WTF

Every few days, a massive Disney cruise ship pulled into port and parked just off the end of our little landing barge project. These arrivals were heralded by a flurry of JAX Port personnel rushing onto our site to chastise us for crimes such as welding, hammering, or driving forklifts on our little fenced-off slice of waterfront. Sparks, noise, and four-wheeled vehicles apparently made the cruise captains uncomfortable and they would sit just off the pier radioing their disapproval to the harried ground crews. Their reticence was so strong that we often stopped all work, stood still, and held our breath while they docked.

During these lulls, I wondered about the type of people who became cruise ship captains. I imagined them as skittish souls that had chosen a solitary life on the high seas because every person they’d ever loved ultimately betrayed them by walking into a room unannounced or sneezing unexpectedly during a quiet moment. Perhaps they were not people at all, but giant pandas which also require perfect conditions to dock a different kind of vessel.

During this delicate ballet, the passengers about to disembark gathered on the bow of the ship and stared down at us. Sated with salty food, sodden with sugary drinks, dazzled by a week of shining seas they peered at us from the depths of a nauseous fugue. Their glazed eyes squinted, their ruddy faces contorted, and over the short distance from their bow to ours, their singular question reached our ears:

“What the fuck is that?”

At that point, the barge didn’t look like much more than, well, a barge. Our own contract welders and painters hardly believed we were building something that would go to sea and catch a rocket, but the paychecks kept showing up so they did too. Truth be told, even we engineers didn’t know what would happen whenever the time came for mission — we just hoped the result would be interesting. So while none of us begrudged the cruising commentariat1 their opinions, truth be told having all our hard work just mercilessly by people who chose to spend seven days on a boat with other Disney adults all singing along to the Frozen soundtrack2 stung more than just a little.

A particular low point came the day I overhead a dad conversing loudly with his son. We were busy pulling massive bundles of power cables down the length of the barge. Each bundle was about six inches in diameter and a few hundred feet long. The entire team lined the deck and pulled the cable down the length of the barge. We looked like we were losing a game of tug-o-war against the weight of the copper and the friction of the insulation on the deck. Adding to the pain, that deck, freshly painted black, measured over 120 degrees in the sun. We’d pull a length as far as we could, drop it, then hustle back to the other end to grab another handful and pull again. It was grueling work and I sweat through my shirt, my baseball cap, and my jeans in a matter of minutes.

“See those guys working down there in the heat, son?” I heard the dad ask, “That’s why you have to go to college and get a degree.”

I looked up at him in his ill fitting striped pique polo and visor that screamed “golf accountant.”3 I caught his comment in the small interval between dropping a bundle of wire before jogging back for the next. I yelled back, “I have two.”

The embarrassed expression on his face said he heard me, but he otherwise carried on as if nothing had happened. Still, the message was clear: the people were not impressed with our barge covered in wire nor our labors upon it.

The Power of Paint

But then a funny thing happened. Overnight all the talk changed, and instead of slandering our work and maligning our professions, everyone started taking photos instead. What was this one weird trick?

We painted an ‘X’ on the deck.

I still sweat through my jeans, conducted in-depth technical discussions with welders that consisted of little more than invective laced with pejoratives, and did Home Depot runs to keep the crew busy. But suddenly, in the eyes of the public, I did so for a grand cause because now this barge was officially associated with the effort to land a rocket.

I found this about-face even more odd than the original condescension. At least the former had made some kind of sense. Upper-middle-class-white-collar-knowledge-workers have long picked on the trades as some kind of lessor work, perhaps out of jealousy of the practical nature of the work, insecurity about their own ability to make money in a changing world, or just good old fashioned ignorance.4

Truth be told, the fawning actually got under my skin more than the slander ever could, because it was a reminder that ego was what had brought me to Jacksonville to work on that project in the first place. The desire to make history and in the process become someone I saw as worthwhile lured me in. The flattery of everyone surrounding the project — from our crane vendors buying us lunch, to delivery drivers snapping photos, to the hotel staff we entertained over beers every evening at the bar in the lobby — kept that part of the ego fed. Of course, if that was all there was to the story there wouldn’t be any issue.

But the reality outside those stories I worked hard to tell was something else entirely.

From that perspective, I lived out of a suitcase in a budget hotel near the airport at the crossroads of two interstates surrounded by a sea of asphalt studded with little islands of fast food. Coffee from the urn in the hotel lobby for breakfast, fast food for lunch, and minimum twelve hour days in the sun spent in pitched battle with everyone from our own engineers, to the Coast Guard, to Mother Nature herself. Most evenings, I had dinner delivered to the hotel bar from one of the chains in the area, washed it down with a few beers, exchanged tall tales with coworkers doing double duty as friends to keep the egos fed, and then caught four or five hours of sleep before doing it all again. I exercised about as often as I took a day off, which was never because I had nowhere to go and no one to see. Every couple weeks I threw out my clothes and bought new ones at Walmart. I told myself it was because they’d been soaked through with sweat and hydraulic oil too many times to be saved, but really they just didn’t fit anymore. When I wasn’t doing that, I was on mission working hundreds of miles out at sea. Everyone claimed they wanted to go on mission, few could actually handle it.

But I was protected from that version of reality. I, too, had a magic X that had been painted on my shirt and which both kept me in adulation and too damn busy to think hard about much else. So, I kept cranking away. Equal parts of me wanting to know what would happen, not knowing what else to do, and reveling in the slow unwinding of self over the many months. In all I bounced between Louisiana and Florida (with side quests to the Bahamas and Belgium5), for about a year. Whenever the doubt got too loud, I’d go shoot pool in the lobby with the boys, have a few beers, and we’d all tell each other how we were making history, if the bartender and other patrons weren’t up to the task themselves.

Another Disney cruise ship pulled into port. A crowd of people got off, and yet more new ones boarded. As always, they gathered on the bow and took their pictures. We used to pose, but after the novelty wore off we just kept our heads down and kept working. A kid stood in the V of the prow, cast their arms wide, and screamed, “I’m king of the world!”

Yeah kid, me too.

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Every fall, we used to pile into a four-seat floatplane and head out west to fish, hunt, and camp for a couple of weeks. My first memories in the plane are mostly of the instrument panel. I remember it as a wall of black gauges, each with white numbers around their circumference, mounted in an endless plastic panel which filled my field of view. I tried to study them while we bounced along through the air, more from a lack of alternatives than anything else. I had no idea what each one was for, but I noticed they each seemed to have their own kind of personality.

While some had needles that swept gracefully through their range, others bounced around assertively. Many picked a number and rarely moved, holding steady, while some others tried but seemed to buzz nervously while doing so. Despite all being roughly the same size, they reported on vastly different scales. Some had numbers that ranged into the thousands and ended in nice, round zeroes while others only went from zero to one. A few reported seemingly random numbers like 12 or 220 or had no numbers at all.

Despite their differences, their common trait was absolute inscrutability to my eight-year-old self. I stared at them with a guarded mix of consternation and amazement. If the secrets of the Universe had been encoded in those little gauges, I’d have been none the wiser.1 Of course, the secrets of my immediate universe — a Cessna 180 on floats navigating Lake Clark Pass — and its ability to remain aloft were precisely what they communicated.

“Where are we right now?” my Dad asked.

The question took me by surprise. Flying with him required being able to enjoy, or at least respect, a good silence that could stretch for hours. This was hard enough for an eight-year-old to obey, but even harder to understand. I had no idea why he enjoyed flying along in silence, a serene smile on his face, continuously scanning the sky, adjusting little wheels here and little knobs there, but he did. I was always welcome to ask a question or make an observation if I had one, but the conversation generally returned to the drone of the engine and the crackle of radio chatter sooner than later.

I didn’t know how to answer his question. I had an informal knowledge of where we were, borne from our many hours in the plane together. I could recognize the water we had been over just a few minutes before — known as Tikhatnu2 — as well as the bluffs by our home on the east side the same way I could recognize the big curve and drop in the highway right before turning left on the road to our home. But after we crossed the water and entered the mountains, I lost my way. Since my vision was limited to the dashboard and what little I could see out the small window to my right, it was hard to say with any certainty which slice of mountain was which.

“I ... don’t know,” I answered truthfully.

“Well, what would you do if I had a heart attack up here and couldn’t fly?” he asked pointedly. This question seemed unrelated to the first, yet concerned me deeply.

