It’s just another early Friday morning towards the end of March where I didn’t have much of a plan to accomplish anything ground breaking. I opened the door to let my dog back in and was met by a blast of chilly wind to the face and bare feet. Where did I put my Minnetonkas?

Our puppy got fed and I made myself a breakfast sandwich with one egg, bacon and two kinds of cheese because that’s what you do after living and working in Wisconsin for a while. I do miss the fresh Colby from the Cedar Valley Cheese Factory near our home there. My daughters loved the factory’s string cheese, and there I go again; unable to maintain a single train of thought about any one subject at any one time. Shout out to CVCF!

Back to my normal routine which involves a login and a scan through YouTube to see what pops up at 5:30 AM. I stumbled across a simple narrated video from a successful studio musician about surmounting the negative feedback he had gotten in high school related to his grades and his future. The musician’s grades back then were about the same as mine, namely bad, where we both could barely hold a “C” average, but he eventually went to college, achieved a Master’s degree in music and created a successful career for himself in the music industry. There wasn’t a whole lot of positive reinforcement from teachers for me back then either, nor any guidance for how I might make myself useful to society beyond high school. College, I was told, was most likely off the table because of my low GPA and my SAT scores. There wasn’t any money for college available to me anyway.

I recall the week before high school graduation in vivid detail, because I didn’t know if actual graduation or the receipt of a diploma were in my future. My grades were questionable and final test scores were as yet unknown. The high school administrators told me that I should get my cap and gown and show up to the ceremony with the rest of my class. It would be a way for me to avoid any embarassment by being absent from the event. I was supposed to walk up on stage when my name was called and receive a hard cover folder just like everyone else. My final test scores would remain a mystery until graduation day. That day had arrived. My name was called. I walked up. I shook the principal’s hand. I was handed my black embossed certificate holder and sheepishly walked back to my seat, refusing to initially open it. With head up and a slow walk back to my seat, I took a pause for dramatic effect and eventually looked inside to find that they had in fact allowed me to graduate.

It’s hard for me to label that a victory, especially when reflecting on the behind the scenes background story. This was a Catholic high school led by the Franciscan order which meant plenty of husky dudes walking around the hallways in brotherly brown robes. One of them was a college football linebacker who loved throwing unruly students and bullies into a wall of lockers. I liked that guy. That monastical brown visual mosaic was dotted with balding priests in black suits and other male students of various heights and widths, but no girls allowed at this school. Yes, it was a super fun atmosphere for a tall and skinny, socially awkward kid who was quickly labeled as “not too bright”. Surviving 4 years WAS a sort of accomplishment I guess, though the school would actually be closing it’s doors with us being the last graduating class. I wonder now, if they just took pity on me and gave me a diploma knowing there wouldn’t be an option for summer school or for me to repeat my senior year.

That Was The Hook, Now For The Real Story

Studying was always difficult for me, even painful. Understanding math story problems was an impossibility. I needed to see or draw out an entire scenario on paper before I could visualize and understand how to solve the problem; a practice not allowed within the time limitations or boundaries of a test paper. English was always my best subject, though reading at any speed was difficult and when typing, I would routinely transpose words or letters within words all the time. I didn’t know it back then and neither did any of my teachers, but I had a few learning limitations to overcome and I had to figure all those things out on my own.

After high school my retail assistant manager job was paying relatively well at the time, enough so that a young man might consider forgetting about college altogether. But, learning how to communicate with people and sell things, and managing the books and bank deposits and product inventories, and developing a flair for marketing ads and in-store product displays did something wonderful for me. I had developed some actual self confidence and had learned on my own and for the first time, that I wasn’t all that dumb after all.

The Ah-Ha Moments Kick In

One day doing inventory and developing another headache, I rested my face in my hand at the desk covering one eye, and noticed that the paper I was looking at was blurry. I checked the other eye and it was mostly clear and in focus. Holy crap. I needed glasses. How long had this been a thing? The headaches immediately went away and I actually started to enjoy reading rather than it being the bane of my existence. I never understood why endless reading and studying for tests usually brought on discomfort or led to me just close my eyes and eventually fall to sleep.

