Bruce Piasecki is a NYTimes bestselling author, and organizational innovator. As founder of AHC Group, Inc. a global management consulting firm advising major corporations on social response capitalism, sustainability, and innovation, he has worked for over a third of the Fortune 500 in change management, including BP, Merck, and Toyota. Piasecki has been an agent of climate solutions for over 40 years. He’s also co-founder of the Creative Force Foundation which annually awards young authors writing on business and society issues. He is the author of Doing More With Less, Doing More With One Life: A Writer’s Journey through the Past, Present, and Future, and other books.

I concluded that stress is good for a creative person and that we, in fact, flower under stress. We bloom under stress. 

A father's death

He would never finish this thought path because he had so little to go on. For decades, he had blamed everyone he knew for his father’s death. Having been raised by his grandmother, mother, and sister, he had to invent his masculinity—from muscle and bone to making his place in a world of markets.

His father would break his long silence only on rare occasions. In this way, Walter was the opposite of his mother, who could return on a dime. He found this not sad, but odd.

In his World War II pictures, Walter was tall, thin, and quiet looking, and he also looked reserved—not meant to be in this world very long. Walter had never really spoken to him as a parent, so Bruce had no real direct recollection of the sound of his father’s voice, or the look on his face when he held him as a child—so all of this needed, wanted, to be reconstructed by the higher winds of memory.

In one faded photo, Walt—with cigarette in hand, hanging around a rock in Hawaii during his days serving in the Pacific—looked much like Eric Arthur Blair, before he became known to the world as George Orwell.

He had been Walter’s child for such a short time—less than three years, two months, and a few long summer days. Yet Walt returned to him on occasion, especially when he was under stress. He came to an important conclusion: In a writer’s life, where rumination runs like a

fear through many years, it pays to recall the details and death of your father and mother.

This calculation of fatherly loss—like Freud standing before his father burning in dream—matters. This kind of loss is as useful as prayer.

Excerpt from Doing More With One Life: A Writer’s Journey through the Past, Present, and Future