“I’d probably crash and die,” I replied, yet again truthfully.

He looked at me like I was insane. This was not the answer he was looking for.

“Point to where we are on the map,” he commanded, handing me a folded chart. I opened it up and the wall of gauges spanning my vision was replaced by a stunning sea of green, tan, and blue. Dashed magenta lines and transparent magenta clouds layered on top. I noticed that each magenta cloud had a little black nucleus, next to which word were printed. I recognized some as the names of town, which felt helpful, until I remembered that the majority of Alaska didn’t contain any town. We could have been any distance and any direction from whatever dot I happened to recognize.

“Look out your window, find a landmark,” my Dad offered.

I scanned the ground outside the right side window, trying to see around the pontoon that blocked much of my view. I saw a continuous row of snowcapped mountains at eye level which descended to a thin river running through lush flatlands. I knew we’d just crossed the Inlet, and, by dumb luck, I’d found Kenai, the town nearest to where we’d taken off from that morning, printed next to one of the little black dots on the chart. I tried to put it all together and found a spot on the map that roughly matched these criteria, vague as they were.

“I think we’re right here,” I said, poking the map with my pointer finger.

“Close,” my Dad said charitably, “We’re actually here,” and he tapped the chart a few inches, or more than one hundred miles, further up the coastline.

Whew, I thought, disaster averted. I feared that I might have been made to guess blindly until I eventually got it right. I’d experienced that during previous lessons in math or mechanics where the answer had been obvious to him but meant nothing to me. Assuming that my training in navigation was complete, I handed the chart back to him so I might retreat to the safety of our shared silence.

Some time later, I noticed that the fierce mountains outside my window had taken on a far more sinister look. Black, jagged, and so razor sharp they had no snow cap. They looked less like mountains and more like the lower jaw of an ancient monster. I looked over at my Dad to gauge his reaction and noticed that he, too, had a row of fangs looming out his side window. We were fenced in, nestled among them.

Sensing my sudden attention to our surroundings, he asked, “So, where are we now?”

I’m not off the hook, after all, I thought.

I took the chart back and searched frantically for the spot where we’d agreed we had been before. I wanted to be able to point to just the right spot, then trace my finger up, effortlessly, to ... well, wherever we had made it to. Instead I just kept staring.

“Remember, we were right here before,” he said, tapping a spot nowhere near where I had been scanning.

“We need to turn north out of this pass toward Lake Telequana, which is up here,” he continued as he slid his finger up the map, “I want you to tell me where to turn.”

There were only a few inches between where we’d been and where we were going. My confidence skyrocketed; he’d narrowed down the search area considerably. I got ready to start guessing.

“The only thing is,” he continued conversationally, “we have to pick which two mountains to fly between. If we choose wrong, we’ll end up in a false pass.”

“What’s a false pass?”

“It’s an opening between the mountains that looks like a break in the range. But instead you find yourself face to face with a peak that rises up faster than we can climb in a valley too narrow to turn around in. It’s a literal dead end.”

I tried to play it cool and keep my composure while the thought, “He’s gonna let a kid decide this?!” screamed at maximum volume inside my skull.

I tried to remember the lesson he’d taught me only an half hour earlier, but it had gone in one ear and right out the other. Except one thing: Landmarks! I needed to find a landmark.

I looked out my little window and remembered the small river flowing beneath us. I looked at the sectional, in the rough area he’d pointed to before. Alas, it was lousy with rivers.

“I just need to know if this is place where we turn or not,” he said, as if we were driving down a shaded country lane looking for a place to picnic, rather than flying through what I saw as a greedy maw determined to swallow us whole.

My vision bounced from the hungry mountains, back to the river below, and back up to the mountains again. Approaching on the right, my side, there was an opening between sharp teeth. That had to be it. He wouldn’t set me up.

“That’s the turn, right up there, where there’s a break in the mountains,” I said relieved to have come up with some solution.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“No, of course I’m not sure!” I screamed in my head, while sitting in placid silence.

He reached back over, to the open sectional, and traced his fingers along a path.

“We’re looking for the opening where this little lake sits just off the river,” he explained.

I didn’t realize the map had that much detail but, as I looked closer, I saw that the rivers I’d classified in bulk were actually quite different. They bent and wound, braided and widened, split and recombined. They weren’t just cartoon lines on a page, even these drawings contained clues. The river by the lake was wide. Wide enough, in fact, that little sandbar islands were drawn in it.

Looking out my window, past the pontoon, I felt that the little river below couldn’t possibly be that wider one on the sectional. There was no room for islands.

“This isn’t the turn,” I decided out loud, “the river isn’t wide enough, and I can’t see any tiny lake on my side.”

“Good,” he said.

We returned to our silence. The illusion of surety is a tempting one. Many of us are so uncomfortable holding uncertainty that we sprint toward resolution, any resolution. We do this especially when we have poor data, and we seem to only accelerate along with the stakes.

It would be many more years until I understood that part of the lesson, though. For the moment, I pressed my face against the glass of my passenger window and watched as our once dangerous false pass slid benignly by.

Trees aren’t, generally speaking, supposed to be out in the ocean. Of course, trouble had been mounting long before we actually hit something, but the way it formally announced itself is etched in my mind: a twenty foot long tree, taken out to sea by the windstorm, riding the seas and hidden in the trough between two large waves. Dangerous situations often build just like this, degree by degree, fooling the rational mind until some event pushes things over the edge and the lizard or monkey or whatever brain kicks in and says, “fuck this!”

That moment landed for me the exact same moment our little boat landed smack dab on the middle of that tree trunk. The noise of the exploding timbers, the shudder of the aluminum boat happened and the sight of thousands of timber shards disappearing over the next wave just as quickly as they’d come made my primal brain take over.

“Go now!” It screamed inside my mind, as I white knuckled the wheel.

That split second, however, is often when trouble turns into disaster.

I remember my Dad once asked me, “What do you do if you’re flying alone at night and can’t find a landmark, and you notice you’re past the halfway point on fuel, and ohhh maybe you’re taking on a bit of ice too?”

I stared at him blankly. I hadn’t the foggiest idea. We were cruising along in the plane on a grocery run to Western Alaska and it was a calm, sunny, winter day. I’d read Hatchet by that point (pretty much a requirement for outdoor Alaskan kids) and while I believed I could handle a plane better than that kid had, my Dad’s scenario was far beyond that book and my own meager abilities. I kept looking at him in silence, figuring he’d tell me.

“Well, I’ll tell you what you don’t do,” he continued after a long pause, “Panic. If you panic you die.”

With that he took a bite of a sandwich thoughtfully, steering us through the air with his knees while he ate, and concluded, “But if you don’t panic, well, then you just might figure something out.”

Such is bush pilot wisdom. Effective, but indirect; helpful, but not comforting. The unspoken moral, of course, being: don’t get into such a situation in the first place. Yet, I think he also knew that sometimes they happen despite our best efforts. Remembering this advice convinced me I still had my head and though it might have been too late for prevention, we still had a chance at a cure.

We had a few things going for us: Foremost, we’d been lucky — we still had our boat. The V-shaped hull had split the tree and driven each half outward as we passed, preventing our engine from being ripped clean off. It ran strong and I took that strength and made it my own. Second, time was on our side. We had a full tank of fuel and the long Alaska summer days meant that, despite the rain that had blown in, we wouldn’t have to feel our way through nasty seas in the dark. Last, but not least, we knew exactly where we were.1

Our group of four had been trying to run up the coast of Kachemak Bay in our small aluminum boat from the small town of Seldovia north to Halibut Cove where we were promised art, fresh oysters, and cocktails. The weather report forecast some wind, but nothing major, and the prospect of light rain. When we’d left the harbor that morning it had started blowing a bit, but nothing out of the ordinary and the sun shone. The trip was easy. We stopped to hike for a couple hours and, as we got back in the boat I noticed the wind had picked up. Since we had friends on board, I tucked us behind Yukon Island to get a calmer ride as we turned out toward our next destination. Ever cautious, I told everyone that we’d just stick our heads out into the bigger water and take a peek; we could always turn around and skedaddle back south from whence we came. As we left the lee of the islands, I noticed the wind picked up enough to push between the seams of the boat’s bright blue canvas top and drove the waves a bit higher.

