Practically Fearless with Chris Girata: Episode 5, Cullum Clark
In this episode, Chris discusses life perspective with the Director of the George W. Bush Institute SMU Economic Growth Initiative, Cullum Clark. Cullum discusses how one life-altering moment led to a series of important changes in his life and shaped who he is today including Cullum’s brave decision to pursue a Ph.D. in economics decades after receiving his undergraduate degree.
Q&A with Cullum Clark
Chris: Welcome back to Practically Fearless with Chris Girata. Today I'm excited to welcome Cullum Clark. He's the director of the George W. Bush Institute SMU Economic Growth Initiative. He's an adjunct professor of economics at SMU, where he earned his Ph.D. in Economics in 2017. He has more than two decades of experience in the investment industry, serves on the board of directors for Uplift Education, and has previously done work with many other North Texas organizations. Cullum, thanks for being here.
Cullum: It is great to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris: Absolutely. Well, here we like to talk about ways in which we overcome fear. So, I'd love for you to just kick us off with a little bit about how you came to be at the George W. Bush Institute.
Cullum: I was in the investment business for a long time and it was good. We were in New York for a while we then moved to Dallas. For reference, I married a Dallas woman. We came home and life was rolling along pretty well. I always had sort of, in the back of my mind, this voice that was saying maybe there's something else. In my own particular case, I would say that it was a little bit of an inner-academic trying to break through. It was a voice saying you need to be using your brain in some new ways. I think a lot of ingredients went into that, but as my wife could readily tell you, I think there were quite a few years of angst of saying, ‘Well, on one hand, the status quo is working pretty well and it pays reasonably well. And I'm pretty decently good at it at the investment stuff.’ At the same time, there was this voice and the voice grew louder as time went by. Essentially, I tried on for size, and many ideas about how to break through to some new chapter in life, on trying a lot of ideas on for size. One day, I had an idea that wasn't necessarily at first blush any better than any of the other ideas that I'd had. The idea was to explore the possibility of going back and earning a Ph.D. in economics. And that led me to initiate one particular conversation that set in motion all kinds of changes in my life.
Chris: So, going back to get a PhD is not something most people would consider doing. But the idea of, mid-career, making a big shift, that's something I bet a lot of people have considered in one way or the other. What contributed to your courage to actually make that shift?
Cullum: It's amazing how often people say, ‘You know, gosh, I would really dream of doing a PhD myself.’ There seems to be a lot of that sentiment out there. It's very interesting, I think in my particular case, there was this sort of growing desire for a new chapter. I had a little bit of a frustrated tendency to be a lifelong learner who never was quite learning enough, who needed to step on the gas in terms of learning. I think I was wired to be a lifelong learner. I think that kin ran in the gene pool. They all were just big readers, big question-askers. My mother very much still is. So, I think the question was, how to go about being a lifelong learner, and the PhD in Economics thing. I'd say the first thing that became clear as I started to go down that path and understand what was involved in it, is, this is going to be hard.
Chris: I have to think that you were turning down certain parts of your life. You had to stop doing many things in order to do this thing that you really want to do. You're married, you've got children and you have just a busy life, like any working parent would be. How did you navigate that kind of difficult, conflict-ridden path?
Cullum: It's true, I had to stop doing some things. I will say I'm very thankful that economics alone didn't stop me from pursuing economics. I was in a position to be able to afford to do it.
Chris: There are very few people who would have reached a point at which you could ride the wave like you'd sort of earned it. You'd hustled. You'd gotten to a place where life was not fully, but at least relatively predictable and stable. And you destabilized it by making this choice. That's something I think a lot of people can relate with because I have to think people listening to this have hopes, dreams or desires that they just never got around to. And they kind of wonder, could they still do it? But one of the biggest hurdles, maybe the biggest hurdle, is not actually economics, but the idea that life is no longer as stable as it has been.
Cullum: I think life can be too stable, Chris. When I observe around people that I talked to, and I'm now 56, but when I talked to people who were in their 40s or 50s, I don't know too many people who say, you know, my life has arrived at this position of great stability and predictability. Therefore, I've arrived, I'm done worrying about it. All I see is people in some form or another, wondering what's next.
Chris: But there aren't a lot of people who take big steps, like going back to school. I wonder what might prevent that because I do think a lot of people probably would like to.
Cullum: I think the people reaching their 40s or 50s, maybe getting to a point where, if they’re parents, they're approaching or they've entered empty nester hood. I think the tendency to say to yourself, 'What's next?' is a very strong tendency. I don't have very many friends who would say, 'Nope, never felt that.' The question is what to do about it. Clearly, going back to school is not going to be for everybody. There are a lot of things people can take on. I have an ultimate boss, President George W. Bush, he worked pretty hard at other stuff, including being President of the United States, and then retired from that. Sometime after that, he took up painting. He's never done it in any form at all before that, from what I understand. It never even crossed his mind to try it as of the day that he walked out of the White House for the last time. So, people do take these things on. In my case, I'm really fortunate, because the thing that I took on really did turn out to be a great fit. So that was fortunate because I entered into something very, very hard. And if it hadn't ultimately been a great fit, where I could really start to see if this is worth pursuing and a really good thing for me, the case for stopping would have been pretty strong.
