In my home office, surrounded by fifty or so black-and-white photographs of family and friends, hangs a framed magazine cover that doesn’t quite belong among them. It’s in color. It’s me, formally dressed, leaning over a desk with my hands resting on it, staring into the camera. Behind me is a map of Tulsa. The headline asks whether I might run for mayor.
I never did. But I kept the cover, and it’s still there, right where I can see it every day I sit down to work.
A long shot, and I knew it
Back in the 2010s, I wrote weekly opinion columns on Tulsa’s urban planning, land use, and transportation policy — first for Urban Tulsa Weekly, then for Smart Growth Tulsa’s blog. I cared, and still care, about the kind of city we were building: whether our streets served people or just cars, whether our zoning served neighborhoods or just developers. Enough people noticed that a mayoral run started to seem like a real possibility, not just a flattering suggestion.
I remember sitting through meeting after meeting with supporters, mapping out what a campaign would actually require — the donor lists, the fundraising targets, the sheer number of phone calls it would take to get there. None of it felt impossible, exactly. It felt like a mountain I could see clearly enough to know how steep it really was.
I had strong support from progressive-minded people across the community. I also knew, from very early on, that it was a long shot. There was no single moment where the campaign collapsed. It was a gradual, honest recognition, spread out over months of planning and strategizing, of two separate things: the sheer scale of fundraising required to be competitive, and something harder to admit — that I never saw myself as a politician. I think I would have made a genuinely good mayor where planning and policy were concerned. I don’t think I had the temperament the job also requires.
What the research says about people like me
There’s a finding from political science that would have saved me some soul-searching, had I known about it at the time. Researchers studying what they call the honesty-humility trait — one of the core dimensions of personality — have found that people who score high on it are measurably less likely to pursue political office, even though voters consistently say they prefer leaders who have it. The very quality that might make someone trustworthy in office is often the same quality that keeps them from ever seeking it. That’s not a flaw. It’s simply a mismatch between a person and an arena, and it’s more common than any of us running for anything ever likes to admit.
The very quality that might make someone trustworthy in office is often the same quality that keeps them from ever seeking it.
Other research on why people ultimately choose not to run points to something just as unglamorous: the practical demands of a campaign, the money, the time away from family, the willingness to ask strangers for favors and donations again and again. None of that requires a lack of courage or conviction. It requires a specific temperament suited to a specific kind of grinding, public, uncertain work. Plenty of capable people, myself included, simply aren’t built for that particular grind, however capable we might be at the underlying work itself.
I didn’t have the language for that at the time. I just knew, gradually and without drama, that I wasn’t built for the version of public life a campaign would have required of me — the fundraising calls, the persona, the constant performance of certainty in front of people asking hard questions. Recognizing that isn’t a small form of self-knowledge, even if it doesn’t come with a ribbon-cutting.
I don’t say any of this because I feel incompetent in general. I rarely do, even now, even with new technology that would humble plenty of men my age. If anything humbles me today, it’s not incompetence but abundance — so many digital tools available that choosing which ones deserve my limited time and attention has become its own small, deflating discipline. That’s a very different problem from the one I faced with the mayor’s race, but it comes from the same place: knowing you can’t chase everything, and having to choose deliberately instead of by default.
The difference between a dream and its container
Here’s what I want a man reading this to take from it, because I think this is where the real inspiration lives, if there’s any to be found in a story about not becoming mayor: the ambition to make a difference in your community doesn’t require the specific container you first imagined for it. I wanted the same things a mayor might have wanted — a more walkable city, more thoughtful development, neighborhoods built for people instead of traffic counts. I just found a different way to work toward some of that, and eventually, a different calling entirely, not unlike the retirement I described in “The Man Who Never Retired” — a life that keeps generating purpose long after the version you first imagined has passed you by.
These days, my ambition runs almost entirely toward The Encore Project — a different audience, a different vision, a much more narrowly defined niche than a city hall office would have been. I don’t experience it as a consolation prize. It’s a separate thing I care about just as much, built by choice rather than by default. I still feel the old pull toward civic involvement sometimes, the itch to write another op-ed on a zoning fight I’m following from a distance. But I’ve learned, the hard way and more than once, that I have to be disciplined about where my remaining energy goes. You cannot chase every ambition you’ve ever had at full strength. You can, if you’re honest with yourself, choose the one that fits who you actually are.
What the cover still means to me
When I look at that framed cover today, I don’t feel wistful. I feel proud. It’s proof that I showed up, that I had a voice, and that some of what I said resonated with people who wanted a more mindful approach to how our city grows. The office never happened, and I’ve made my peace with that more completely than I expected to, back when the decision was still raw.
The ambition to matter to your community rarely dies just because one specific door closes. It goes looking for another door.
If you’re a man in your seventies or eighties looking at some version of your own unclaimed office — a title you once wanted, a race you didn’t run, a role you talked yourself out of — I’d ask you to consider the same distinction I eventually landed on. The ambition to matter to your community, or your family, or your own sense of purpose, rarely dies just because one specific door closes. It goes looking for another door.
Mine turned out to be this platform, built for men exactly like us. Yours might be something you haven’t found yet, or something you set aside years ago without ever really examining why. Either way, I’d bet it’s closer than you think, if you’re willing to be as honest about your own temperament as I eventually had to be about mine.
The mountain doesn’t have to be the one you first pictured. It just has to be one you can actually climb, on your own terms, with whatever years you’ve still got left to climb it. This is the third piece in a series about the kind of growth that catches you off guard — the first was about the day the playing field leveled, the second about the promise I made to be a team player. This one, I think, is the most personal of the three.
