The innevitability of adversity☠️

Wonderland

Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, Katherine Graham saw pretty much everything go right in the first half of her life.

Her father, Eugene Meyer, was a highly successful financial genius who made a fortune in the stock market. Her mother, was as beautiful as she was charismatic and came to be a brilliant socialite.

While growing up, she enjoyed the best schools, teachers, houses, doctors and even servants dedicated to fulfill her every wish.

In fact, she was such a fantastic person, that instead of squandering her family’s fortune, she cared deeply for it hoping to preserve the money her dad had made and hopefully grow it.

In 1933, Eugene bought a newspaper business which was sutruggling at the moment, but deep down he knew that business had a chance.

The name?

The Washington Post.

For years Eugene worked tirelessly and little by little the business started to turn around.

As Katherine was the only child to actually show some interest in it, she inherited the business when she was older, and trusting her partner’s skills, she handed over the paper to her equally impressive husband, Philip Graham.

All was going well. She had everything we hope to have in order to be happy. A family, kids, a smart and caring husband, and a business of her own.

Plus, a good amount of money never hurt nobody right?

Sh!t happens

The only thing certain in life is that, at some point, adversity will innevitably fall upon us.

We don’t know how, or when, but it always does.

Such is the story if Katherine Graham.

The perfect example of how you can do everything right and still yourself in deep sh!t.

Life seemed perfect for forty-six years old Katherine Graham, but things were about to take an unprecedented turn.

Loving husband, Philip Graham started taking some uncharacteristic decisions and his behavior became more erratic as time went by.

Things such as drinking heavily, making reckless business decisions and even having affairs became everyday nuisances.

Rich people’s problems am I right?

While Katherine sought to nurse him back to health, as she was napping in the next room, Philip took a hunting rifle and put an end to his life as a consequence of a sever mental breakdown.

It was then that Katherine found herself with three kids, no work experience and the Washington Post at her hands.

It’s also important to note that the Post had thousands of employees at that time, whose jobs depended on Katherine’s decisions.

She was unprepared, timid, and naive.

The nine circles of hell

Just like Dante must journey through hell before he can reach Paradise in Dante Alighieri’s famous narrative poem The Divine Comedy, Katherine would find herself in a series of trying and wrenching events which would last nearly two decades in order for her to find “peace”.

And unfortunately, this was just the beginning.

Though one thing that’s worth noting is that, despite having close to zero work experience, Katherine did trust herself to know what’s best as well as surround herself with the right people.

So as soon as she took control of the post, she realized the board needed some urgent change.

She hired a young upstart to replace the good too-old boy the company had been using for decades.

Though the next step wasn’t gonna be that easy.

Weeks before the company went public, a decision made long before Katherine became part of the team, the Post received a collection of stolen government documents.

As you might’ve imagined, editors were anxious to make them public, though a court order was released in order to prevent them from doing so.

Katherine on the other hand, despite being advised against it by everyone in the company, specially the legal department, proceeded to publish them.

She knew that there’s no such thing as bad advertisement and as any passionate journalist, she wanted to make such documents public.

And as expected, sh!t went down.

Let’s just say the white house was far from content with such decision.

After the Post investigation of a burglary at the Democratic National Committee´s headquarters, she had practically signed a war declaration with the White House and Washington´s most powerful elite.

Aides even claimed that the White House was secretely planning on how to ¨screw the Post over”.

Can you imagine? The most powerful office in the world secretely plotting on how to screw you?

And as if that wasn’t enough, stock price was less than stellar that year.

in 1974, a unknown investor began to aggresively buy up shares in the company and the board was afraid it might signal a hostile takeover.

Graham was dispatched to remedy such situation.

But problems were far from over.

Twelve months later, the paper’s printer’s union vegan a vicious strike.

Things got so aggressive, that at one point, people wore shirts with the words:

“Phil shot the wrong Graham.”

Crazy right?

Worst part came after fighting back when a call came in reporting the union had sabotaged company machinery.

Now typically in this situations, fellow newspaper businesses would help with the printing but let’s jsut say competitors refused, which costed the Post around $ 300.000 a day in advertisement.

And with all that going on, a suite of major investors opted to sell their stocks positions ostensibly having lost faith in the Post.

How can you possibly fix this?

Graham’s answer:

DOUBLE-DOWN ON YOURSELF

To make an omelette…

As the maxim goes:

“In order to make an omelette, you must break a couple of eggs”

For Katherine, that meant getting her hands dirty and dealing with what’s in front of her. Because no real success comes for free.

We all must pay the toll of adversity.

So what did Katherine do?

She invested on herself, well…her company.

After meeting with the previous unknown investor, she decided to buy back the company’s shares on the public market.

A truly dangerous move that basically no one was doing at that time.

Even more risky considering all the things the Post had gone through the last couple of years.

It’s a list of problems so exhausting to read, let alone go through, yet Katherine dealt with them better than anyone would.

And the outcome?

Well, you be the judge”

• The leaked documents Katherine published are now known as the Pentagon Papers and became one of the most important stories in the history of journalism.

• The Post’s Watergate reporting which enraged the Nixon’s White House, changed and shaped American history as well as take down an entire adminsitration. (They also won a Pulitzer Prize, by the way)

• The so-called unknown investor the board was so afraid of was actually a young Warren Buffet. (I’m pretty sure you know who that is)

• She eventually overcame the strike and reached terms with the union.

• The Post main competitor, the one that refused to come to aid, suddenly folded and was later acquired by Katherine.

• Her stock buybacks made the company billions of dollars as well as keep it afloat during dark times.

All of this misfortune was actually leading somewhere.

If you’d invested $ 1 in the Washington Post’s IPO’s in 1971, that same dollar would be worth $ 89 by the time Graham stepped down in 1993.

89 times more!!!

This means, not only is Graham one of the most successful female CEO’s of her generation and the first to run a Fortune 500 company, but one of the best CEO’s of all time!

Whether you want it or not

Graham didn’t cause her husbands suicide, nor did she asked for the Watergate and Pentagon papers.

And just like her, all of us will eventually have to go through situations which may seem unfair, and they probably are.

Yet, they’re still ours to deal with.

It’s not our fault, but our obligation.

Graham did everything right, and still found herself in the midst of a twenty year long storm.

And it’s in this situations that ego will tell us that this is unfair.

That this isn’t supposed to happen.

That we don’t deserve this.

Psychologists call it a narcissistic injury. When we take personally totally indiferent events.

We are not in control of what happens to us or around us.

We are merely in control on how we react to it.

So, can you trust yourself when things go south?

Or will your ego get in the way?

Will you push through?

Or will you blame it on fate and ignore it?

It’s in this situations that you can do what Graham did.

Adhere to internal metrics and evaluate yourself on them on a daily basis.

Forget about the long term, focus on the daily-small things.

It’s the accumulations of small changes that leads to success.