Chris: So, I'd love to pivot, but remain within the lane of education. You've done a lot of research, writing and advocacy on what you've described as doubling down on college education, particularly here in Texas. I know that I've heard you speak multiple times where you've said the outlook for Texas is so bright, but we're not raising up the kind of workers that we need to keep that growth. I'd love to hear what you think about what we could do here in Dallas to support that kind of continued education.
Cullum: I think as a first step, we'd go to kind of a 30,000-foot level. The world has been changing all around us in some pretty profound ways. I teach a class on economic history and I think it's always useful to go back and put things in a historical perspective. We really don't have to go back very far. To find a time when maybe our great-grandparents were overwhelmingly farmers, in a world with very relatively limited choices and limited technologies available and the returns to further education were so limited. That was the reality of human life. If the story of life was a day, I think that was the reality of life until 11:59 p.m. Then, all of a sudden, there's been this enormous cloudburst of change to a greater degree than ever before in history. A great many people who have fulfilling and challenging lives are going to be doing this very hard thing of continually upgrading and retooling their minds. They're going to keep learning things because they're going to be trying to keep up with some aspects of how the world is changing.
Chris: I assume that means many different kinds of post-secondary education where it may not look purely academic, but there is this desire, or perhaps need, for people to become more expert in something.
Cullum: I am a huge believer in post-secondary education in some form. I don't think we're anywhere close to cracking the code of what it would mean to have somebody finish their formal education at age 18 and be able to say that they are well and truly done with all forms of formal improvement to their mind, given there's a pretty good chance to live into their 90s and might well work well into their 70s,. I think that even when we talk about some traditional occupations, working with some type of equipment, the equipment's totally changed, right?
Chris: And changing all the time.
Cullum: The people who become carpenters, the people who become electricians, the people who become HVAC installers, the people who do any of the thousands of jobs in a hospital say the equipment's changing all the time. We find, not surprisingly, that the people who go into those fields, a large percentage of the time, are getting some kind of formal training to do it. In Dallas, and in cities everywhere, we're maybe in the fourth inning of a very long transformation in how the higher ed and post-secondary sectors work. In order to prepare people for this world, and not just prepare them in the sense that they go up to a certain point - but where they keep on retooling and upskilling over the course of a lifetime - we're a long, long way from that. We could dream together about what is needed. I think a great deal of change already has been occurring and a great deal has yet to occur. I would, in the strongest of terms, tell just about anybody they really should be looking at some kind of pathway of further formal education. Whatever form it is. Maybe it's in a traditional four-year school, maybe it's your traditional two-year school. Maybe it's in something that we loosely call an apprenticeship. It can take a lot of forms, but they ought to be planning on doing some of it. They also ought to be planning on returning to it over the years and continuing to do professional development and upgrades.
Chris: We've talked a lot about your professional identity and your professional experiences. I'd love to turn toward you as a person. I happen to know you are a man of faith and imagine that there have been points along the way in your life, where your faith identity has actually been brought to bear in your decision-making in a pretty explicit way. I'd love for you to maybe think back to at least one time in your life when you were faced with a decision. Perhaps you were struggling with something in your life, and you brought your faith life into that decision point.
Cullum: We've talked about one transition in my life, which was going back in earning a Ph.D. in economics. In 2013 when I started that, let's get back to the year 2000. In the year 2000, my wife, Anita, and I had two daughters. We had moved back to Dallas from New York City. We had been here about seven or eight months when we had the greatest moment of transition in our lives, which was when Anita's dad, Vin Prothro passed away very suddenly. That was a very painful time and a great shock to everybody involved. That led to many conversations worth of reflection and faith journey on the part of all of us. I oftentimes look back and think well, before that we were kind of adults on paper. Officially, we were old enough to vote. I'd had a job for seven or eight years at that point in time. I had a graduate degree. We even had our first two kids. But I would say that was a moment of a true moment of passing into a different stage of adulthood. For me, it was a moment of saying 'Who am I now? What's next?'
Chris: Was that because, for the first time, mortality was present to you?
Cullum: Yes, absolutely. For all of us who've ever lost a parent, I think there is that moment when you realize there's no one ahead of you in the lineage.
Chris: You are the oldest now. It's coming to you.
Cullum: That, strictly speaking, never became the case for Anita or me because our moms are still alive today, thank goodness.
Chris: But the idea of it.
