Life of Significance - Bill Haslam

This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity.

Sanyin Siang: Do you want to live a life of significance? The choice is yours. In this Duke University series on building and leading a life of significance, we will show you how to do just that.

Hi, I'm Sanyin Siang, the executive director for the Center on Leadership and Ethics, and I’m your host for the series. My co-host today is my wonderful friend Greg Jones, the current president of Belmont University. He has a visionary, entrepreneurial spirit; and he’s one of the people in my life who first comes to mind when I think about people who are living a life of significance.

Our guest today is former Governor Bill Haslam. Bill is the author of the book Faithful Presence, which we’ll hear more about later in the episode. He is also the former Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, a successful business leader, beloved statesman, and a family man. (I hear he has 10 grandchildren!)

Greg Jones: Thanks, Bill, for joining us. You’ve lived such a rich life thus far in so many different arenas. What does living a life of significance mean to you? 

Bill Haslam: The people I know who are living a life of significance are the people who understand that the story is not about them. I know people who think the world revolves around them, and at the end of it, that always seems to blow up. Unfortunately, we live in a world today that is more about self-actualization than self-sacrifice. But the people I know who are living the most significant lives are the people who don’t think the story is about them.

Sanyin: I love the idea that the story isn’t about us—it’s about others. Let’s flip that around. Who are the heroes of your own story?

Bill: When I think of the heroes in my story, I start with my father. I hit the lottery when it comes to having a great dad. He taught me about giving—about financial giving and giving of your time. He taught me about building your world around your children and having the things you do be about their future instead of your own current situation. I live in the same town I grew up in, and hardly a day goes by when someone doesn’t come up to me and says, “I want to tell you a story about your dad and what he did for me.” It’s hard not to feel incredibly grateful for having a hero like that.

Sanyin: It sounds like your father made people feel like they were special, like the mattered. That is part of his legacy. There’s also this long Christian tradition of reflecting on our end to be able to gain clarity about our present. What do you want your legacy to be?

Bill: It's such a great question. I hope my legacy is one of the people around me feeling like I gave of myself to them. And whether that be my children, my grandchildren, my wife, obviously my wife, but the friends and the people around me—I hope that they would never say that I thought the world revolved around me.

And, you know, at the end of the day, I’m sure that when someone is writing my obituary, they’ll say—he was the Governor of Tennessee; he was the Mayor of Knoxville, et cetera, et cetera. But I hope that people who know me best will say, “Yes, but those things were just the subtext or a footnote. They weren’t the main story.”

Sanyin: How do you actualize that? 

Bill: In the Old Testament, the prophet Micah says, “What does the Lord want from me? Act justly, love kindness, and walk humbly” And I think that’s how you actualize it. When you think about what you should do today, I’ll try to do those things. I’ll try to act justly. I will try to love kindness, love mercy. And I will try to walk humbly. 

And kindness, I’ve heard people say, is a gateway drug—or gateway fruit—to all the other virtues. And kindness isn’t just niceness but looking out for the interests of others.

Greg: Bill, I want to talk about the last part of that phrase—walking humbly. You've had extraordinary accomplishments. You left office as Governor with a really high approval rating in this era of fractured politics. You worked across the aisle and accomplished a great deal working with Democrats on education. As a Republican Governor, you've set your sights high for what kind of impact can happen. And yet you do it with remarkable humility. 

In your book Faithful Presence, you talk about the importance of humility for people of faith. Could you talk more about how you’ve managed humility in the context of your career? You’re a problem solver. I mean, you’re an old-fashioned politician in that you think politics is about solving problems and helping improve people’s lives. You’re in a highly visible role, and on some level, you have to have self-confidence. But there’s humility in that you always thought it was really bout the people to Tennessee. Could you talk about what you think humility is, and how it avoids the false sense of it being weakness?

Bill: I believe I’m called to solve problems. And I had an extraordinary opportunity to be in an office where I could make more of a difference than I thought I could. When people ask me what surprised me about being Governor, I say, “You can actually make a bigger difference than I thought.” I know we tend to divide ourselves between Republicans and Democrats—and there are real differences. I’m not minimizing those. But I’d encourage people to look for those who are there to make a difference versus those who are there to make a point. 

Greg: One of the things I really admire about you is how relational you are and how you really care about people. It’s rare to find a politician as successful as you’ve been who is as good a listener. You and your wife Crissy are remarkable in your kind of care. You wrote in your book that being the mayor of Knoxville sometimes felt like being the senior pastor of a congregation. Could you talk about how you’ve paid attention to the role listening plays and how you listen not just to what people are saying, but what they’re feeling? 