A year after high school I started to reconsider going to college while keeping my full time job. A local community college was my only option and I started to take as many classes each semester as I could afford and fit into my schedule. Community colleges are wonderful places to establish self confidence and it all came with a motivational by-product. Since I was paying for the classes myself, I actually wanted to do well. The other kids there were actually nice. Students supported each other. I was comfortable there. My first semester? I pulled a GPA of 3.975. That whole school thing was still hard for me, but I learned that I could figure it out and that I could succeed there. I transferred to another University after 2 years with a great transcript, though with my work schedule and only taking a couple classes at a time, it took me 7 years in total to get my Bachelors degree. I never gave up along that long, drawn out road. Because of the full time job, I was able to graduate debt free.

Throughout college I also learned (on my own) that I was not what the specialists like to refer to as an “Auditory Learner”. I needed to write everything down and map it out on paper or the computer in order to comprehend the problem or begin to develop a solution. My “Visual” learning preference drove many of my bosses nuts over the years when I couldn’t quickly translate 2 hours of their verbal rambling and instructions into immediate action. What others viewed as a limitation, actually made me a pretty effective software engineer and architectural systems designer. I’ve got like, awards and stuff. Some of my solutions and technical approaches were published in peer-reviewed trade magazines. Maybe not such a dummy after all.

When it came to writing, it was always a welcome challenge. For whatever reason, I love to tell a story. I did it on the sales floor and discovered that if you tell your story honestly and with empathy, it tends to resonate with people. Presenting technical solutions and business transformation road maps to a professional audience follows the same approach. Be you. Tell your story. Define the antagonist or problem statement and map our your approach to a solution. Tell it with honesty and a touch of humor. Smile. Build towards common understanding and do it with sincerity. Those were all amazing experiences and helped me to get more comfortable with the writing craft. It’s just one more example of how a little dedication and lots of practice helps you get good at just about anything.

Developing a book was definitely never a goal of mine. I’m assuming that has a lot to do with my original experiences in high school and some left over challenges I still have with writing words and thoughts in the right order. I do tend to babble and drift from subject to subject. Segue is not just a word, it is apparently a communication lifestyle choice for me. I’m not sure if it comes from a touch of dyslexia or if it’s just a matter of me being very easily distracted, shifting my focus from this to that to strawberries. I’ve never been tested, it’s just a thing I deal with. And maybe that’s the point; I’ve just learned to deal with it. Writing and editing takes me more time than others because of all the back checking, and making sure my thoughts actually run down a singular story line path. I have to move words back to the correct order in a sentence. Spell check remains employed on my computer because it stays busy changing words like “jutsficatoin” into “justification”. The point to this part of the story is that despite all that, I’ve still written 4 books, 3 under another pseudonym. We’re not talking Pulitzer or best seller material here, but they were hard to do and a joy to write and have made a little money too. Not bad for a guy who almost didn’t graduate from high school. As a side note to explain my little learning issue, that last sentence was originally written to say: “Not bad for a guy who didn’t almost from graduate high school”.

College Is Not The Lesson Learned

Following high school, I could have just as easily taken another career path, in fact I was already on that road in the swimming pool, hot tub, and pool table business. It’s a weird combination of products, I know, but it kept the store open year round. Nobody is buying a swimming pool in Michigan, in January. The lesson is really about building self confidence in whatever you choose to do. I started with no confidence at all, truly, but it simply built up over time. Invariably you tend to discover which things in life you like to do and that you’re good at. Some people are great at social interaction and establishing a connection with other people and I know many who love being a Realtor, or work in customer service or sales. Some prefer to work alone and be their own boss, like the super nice guy who replaced our roof last year, or our sprinkler system & lawn maintenance guy whose wife runs their scheduling office. They both aren’t great communicators, but are awesome technicians. Had I known more back then about woodworking as a viable business, I might have gone down that path too.

