Living the Dream!

I just spent four incredible days at a career development conference in Sandy, UT put on by the company I work for.  It had a theme of “becoming Legendary Leaders.”  Most of the presenters were people I know well and work with closely at the office, who have very unique and interesting stories to tell about themselves, their careers and personal lives.  One such was Mirna Valeria, also known as “The Mirnavator”, or better known as the author of the world-famous blog Fat Girl Running.  She is a highly athletic woman competing in marathons and races all over the world. And she’s pretty fat.  She’s fit and she’s fat, and she’s changing the way people think about equating fitness with thin-ness.  She’s been featured on NBC Nightly News, the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal and others. Runners’ World magazine did a 14-page spread on her.  It was very interesting to hear of her experiences and see her story. 

Then there was Adam Horrocks, director of system architecture, who is one of the more brilliant, but bizarre people I have ever met in my life.  Adam is passionate about learning about how to do anything and everything - and I mean everything! He went out and bought alpaca wool just so he could learn how to spin it.  He bought modern spinning wheels, and antique spindles so he could learn both modern and ancient techniques.  As he began to weave things with his newly-spun alpaca wool, he began to study about where the different colors of dyes come from for dying wool, and found that many of them are made from rather exotic insects.  So he began to collect these exotic and strange insects from all over the world so that he could make his own dye at home.  His wife, hated it, because it stunk up the house.  One particular color of dye can only be made from a certain species of snail indigenous to Israel.  So he travelled to Israel to find these snails.  He has weaved hats from human hair, learned how to make wine, though he can’t drink it because he’s LDS – he just wanted to learn how it works, and how to make it.  He learned how to tattoo, and taught this skill to his kids.  He bought a tattoo training dummy, that he and his kids would practice on for family home evening.

Adam knew nothing about photography, but decided to try to learn what makes some photos more popular than others.  He studied the winners of photography contests, and then spent a year trying to imitate what he saw in those photos that made them so popular, and has since had some of his own photography win in international competitions, and even been featured in museums and sold for a significant amount of money, even though he still doesn’t know anything about shutter speed, or aperture size, or anything like that – he just figured out what was popular and imitated it.

Then there is Elmer Benitez, the director of Cloud Operations who recently decided to go from being relatively sedentary in his lifestyle to becoming an Ironman triathalete.   Or Jake Hammock, the head of cyber security who is, in his free time, launching a business creating dirigible water condensers which extract moisture from the atmosphere to create thousands of gallons of clean, drinkable water every day in order to solve water shortages in underdeveloped locations.  He’s piloting it in southern Utah right now.  His design includes having all that water dropped to the ground through hydrostatic turbines, thereby also generating enough electricity to power the entire city of Sandy at the same time!  Unlimited water and power from the atmosphere.  Can you imagine it!?  Adam gave him the wine he had made, and Jake said, “I’d better drink it this week, because I’m on lesson 11 with the missionaries now, and after next week I won’t be able to drink it anymore.”  So now Adam is like, “Oh, no!  I’ve become Satan!”

It’s so fun and inspiring to see the amazing things that people are able to do and accomplish when they follow their dreams and passions.  But there is something about these conferences that always leaves me unsettled, and I think I am now beginning to understand what it is.

I was born on Fort Huachuca Army base in Arizona.  I was the third of what would eventually become 9 children born to my parents.  Less than a year after I was born, my dad left the Army and relocated to Colorado Springs to start work as an electrical engineer at Hewlett Packard, which you probably know as a computer manufacturer, but that’s not what they were back then.  HP was an instrumentation manufacturer.  My dad worked for the Logic Systems Division, which always made me smile because they liked to abbreviate it rather than spelling the whole name out, so everything my dad would bring home from work showed that he worked in the LSD lab at HP.  He has a plaque, no lie, that the company awarded him at one point, that recognizes him as being an exceptional LSD engineer.  In elementary school, when all the kids get to tell the class what their dads do for a living – “My dad’s a doctor,” or “My dad’s a pilot,” – I’m all, “My dad’s an exceptional LSD engineer!”  He was never one of the dads invited to present at show-and-tell.

Dad designed oscilloscopes, signal generators and logic analyzers.  Dad actually built his own oscilloscope from a kit, and I used to love to play with it.  For those who don’t know what an oscilloscope is, imagine a high-voltage machine gun firing electrons at the speed of light into a vacuum-sealed glass tube, which is the screen, coated on the inside with a phosphorescent powder, so that when the electric bullet would strike the phosphorescent coating, it resulted in a tiny explosion of pure, green light. That’s a pixel.  Add a couple of electromagnets at the barrel of the gun, and you could magnetically deflect the electric bullets to cause them to hit any part of the screen you want.  This is called a “Cathode Ray Tube”, or CRT, and it was the technology behind most TVs and computer screens until the early 2000s when LCD technology began to really rise in popularity.

Now, take that Cathode Ray Tube, and power its electromagnets with an amplified electrical signal of any kind, and you will be able to see the actual signature of that electronic signal visually play out on the CRT screen.  That, in a nutshell, is an analog oscilloscope.  I used to love to hook up dad’s oscilloscope to anything I could possibly connect it to.  I’d open up the casing on Dad’s TV (which he also built from a kit), and connect the probes to random places on the circuit boards – just to see what the power signature would look like.  My favorite thing to connect to, though, was the power outlets in the wall.  How many of you can say that your parents allowed you, as a small child, to shove metal pins into live wall sockets? 

Standard household power has a signature oscillating between positive 170 volts and negative 170 volts at a rate of exactly 60 times per second.  Adjust the scale and timing of the scope just right and you could get a perfect, green sine wave to flow across the screen and splash against the far side like precisely spaced swells on a vast, electric ocean.  It’s a beautiful and mesmerizing thing, and I could just sit and watch it for minutes!  Yeah, it got pretty boring pretty quick.

