Pursue Excellence and Success Will Follow?

Why Having “Mad Skills” Can Get You
Absolutely Nowhere

And How Not to Murder
Your Time & Talents
Chasing The Latest Shiny Object

Back when I was still a bored-out-of-my-brain paper pushing project manager, working in construction…

… I got a premonition one day that sent a shiver down my spine.

It would’ve been during that 3pm lull you get in your typical 8-hour hamster shift, and I was downstairs fixing myself a coffee. Boss was out, I was the right hand man, and everything seemed dandy…

… on the surface.

Except, as I poured my coffee, something rushed over me like a cold wave going down deep, giving me goosebumps on the back of my neck. “This job will end in about 6 months”, was the voice I “heard” inside.

If you can call it a voice at all…

… it was more like becoming instantly nauseous and afraid, while the impression of impending doom reverberates through your bones.

Wow, again?

I thought I was really on to something with this job…

… after all, I’d had 2 pay rises in as little as 18 months, which put an extra $25k of take home in my pocket.

Eighty five thousand dollars, plus super on top...

… I was getting close to my dad’s salary.

But it wasn’t about the money dammit, my daughter had just been born.

Sure, I had become a bit of “burn the boats” kinda guy by then, only looking forward, never shrinking back. And I’d been jobless before…

… this would be my 5th time around the traps.

But she was so small and fragile, and gorgeous…

… and I was there for the whole thing, the moment of her birth is permanently etched in my brain.

And having to go back to work after she was born felt like frickin’ child abuse.

Facing the wolf on my own, I was used to that, went to live alone in a big city straight after graduation.

Ok, I had one friend there that I stayed with initially…

… but I got kicked out his house after pissing off his wife (she needed him all to herself), and moved into the haunted home of an old Scottish WW2 veteran.

And there, in the room I rented for $75/week, I learned the art of solitude, and of controlling my fear reflex from seeing my pathetic savings dwindle down, drip drip drip…

… as I waited for yet another jerk-off HR manager to get back to me.

So I wasn’t green by any stretch, more of a middle-weight with a few battle scars you could say. But the thought of not being able to take care of my fledgling family…

… that was heavy-weight division, and it was nauseatingly terrifying to say the least.

Cuz, let’s face it, it was bit of a miracle I got that job in the first place, and this wasn’t home, it was a new country altogether (we’d moved).

But what got me the job, funnily enough, was my very first bit of freelancing work that I landed when I had arrived in that big city, 3 years prior, as a fresh wet-behind-the-ears design school grad.

The Very First Commercial Project Worth $2K I Ever Did
That Got Me An $85,000 Job In Another Country
3 Years Later

I’d applied to the ad just before lunch on a Sunday sending through the pics you see above, and the guy replied that afternoon offering me an interview.

Ten nail biting days later, the job was mine.

During those 10 days I had found a data-entry gig, just in case…

… but mainly it was to keep my new wife from losing her mind.

She hadn’t tried life without a safety net yet.

You see, I’d been a bank teller after leaving high school and had honed formidable touch-typing chops, which then got me into higher paid data entry gigs. So, it was a handy fallback to have up my sleeve.

Data entry was good coin back then for a single student in his early 20’s…

… way better than what most dudes my age were earning.

And they left you alone too. You could put your headphones on, get in the zone, and just melt the night-shift away.

Which was a damn sight better than my customer facing days as a bank teller…

… where you had to be pleasant to customers, and courteous, and count their cash in front of them through the security shield (my teller days were numbered after I once made the mistake of taking a guy’s cash to the counting machine, on another table behind me… he was short quite a few dollars, but when I came back to tell him he accused me of pocketing it… and I completely lost it… hey I was only 22).

Anyway, I was in the middle of a brand new data-entry gig when the confirmation on the job above hit my inbox. This was before smartphones, so my wife had to check my email for me and call me…

… and when she did, I’ll never forget the feeling, I got up and walked straight out the door.

Burn the boats! We were finally going places.

T-Minus 6 Months to Oblivion

So, fast forward a few years, it was just as well that a couple of months prior to this coffee break vision of Armageddon, I had started sniffing around for people involved in 3D printing on Linkedin.