The first problem is that as we picked our way north, those waves kept building. The second problem, which is a bit sneakier, is that they took their sweet time in doing so which was time that we spent getting further from the safety of the islands and our protected run back to town, each passing moment making our exposure all the longer if ever we did decide to turn around. The third problem, the insidious wildcard that I hadn’t properly planned for, the thing that almost turned an uncomfortable day into a disaster, was the tide change.

The third problem, the insidious wildcard that I hadn’t properly planned for, the thing that almost turned an uncomfortable day into a disaster, was the tide change.

Once, many years before and just a couple miles down the coast from where we’d just landed on the tree, I crawled out of my tent in the middle of the night to pee and found that same little aluminum boat lying akimbo on a slanted field of boulders, like it’d been dropped from the sky. Of course, it had been dropped by the ocean instead, which set it down onto that steep hill strewn with rocks the size of cars before retreating a football field away. Yet I didn’t worry, because I had a little pocket-sized tide book stuffed in my coat that promised the water would return in the morning. I had stayed up the night before with my brother drinking scotch, pushing out the boat bit-by-bit with the ebbing tide, and paying out line until we were satisfied we’d gone far enough that the next day’s high tide would lift the boat again. We measured beach-lengths with a rifle, did some rough trig under the influence of Lagavulin to determine the vertical drop, and toasted to a job well done.

The point is that I knew how tides worked in that area. I knew how far they dropped in just six hours. From there, it isn’t much of a leap to understand that achieving that time table requires roughly a shit load of water to move out of those bays very quickly. Yet I had never experienced the combination of high winds pushing the sea in one direction while a powerful outgoing tide pulls it in another. Worse in our case, the winds and the tide were perpendicular to each other. This creates what is called a “confused sea” where waves come from multiple directions, swirling, crashing into one another, sometimes stacking into something bigger.

Checking the map I could see we were just off China Poot Bay. That triggered a dim memory of a brightly lit warning sign, like those used in road construction, stationed at the top of the boat ramp a few days before. Its flashing letters had warned that during tidal changes small craft had a danger of capsizing at China Poot Bay. I knew that if the boat flipped, and we all went in the water, it was game over. Even on a calm day, the water temperature would overcome us in minutes. But during a windstorm there was little chance of staying together — let alone making it to shore and staying warm.

Off our port side I saw the lights of the Homer Spit squiggling faintly on the horizon through the falling rain and clear, crinkled plastic of our boat’s canopy windows. Hotels, restaurants, and my truck with the boat trailer were all there somewhere amid the dim but alluring twinkles and I felt their gravitational pull, only five miles away. It wasn’t the plan — all of our gear was back in the cabin in Seldovia — but beat going in the drink, washing up on a beach, or trying to fight the seas back south. I made the call and, we as crested the next giant wave and started down the backside, turned us sideways to follow along inside its trough.

Distance is absolute, but the time doubly relative. The rough seas both limited our actual speed and heightened our senses to such a degree that every moment passed like an hour. We spent that eternity in silence, picking our way toward the lights shining like salvation on the Spit. Worse, we couldn’t drive straight at our target because of the waves coming at us from the side. We had to quarter into the swell zigging off course south and then zagging back north at 45 degrees. Whenever a particularly big wave rolled through I’d turn our nose completely off course to meet it head on, our pointed bow cutting through it and throwing spray clean over the roof of the canopy. I held the wheel in one hand and the throttle in the other, constantly adjusting our speed to push up the front of the swell before cutting it to glide down the back. WHRRRRRR-urrrrrrrr-WHRRRRRR-urrrrrrrr, up and down, up and down.

The GPS showed us moving at 3.7 miles per hour which, coupled with our swerving track, meant we must have been out there for close to two hours. On a clear day it would have been 20 minutes. Yet I didn’t rush. I held it in hand, spun the wheel, listened to the crash of the sea as it broke over the bow, the squeaking swish of our little windshield wiper as it beat back and forth, and the comforting rise then fall of the engine.

With excruciating slowness the lights grew brighter through the rain. I began to make out the hotel and piers through the spray and mist. Still, I didn’t rush. No reason to push luck in the home stretch. We ran all the way up close to the beach, then swung hard to gain a following sea and pushed into the harbor. We preserved the silence as we found a moorage, tied up, and killed the engine. It was late, we were tired, and despite the cool rain I had sweat through my shirt. We walked up the ramp in search of dinner, begged some fish and chips from one of the only restaurants still open late into the evening but too busy to seat us. We waited outside on a bench for an hour while they snuck our order in. I watched the ocean crash violently, relentlessly, endlessly on the shore.

This story has been on my mind a lot as I work through the early phases of this new company. In many ways I feel like I’m back in that little boat, tossed to and fro by confused seas. Though the goal is on the horizon, tantalizingly close, progress means we aren’t always pointed straight at it. I know this is not the typical position a founder takes, as most prefer to say that everything is easy and perfect at all times, but I think it is the more realistic one.2 This is patient work, and there are many people in the proverbial boat with us — our families, our friends, our new team members, our investors, and our development partners. Some days it’s easy running, throttle wide open on sunny days sprinting at the target, laughing the whole way — and sometimes it’s the exact opposite. Yet those latter days are the most interesting, as we see what everyone — including ourselves — are made of.

But for me, at the wheel, even in the worst conditions I remember that not very long ago I stood on the shores of my sabbatical muttering, kicking rocks, commenting on the other boats coming or going, and watching weather blow through while wondering if I’d ever be out there again. So on the hard days I remind myself of a simple fact: I asked to be at sea. And I got it.

We were out on another mission, still in the early days of trying to get a rocket to fall from space and land on our barge 200 miles or so east of Florida (emphasis: trying). Already we anticipated victory and eventual biopics, even though the preceding missions had each ended in explosion, disappointment, and hauling the burned-out husk of the barge back to shore for many long weeks of rebuild. Yet, the magic of that team lay in its ability to never ask “if” only “when.”1

“When,” however, centered itself in every conversation:

When will the barge be ready?
When will it leave for mission?
When should we be on station for landing?

When will the rocket launch?
When will the rocket launch?
When will the rocket launch?
When will the rocket launch?
When will the rocket launch?
When will the rocket launch?

When can we be done picking up debris and head home?

While out on mission, we lived on a 170 foot long boat, an offshore supply vessel, that followed the tugboat around which in turn towed the uncrewed barge. A nearly 200 foot long vessel sounds big until you see it and realize that most of its advertised length is made up of an open work deck for the rear two-thirds. The engines, bunks, galley, storage, bridge, crew, and everything else a sea-going vessel requires must fit into the remaining sixty feet.

So beyond discussing who would star as each of us in the inevitable movie2 about our eventual success, the reason we sat around that small table in the galley was simply because there weren’t many other places to go and not much else to do. We got kicked off the bridge when the captain wasn’t feeling chatty and we couldn’t stand spending more time than we had to in our windowless bunk rooms, the sound of the waves slamming the hull right by our heads, tossed ceaselessly by every wave inside a rough cut bed frame fashioned from unpainted 2x4’s that had the air of a cheap coffin. We had deck chairs, but that was a rare treat — waves came over the sides of the back deck in all but the best weather.

So, while being out on mission sounds cool, and let me tell you it works wonders when doing pickups at the bar,3 the reality is that they’re mostly dead time. To put my own verbose twist on a well-wrought axiom about war: it was days marked by unyielding tedium blooming into lassitude for life at large, punctured by moments of such extreme emotion you’re not sure if it was excitement, terror, lust, or all three electrocuting your spleen. They are about frittering away the hours watching people take turns being seasick until something major happens, which isn’t my favorite way of spending the finite hours of my life.

Tourism at the Hidden Edge

Yet, people constantly angled to come along. It seemed like every day I had to regale a new stranger with stories of massive storms with waves so large that they threatened to blow the windows out of the bridge that sat twenty feet above the water, chasing the barge to the Bahamas when the 3-inch tow cable snapped in a storm, frozen pizzas most nights for dinner, and the undignified (yet subtle) art of trying to stay on the toilet while it bucked like a meth-addicted bull with a pineapple up its ass.

Over time, I learned that rather than dissuading people, these stories served only to ignite a spark in their eyes, to somehow challenge their mettle. I inadvertently dredged up whatever particular flavor of unworthiness lived in their hearts and convinced them that this thing — in reality a week or so on a cramped boat — was some metaphysical cure for their lack of adventure. They sought their personal Edge, and to see who they'd be when they found it, just as I was. Many a JAFO from headquarters would somehow finagle a ride-along by sweet talking this person or that, and arrive unannounced on our docks with the sunny air of someone on holiday.

