I have to start at the end to start at the beginning. It’s hard to know what the beginning was if you don’t know where you’ve ended up. In a book, that’s fine because a gracious author will wrap things up for you by the time you get to the back cover, but in life we have to be a little bit more creative.
The way this story ends is with my wife asking me a question that seems simple: “why do you think you’re so good at engineering?” Of course, I first thought that she was making fun of me, so I asked her very sarcastically why she thought she was so good at working at a nonprofit, which is what she does for money. But then it turned out that she really wanted to know. And then it turned out that I really didn’t know.
When I don’t know what I think about something, my brain really hurts. I don’t mean that I’m confused, although I am, and I don’t mean that I’m thinking about it constantly, although I am; I mean that my brain hurts like Sisyphus. You remember him, he’s the one who had to keep pushing the rock up the hill and watching it roll back down for all eternity. I thought about it for months and months. All that time I was wondering what I could possibly be doing that your average engineer wasn’t doing.
Although I’m acutely aware of the many things I need to improve on (and attempt to hide them every day), I am proud of my work ethic, creativity, attention to detail, knowledge of what’s important, sense of balance, and holistic vision, among other things. As I thought I became aware that although all those things are important skills to develop, many people have them and yet are unable ultimately to satisfy their ambitions.
Time will have to tell us if my greatest ambitions are ultimately satisfied, but I can confidently say that many of my ambitions have been already, and it’s this process of identifying a goal and proceeding toward it that defines much of my progress. Perhaps this sounds too simple. We often think that your average person has many hopes she is trying for at any given moment. Especially when considering educated people, it seems that we assign each one a certain striving based on her work. I think, however, that a real goal is something much more than that.
I didn’t know how important it would turn out to be, but when I was about 13 years old, my favorite thing to do was to take machines apart and see if I could put them back together. My dad had lots of old bicycles, clocks, vehicles, toys, tools, and you-name-its for me to examine, and mostly I was able to understand their inner workings and get them back in one piece. When I was watching TV with my mom and saw an educational show about hacker culture and wearable computing at MIT I was astounded that there was a school where they actually taught people to tinker in this way. So I made up my mind right then to go to MIT if I could (and I later did).
What if I hadn’t made it in? I don’t think it would have mattered much. There are three parts to my goals. First, the goal has to be reasonable, but just barely so. Starting a colony on Venus is never going to happen in our lifetimes (please, someone prove me wrong!), but one could certainly dream of building a robotic satellite to go there. Second, the goalsetter must be fixated on the goal, allowing nothing to dissuade. In this sense, my goal of going to MIT could have remained unattained, but the real goal was about being able to design and invent machines anyway, and many other places would have been just as good. Third, the goalsetter’s actions must be constantly honorable and constantly guiding her toward the destination. A true goal informs all choices that pertain to it, be they as simple as what book to read or whether to study math every summer in middle and high school to get into the advanced class.
It can sound a bit arrogant to say that I have laid out all these paths and reached for and attained them, but there are other goals I have missed as well. I only got into one graduate school, for example. The critical thing is to establish the next target, believe I can make it, and do what I can right now to make it happen.