My Caldwell colleagues and I finished a search project this week that took quite a bit longer than the average search project. (Okay, it took about three times longer than the average search usually takes…)

It should be noted that this is a great client, who runs a great company, in a geography that is attractive to millions of people. The people who work at this company are smart, diligent, strategic, creative, and empathetic. They floss regularly and have excellent manners.

Why did this search take so long?

The answer is simple – good things take time. And in this case, the client took the time to get things right.

In July of 2021, I began writing a weekly email to my mailing list, in order to reconnect with friends, clients, and candidates, i.e.,relationships built over the past 40-plus years, but from whom I may have grown distant during COVID. Writing this does more for me than it does for you – thus, I appreciate you indulging me.

Writing TFTW helps to surface lessons from the 500+ executive search and assessment projects that I have taken on – and allows me to repackage and redistribute those lessons. Let’s face it, the entire world is a classroom, and the answers to the questions that test us are not always multiple choice. We bounce the answers off of our hearts, our intuition, our spirit, our experiences, and the values that have been inculcated in us through our parents, teachers, mentors, the church, educational institutions, and the media. I hope these thoughts can help shape the answers to the questions with which you wrestle.

In honor of Presidents Day, I thought it would be appropriate to share with you the true story of my first encounter with a President of the United States.

This week’s edition of Thoughts For the Week is adapted from my forthcoming autobiographical novel, Seeking ‘The Big Time’.

One explanatory note. Yes, the character “Dickie” in the story below is yours truly, Rich Perkey. I shed the nickname “Dickie” in high school, so that I could run for class president and use “Get Rich Quick!” as a campaign slogan. (Yes, I won…).

I hope you are doing well.

Some of you cynics out there – and the probabilities are that there may be one or two cynics among the millions of readers of this weekly screed – might ask “is Rich Perkey really, truly hoping I am doing well?”

The truth is…

No, actually, I am sitting on Delta Airlines Flight 416, which is parked on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport. I am hoping that a mechanic will fix the problem with the air system. I am hoping that the gentleman seated next to me will learn to cover his mouth when he fails to stifle his cough. I am hoping that he does not have COVID-19 (or any number of COVID), diphtheria, tuberculosis, shingles, hoof and mouth disease, or any other pestilence that might penetrate my baby blue mask.

I only mention the color of my mask in that it matches my eyes.

My wife Jill has a startled, stricken expression. It is 8:00 AM on Saturday, January 28th.

“Read this,” she says, lifting her phone towards my face.

A text reads: “Billy Selmon died this morning...”

What? That is impossible. We had just seen Billy five weeks ago, at a Christmas party. He was beaming, as he always had, ever since we had first gotten to know Billy Selmon as a high school basketball teammate of our son Connor. His broad smile, so genuine, so Billy Selmon, was that of a young man who had blossomed into a husband, a father-to-be, a professional.

The fourth and final president who Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Doris Kearns Goodwin examines in her book, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, is our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. I am tempted to go off script in this section of “Three Things” and write something like “it is ironic that President Joe Biden is the 10th president who has served since Lyndon Johnson, yet both Biden and Johnson were born in 1908,” but I am not going to do it.

Wrote Lyndon Johnson during his college days at Southwest Texas State Teachers College: “Ambition is an uncomfortable companion. He creates discontent with present surroundings and achievements. He is never satisfied but always pushing forward.” Johnson maniacally pushed forward on every job, vote, or cause throughout the rest of his life, always “discontent with the present surroundings.”

Goodwin’s describes young Lyndon Johnson as a boy who learned politics at the knee of his father Sam, a Texas state legislator who was an immensely popular figure in the Texas State House.