Bill: Greg, you understand the pastor’s role real well. When you’re in a leadership position, you realize that if you were to ask everyone in the congregation what they care about, you’ll get a lot of different answers. We live in a diverse, pluralistic society, and some people in a church would say we need to spend our resources on youth programs; and others would say no, no, no, we need to do better global outreach. The list goes on. All of these ideas are good ideas, but listening is how we discern what actually gets done, given the resources we have. Given that we can’t do everything—we don’t have a budget to do everything—how do we prioritize what’s going to serve people best?

And—I’ll add—it changes everything if you truly do believe that the other person on the other side is truly created in the image of God. If you buy into that basic truth, then that changes everything. It’s harder to hate if you believe that.

There were a lot of nights when I was listening to somebody tell me what pond scum I am or was—and I had to work really hard to picture them in the image of God. But it was still true.

Greg: I want to ask you about Crissy. Part of your success as Governor was Crissy’s role as First Lady. Could you talk about how the two of you have lived your life together, what you’ve learned from her, and how that friendship has enriched your work?

Bill: One of the most pleasant surprises about being Governor was that it was a job you truly could do with your spouse. There aren’t a lot of jobs where you can do that. If you’re an executive at a Fortune 500 company or a doctor, your spouse probably isn’t going to be by your side all day. But as Governor, you really do get to do things with your spouse a lot. 

Crissy found several things that mattered to her, from illiteracy to helping folks who were interested in being foster parents. So she got to know all of the same people who had campaigned with me across the state. It was a wonderful gift because she knew all the folks and could share her wisdom. When issues came up, she would have an insight about that person or their motivation and be able to suggest a way to effectively communicate. That’s the first point.

The second point is this. Being with the same person for a long time through life’s journey is underrated and under-celebrated. We’re in our 60s now and have been married for almost 40 years. And sometimes I think, why doesn’t anybody talk about how wonderful it is to be married to the same person that you’ve gone through life with? Married life in your 60s is really fun, and nobody talks about that. I’d argue that this decade is the most fun part of being with somebody for a long period.

Sanyin: So much of what we’ve talked about so far is about the big moments: serving the state of Tennessee or the city of Knoxville, the book, being able to make a big impact. But life isn’t only just about the big moments. It’s about the small moments. So, can you share a story with us about a seemingly small moment that was actually a significant moment?

Bill: There are good things and bad things about having a “big job”—being Governor or whatever. The nice thing about that is sometimes the small moments can be big. If you’re the Governor and you stop to talk to a child, they might remember that more than if you weren't. But the downside to that is your life is so full. You're not just drinking through the fire hose, but you're trying to swim upstream through about one hundred fire hoses. You miss a lot. Recently I had to have my shoulder replaced. And in the process, I was thinking, wow, oh man, that’s a significant procedure. But it occurred to me that my sister, who’s worked for me for 20 years, had her hip replaced while I was in the Governor’s office. And I remember being aware of that. But I don’t remember thinking, oh, that's a significant procedure. I don’t remember being thoughtful or concerned about what that meant for her at that point. I remember wondering when she’d be back at work. And if you miss those moments, you’re going to miss the chance to empathize or sympathize, which is what the people around us want most.

Sanyin: So now with that lesson learned, how are you building empathy into your daily habits? How are you being more mindful of those small moments?

Bill: I try to remember that everybody's going through a deep struggle of some kind, which helps me to remember that even a small kindness can be a big deal. And I do think kindness is contagious, even if it’s a small act—asking about somebody's family or remember to ask about something hard going on in someone’s life. In today’s world where there’s not a lot of kindness, I think the impact is multiplied.

Greg: Bill, I want to ask you a question about a story that got a lot of press coverage, and you talk about really powerfully in your book. (Although there’s a small moment outside of the news coverage that most moved me.) This question is about the African American woman who was imprisoned, who you ultimately decided to pardon. The small moment is that you and Crissy actually visited her, and that struck me as an extraordinary moment that we don’t pay enough attention to.

Bill: Cyntoia Brown, now Cyntoia Brown-Long was a 16-year-old who ended up on the streets in Nashville working as a prostitute. And no 16-year-old girl chooses to do that. One night she picked up a customer and she ended up killing him in his bed in what she herself described as a horrific act. She was sentenced to life in prison as a 16-year-old, which meant she wouldn’t be eligible for parole until she was 51. 