Inevitably, missions ground those boys4 to dust.

I remember one particular child arriving in flip flops, board shorts, and Ray-Bans. He had a single backpack in which, I assume, was his work computer (to do what with, I don’t know, since this was before Starlink and our limited satellite bandwidth was reserved for mission comms) and a change of tank tops. Just a few days later he was begging to go back to shore — eventually, he demanded we call him a Coast Guard chopper, which of course we did not (and could not) do just because someone was tired of being tossed around on a boat at sea. He was defeated; the spark had left. The Edge he hoped to discover faded somewhere beyond the horizon.

I felt for him because I too had experienced this particular disappointment in my own life. The idea that simply by being a tourist on someone else’s adventure we too could be transformed is alluring. This is why we identify with sports teams (saying “we” got the big win) and endless watching the Hero’s Journey play out on the big screen. Yet, that idea is also insidious.

Of course, watching a rocket fall from the edge of space and try to land is exciting. There is an undeniable shock that ran through my body every single time I’d first glimpse that rocket freefalling through the sky, dropping silently until the precise moment I was sure it couldn’t stop, and finally igniting its engines to land.

But it’s not enough to just see it — otherwise everyone watching rocket landings at the Jetties by the Cape would be similarly transformed as boosters come back into LZ-1. We could bus people in and transmute the world to a higher plane one first stage landing at a time. Just like the baby in the board shorts, you cannot be a tourist to experience. Life is to be lived and experienced.

If it’s silly to think people can be transformed on a beach watching spaceflight, then it’s even sillier to think that everyone has to actually engage in launch and landing to transform. The good news is that you don’t have to lead a team, found a startup, climb a mountain, or even get off the couch to find the true Edge living inside.

The Edge is Everywhere

My great mistake5 was believing that the Edge only existed at the end of grandiose pursuits. I believed that only those adventures which were gaudy, public, and painful possessed the power to measure, transmute, and transform. I felt that I had to be launching rockets, or landing them, or building businesses, or running up mountains, or engaging in some other ostentatious show of will to navigate whatever Edge I sought. I believed I had to be on some literal physical edge to find the deeper philosophical Edge within.

Of course, I quickly got stuck — working to land rockets on a barge cannot be expected to automatically transform me from a self-destructive boy into a centered grown up anymore than those just watching. I was engaged and working hard but didn’t realize I was engaged in the wrong things. I was working but avoiding the actual Work that job presented. Desperate for something to change, I upped the ante.

I drank too much. I ate like shit from all the fast-casual chains surrounding the hotel I lived in. I worked seven days a week for months on end. I lost contact with friends. I cheated myself out of sleep bouncing from barge to bar and back until I was down to just a few hours a night of sleep, all in an effort to prove something I couldn’t define to someone I couldn’t name. My memories from that time are mostly a greasy blur of time on shore punctuated by moments of sheer terror and awe at sea.

Now there’s an Edge to explore. No, not the terror and awe; too transient, too ineffable. Those exist at a maxed out limit that are hard to make sense of later. I’m talking about why I felt I needed to do any of those things — the drinking, forced insomnia, and poor diet — to make the job worthwhile. The Edge wasn’t landing rockets, it was figuring out why I felt I had to punish myself while doing it. Why did I believe it was only valuable if it hurt?

Crucially, how do we find these Edges in day to day life without spending a year living in a hotel and eating fast-casual crap every night?

Well, it ends up there’s a simple solution that avoids hand-wavy meta discourse:

Focus on the small stuff and notice the bullshit you cook up.

You wanna find the edge? Turn off your phone for a day and count how many times you reach for it. Notice how every time someone you’re talking to, eating with, or even in the same room as pulls out theirs, you automatically reach for yours. Notice how you tap that front left pocket whenever you get a distracting thought like a nervous tic. Then notice what other behaviors crop up to replace the phone in those 24 short hours away.6

Oh you can’t turn it off because of responsibilities? I get that — some of us are always on call to people that depend on us. Well, why don’t you go ahead and open up your screen time stats and then delete the top five apps in that list that aren’t called "Phone.” Even better, deactivate the accounts behind those apps. Then call your fucking mom, dad, grandparents, brother, sister, second cousin, or whomever else you’ve been avoiding and check in on them.

Ready for the next step? Go sit in a comfortable chair facing a blank wall. Set a silent timer for 10 minutes and simply notice your breath as it comes in your nostrils then flows back out.

What’s that? A thought?

Thank it for coming by and then dismiss it. Thoughts are for the other 950 minutes of your waking day. Focus on the breath.

Breath comes innnnnnnn, breath goes out.
Breath comes innnnnnnn, breath goes out.
Breath comes innnnnnnn, breath goes out.

Why are you shifting around so much? I thought you picked a comfortable chair. Funny how even the body is trying to bail you out of this with little phantom itches and aches and wiggles! I think you two might be in cahoots.

And when did you notice that your eyes weren’t closed anymore but you were staring at that blank wall instead? Took a second, didn’t it? Have you noticed that the only thought banging around in your skull is a mad sub-language desire to look at that stupid fucking timer?

What are you trying to get away from? You’re safe, sitting in a chair that you picked, in a silent room, looking at a blank wall. Are you already calling the whole exercise a stupid waste of time? Well, congratulations (or condolences), there are some fun little edges for you to explore, and you didn’t have to earn Forbes 30 under 30, cross your arms on the cover of Inc. magazine, or blow up your whole life to find them.

Engaging in the Real Conversation

Look, I’m not preaching from some dais on high. I get it, it sucks. But that’s what makes it a real Edge.

I remember 10 minutes sitting on a pillow focusing attention on the ends of my nostrils used to feel simultaneously like a Sisyphean slog through a CIA black site interrogation session and the silliest shit I’d ever been asked to do. I’d wiggle around or peek to check the timer and be righteously indignant that I still had seven minutes to go!

Even on my best days I found myself simply enduring the time rather than experiencing it. Man, what does that say about me? Yet, I slowly grew the courage to notice these little oddities and got curious about them. Each was found a tiny little edge — a new face to mine.

Hell, I’ve been at this the better part of a decade and even now all that often separates success from outright disaster is the hard-won ability to take a single extra breath before responding to someone who, I feel, has just said the stupidest or smuggest shit in the history of human language. If I can suppress the eyeroll and self-righteous indignation, that’s bonus points.

Adults wielding words recklessly gets under my skin. So do people who drive in the left lane ten mph under the limit, as if they are King of the Highway and so do about a trillion other little petty stupid things that are embarrassing to write down and publish on the internet. But I write them here because we both know you’ve got your own bonkers list, and so does everyone else. Maybe we can all just admit it, have an awkward laugh, and get curious about them.

That’s the first Edge — just being willing to face what’s really going on and hold a real conversation with it. Ironically, when I thought I was most at the edge on the barge, I was actually using that work and the all-encompassing nature of it to drown the out the true conversations I actually needed to be having. Hey, pobody’s nerfect and my only saving grace is that God isn’t done with me yet.

The practice, like a lot of life, is to keep showing up showing up to that conversation, again, and again, and again ad nauseum — possibly ad infinitum — but choosing to do it anyway. Even Jack Kornfield, the celebrated author and meditation teacher who wrote an entire book about how to navigate life after finding enlightenment7 is open about how much he struggles with incompetent drivers being on the road around him (wow, I’m just like Jack Kornfield for real!).

Forget the Big, Embrace the Small

These are little things, but as Hank Scorpio tells Homer Simpson, it’s the little things that make up life. I, for one, am not going to argue with the wisdom of Albert Brooks as a Bond-style villain in a top three all-time Simpsons episode. The little things create our perception of reality and everything we experience is filtered through that perception. How healthy and rested we are, and even what we ate last, has a lot more to do with our outlook on the world than we may be comfortable admitting.

So, what’s the takeaway? I guess that I realize those grandiose gestures I spent my 20’s chasing might actually be the cheapest, that they are not required for transformation, and that they might actually be getting in our way. It’s easy to give the big stuff our attention and our best. It’s so easy, in fact, that the big stuff becomes a convenient excuse to ignore and numb the small stuff eating us alive. If my 20’s were about avoiding the small stuff to focus on the big, my 30’s have been about just the opposite. Strangely, much bigger and better things came from flipping that focus. As I said, Scorpio was right.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t dream big or have grandiose things in work. It means that I now know those can only be achieved if I have the little things in order. Ten minutes a day in a comfy chair noticing my response to my own thoughts might be hard, but it’s valuable. And if I can interrogate those Edges, I have noticed that the big things tend to take care of themselves.

