Every time I go back to Las Vegas, I think of the same night. I don’t think of the rugby, though the rugby was why I was there, and I certainly don’t think of the casinos. I think of a young couple in the corner of a dessert parlor at the Wynn, and of the thirty dollars I didn’t spend.
Running every year right around my birthday, a major rugby tournament played out in Las Vegas. It made an easy excuse for family to come out, and that year my father and my stepmother met me there. My stepmother has an unbelievable talent for finding the best thing in any city: the reservation nobody else could get, the show you’d never have heard of on your own. That night she’d found both. We had dinner at the Wynn and then went to Le Rêve, the water show that lived in the Wynn’s own theatre, and it was spectacular. The actors were truly amazing. Watching the players dive two stories into a pool and seeing a below the knee amputee actor perform so well that his disability was hard to spot etched themselves into the evenings memory.
Walking out of the theatre, my father announced that he could use a little bit of a sweet. So we found the Wynn’s ice cream and dessert parlor and paid for the obligatory overpriced cookie. It was a good cookie, not homemade, but that is not what you’re paying for.
By then it was around nine o’clock. I had to be up early to work the tournament the next day, and somewhere in the back of my head I was doing the arithmetic on sleep. That’s when I noticed them.
Tucked into the corner of the room sat a young couple. If you didn’t study them for a while you’d have missed it, but she was in a white dress and he was in a suit that didn’t fit him well. They were huddled over a single, small dessert. They were nervous, they were happy, and you could tell from the way they sat with it that they didn’t have much money. They didn’t say much but looked at the dessert with glances to each other. They never glanced at their phones or at anyone else. They were the kind of looks that anyone who has been married has had: joy but with a piece of “What have we gotten ourselves into? We can’t even pay for small things!”
They were newlyweds, or about to be. And they had almost certainly spent everything they possibly could to sit in one of the upscale rooms on the Strip and share a dessert, because that night deserved it.
I knew, sitting there, exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to stand up, walk over, and ask, “Are you two getting married, or have you just gotten married?” Then I wanted to buy their dessert and just take care of it for them.
I didn’t.
I am ashamed to say I thought of myself first. It would have cost twenty, maybe thirty dollars. At that point in my life that was a huge amount of money, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. Yet, all these years later, I couldn’t tell you what I did with that thirty dollars, and I can tell you nearly everything about that couple.
My stepmother has a line she’s used for as long as I’ve known her: “Regret is the most wasted emotion.” I’ve always heard it a little differently than she may mean it. To me it isn’t a comfort, but an instruction. If regret is wasted, the way not to waste it is to act before it has a chance to form. When you’re given the opportunity to help someone, go ahead and do it.
The Dessert Parlor in Our Lives
I’ve spent a long time since then noticing how often that moment repeats itself at work, in rooms far less glamorous than the Wynn.
Sitting in a meeting where a junior colleague offers an idea and it lands flat, we notice, and we wait for someone else to pick it back up. Walking past the new hire who has eaten lunch alone at her desk all week, we notice, and we tell ourselves she probably prefers it. Reading the email from a peer who is plainly underwater, we notice, and we answer the question they asked rather than the one they didn’t. I’ve walked by so many offices and cubicles that I have lost count of the humans in them. Each one has a story, a struggle, that I could lighten just a tad.
None of these is a dramatic failure, which is exactly why they’re so easy to commit. The workplace, like that dessert parlor, runs on a quiet etiquette that tells us to mind our own table. Speaking up for someone in a meeting can feel like overstepping. Offering help can feel like implying they need it. Buying the coffee, covering the shift, or writing a note to a colleague’s boss to say they did good work can all feel like more than the job asks.
They usually cost about what the dessert would have cost. It might be five minutes, or one awkward sentence, or once in a while real money. What they buy is out of all proportion to the price.
That window is short. The couple finishes the dessert and goes. The meeting moves to the next agenda item. The new hire either finds her people or decides this isn’t a place where anyone looks up. The moment to act is rarely dramatic, and it is almost never repeated.
Noticing is Not Acting
I thought I did the hard part that night. I noticed. I read the room, the dress and the suit and the nerves, and I understood what I was looking at. But then, I did nothing with it.
That gap between noticing and acting is, I suspect, where a great deal of workplace culture gets made or lost. Most of the leaders I’ve worked with are good noticers. They can tell you who is struggling, who is being overlooked, and who is about to leave. Fewer of them close the gap. This inaction is not a lack of care, but a lack of nerve, habit, or permission. The people around them learn from what they do, not from what they notice. That’s culture and leadership being taught quietly, one small act at a time, or one small absence.
The long view runs the same direction. I doubt that couple would remember the dessert itself if someone had paid for it. I think they’d remember that a stranger saw them on the most important night of their lives. People at work are no different. Years on, they’ve forgotten the project and the deadline, and they still remember who stood up for them in the meeting. I recently had a moment when a colleague, vehemently told the room how amazing I was. I can’t remember everything she said, but I remember my feelings, and I suspect that I will never lose those.
Eating the Cookie
Sitting in that dessert parlor, I had nowhere to be for ten minutes. I had an overpriced cookie in my hand, my family around the table, and nothing pulling at me but the thought of an early morning. Because I’d stopped, I looked around, and because I looked around, I saw them. The noticing came out of the stopping.
Most of my working days don’t have those ten minutes in them. I go from meeting to meeting and inbox to inbox, and I rarely, metaphorically, eat my cookie. I suspect most of us are the same. We don’t fail to help because we’ve weighed the moment and decided against it; we fail because we never saw the moment at all. My meeting on schedule bleeds into one on ones bleeds into the client meeting bleeds into a call from my wife about what is going on this evening.
Our true work begins before the helping. Slow down. Eat the cookie. Look around the room and say, those are people I should help. And then, as my stepmother would remind me, don’t waste the emotion on regret. Go ahead and do it.
(An obligatory picture of me, at the Las Vegas Airport gate where Clooney, Pitt, and Damon leave each other for the final time in Ocean’s Thirteen)
