Stanford Business

FEBRUARY 2007


A Father-Daughter Team Tilts with Quixote


Illustration by
Lauren Simken Burke

The literary character reminds us that some great actions are not tied to hopes for great outcomes.

by Hugh McCloskey Evans III, MBA ’92

It has been three years since the delivery room doctor announced that my newborn daughter had “too much space between her big toe and the next one” and that she was “thrusting her tongue out too much.” Diagnosis: Trisomy 21, better known as Down syndrome.

Since then, I have learned that being the parent of a disabled child is mostly like being the parent of a normal child, only more so. Parenting is an exhilarating and exhausting experience. A special-needs child amplifies those emotional endpoints tenfold. I like to tell my wife that we had our first two kids, and then when Sidonie came to us we had kids number three, four, and five all wrapped up in one. Our Sidonie requires extra effort, emotion, money, and perseverance. So while many people are reluctant to express it in front of us, the logical question comes up: Is it worth it? Let me declare in no uncertain terms that it is. Strangely enough, a Business School course on Organizational Leadership offered me the most guidance in explaining why this is the wrong question to ask.

In that class taught by Professor Jim March, I learned to probe the inner life of the famous literary character Don Quixote, who lived in the 16th century as a committed “knight errant.” Quixote’s behavior is driven by what he determines to be important, not by what the outside world expects or wants of him. The world sees windmills; he sees menacing giants. The world sees sheep herds; he sees invading armies. The world sees a haggard peasant; he sees the beautiful Dulcinea. When questioned about his decisions, he does not justify his actions in terms of their expected consequences. Rather, he says, “Yo sé quién soy”—“I know who I am.” Quixote celebrates a non-consequentialist view of humanity.

Vision, not calculation, motivates Quixote’s actions. He pursues self-respect over self-interest. He reminds us that some great actions are not tied to hopes for great outcomes, but rather to the willingness to embrace commitments without regard to consequences. To someone who would say that these ideas are madness, the proper answer is Quixote’s: “For a knight errant to make himself crazy for a reason merits neither credit nor thanks. The point is to act foolishly without justification.”

In our modern world, a person’s worth often seems to be determined by what he or she can offer others in a commercial context, be it measured in goods, services, intellect, humor, creativity, athleticism, or whatever. This idea of calculative exchange has invaded practically all of our relationships. Let’s face it, it’s probably true even within our own marriages. Would you value your spouse in the same way if he or she stopped being nice to you? Do we love only when love is returned? Perhaps a parent’s love for their child is the only domain left where human value is embraced unconditionally and without any consequential justification.

Quixote reminds me that if we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, learn only when learning is valuable, we abandon an essential feature of our own humanness—our willingness to act from our conception of who we are, regardless of the consequences. We are more than B.F. Skinner’s lab rats. We have the ability, despite our transactions-based culture, to value human life as a matter of “inward consciousness,” to use the words of John Stuart Mill, rather than as a matter of return on investment. This is why asking “Is it worth it?” is the wrong question.

I do not mean to suggest that Sidonie’s arrival has brought me only epiphany and peace. My wife and I have experienced deep fears and more stresses. We can accept that Sidonie will not be a Nobel Prize winner or a professional athlete, but we wonder about who she can be, who she will be, and where all this early intervention stuff will lead. Will Sidonie have great frustration talking? Will she have trouble integrating sensory stimuli? Will she “succeed” in school? Will she have friends? We don’t lose sleep at night wondering how our other children will turn out, so why do we lose so much sleep over Sidonie? Why is it that we feel the need to know right now what her life will be like 10 years hence?

There are other mind games, such as worries about what medical or financial problems will reveal themselves, or how our other children and our marriage will cope with the stresses that accompany the extra effort required for a child for whom things don’t come easily and automatically. And while we do celebrate the child whom we have, there is no denying we had the need to mourn for the child who did not come.

But now, for me, the single most important insight learned from Sidonie is that she belongs in our family just as she is. She is not a flawed version of some “other Sidonie.” She is exactly who she is supposed to be, and she is being the best and only Sidonie that she knows how to be. Like Quixote, she is comfortable with her nature, so I can be as well. To the extent that there is dissonance between who she is and what we expected from her, then the problem lies in our expectations rather than in Sidonie herself.

T.S. Eliot once wrote, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” This is a modern version of Quixote’s aspiration to unconditionally embrace a proper life. Three years ago, the news of Trisomy 21 was viewed as one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Today I have glimpses that it may be one of the best. In my world, there are not many windmills, but we are all Quixote, or can be when we permit it.

Hugh McCloskey Evans III lives with his family of five in Baltimore. In 2003, Professor Emeritus Jim March adapted part of his Organizational Leadership course into the lecture-length film Passion and Discipline: Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership.

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