“Ok,” I replied.

There wasn’t much else to say. She’d been helping coordinate Afghan refugee evacuations out of Kabul to the U.S. and we’d always intended for our house to be used as a hub for things like that. If you know Jennie, it made sense that this would be the next step.

She was pulled into this work when a friend of hers in Kabul asked for help evacuating. With the T*lib*n1 taking back over, things were changing fast. He had been accused of the heinous crime of advocating for women and helping young people become entrepreneurs. He needed to get out. He’d asked for help getting in touch with a cabinet member of the Biden administration he knew.

How do you get hold of someone like that? I have no idea. When Jennie explained what she was doing, my only thought was that it would take a miracle. Yet Jennie was undaunted. She immediately reached out to her network and got to work. Eventually, she slid right into the DM’s of this person’s spouse and sent a picture of her friend alongside these people at an event in D.C. where he had been honored. Presto, his family was added to a list for transport out. He snuck himself to the airport, got through the gate, onto a flight, and made it safely to the U.S.2

After that, Jennie found herself pulled into Signal chats where she kept working to help other people get out. Not everyone made it. Whenever the T*lib*n intercepted someone, they’d kill them and send gruesome photos as proof to the group chat. It took a massive toll, and Jennie kept saying she was done, but then she’d dive back in.

In typical Jennie fashion, she took on this massive effort late at night as we tended our newborn. Being just a few months postpartum obviously made everything harder, but it also drove her onward. There were so many people that needed help, and so many of them were children, guilty of nothing more than being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then Jennie saw a woman named Hellen, who lived in Anchorage, tweet about a fundraiser for an Afghan family relocating to Alaska. The father of the family was a dual citizen who had lived in America but moved back to Afghanistan after his first wife died. He had been living in Kandahar, but he also had an adult son who lived in Anchorage and was Hellen’s friend. The father had remarried and had six more kids, who ranged from fourteen to just two years old. They were coming to Anchorage to start their lives over and needed a place to stay while they figured out long term housing. Jennie jumped in and offered our house as a soft place for them to land while they figured out what came next.

Hence the one sentence declarative text message I received at the beginning of this story.

A couple weeks later, eight very tired people walked through our door. I’m going to avoid names here, again for safety reasons, but I remember the youngest, not even quite two years old, walking around with wide eyes and a pacifier. Her older brother, around five, clung protectively to his dad. The two middle sisters, around eight and ten, sported defiant poker faces. Then came the two oldest girls, the first about twelve years old, who was quiet and kept her eyes down. Her elder sister, fourteen, stood straight and silently took everything in. It was immediately clear she was the leader, if not in title then at least in spirit. For the purposes of this story, we will call her Meena (after the founder of RAWA). Their dad spoke good English but, of course, no one else spoke a word. Their mom fussed with the youngest while we managed the initial greetings with smiles, nods, and trading names.

The immediate work was to get the kids registered for school, which had already begun, and set them up with Catholic Social Services to begin the hunt for permanent housing. Jennie and Hellen set to these tasks with ferocity. A woman named Andee, a former schoolteacher, knocked on our door and offered to help tutor the kids. The team was formed.

Education in Earnest

Over the next three months, the house became a hub of joyful chaos. We cooked, we played soccer in the yard, and the kids choreographed routines to the craziest Bollywood videos I’ve ever seen. As fall fully gave way to winter and the days got shorter, we started doing movie nights downstairs. Everyone piled on and around our big gray couch with popcorn and pizza.

One night we watched one of the Minions movies and one of the yellow blobs (Bob) points to a rat and says, “poochy.” It’s a micro moment, a complete throw away gag and yet without missing a beat, the kids all turned to one another, nodded, and repeated “poochy” solemnly. I paused the movie and tried to explain that it wasn’t a poochy, it was a rat — and that poochy was just a term of endearment for a dog, not any kind of proper name. How does one who doesn’t speak Pashto do that with a group of kids who don’t speak English? For me, it took putting dignity aside, pointing emphatically to the characters in the paused cartoon while saying the correct terms. I looked insane, but it was important. These kids, like all kids, paid attention. They were smart and wanted to learn. But coming from absolute zero was going to be work.

Jennie and I knew what needed to be done: educate the two oldest girls as fast as possible. After all, they had the least amount of time before a potential high school graduation, they needed to learn the most, and they also represented the foundation of the family’s future stability. Meena was about to walk into ninth grade with almost nothing that would be helpful in an American school: zero English, zero math, zero history, or anything else. Her sister was heading into middle school equipped with the same. Like a fucked-up version of Billy Madison, they had to not only learn the entire curriculum from first grade to high school, but they also had to learn to speak, write, and read English along the way, all while navigating a new culture along the way.

Jennie sat down with Meena and her next youngest sister at our dining room table, a phone translator app open between them, working from English to Pashto and back again trying to establish the baseline of their education before their first day. She showed them on a globe where they’d come from, tracing an arc from Afghanistan to Wisconsin where they’d first entered the U.S., then another up to Alaska. This inspired stunned silence.

I had the bright idea to show them Google Earth. I started by zooming into Kandahar. Their eyes widened. They recognized it immediately, even from above. They pointed and spoke hurriedly. Then I zoomed out from the city to Afghanistan, to the Middle East, and to the entire eastern hemisphere. I rotated the globe almost 180 degrees and started zooming in on Alaska, then Anchorage, then our house. This evoked outright shock. It was one thing to see it on a globe; it was another to be able to zoom in; to realize just how big each of those tiny, brightly colored countries really was, how vast the oceans were, how far they had traveled.

We grabbed my daughter’s kindergarten and first-grade prep books out of her room and flipped through them. Laboriously, through translation, we discovered that they didn’t know the concepts of addition or subtraction, let alone multiplication and division. Jennie showed them shapes and asked a question via the translation app. The girls pointed to a word on the screen, looking confused. Jennie selected it and translated it back to English. It was “triangle.” They hadn’t been taught what a triangle was. Jennie asked Meena, the oldest, if she’d been to school. We learned she’d gone only to the first grade.

Imagine for a moment what it was like to be in their position. Everything they’d ever known had been snatched away from them by the whims of fate. They were in a new part of the world, in their most formative years, not only learning a new language but one that was also read in the opposite direction (left-to-right) with an entirely new alphabet. Meena had no real formal schooling and was being asked to walk into an American high school with zero cultural context. It would take a miracle to pull it off. Most people would fold faster than Superman on laundry day in that situation.

Meena didn’t.

Work.

She and her sister sat down at our table every single day after school and worked with us and Andee. They devoured my daughter’s workbooks in just a few weeks. We bought more at Barnes & Noble, and after a few months, they were through the bulk of elementary school, at least for math and science. Jennie and Hellen had signed the girls up for ESL classes at their schools, where they had a fighting chance to learn to read and catch up to their peers.

As the weeks went by, they started to realize the sheer amount they had to learn. This is the most delicate moment of any undertaking, when the true scope of the challenge ahead becomes clear. You realize all the work you’ve done to that point served only to define the enormity of what is left to do. Instead of making forward progress, the scope of the challenge expands endlessly before you. You feel like you’re treading water as everything you don’t know makes itself known for the first time. Whatever this realization is called,3 it kills everything from home renovations, to startups, to expeditions, to marriages, all the way up to lifelong dreams closely held but never touched. I’ve seen it take the light out of grown men’s eyes more than once. These two teenagers faced it and kept right on pushing.

After a few months, the family moved out to live with their dad’s grown son (the kids’ half-brother). Jennie offered for Meena and her sister to continue to stay at our house during the school week so that they could study at an accelerated pace. The parents agreed, and after school, the girls rode the bus over and we worked until bedtime. Andee came over every afternoon after school to tutor and my mom Beth jumped in, too. Hellen showed up with meals and motivation. We took turns cooking, teaching, getting our own kids ready for bed, doing our jobs, and tutoring in a mad blur every evening. But we found a rhythm, and the girls made progress at an astounding rate.

