I recently re-read Not Fade Away, which is Peter Barton’s biography/memoir (it was co-written with Laurence Shames). The book was first recommended to me a few years ago by a friend and I like to revisit it from time to time.

Peter had a fascinating life and career, which included working closely with John Malone during the 1980s to build the cable industry in the US. He eventually served as the founding president of Liberty Media. He was diagnosed with cancer in his 40s and the book covers his personal journey battling the disease and confronting his own mortality. He sadly passed away in 2002, at the age of 51.

The book is a good read and a reminder that life can be short, so we should live it deliberately and with a sense of urgency. Below are a few of my takeaways / short lessons from the book (combination of some direct quotes and my paraphrasing):

1) We are often guilty of the arrogance of good health.
After a period of living with cancer, Peter writes about how he began to notice certain things he had never paid attention to before, because they never applied to him. Prior to his diagnosis, he was impatient with people who didn’t move as fast, or couldn’t do what he found easy. Yet the simple things we often take for granted are monumental struggles for many people (e.g. climbing stairs, putting on clothes, even digesting food). Forced to recognize his own fragility, he started to appreciate more the troubles people go through – “how patient they are in their suffering, how bravely they confront their burdens, how untiringly they support their loved ones.”

2) We are largely conditioned to live in the future, not the present.
In business/investing, the whole idea is to figure out what will happen and then prepare for it before anyone else does. The present hardly exists, except as a launchpad for the future, and worrying becomes “practically the defining trait of the responsible adult.” And while he was enjoying his life and career, he often felt he was “merely visiting the present, dropping in for precious interludes. The norm was to be chasing things that were up ahead.” After his cancer diagnosis, he realized he no longer had a future, just some indefinite time ahead of him. He made provisions for his family’s future, of course, but otherwise there was nothing but the present to make the most of. He resolved to never had a bad day for the rest of his life – not that there weren’t difficult moments, just that he wouldn’t waste his time or energy on things that didn’t really matter to him.

3) We need to define for ourselves what is enough.
Peter writes that he was 38 when he made his first real windfall – cashing in his stock options at the time for a million and a half dollars after tax. Not necessarily a lot by some people’s standards, but enough to put his life on a “different and far less pressured footing.” He knew his wife and kids would be secure, that his family would have a home to live in and that school and college tuitions would be paid for. He made even more money after that, but the rest was “monopoly dough, just a way of keeping score.” He eventually resigned as president of Liberty Media at the age of 46 to focus on other interests, “a decision that [to other perhaps] seemed wildly abrupt and unexpected, but was in fact part of a long-considered plan.”   

4) We develop a very different perspective on our lives as we approach the end.
When Peter finally started to looked back on his life as a whole, he realized the road curved, rose and fell more than he had realized. The sequence wasn’t half as tidy as he thought it was at the time. He ultimately saw his life as something complex but also strangely perfect, because it was “completed.” He also describes how the present, past and future no longer seemed to line up in a strict, unchanging order; instead, there was more of a looseness and fluidity to them. As he neared the end of his life, he described the calm he felt as “a more durable case of the contented exhaustion [he] felt after skiing for ten hours, or playing music through the night, or working round the clock at something that seemed terribly important at the time.” It was a calm that came from knowing that he had held nothing back.

5) Will we pass the “funeral test” when we die?
Peter’s passing was major news in Denver (where he lived), and there were long feature articles in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times also saluted Peter as a media pioneer. But as his co-author Laurence Shames writes, Peter would have likely been more pleased to see the hundreds of friends who rallied around his family and the more than fifteen hundred people who turned out for his memorial. There were, among other, “the kids he had coached, colleagues he had advised and schemed with, neighbors whose dogs had gotten muddy alongside Peter’s dogs, people he had skied with, or biked with, or with whom he had sat around the piano and jammed and wailed.” The event was a celebration of a short life well lived. And his story is a good reminder that we will all, sooner or later, make the same journey.