When I was twelve, I spent every Monday free period in the back corner of my school library, studying the Sunday New York Times and the latest New Yorker.
The clothes. The watches. The stores. I didn't have access to any of it. I had dreams and an imagination. At twelve, that was enough.
Nine years later I was still in school, working part-time selling men's fragrances in a department store.
It was Christmas, and Cartier announced a sales contest. The salesperson who sold the most Cartier fragrance would win a Cartier watch of their choice.
There was one small problem. I worked in one of the smallest stores in the chain. We weren't in a mall. We didn't have thousands of people walking past us every day. If this came down to foot traffic, I didn't stand a chance.
But I knew exactly which watch I wanted. A Cartier Tank. So I decided I was going to win it.
And I went to work. I made sure we had the inventory to support the goal. I wore the fragrance, Santos, every single minute I was on the floor. I showed it to every man and woman who stepped up to my counter. If I couldn't win on traffic, I'd win on effort.
And much to everyone's surprise, including perhaps my own, the smallest store won. I got my Tank.
At twenty-one, I couldn't have understood what that watch would come to mean. I only knew that nine years earlier I'd been a boy in the back corner of a library, looking at beautiful things in magazines, never imagining I'd own any of them. And suddenly one of them was on my wrist.
I wore that Tank through everything that came next. It was there when I got married (and divorced). It was there when my son was born. It came with me on my first day at Neiman Marcus. My first day at Hermès. My first day at Tiffany & Co. It wasn't sitting in a box waiting for an occasion. It was living my life with me.
Then I went to work for Tiffany. Cartier was a competitor, so the Tank had to come off while I was working. I wasn't sad about it. It was part of the job. For the next twenty years I wore it only outside work, and I was careful about where and when.
Over those years I bought a few Tiffany watches. But something became clear to me over time.
Money can't replace memories.
You can buy another watch. You can't buy another wedding day. You can't buy the day your son was born. You can't buy your first day at a job that changed your life. And you can't walk into a store at sixty-eight and purchase your own history.
Those Tiffany watches came into my life after the story was already underway. The Tank had been there while it was happening.
When I retired, there was no longer a reason not to wear it. So I put it back on. And every time I do, it makes me smile. Even now, as I write this essay, I'm smiling. Because I'm not really looking at a watch anymore. I'm looking at a life.
Now here is the part that matters, and it's bigger than a watch.
Living abroad had been my dream for as long as I could remember. Longer than the Tank. And that one didn't arrive as a contest. Nobody at Tiffany woke up and decided Bill should move overseas. There was no door to walk through. So I built one.
At the time I was running the smallest store in the chain again, out in Palm Desert. I put together the case for why the company should move me into its international division. And I had to do it carefully. My VP couldn't feel like I was going over her head, or that the director of her smallest store was pressuring her to leave the region. It took two years of patient, deliberate work. In the end, I became the first US director to move into the international division, and I got my life abroad in Australia.
Do you see the thread?
Both times, I was standing in the smallest store in the chain. Both times, a door opened only partway, if it opened at all. Both times, it took a plan, patience, and more work than anyone saw. And both times, I got where I wanted to go. Not overnight. Not because anyone handed it to me.
The only difference was this. With the Tank, an opportunity appeared, and I seized it. With the move abroad, no opportunity appeared, so I created one.
That's the whole lesson, and it's why this story was never really about a Tank watch.
Because my Tank happened to be a watch. Yours doesn't have to be.
Maybe yours is the business you've talked about for ten years. Getting your body back at sixty. Going back to school at fifty. Seeing a place you've only ever seen in photographs. Buying your first home. Learning something nobody in your family ever had the chance to learn.
The object isn't the point. The aspiration is.
And here's what the smallest store taught me twice. The door rarely opens all the way. Sometimes an opportunity appears and your job is to be ready and outwork the room. And sometimes no opportunity appears at all, and your job is to build the door yourself, one patient move at a time.
I happened to choose retail. Or perhaps retail chose me. Either way, don't mistake the setting for the lesson.
Maybe you're still at the point where all you have is an idea of what your life could become.
Maybe an opportunity has appeared and you're wondering whether you're ready for it.
Maybe you've waited long enough for someone to open the door and you're beginning to realize you may have to build one yourself.
Or maybe you're sixty-eight, like me, and you still believe the best years of your life are ahead of you.
Wherever you are, don't confuse where you're standing with where you have to finish.
I didn't know at twelve what would happen at twenty-one. At twenty-one, I couldn't have imagined what I'd be building at fifty. And at sixty-eight, I don't pretend to know which doors might open next. I only intend to stay curious enough to notice them, and stubborn enough to build the ones that don't.
As I see it, aspiration doesn't have an expiration date.
Until next time,