We kept this up for two years. It was no simple montage, though. As impressive as their progress was, the task of catching up to high school was more impressive still. And we were partially down one team member from January to May: Jennie had agreed to run for State House eight months after they arrived.4 This meant she would be in Juneau during the workweek and home on weekends during the spring semester.

So, that spring when it was down to Andee, Beth, and I on the tutoring front while Hellen focused on the remainder of the family and Jennie coordinated from afar. For those two years, I had a front row seat every Monday through Friday to the girls’ transformation. They experienced every emotion from frustration and anger, to confusion, to elation as a concept finally made sense. Sometimes we worked past midnight. Despite that, every morning they were up, packed their own lunches, and made it to the bus. They worked harder than the vast majority of adults I’ve known and complained far less.5 It seemed that they, too, understood the stakes.

Side Quests and Scholarship

Like any quest, the path we took wasn’t a straight line. Along the way, we ran into any number of challenges that necessitated side quests, like word problems where they didn’t understand key words, (“what is a carnival? what is a ticket?”). Because of their hard work they understood the math once the equations were setup, but they wanted to know what a carnival and ticket were. This isn’t an issue in and of itself, of course, but extrapolate that moment across the entire breadth of English nouns and I feared we’d run out of time. I found myself saying, “Don’t worry about what a carnival is, we will get back to that, it’s not important, we have like ten more of these to do!”

But they wouldn’t relent, they wanted to understand it all, so we went on regular side quests to search Wikipedia and YouTube for info on things like carnivals and tickets. It was time well spent. Through those side quests, I watched their worlds expand and transform — and it wasn’t always fun things like carnivals. Often, these adventures led us to difficult conversations. When Meena asked me, “What’s the three-fifths compromise?” one day when she was studying history, we embarked on hour long side quest explaining America’s past and how systems of power work which was more sobering than they had prepared for.

There was also the home economics assignment where they were supposed to find a job posting they were qualified for, then find an apartment and build a livable budget. To Meena’s sister, this seemed like an easy task — she could simply work at the grocery store or McDonalds, she declared. But as she started searching the web for an apartment, and saw their prices, she realized that the cost meant she couldn’t afford to buy a new car, or even much of a used one. She’d have to ride the bus. Even then, she still wouldn’t have enough money to travel the world like she planned, and she’d have to cook simple meals every night. She cried for a long time as that reality sunk in.

The education that they were pursuing for its own sake took on a new urgency. They’d thought they had already arrived, by getting to America to pursue the American Dream, the main quest was achieved. But school was teaching them more than just the curriculum; it was opening their eyes to the reality of the world they’d left, and the one they stepped into. It wasn’t enough to get the miracle of escape; they had to understand that their journey was not ending, only beginning. Education for education’s sake is a lovely thing, but unfortunately for us, it is a thing of privilege. Their education also needed to be practical.

It also needed to be paid for. I wasn’t sure how it would happen, but I never spoke of it because I didn’t want to dim their hopes. I remember well getting into my dream school for undergrad and how in a moment my pride turned to pain as I realized I’d never go there. I had been naive about the costs — honestly, I hadn’t even considered them. I thought only about getting good grades, doing well on tests, and writing great essays to get admitted. I assumed the rest would take care of itself. It didn’t. I found a way to pay for school in-state by working through undergrad, and everything turned out fine. But I didn’t know what we’d do for Meena.

She figured it out for herself. Despite participating in every program at school, such as TRIO and National Honor Society, they also started taking classes at the local trade school in addition to their regular workload. Some in business, others in CPR, nursing assistance, and emergency medical training. Meanwhile, they also enrolled in summer school, worked at a local bakery, and sent Jennie emails with her five and ten year goals alongside her detailed plans to achieve them.

Somehow, Meena still found time to apply for dozens of scholarships. She had Jennie and me write letters of recommendation, got more from teachers, and wrote dozens of essays. I remember being proud of her, but thinking it was a long shot. She was going through databases of scholarships online and making applications to each.

Then, she won one: $50,000 per year — enough to cover a bachelor’s degree. Once I was sure it wasn’t a scam (because it feels like more and more everything is a scam) the realization settled in: another miracle. She did what I couldn’t. She found the money and found the way.

Graduation.

This spring I went to the first high school graduation I’ve been to since my own exactly 20 years ago.6 I listened to a valedictory speech filled with slang I’ve never heard, but echoing the same themes in every similar speech since time immemorial: Genuine gratitude for friends and fuzzy hopes for the future.

And there in the fifth row sat Meena in her cap and gown, with different colored cords adorning her neck for all of her achievements. Just four years before she stepped off a plane and into an entirely new world. She didn’t know math, or how to read English, or the challenge she was embarking on as her family’s new life began. Now she was graduating summa cum laude. They called her name, she crossed the stage, shook hands, and received her diploma.

This fall she’s applying her scholarship to nursing school, and after that, who knows. She dreams of being a midwife, maybe eventually going to medical school, and one day being able to return to Afghanistan and open a hospital for women and children. No matter what, she will always be a genuine, walking, talking, living miracle. In a world where those are increasingly scarce, I think that’s worth celebrating.

I took a handful of calls. I told myself it would be good to see what was out there, or keep relationships warm, or a million other things. But really, my mind was just grasping for any excuse to avoid being stuck sitting in slow silence for two years. I knew I needed it, but man I sure didn’t want it. Despite the misgivings, I stuck to my plan of not working for a while to see what would happen.

I am Become Sleep, Restorer of Will

The first thing that happened was I slept. That hadn’t been the goal — it snuck right up on me. I thought I’d immediately start cookin’ on the next big thing. While I waited for it to appear, I’d often lie down to read on our big couch next to the bookshelves only to find myself startled awake minutes later as the book I was holding fell square onto my nose.

I had chosen to revisit an 8-book historical military sci-fi series about a regiment of Union soldiers that fall into a portal and land on an alien world where nomadic eight-foot-tall aliens raid settlements from humans like cattle to feed their endless march. Look, they weren’t great, but they were interesting. They had action on every page! Point is, it wasn’t their fault I spent weeks falling asleep on that couch in the glow of the afternoon sun.

After a while, I decided to be honest with myself and just lie down without the book. Jennie just let me sleep. Then she’d wake me around dinner time. I’d eat a few sleepy bites, mumble my apologies to the family, and stagger upstairs to sleep some more.

That’s burnout for you.

It’s important to point out that even though I’d been near-religious about sleeping 8 hours a night for years, it made no difference. There’s a different kind of tiredness that builds up which regular nighttime rest or even a two-week yearly vacation can’t cure. That exhaustion is only addressable once you lose access to your buzzing inbox and calendar forever. When the incessant hum in the back of your head is gone. It’s when the mind finally shuts up that the body can catch up, and the healing begins.

All that sleep felt like a huge setback to someone who was sure I’d be whipping up a new company in no time flat. It went on so long I started to wonder if I’d ever be restored to my former energy.

What if I was washed up?
What if the well was dry?

There was nothing to do but sit with it. I had to learn to be ok with the rest, practice patience, sit with the fear the mojo might never return, and be curious about it all.

That was work enough for a quite a while.

Better Questions, Fewer Answers

Throughout this time, I woke each morning with a fresh idea coupled with a surge of near-manic energy to build whatever it was. It was bullshit, of course. A hairbrained plot conjured to escape the long recovery. I pursued a few, but the energy never lasted long. Those “ideas” were nothing more than the bored throes of an overactive mind used to driving forward at all costs, unhappy to find itself relegated to the backseat, disconnected from a body that simply couldn’t go.

Between naps, I began taking long walks on the trail behind our home and, as the seasons passed, I began to feel better. Of course, better is hard to describe. But the shortest way to explain it is that I felt more embodied and days gained their own rhythm outside my own. I could feel my feet and I’m not sure I ever had before, or at least not as long as I could remember. I could sense feelings rising, and instead of being driven by them I was better able to decide myself whether or not they were true.

Summer came and went, the leaves fell, the weather turned, and my long walks turned to slow skis along the same trail. Just as those skis began to give way back to spring walks and summer runs, I noticed the ideas (which never stopped coming) had transformed in one crucial way: Instead of arriving as answers, they came as questions.

It’s easy to get excited about some thesis or hunch — a new widget, a different business model, a novel approach — but certainty is fragile. Our thinking is notoriously fuzzy and often these ideas don’t survive even the barest scrutiny. Questions, on the other hand, are scrutiny and so make much more fertile ground to explore.