Today, we would see her as a sexual trafficking victim. We would also have a different sentence for juveniles. 

But then [in 2004], as I said, she was sentenced to life, and would be 51 before she was eligible for parole.

Well, Governors have an extraordinary power to pardon or grant clemency to people. And her story became famous. Somebody did a series on her that ended up on Netflix or somewhere. And all the stars—from Snoop Dogg to Kim Kardashian to LeBron James—picked up on her cause and started tweeting about it.

Near the end of my time in office, we had the chance to consider pardons and started considering her case. We spent a long time laboring over her case to make certain we got it right—make certain we weren’t treating her any differently because of the media publicity. 

But we considered all of the circumstances and decided to grant her clemency after 15 years from the time she was first arrested because she truly had rehabilitated her life. It’s a wonderful story of redemption, of Christian redemption, her life changing. She ended up going to college in Nashville in prison college and she got a 4.0. She really, truly, did change her life. So, we decided to pardon her.

But think about it. Because her case got so much national attention, her story and our story were interwoven publicly for four or five months. I never went anywhere without getting asked about her. 

So, we made the decision to grant her freedom the August after I left office. When we left, she had six months left to serve. 

Crissy and I went to visit her in prison. We sat there and thought: This is an incredible story. We had the chance to visit as three people who were brother and sisters who had a kind of shared story we were in together for a while. 

Greg: Seeing her as a sister is just so moving. We think about the public role and the public story—you had the power to make a big decision—but you had the humanity to recognize the relational dimension. For you and Crissy to go and spend time with her is just a powerful sense of both the big and the small, the public and the personal, and the difference we can make when we reconnect and reweave the social fabric in those ways. I think that’s part of what makes your life such an extraordinary life of significance.

Sanyin: That was such a moving story. All of these themes are coming together: kindness, living for others, seeing the image of God in people. 

I think one of your gifts, Bill, is the ability to see beneath. I think you’re able to see the person behind what is first presented, behind the label we’re all given. Tell us more about that.

Bill: You talked about the importance of recognizing your failures. I think there's been a lot of times where I have missed that. There's a wonderful story in the Gospel when a woman is caught in adultery and the crowd drags her out in front of Jesus saying, “We caught this woman in adultery, what are you going to do?” And what I thought was significant is that it obviously takes two to commit adultery in this case. But they just brought her. And then second, Jesus says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” It's a famous line, but it's interesting because right after it, the Bible says, “and then one by one, they drop their stones, beginning with the oldest, and walked away.” I think it’s significant that the oldest dropped their stones first because I do think that, as we grow, we learn a lot about own frailties and weaknesses.

Greg: I have one last question for you, Bill. We’re both grandparents and we’ve talked some about what kind of world we’re leaving to our grandchildren. What is it that you want to say to your grandchildren or my grandchildren about the future? What have you and Crissy learned about life thus far?

Bill: Unfortunately, both of our grandchildren are going to live in a world that is snarkier and more cynical, and more full of animosity. I think some of that is due to the reality of social media and saying things online that you would never say in person. So, I’d encourage those children, my grandchildren, to get past that world. Your 1234th friend on social media won’t add anything to your life. But your fourth real friend will add something to your life. Your real friends are the folks who know you, your weaknesses, your strengths, and want to be on your team anyway.

And I'll just end with this. The first question was, who are the heroes in your life? I have a group of guys that I’ve met with and prayed with every Friday morning for 20, 25 years. When the whole idea of running for office first came up, I didn’t take it that seriously. But that group, when I brought it up to them, said that I should really think about it. And were it not for that group of people, I might not have seriously pursued this. So, the beauty of other people in your life should never, ever be minimized in terms of living a life that’s abundant.

Sanyin: That is so beautiful. 

My key takeaways as I reflect on our conversations are that kindness is central to a life that matters. Prioritize kindness in the moment, in the day-to-day. And how do we actualize kindness? Remember that it’s not about ourselves. Kindness comes into effect with others, when our stories and other people’s stories intertwine. We have to listen to what they’re saying and listen for how we can make a positive difference in their lives. This is also about seeing beyond labels. A quote by William Butler Yeats comes to mind: “Talent perceives differences but genius, unity.” So much of your story, Bill, is seeing the common beauty in each other and recognizing the commonality of being human. We have our flaws and our foibles, and therefore we’re bound together in this larger story. If we can take the time to invest in others, then we’ll truly live a life of significance. Thank you, Bill.