An odd bit of Zen, or something, on life goals- changing, degrading, growing, evolving, I’m not sure.
At a fairly large meeting last week at work, we had a speaker come in who is sort of a higher up in the overall chain of command. Our company has an extremely large, confusing, fussy chain of command with a lot of “strategy groups” and such along the way, so I’m not sure exactly where this guy falls, except that he’s high enough to be considered worth flying in from the coast to be a guest speaker, but low enough he would come to a relatively small meeting(150 people in a company of 150,000), stay for the whole thing, and not be a keynote speaker.
That’s a bit irrelevant to the story, but it sets the stage. He was part of a panel discussion. To introduce themselves, each speaker had a single PowerPoint slide (which from the divergent styles, fonts, layouts, and approaches to content, it was apparent they each prepared their own).
His slide had all of this in bullet point form, but I think it’s worth recounting how he narrated it as well, as closely paraphrased as I can remember.
He was born on an Army base and described himself as an Army brat. It was always his dream to fly fighter jets, specifically F-16′s. He went on about this for a bit. However, when he was ready to enter the Air Force Academy, his vision was not up to their standards (you can’t fly fighter jets in the Air Force if you wear glasses). So, he decided that he would be a military officer. I forget the exact name of the school, but there is apparently a hugely prestigious Air Force school that one goes to be become a really important Air Force guy. Like, you have to interview with a US Senator and a few other equally impressive people just to apply to get in. This application is a very long process.
(This part is a little fuzzy, it was late in the meeting, so I was fading in and out.)
During the application process, he met a girl, and applied to a regular college. By time his application to the military school came back (he was accepted), he decided to stick with the girl (maybe wife by this point), and the college he was going to (a place you’ve probably heard of, but not Ivy League or anything).
There may have been a bullet point about children and joining our company here, but if there was it was rather quickly and generically covered.
His next big accomplishment on the list, and he was quite excited about this, was that he build a deck on his house. They live on a golf course, and he spent the last year or so designing and building a deck for the back of his house, facing the golf course.
Now, he didn’t actually build it, like cutting the boards and hammering the nails (“But it looked fun!”). He hired contractors who did the work, but he was very proud and still referred to it as himself building a deck, and was adamant that a very detailed sketch of it the deck in the lower corner of his slide was in fact his “back of a napkin” design for it, drawn in perspective, with measurements.
In fact, of the pictures on his slide, telling us who he was, two of the pictures were of the deck, one was of a jet, and I think the other was a generic family type picture.
It just struck me as odd how he went from wanting to fly fighter jets, to being on a panel discussion introducing his life by focusing on the deck he spent the last summer not actually building.
I suppose this happens to all of us to some degree. We all wanted to be an astronaut/cowboy/princess/president/fire fighter when we were little. Or, in my case, paleontologists (I was an odd kid). Yet very few of us will end up being the first Space Presidential-Princess of all the Fire Fighting Cowboys.
It just struck me as odd for someone to present this shift is such a straightforward, yet, I’m guessing entirely unintended, manner.