Dad spent the rest of his electrical engineering career at Hewlett Packard.  A whole career at a single company.  Who does that nowadays?  At one point he was promoted to a section management position.  He hated it.  He asked for a demotion and a pay cut to go back to being an engineer.  He was well liked, but he wasn’t popular.  He was active, but not outspoken.  He never received any accolades or awards for having done anything great in this world.  Even in the Army, he was never deployed, never saw any action, never received any medals.  He was just a good officer, and a good engineer.  That “LSD Engineer” plaque is, probably, the most significant award he ever received.  Did the man have no dreams?  No ambitions?  Did he ever once aspire to greatness in anything?  What noteworthy thing did he ever do in his life that anyone would invite him to be a keynote speaker at a conference?  And yet, that completely unremarkable man is by far my greatest inspiration and most revered hero in all the world.  And I’m beginning to understand, now, that not all greatness is newsworthy or remarkable.

As a society, we gravitate towards and place higher value on the unique and the interesting; the amazing or unexpected; those things which make us sit up and say, “Wow!”  We cling to those stories of people overcoming socioeconomic disadvantages or physical or mental disabilities, and we like to attribute greatness to those people, while we ignore and devalue the many advantaged individuals who are doing the exact same things.  A news story you will never hear is, “Middle-aged, white man loves his wife!  An anonymous source has reported that the man, whose name has not yet been released, goes home from work every day at 5 o’clock and eats dinner with his family!  Full story at 11!”  It just isn’t newsworthy.

But is it greatness?

My dad and mom and their siblings established an annual tradition of getting together at Lake Powell every summer for a week.  We had three ski boats between us, one of which was my dad’s, and we would go find a deserted beach somewhere isolated, set up our tents, and spend the whole week waterskiing, kneeboarding, wakeboarding, tubing, cliff jumping, paddling around on inflatable toys, or simply relaxing on the beach with all our cousins all week long. I remember endless hours of sitting in beach chairs under plastic canopies, slathered in sunscreen, our noses and ears whited-out with zinc-oxide, perfecting the art of cheating at Speed-Uno.  I also remember that no matter how hard we tried to prevent it, the sand got into everything – in our tents, in our sleeping bags, in our food, in the plastic tub of red vines, even inside our swimming trunks.  We’d jump into the water and shake about trying to flush the sand out of our privies, but we could never quite get it all out.  It was a glorious week of relaxation and fun which we all looked forward to every year.

One year, we were driving to Lake Powell, all of us in Dad’s old Ford Econoline van, towing his 19-foot boat, which we named "Sherwood-B-Fun" over Wolf Creek Pass, high in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado.  Cars and even semi trucks continually passed us on the left as our van struggled to climb the high mountain pass.  Then, just as we were approaching a small town that we had only ever glimpsed in passing from the highway, we were startled by a sudden bang, followed by a loud and persistent “KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK…” coming from the engine compartment.  It doesn’t take a mechanical engineer to know that this meant our van was not going to make it to Lake Powell.  Not this year, nor ever again.   Dad took the single lane exit to leave the highway, and as it was getting to be evening, he pulled right into the closest Howard Johnson so we could eat, rest and take the evening to figure out what we were going to do. 

While the rest of us relaxed and slept in our motel room, Dad walked further into town to try to find an answer.  As it turned out, there was one car dealership in that little town, but it was closed.  Dad walked around the lot with a flashlight hoping to find something affordable that could pull a boat and carry a large family, but being a small, rural dealership, there wasn’t a whole lot of options.  The only thing he could find was a brand new, 8-passenger Suburban, fully loaded with a towing package for $35,000.

Now you have to understand something about my dad.  He had never bought a new car in his life, nor did he ever intend to do so, because as soon as you drive it off the lot, its value drops in half, and only goes lower from there.  Dad only bought cars that were several years old, but still in good condition.  And he would shop around – not just at a lot of dealerships, but at ALL the dealerships in the city, and some in neighboring cities - to find the best value, and then he would bargain for a lower price – never buying a car on sight, but making a reasoned, comparitive decision and then sleeping on it, and then going back the next day and negotiating an even lower price before finally closing the deal.  That is how my dad buys cars.

First thing in the morning, Dad loads us all up in the van, praying it will make the drive to the dealership.  He pulls up to the sales office “KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK”ing all the way, gets out of the van, looks the astonished salesman in the eye, points at the Suburban and says, “I’ll take that one”, and then proceeds to unhook the boat.  The bewildered salesman says, “Uh, ok” and starts drawing up the paperwork.  20 minutes later, we were back on the highway, passing all the other cars and trucks as we zoomed the rest of the way up the mountain, reveling in our cherry-red, 4-wheel drive, automatic-everything, new-upholstery-smelling, 5.7-liter, front and rear air-conditioned luxury wagon!  I am certain that in his heart, Dad was dying a little bit thinking about how he would be very literally paying for this decision for the next 10 years, but nothing was going to stand in the way of taking his family to Lake Powell so we could cheat at cards with our cousins for a week.

Did my dad have dreams and aspirations for greatness?  He sure did!  And he lived his dreams to the fullest.  They just weren’t the kind of dreams that get you book deals, or an interview on the Tonight Show, or go viral on Facebook.  His dreams were me, and Kurt and Art and Marty and John and JoDee and Maryle and Michael and Scotty.  His dreams involved missions, and Temple weddings and grandkids, and world-famous raspberry milkshakes at Bear Lake.  And I’m realizing, after a week of hearing amazing, inspirational stories about amazing, inspirational people, and asking myself, “Don, what is your dream?”, and “How will you become a Legendary Leader?” that I now have an answer:  I aspire to be just like Dad.