty certain it doesn’t fit within the tall quadrant, either. It’s as if my height is the perfect analogy for the rest of my life – neither tall nor short, neither poor nor rich, neither clever nor stupid. Just an average bloke, plodding along.

And while I might have wanted Harry to write a more flattering description on his Father’s Day card, at least he didn’t write ‘My dad is a rudderless, drunk, out of work, overweight, absent parent’ or ‘My dad is a self-obsessed tosser who has forgotten what is really important in life and instead dedicates every waking hour to a job he no longer enjoys so he can buy things he doesn’t want, to impress people he doesn’t like.’ Admittedly, descriptions like these would have been a bit of a mouthful for an eight-year-old, but at one time they would have had more than an element of truth to them.

Not that I ever wanted to fit either of those descriptions. But after twenty years on the corporate treadmill as a mortgage slave, I had well and truly lost my way. I just woke up one day and realised that a decade or so of small compromises and put-off dreams had led me to a place I didn’t want to be. Basically I had turned into that classic corporate warrior – eating too much, drinking too much, working too hard and neglecting my family. Just to top things off nicely, at the time I was coming to this painful realisation, I lost my job. Not a good Marsh family Christmas that year.

It might have spoilt Christmas, but it turned out to be exactly the kick up the arse I needed. You see, in the middle of this period of self-pity, humiliation and terror, I turned forty – and on my fortieth birthday, I had an epiphany. I suddenly realised that most of the men I knew – in particular, businessmen – talked rubbish. All the time. About everything. To everyone.

To my horror, I realised that I was one of them. This meant that my wife, my boss, my mates, colleagues, children, employees and customers never got the real man they were dealing with. Instead, they got the pretend man.

I suspect many people find it hard to identify their true feelings, let alone express them. In some ways, it’s easier to skim along the emotional surface and play out the conventional role that society is happy for you to occupy. Even if every now and then you wake up wondering ‘is this it?’, it’s just somehow simpler to ignore the little voice inside you and carry on as before. Work, earn money, buy things. Work earn money buy things. Workearnmoneybuythings. Everyone else seems to be on the same conveyor belt, anyway, so it can’t be all that wrong. Don’t ask why, just earn as much money as you can. Because, after all, the bloke with the most amount of money and toys when he dies wins. Doesn’t he?

A pilgrim once asked the fifth-century ascetic St Benedict for advice on how to live his life. St Benedict memorably replied, ‘Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of your miserable existence.’ Which is precisely what I did a few years ago. I paused. I decided to stop ignoring the little voice inside me. I began, in the words of St Benedict, to ‘listen and attend with the ear of my heart’.

After a couple of days of such reflection, I made a promise to myself that I would stop pretending. Stop pretending I believed things I didn’t believe and stop pretending I didn’t believe things that I did believe. I cut out and put in my wallet these words by eighteenth-century revolutionary Thomas Paine: ‘It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.’

So rather than look for another job, I decided to take a year off and try to wrestle back some control and purpose into my life. It wasn’t all beer and skittles – just ask my wife, Kate; living with a man who is ‘finding himself’ isn’t the best fun in the world – but I did have a modicum of success. I gave up the booze, lost the weight, got respectably fit and, most importantly, connected properly and meaningfully with my family. I also wrote a book called Fat, Forty and Fired about that particular period of my life . . . but to cut a long story short, I took a year out from the corporate rat-race to get my house in order.

House in order or not, my finances were quickly rooted. Wonderful though my ‘time off’ was, I had to return to work sooner rather than later because the savings were rapidly running out and we had no income. Gorgeous as our kids are, they do have to eat and wear clothes. All four of them. Whenever any of those ‘are you properly prepared for your retirement?’ super ads came on TV, I’d feel physically sick. Screw my retirement, I’d think – I don’t know how we’re going to get through September. So when I was offered the job of CEO of the Australian office of an international communications company, I took it.