Why are things the way they are?
What’s holding back change?
What prevents new futures from emerging?

I asked these questions about a handful of technologies I had interest in, and that led to analysis and yet more questions. I had conversations with experts across academia, industry, national labs, and - as the questions matured - potential end users. The key always was to hold any growing convictions loosely and let the curiosity drive. Lots of assumptions withered, many more grew in their place, until, almost without realizing it, a thesis and an opportunity emerged from where these questions intersected.

I never would have found it if I’d approached from a place of perceived answers and insane speed. Each of the technologies I had with at the outset ended up abandoned, but leading a level deeper, to questions about what would take to enable them. Being able to handle the many false passes and dead ends gracefully, instead of trying to force through them is a gift.

More Than a Rest Stop

Earlier this year, a buddy of mine had me out to his hangar where he’s working on bringing an old airplane back to life, manufacturing them for families traversing the Alaskan bush. It’s really cool work. After touring the facility, I told him about my new company. He was excited, but I could also see some disappointment in his face.

“So, it never goes away, huh?” he asked.

He’d been following this Substack (hi!) and was hoping that after building and selling a company, I was done. That the itch was scratched, that I was somehow cured. I admitted that for a long time, I thought I was done. And if at the end of this sabbatical all that I had was a new company and the same old way of doing things, I’d not be nearly as excited. Instead, I’m just done with the old way of doing things.

Time off should be more than a rest stop. Rather than a pullout from the interstate of life where we gas up, stretch, pee, buy a Big Gulp, and hit the same old road again it is a chance to go an entirely new way. As excited as I am about the new work, I am most curious about how it might be done differently.

Can a startup be built while remaining in balance?
Rather than pursuing work as an end (selling companies, boosting ego) can it be a Way?
How might our work inform the larger Work of our lives?

I have much more to say on this, and suspect it’ll become a deeper exploration over time.

As my friend reminded me this week (courtesy of the Dao), “newness is born from stillness.” Not just new companies, but new perspectives and new ways of being, if we’re willing to invest the time. To see something from a unique angle takes space and patience. That is the true value of a sabbatical. A chance to recharge, sure, but to let life catchup and to see ourselves as we are rather than how we were. Not to hop onto the same old interstate, but pick a more interesting path. To let old stories pass away and new ones to be born and to sit, if we have the patience and courage, in the stillness and let come what may.

Lagavulin is one of Scotland’s oldest distilleries, located on Islay (eye-la) and a two mile walk along a path out of the town of Port Ellen. One mile down the path you reach Laphroaig (la-froig) and three miles down you arrive at Ardbeg. Each are excellent distilleries in their own right, but in my heart, there is only Lagavulin.

I grew up listening to my Dad tell stories, often around a bottle of Lagavulin. I have fond memories of nights around the campfire out west beyond the roads in rural Alaska, listening to him with my uncle and grandpa. They each had a small porcelain enamel mug with a small dram in it that they sipped as they took turns telling stories, laughing, or just nodding along. The peaty smoke of the whiskey mixed with the cold fall Alaska air. It was dreamy and homey all at once.

It was the family single malt, if we could be said to have one, simply because it was his favorite and there was always a bottle in the house. My Dad spoke often about his dream to visit Lagavulin one day, but for one reason or another we kept putting it off. Life moved fast and changed often. Next of us could predict that when he finally made it there, it would be as a small bag of ashes in my pocket.

—

I got the call on February 17th of 2011. Dad’s cancer had taken a turn for the worse, and it was time for me to come home. I stood in the research lab at Ohio State where I performed experiments in pursuit of a Master’s degree. I packed up my things, headed to the airport, and flew home to Alaska. The day I arrived he was discharged from the hospital to head home. None of us — my Mom, brother, or I — knew what to do, or what to expect. We were shown how to use his feeding tube to administer meals and pain meds, and we were told to wait.

My Dad setup in his favorite recliner in the living room, and I setup a table and folding chair near him. I worked half-heartedly on schoolwork, and we watched old movies. I wish more than anything I’d have asked him a million questions or recorded all my favorite stories of his, but he was in near constant pain, and I didn’t want to bother him. Truth be told, I was too scared to ask because that would have meant facing the fact that he was going to die. That one day very soon, he’d no longer be with us. I didn’t know what that meant then, and I was putting off finding out as best I could.

Some days he’d sleep through, others he’d be lucid and half-heartedly watch a movie with me or we’d chat a bit. I was happy on those days because I thought maybe, miraculously, he’d somehow get better. I considered that the dozens of tiny tumors spreading across his brain might just disappear. Of course, they didn’t.

On one of those good days, he asked to have his recliner moved over to the sliding glass door. It led out to the back deck which looked over the lake below. He asked for us to open the sliding glass door. It was a cold February day, and the wind whipped the snow on the back deck up into great whirls of dancing flakes that blew into the house, all over my Dad. He sat still in his recliner, eyes closed, and let it wash over him. I could feel him going out the door, being pulled back into that wild Alaska once more where he used to fly across the tundra.

He remained still and let the cold soak into him, feeling one last time the touch of the place he loved so much. Then he turned to me, with a sparkle in his eye, and said, “I’d really love a little Lagavulin.”

“Mike!” my Mom exclaimed, “You can’t have a scotch, what about your meds?”

“Oh yes,” he replied, turning toward me with a wink, “It would be a shame if it killed me.”

I laughed and poured him a little bit, just enough to wet his lips. He smelled it, savored it, and sat at the open door holding the glass. He looked a lot like his old self in that moment, and I loved that he kept his since of humor. On days like that I really believed those tumors actually might just disappear.

Of course, they didn’t. A few days later, he was gone.

—

My life accelerated dramatically in the four years after we lost him. Looking back, I think was by subconscious design. I returned to Ohio State and earned a master’s degree. I got a job at SpaceX helping build the west coast launch pad. I got married. I quit that job and moved to Seattle. They offered me a job building the landing barges. I took it to escape that failing marriage. I ended up on the high seas watching rockets fall out of the sky. Then, in the fall of 2015, I hit the wall.

I hadn’t ever really said goodbye to my Dad, faced his illness, or dealt with the loss. I was beginning to realize that I’d tried to escape into work as a way to escape the memories and the hurt, and to make some kind of mark to prove I existed; to rebuke my own mortality. After 12-months I didn’t have much to show for my efforts. I’d been bouncing between a hotel room in Morgan City, LA and Jacksonville, FL building and repairing the landing barges for a year. I lived out of a single suitcase that had a few company t-shirts and a new pair of Wal-Mart jeans every week.

My Mom, brother, his fiancée, and I planned a trip to Scotland to spread my Dad’s ashes. I quit the barge, got on a plane, and flew into Edinburgh. We rented a car and drove to Dunoon to catch the ferry to Islay. I stood on the bow of the ship, letting the wind and rain wash over me, feeling a little like my Dad must have felt on that February morning four years before. We arrived into Port Ellen and the next day set off for Lagavulin.

We had no plan. We just walked down there with hopes and a small Ziploc bag of the cremated remains of the man we’d all loved most in the world. We signed up for the premium tour because it had taken us more than my Dad’s lifetime to get there and who knew when we’d be back. We were led around the distillery where we learned the fascinating process of how Lagavulin is made. We saw the tuns, the pot stills, and the single mill that the grain of every bottle runs through. At the end of the tour, we were led into the old stone warehouse where barrels were stored.

Our tour guide was none other than Iain McArthur who was full of great stories and had been featured on the TV show Parks and Recreation when the character Ron Swanson paid Lagavulin a visit (you can see him leading the tour in this clip). He sat us down and rolled out a number of casks to try, quizzing us all the while.

At one point he asked, “What’s the best whiskey in the world?”

The crowd answered, “Lagavulin!” in a chorus.

I had a different answer: “Free whiskey.”

He walked over, shook my hand, and said, “Now that is the right answer!”

Then, perhaps as a reward, he let us in on a very special treat. A barrel of Lagavulin that was filled in 1966, well before humans walked on the moon. It was 49 years old. He uncorked it and drew a tiny amount from the cask, putting a scant milliliter into each of our tasting glasses, which he called a wee dram. It was smooth from nearly five decades of tithes to the angel’s share, and tasted like warm honey, vanilla, and smoke. I again thought of my Dad on the cold February morning, savoring his last. Just enough to wet the lips. An amazing, once in a lifetime treat — or so I thought.

