[Issue# 005] Who Are You Still Feeding?

Hey, it's Mark.

Quick note before I start. These letters have been getting long. Too long. So starting today I'm doing one story, one thread, all the way through. Tell me if it's better.

Here's the one.

There is something powerful happening at my lake.

(Stay with me on this one. It's not really about the bird.)

For eight years I have watched a pair of bald eagles nest by the water here. The father is Eragon. The mother is Eleanor. Somewhere early on we decided that every bird on this lake gets an E name, and once you make a rule like that, you are stuck with it.

This spring they had a baby. And by this spring, we had used up every good E we had.

So we named him Elon.

I am not going to sit here and defend that. But a rule is a rule.

For most of this year Elon has been the best thing on this property. And this month, his father started attacking him.

Not correcting him or nudging him.

Literally driving him off … coming at him hard enough that the young bird breaks and flies. And Elon keeps coming back. He circles, he lands, he edges toward the tree he was born in, and Eragon comes for him again.

The first time I watched it, I thought I was seeing something go wrong.

Here is what happened before the altercation, and it's the part I want to focus on today:

When those eggs were laid, the mother essentially did not leave. For about five weeks the father hunted and delivered and she sat. Then the eaglet hatched at roughly three ounces … about the weight of a deck of cards … and for the first few weeks of his life, one parent or the other was in that nest more than 90% of the time.

Ten to twelve weeks in that nest, one or both of them within a few feet of him almost the entire time, going from a handful of ounces to nearly flight-ready.

And that nest isn't one season's work. Eagles return to the same nest and build on it, year after year. The largest bird's nest ever recorded anywhere on earth was a bald eagle nest in Florida: nine and a half feet across, twenty feet deep, more than two tons of sticks. Generations of birds adding to one structure.

Two tons of construction … for a bird that lives in it for about twelve weeks.

And it worked. On a scale that is hard to believe.

In 1963 there were 417 known nesting pairs of bald eagles left in the lower forty-eight states. Four hundred and seventeen!!! According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports today there are more than 71,000 nesting pairs, and over 316,000 birds.

Every single one of them came out of a nest run exactly like the one on my lake.

Then it ends

Here is what actually happens, and it is harder than the version I would have told you a month ago.

The parents keep feeding that youngster for another four to eleven weeks after he first flies. Then, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-two weeks old, the tie breaks.

The food thins out.

The territory turns cold. And the young bird leaves.

And this is the part that shocked me:

The bird they never left alone for five weeks. The bird they fed four times a day for three months.That is Elon on my lake right now, being told by the only two birds he has ever known that he does not live here anymore.

Here is why they are right.

Because the alternative is worse.

Picture the loving version. Dad backs off. Elon stays. He builds a nest a hundred yards away, right next to the one his sibling built last year. Give it a decade and there are ten eagle nests around my lake.

And not one of those birds is doing what an eagle was made to do.

The whole thing would collapse into one crowded, comfortable, well-fed lake.

Somebody I trust read an early version of this letter and sent me a line that has been going around.

I understand why people like it. But it has always bothered me a little, because it treats the whole thing like weather … like the cycle just happens to you.

What Eragon is doing is not weather. He is choosing to make it hard. It is on purpose and it is on a schedule. All for a bird he spent six months keeping alive.

So instead of ten nests, that young bird goes out and roams for four or five years … and then, this is the part I love: he usually comes back and builds his own nest within about a hundred miles of where he was born. Close enough to know the water. Far enough to be his own.

That does not happen unless somebody makes it happen. And the somebody is the parent who spent every day of that bird's life proving how much he loved him, and then refused to let him stay.

Now the part I don't love saying:

I have two friends right now. Both serious people and both running real companies.

Both with a grown child at home who will not launch.

And both of them are being absolutely wonderful about it. Both of them are building the tenth nest.

And it's not just their kids. One of them has a VP who's been "getting ready" for the corner office for three years now. Ready last quarter. Ready this quarter. Still never handed the P&L.

The other has a co-founder who stopped building the company a while back and started managing his place in it.

Nobody fires them. Nobody promotes them either. They just stay. Fed, comfortable and not growing.

I could sit here and write you a whole letter about them. Except I know exactly what I am, because it happened to me in reverse.

About six months ago my own kids sat me down and told me it was time for me to go. They said: we're okay, we made it through, we are who we are because of you … and now you're sitting on everything you have and using it for a handful of people. Get back in the ring, Dad.

My kids evicted me.

They loved me enough to stop letting me stay in the nest we had built together while I was healing in it. And I resisted. I circled back. I edged toward the tree.

I am writing to you right now because they would not let me land.

So here is what I think Eragon is saying out there.

Remember our naming rule. Every bird on this lake gets an E. It is a ridiculous rule and we keep it anyway, because we said we would.

Out there they have a rule too. Theirs is not ridiculous, and it is not optional. And it is the only reason there are seventy-one thousand eagle nests in this country instead of ten of them around one lake in Indiana.

I did not sit beside you for six weeks and never leave. I did not bring you fish four times a day for three months. I did not make you strong and give you those wings so that you could stay here where it is safe and never be seen.

There is another lake. And there is another bird out there who is going to build something with you.

And someday people are going to stand at the edge of that water and point up and say — look at that one.

Go be that one. I am not going to apologize for how I make sure you do.

A rule is a rule.

One question.

Who are you still feeding?

Somebody in your life … a kid, a hire, a partner, a founder you back … is being loved into staying. And you are the one bringing the fish. Not because you are weak. Because you are good at it, and because it is the last thing you know how to give them.

Somewhere in your company there's a role that never opens up. A decision you keep making for someone instead of letting them make it.Because letting them fly still feels like losing them.

Hit reply and tell if anyone came to mind. Just a few sentences and I read every single one.

Blessings,

Mark

P.S. As I write this, Elon is on a limb about sixty yards from the nest he was born in, looking at it. He will be gone within a few weeks and I will probably never know which bird he is again. His father has not fed him in a while now. But I notice the old man has not left the lake either. He is just watching from the other side of the water … close enough to see him go.