I’m still not sure where the motivation to overcome those original high school challenges came from. I couldn’t credit any single person, or group or institution for somehow triggering that proverbial light bulb above my head. Perhaps it was just a feeling deep down inside knowing that I wasn’t really a worthless dummy, and that I could actually be good at something. Figuring out that something, took me a few years to finalize and it was one entry level computer programming class that hooked me. I liked the logic of it all, and I especially liked being able to visually map that logic down on paper so that it made sense to me. Program logic, network and server diagramming logic made sense to me too. That coupled with a set of basic communication skills I had learned as a hot tub sales dude, and I could effectively speak understandable English in complete sentences no less, to non technical people. That in a nutshell, explains my entire professional career.

I wish I had known more about the woodworking trade as a business way back then. I love all my time in the shop and am proud of all the furniture and art created there. It plays to all those strengths I had discovered over the years too, because it is tactile and visual and allows me to draw and design something until it makes sense to me. I happily use basic math and geometry again to craft proper angles and radius curves when I hated math in school. Hard work usually produces something beautiful and tangible and long lasting, and with YouTube I still get to tell a story during the whole build process. With 20/20 hindsight, this could have been my dream job, but I still loved all my time spent at PeopleSoft and a few other companies too. I was just telling a different kind of story.

“Well, the world needs ditch diggers too”.

The above was a line from the movie Caddyshack where judge Smales says that to the protagonist after the young caddie admits that he didn’t have the money to go to college. It’s an insensitive jab but carries a bit of truth too. That job, any job should be nothing to be ashamed of. If you like what you do and you’re making honest money to pay the bills and take care of your family, then you’re my brother or sister and I support your chosen path. But if you’ve always felt that you were capable of something different, that you could succeed in another type of role then with hard work, you can succeed. I have a nephew who was always awesome at pen and pencil drawings, even from a young age. He was told by his own high school and a series of other “adults” that it was a really nice hobby but that he should focus on getting a real job. He did that because he was told to, but quickly realized he was capable of more. Thankfully by sticking with graphic design and more personal growth in the art form, he now designs covers for rock band albums and fantasy art posters for commercial films and corporate customers. Good on ya, pencil dude. I guess it’s all touch screen monitors and graphic pens now, or maybe just magic?

So, don’t let someone else tell you what your limitations are. Your performance will always be measured by somebody other than you, but that does not and will never indicate your true capabilities. If you hate or are simply not effective in learning that particular field of study, you will not perform well. You have to want to learn and be interested in the subject to gain any ground. My performance in high school was terrible, but I hated it there, I apparently needed glasses to read without a headache, and my preferred learning approach required more visual methods and tools than the school could provide. I mean, who knew? A couple years later I had figured out what my limitations and preferred learning methods were, and found ways to get over those hurdles.

In the end, you simply need to do you. As you grow into adulthood, you tend to develop an understanding for the things you are proficient at and for the things you really enjoy doing. Not a job description, but a set of skills that you are most comfortable with be it communication and relationship building, or physical work, or the mechanical trades or graphics design, or writing or whatever. If someone or a group of people or some institution tries to tell you that you can’t or shouldn’t do something, that’s where the high school hairs on the back of my neck start to stand up on your behalf. It’s also an introspective and pragmatic question about your own capabilities that only you can answer. For me, I could never successfully do a job where I had to deal with someone else’s physical pain. I’d take the emotional empathy train right to tears before I could ever treat the patient. Even if I thought I might be smart enough to be a doctor, I could never be a doctor, but I understand that personal skill limitation.

Much like the musician admitted in his video, I got angry remembering what my life was like at the end of high school and all the support I didn’t get to help map out the plan for the next phase of my life. “Your grades and SAT scores aren’t great, so good luck getting into any college… NEXT.” I had to take a breath, take a figurative step back and remember where I had been and what I had done since then.

Nobody can really define me other than me. Nobody can define you other than you. Once you take an honest self assessment about the things you’re good at and the things you really love to do, hard work and determination will take you anywhere you want to go. That, regardless of what anybody else says you can or can’t do. Believe me. Been that, got there, done the t-shirt.