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.