On my return to the workforce, I suspected that although my new-found, or rediscovered, ‘enlightenment’ might make me happier, it would probably also make me a ‘loser’ in the cut and thrust of commerce. It’s all well and good getting back in touch with your feelings and family, but tree-hugging ain’t going to get you to the top of the career ladder. Still, this was a price I was prepared to pay in my bid to stop living a life I had come to believe was shallow and unauthentic. Turns out I was only half right. It did (and does) make me happier. Bizarrely, though, it also made me more, not less, successful in traditional terms. I thought I’d be less effective in the workplace. Precisely the reverse was the case. I found it easier to make effective decisions without the previous pretence. It seems authenticity makes commercial, not just personal, sense.

However, any notions that a quick-fix one-off break was all I’d needed were soon dispelled. I may have been ‘fit, forty-one and hired’, but I still had to face the same demons. Juggling what’s important with work is a damn sight easier when you haven’t got any work. By the same token, no one’s going to pay you for being an enlightened SNAG who does the school run each day, either. It was one thing coming to the realisation that I was no longer the man I wanted to be, another to work out the type of man I wanted to be – and yet another thing entirely to be able to follow that aspiration through. In real life. Day to day, here and now.

The playwright Anton Chekhov once said, ‘Any idiot can face a crisis – it is day-to-day living that wears you out.’ He’s got me bang to rights. I’ve had my crisis. Even dealt with it moderately well, thank you very much. But what about normality? How am I going to deal with that in a way that makes me proud I am living up to my hopes and dreams? I’ve made a lot of changes in my life in a short period of time, and one thing I’ve noticed is that any ‘improvement’ I’ve made gets significantly more difficult to sustain when what I call the ‘wow, haven’t you lost lots of weight!’ phase is over. In the first few weeks after you’ve given up drink, it is interesting and worthy of affirmation and support. Four years on, and no one gives a toss. Kicking it all in for a year and living off your savings is all well and good, but it’s not a recipe for the next ten, twenty or thirty years.

I want to learn how to live well. Not well in terms of having a yacht, but well in terms of making a positive contribution and leaving the world slightly better than how I found it. On a sustained day-to-day, year-to-year basis – without becoming a sanctimonious, joyless, superior prick.

Thousands of years ago, Socrates maintained that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living. I reckon it’s a thought that is every bit as relevant today. Why on earth do we live as we do? Why on earth do I live as I do? What’s the point of it all? To my mind, just because you think it’s unlikely that you’ll ever find the definitive answers doesn’t mean you should stop asking the questions.

Reality

When my wife, Kate, read the Father’s Day card Harry had made, she remarked with a resigned shrug, ‘Being short is the least of your problems, Nigel.’

Now, I may be ordinary but there is one exceptional thing about me and that’s my wife. Or, as my friend Todd puts it, ‘the best thing about Nigel is Kate’. Thanks, Todd. I met Kate more than twenty years ago, when we worked for the same company in London. To my friends’ astonishment and my parents’ delight, I somehow talked her into marrying me. Having promised not to get in the way of her already impressive professional progress, I immediately proceeded to get her pregnant three times in quick succession. The fact that the third time was with twins neatly destroyed any remnants of her career. The other promise was to keep her near her family in London. The move to Sydney took care of that one.

Kate’s not so good in the mornings, but I could see where she was coming from. Because two years after reentering the rat race I’d realised that, while I may have been making the best of the situation, perhaps there was a different path. A path where I changed not just the attitude – but the situation as well. I’ve come to believe that balance isn’t about having it all – it’s about making intelligent choices. Perhaps the answer had been staring me in the face all along and was brutally simple – rather than attempting to be an enlightened office rat, maybe I should simply stop being an office rat.

‘Fine, in theory,’ Kate had said when I revealed my grand plan. ‘But how do you propose we’re going to pay the chuffing mortgage and feed the kids?’

She had a point. Kate usually does. Throughout our marriage, she has been the voice of sense and reason. She doesn’t pander to me – a characteristic that on more than one occasion has saved the family from total disaster. Moreover, at the risk of making her sound a saint, she manages at the same time to do a remarkable thing – she combines her regular doses of realism with constant encouragement.

But now, having already put up with one career break that destroyed any savings we had managed to put by, she faced me, and therefore us, doing it all over again. This time without a redundancy payout.