Cullum: Yeah, that's it. For me, that was a moment that set in for the first time. Before that I had lost grandparents, but that's something that, as much as I missed them, that you kind of do as a kid. This was seriously unexpected. So, I think that sparked a whole lot of reflection for both of us. In my case, it led to a whole lot of very serious conversations of a sort I had not had before.
Chris: Such as what?
Cullum: I started to have very regular lunches with an Episcopal priest, Bill Power. Bill was a great guy, and we had many great conversations. Oftentimes, at a place called Food From Galilee at Schneider Plaza. Not always there, but we just got into a long set of conversations about where I am in life. That leap did lead to some pretty significant career decisions along the way, but I think in a more profound sense, it really did lead to a really significant new phase in thinking about life, mortality and what matters. It was, undoubtedly a painful, but great transition for us.
Chris: I definitely think that facing death is one of the great fears. If we distill Christianity down to any little nugget, it's that death itself has been defeated. Because death is the great scary moment, regardless of how courageous a person is. Death is the common denominator. None of us will make it out of here alive. So, at some point, as you did when Anita's father died, death becomes quite real. It comes much closer than theoretical. It's no longer at arm's length. It could be you. That then begins a moment when you do change the way you see the world. You change what you value.
Cullum: I think you really do have a moment, and certainly I know I did when death becomes less scary. And what starts to become scarier is the prospect of not living out this scarce time we have in the world as we want to live.
Chris: Is it fair to say that kind of shift is perhaps what set the table, so to speak, for your courage to actually, mid-career, make a big shift?
Cullum: No question at all. I don't think, absent that, it would have happened - at least not when it did. That set in motion, a whole lot of thinking of well that it was no longer going to be about frantic resume building and trying to climb some sort of mythical ladder ahead. It's going to be about trying to live right now. I will say it led me, for a number of years, in a number of undisciplined, but interesting directions.
Chris: What does that mean?
Cullum: In this sort of effort to live in the now, in a way that felt meaningful, that it was trying to live with integrity - live as I wanted it to live. There was a moment where I probably started saying yes to quite a number of volunteer things to a degree that in retrospect, may have been excessive. When I look back on that time, it was a time when I cast around in ways that helped make me who I am today. When you add it all up, all the various things that I spent time on, it was a bit all over the place, but it was a good all over the place. It did lead to not only what I'm doing now professionally, but in a larger sense, how I'm living today.
Chris: Many of the people watching this are going to be parents. Being that you're a dad, how do you take that experience that you had and pass it on to your children in a way that helps them to get a little beyond that themselves? God forbid, they don't have that kind of experience themselves, but they still gain some of the benefit of having been challenged in that way to live their lives a bit more broadly. I might say, less about success and more about significance.
Cullum: Boy, that's a tough one. Going back to Old Testament times, one of the classic challenges as a parent is hopefully, we live long enough to know some stuff. We try to transmit it, but then we come up against the reality that the next generation has to learn it their way and not just listen to their forebears. When I look at young people today, one thing that I can't help but be a little concerned about is we've never lived in a time of such prosperity. Certainly, my daughters have benefited from that. But at the same time, it's hard to - at least for quite some generations now - think of a time when young people have been so anxious. Not necessarily about the larger meaning of life, but anxious about whether they have a good enough resume to get into the right school or get the right job so young. That is disturbing to me. That's not specifically about my kids. That's a general observation. My kids have lived it to some degree. I would like nothing more than to get the attention of my own three daughters, and any other young person, to get them to understand that there will come a time when they recognize that frantic, hectic resume building – well, they're going to run out of runway on that. There's going to come a time when they say I can't do that anymore.
Chris: Well, not only that, but it's actually not as important as I thought it was.
Cullum: Just about everybody comes to that conclusion as far as I can tell. I'm not really optimistic that we can truly persuade young people to never worry about it. They're just going to. I've tried, as a dad, to take up every possible opportunity I can to talk through whatever I've learned in my life with my daughters.
Chris: I wonder if you being vulnerable about how death impacted you and changed you, if nothing else plants the seed of understanding that whenever they hit that wall, whenever they have that experience that pulls the rug out from under them -- how that feels. They're not alone and they've got you to help them navigate all the complexity of whatever they're feeling in that moment and to really make something good out of it, and really look at life with that courage.
Cullum: I hope they think that way. I think one thing that's been distinctive for my daughters is that they did see me wrestle with the decision to do the Ph.D. program. They also saw me wrestle with trying to actually get through it -- particularly the first year, which was really, really hard. They watched that and they knew that I was sometimes pulling my hair out and that it was about the hardest thing I'd ever taken on. Certainly, that influenced me that I should stay with it because they're watching. I think in a larger sense, for them to see the vulnerability and to see it's worth it to stay at it and try the hard things to try to keep life fresh.
Chris: The struggle is worth it.
Cullum: Absolutely. The struggle is worth it.
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