May 10

May 10 Sophisticated Living: Stifel Letter

From the CEO of Stifel

Written by Ron Kruszewski

"Six miles, in the snow, uphill, both ways.” As the years go on, I find it’s getting harder to comment on the march of technology without invoking the tone of my grumbling grandparents. You know: the eternal, hoarse-voiced lament about how easy kids have it now, how soft and cushy their world is. “The civilized man has built a coach but has lost the use of his feet,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, always a reliable grouch, in 1841.

The problem is that it’s almost never true -- especially not if you take complexity into account. In fact, it’s almost always the opposite. When I wanted to pass a note in class, I used a pencil, a paper and my palm. Now, sending a message under the desk depends on familiarity with an entire software stack, a handle on the global networking infrastructure, and most critically, an aptitude for rapid judgement about corporate privacy statements and retention policies. What could an ill-timed screenshot mean for one’s entire future, and that of one’s family?

But what about time? If there is anything from my childhood that deserves an elegy it is the way we knew time. I may never have walked uphill to school, but I did have to trudge through time -- the thick, muddy time that pools between noon and dinnertime on a humid Midwestern Sunday. We spent those days on a lake, where I learned to waterski and to beat my parents’ friends at Euchre, because there was nothing else to do.

This year, I spent the Easter holiday with my kids and grandkids, and as always, it was an exhibition on the miracles of social media, virtual reality and drone flight. But more than that, what they showed me was an alarmingly virtuosic use of time. As a child, I trudged through time. But my grandkids, with all these implements of diversion, skate through it.

That lake I grew up on was far from anywhere, measured in miles or minutes. I am grateful for that, because more and more I realize the importance of both dimensions. Distance only makes something remote, while time puts it in perspective. All that unclaimed time is where you get to know yourself; it is the headwater for the ambition and character that runs through a lifetime. I have also found it is where I am most open to change. Through a chance meeting with another idle soul or the sudden impulse to pick up a lonely book, empty time is where new ideas sneak up on you.

When everything is a gesture away, what’s missing is the time for self-reflection. Time to just think. Time to be bored. Time to swim in one’s thoughts as they grow calm. As reluctant as I am to admit it, our grandparents were right about the value of those six uphill miles -- but not because they toughened the feet. They were good for the mind.