What was worse, from her perspective, was the inconvenient truth that my post-year-off re-entry into the corporate world couldn’t have been more triumphant – in the traditional definition. The firm I went back to run had a wonderful period of success – profits up, revenue up, corporate awards coming out of our every orifice. Perfect timing after three years in charge, then, to leverage this success – cash in and take the big job in head office. And what does Nigel want to do? Move to New York and take on the world? Nope, instead he wants to kick in his job and start training for his Bronze Medallion lifesaving qualification. Marvellous – that will pay the bills.

Kate knew that with me committing career suicide for the second time in four years she would yet again be condemned to a life of regular arguments about stupid little things. Like ‘Why can’t you buy homebrand shampoo instead of the expensive stuff?’ or ‘Do the kids really need curtains in their bedrooms, anyway?’

Nevertheless, despite her entirely understandable misgivings, last year I once again turned my back on traditional career advancement. I moved into the chairman role at Leo Burnett, the company I work for, and now, rather than spend my days at a desk in an office, I divide my time between family, writing and public speaking. Which basically means I have swapped worrying about having a shallow one-dimensional life for worrying about having enough money to keep our heads above water. I have days when I’m not sure it was such a clever exchange. It’s entirely possible I won’t be able to make the finances work. But I’m sure as hell going to give it a try. Irrespective of how scared and uncertain I am about the future, I’m committed to giving a different, less conventional, path a go. And unlike last time, this time I’ve chosen to step out of the rat-race.

Now, this is a personal, individual choice, and I’m not criticising how other people choose to lead their lives. It’s just that I suspect there are many ordinary people who don’t actually choose their life. It just sort of happens. And actually there’s not much wrong with it. But at the same time, as you get older you can start to wonder if maybe there isn’t more to life. You are basically a nice person and you’re working diligently to look after your family and climb the career ladder, but somehow it all feels a little hollow. A little like you are marching to the beat of someone else’s drum. In many ways, I envy those people who have no element of doubt that the next promotion is obviously the thing to go for. I’d love that level of certainty.

In its absence, however much I tried, I simply couldn’t stop asking, ‘Why?’ Why is it better to get richer and more senior? Why do the people in the first-class lounge look so damn miserable? Why is it the right thing to dedicate myself to this firm for the next twenty years until retirement?

I was shocked when I decided to look – really look – at the people ‘above’ me and discovered that the truth was, although I liked many of them, I couldn’t find one whom I admired – whose life I coveted.

At this time, I read a wonderful quote from the former White House speech writer Ben Stein, who said, ‘The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.’ I’ve come to believe that you have to take personal responsibility for the type of life you want. The cliché unfortunately is true – if you don’t design your life, someone else is going to do it for you. And as much as I respect and feel affection for the companies I’ve worked for, I’d rather I planned my life than they did.

Part of making this choice involves learning how to divorce my self-worth from my career or job title. It’s clearly something many people simply can’t do. To them, your identity is so completely wrapped up in your job title that if you haven’t got a job, you haven’t got an identity. I cringe when I think of the occasions in the past when I must have been hideously socially awkward by not being able to see past a person’s lack of traditional employment. I now have a greater understanding of how challenging it must be for women who make the decision not to go back to their job or career after having kids. Challenging not only when they have to respond to the relentless ‘what do you do?’ questions but also challenging to their own internal sense of identity and self-worth.

I hate to spoil the dreams of any bored office rat out there, but not going to work every day isn’t a problem-free paradise, either. I wouldn’t quite agree with my brother’s description of my life as ‘poverty-stricken domestic tedium’, but there is a certain relentless grind to the day-to-day reality of family life that you can’t fully appreciate if you’re used to knobbing off to the office every day.

One of the biggest lessons this time around, however, is that I can’t do it all on my own. Nor should I try. I’ve had some much-needed humility beaten into me. As the wonderful writer Michael McGirr once said, ‘We are enriched by what we can’t do, even more by what we choose not to do. The secret of being human is learning how to enjoy our limitations. If we could do everything we wouldn’t need other people.’

I need my wife, I need my family and I need my friends. I couldn’t do any of the things I want to without them. That’s the reality.

I also need some more money, but that’s another story . . .

Pizza