It had been another one of those sleepless nights where’d I get up and watch some TV to try and turn my mind off…

… except this time I’d switched on to Youtube and found myself watching Jay Leno’s Garage.

I don’t know what it was that was keeping me awake, everything was fine, or maybe my animal instincts were just starting to kick in…

… sensing the calm before the storm.

Being a car guy, I always had time for Jay, and on this episode he showed how a company called NextEngine re-manufactured an old D valve, from a 1907 steam car, that went out of production in 1910.

3D printing looked like the future, and I was a 3D guy it was well within my circle of competence…

… so I decided that night to begin moving towards it.

In fact, we’d dabbled with 3D printing back in design school as far back as 2003, back when it was called stereolithography and limited only to plastics.

We had to pay for our own materials and make our own models back then too.

Guys were shelling out north of $800 for models no bigger than a Rubik’s cube.

My Final Year Industrial Design Project Was An Electric Off-Road Vehicle Concept For Sony
With An Augmented Reality Lens for a Door
(AR Became Reality More Than A Decade Later)

It Measured 6” x 4” x 4” And Cost Me $650

Ex-Lockheed Martin

So I came across this guy on Linkedin, John Barnes, an ex-Lockheed Martin materials engineer from the U.S who’d just taken up a post at CSIRO…

… which is Australia’s equivalent of DARPA, or Oak Ridge Labs.

They had just got an Arcam A1 EBM machine, which 3D printed titanium, for a cool $1.3 million of tax payer's money, and were eager to try it out.

Back then, the local car manufacturing industry had just hit the skids with GM, Toyota, and Ford all set to pull out…

… and, a lonely Tier 1 brakes supplier called Chassis Brakes, must have asked CSIRO if 3D printing could innovate their humble cast aluminium brake caliper.

So, after I finished up with the project management job, I badgered John and he gave the job of designing a 3D printed automotive brake caliper

The “Revolutionary” 3D Printed Titanium Brake Caliper

That Didn’t Put a Single Cent In My Pocket

This is my main problem with smartphones and tablets, and note-taking software…

… often times they just make things more complicated.

Young people like them because they’re lives aren’t that complex… yet.

But listen to me, young man young woman, that device that runs your life right now, that you think the world of…

… is a double-edged sword.

Later on, when you decide to start a family and, oh I dunno, both lose your jobs (like me and my wife when we started ours… happening more frequently now)…

,,, and it all hits the fan big time, and you go into your compression phase, and you have a million decisions to make…

… but the 5G car, fridge, toilet, toothbrush, and septic tank are all demanding your attention right now or else…

… you’re gonna need every minute of unplugged sanctity you can get (try that ancient idea I mentioned above).

And although I still use OneNote on my phone and tablet a lot…

… they’re not the first thing I grab when I need to disconnect from distraction, and get myself into a state of focused calm…

… so that I can begin thinking clear enough to refine those gold nugget ideas, that I so desperately need to get to
(cuz time’s a wastin’… 3, 6, 12 months… the kids are now at school… poof gone!).

But even if you’re a bit further on in the game of life, don’t make the fatal mistake of thinking it’s too late for you.

Bruce Henderson, ex-bible salesman…

… in 1963, started The Boston Consulting Group (the most successful consulting group in the world at the time), after having been fired (again) at 48.

My grandfather, who survived months of Japanese torture in Indonesia (back in WW2, when it really hit the fan), had had 3 strokes and 5 heart attacks by the age of 78.

But when he finally left this earth, his mind had never been sharper, and he had never been happier nor more at peace.

Save for his body, he left here as the best version of himself he’d ever been…

… and he’s with the great engineer now, in the infinite country beyond the horizon, discussing projects beyond his wildest dreams.

And even though my exterior doesn’t hold a candle to what it was 20 years ago…

… the firmware inside is many many versions more sophisticated than what my “old” self had to work with back then (it’s true what they say… youth is wasted on the young).

Because it’s not how you start the race, nor even how you run the middle leg…

… it’s how you finish that counts.

Hey, you ain’t done yet.

Eyes on the prize.

Every good playwright knows that the climax of the story happens in the third act.

So shame on you sir, shame on you madam…

… if you don’t move heaven and earth to ensure you go out with a bow.