After the tour, I hung back and awkwardly approached Iain. I explained our situation, that we’d come from Alaska, and that we hoped we might go down by the water the next day, spread some of my Dad’s ashes, and do a small toast. I felt bad, like we were imposing. Iain would hear none of that. He insisted we come back the next day at noon. We said goodbye and started the walk back into town.

The next day we arrived at the appointed hour. I had again developed cold feet, sure that we were not actually welcome, and he was just being nice. We loitered a bit out front, unsure how to proceed. Then, he appeared in the doorway and yelled, “What are you all doing out there? Come in, I’ve been waiting for you!”

He again led us down into the old barrel storehouse. He then turned to my Mom and said, “Lass, I am sorry for your loss. Which of the whiskeys you drank yesterday was your favorite?”

My Mom doesn’t drink much, certainly not much whiskey, and definitely not any of the peaty, heavy, medicinal Islay whiskey. As part of the tour the day before, we’d tried a 13-year, 17-year, 21-year, 33-year, and of course the scant taste of the 49-year. The allure of mellow sweetness was too much to ignore. My Mom thought for a moment and then said, “I liked that 49-year!”

Iain’s eyes lit up.

“No!” I interjected. I could see what he was going to do next.

I had purchased a bottle of Lagavulin in the gift shop the day before, the standard 16-year, for our little ceremony. Right next to it, I’d seen a bottle roughly the same age as me, a 27-year or so, that went for a few thousand dollars. I could only imagine what the 49-year might run. I opened my backpack and showed Iain that I’d come prepared.

“How about this one I got yesterday?”

“Put that away,” he said, “The lass wants 49-year, and 49-year she shall have!”

With that, he walked over to the barrel which was still out on the floor from our tour, dipped in a siphon. He drew on it, filled it to the brim, capped it, and then walked over to us. We equipped ourselves with small glasses from a side table, and he released the siphon over them. Where the day before we’d been given just a taste, he now poured full glasses up to the brim. He poured himself one, as well.

“So,” he asked, turning to my Mom, “tell me about him.”

With that simple invitation, we launched into stories about my Dad. We talked about him and my mom flying above the Arctic Circle, and them living without running water in Fort Yukon. We talked about the little air cargo business we’d had that flew groceries and fuel to communities off the road system. Iain told us stories about his family, life on Islay, and spending his career working at the distillery. We talked about what it was like for him to host Nick Offerman when Parks and Rec filmed there. We laughed and reminisced. It felt just like growing up, telling stories around the campfire or the bar at my parents’ home with friends, family, and neighbors.

The hours passed, the glasses refilled many times, and the stories got sweeter. Eventually, Iain suggested we head down to the water. We stepped out of the barrel house and went down to the bay. Iain gave a Celtic blessing, I opened our little baggie, and we spread Dad’s ashes in the water. We stood in silence for a while.

After some time, we thanked Iain, but I didn’t feel like enough. I wasn’t sure how best to express my sincere gratitude. I awkwardly offered to pay him. Of course, he refused. He told me that sharing memories over a dram (or three, in this case) was what he enjoyed most. I told him that we’d never forget his kindness, and that we’d always have a bottle of Lagavulin in our home. Sad, happy, nostalgic, and a thousand other feelings mixing in our hearts, we set off on the walk back into town.

—

Today, Sunday March 2nd, is 14 years since we lost my Dad. I don’t drink much anymore; the fun has faded over the years. Too many nights of numbing after 14-hour workdays and cheap escapes from lives I didn’t want to lead added up to take away the appeal. But I still keep a bottle of Lagavulin in the house, as I promised, for when friends and family are over and we feel like sitting around sharing memories — just like around the campfires of my youth and in the barrelhouse on Islay.

Even if it’s just a wee dram.

Howdy friends,

The end of my sabbatical is near1 and I’m spooling up a new company! I have been heads-down in formation, organization, and fundraising mode to begin 2025. Things are going well on that front, and I’ll share more soon, but I have unfortunately neglected this project a bit. Therefore, I wanted to check in with this “proof of life” plus give the paid members a little treat for their patience: an unreleased book chapter about building the landing barge and its first mission! It goes from Louisiana, to Florida, and down to mission control. Plus, it includes some cool pictures I took along the way.

I promise I will be back in the next week with a regular installment, and I have five more issues drafted in my trusty notebook. Therefore, safe to say regular programming will resume. In the meantime, if you’re not a paid subscriber, you can instead read the ridiculous story of how I was hired into the space race in the first place for free right here:

Of course, whether you are paid or not, thank you for your support and reading this work. It means a lot. And now to the story…

Read more

This summer I rode my fat bike 38 miles from Cooper Landing to Hope along the Resurrection Pass Trail. I don’t know why I did it, to be honest. I grew up riding both road and mountain bikes, but as I got into running more my road bike started spending most of its time hanging in the garage. Biking off pavement abruptly ended after my mountain bike was stolen and I never bothered to replace it.

However, the stage for a comeback (and this particular ride) was set when my brother asked me to come down to the bike shop with him. He was picking out mountain bikes for him and his wife because they wanted to get into single-tracking. The second I walked in I noticed a Ferrari Red carbon fiber fat bike on the top rack at the back corner of the shop. The shop clerk also noticed my interest and immediately began extolling its many virtues:
It can be ridden year-round with studded tires! It’s great for commuting! It was a do-all bike to take anywhere any time! And yes, it could absolutely be single-tracked if I wanted to.
I playfully accused him of trying to boost sales, but he assured me he didn’t work on commission and dared me to test ride it.

I took it for a spin and fell in love. It was awesome. A giant bulldozer that could roll over just about anything, and yet because of its all-carbon frame, it weighed less than most mountain bikes. Still, it felt like a splurge.1 I couldn’t justify it. But as my brother purchased his two new bikes, the salesman mentioned that I could dip my toes in by renting a fat bike to try out for a weekend.

The Map 🗺️

The next day I joined my brother and sister-in-law at our local singletrack trails to break in their new rides. As they skillfully tried to negotiate roots, ruts, and ramps I sat my happy ass down and just rolled over the top. I felt unstoppable. After just one ride, it was obvious what I would do on Monday morning.

I bought the bike and rode it almost every day for the next six weeks straight. Usually I rode alone, but sometimes I rode with my brother or brought my daughter to let her try some of the trails. As my speed and confidence built, I started thinking about longer rides.

Somewhere from the dark abyss of memory, Resurrection Trail surfaced. I had cycled part of it as a teenager with my dad, but never done the whole thing. I knew it was 38 miles and some change. I knew it was a lot of uphill, followed by a lot of downhill. It’s considered a challenging route, but far from expert. Somehow, I decided it would make for a perfect fall ride. I ran through the situation, as I saw it:

I just set a PR in a half-marathon a couple months earlier, and as part of that training I’d jogged 20 miles. Surely, I could bike twice that distance. Bikes are way more efficient! I could carry lots of food and take breaks if I got tired. I’d bring spare clothes in case the weather changed on me in the mountains. I could carry all those things on the bike rack, or on my back! Most important: I knew winter was on the way, and would hit the mountains shortly, so if I was gonna do it, it would have to be soon.

I wouldn’t call this a plan. I wouldn’t even call this a ‘concept of a plan.’ I would call it a very rough outline at best, but really it was an idea. Put another way, I had the map in front of me, but absolutely no idea the true character of the territory it represented. I’d soon learn that a map, or an idea of what it takes to do something, is not the same as doing it.

The Territory 🚵

The dictum “the map is not the territory” was coined by Alfred Korzybski. It’s a crisp little idiom that I only recently learned.2 It teaches us that an abstraction or idea of something should not be confused with the thing itself.3 This can be anything: a new job, a new relationship, or a god forsaken near-40-mile ride through Alaskan mountains in the fall. In short, we have no idea what something will be like to truly experience, no matter how well we plan, until we’re firmly in it.

The first ten miles of the ride were a joy. A bit of climbing, but lots more scenic cruising past a gorge cut by a waterfall, swooping around tight turns along a scenic mountain lake, and charging along wide double-tracks through high mountain plains. We made phenomenal time through this section, and the weather was perfect. A soft misting rain meant no dust, while the air temperature hovered in the low 40’s. This meant that I never got too hot even when working hard.

Meanwhile, all the gear, food, and supplies I’d ever need hung from my shoulders in their large dry bag. Due to not knowing the ride I brought everything I thought I’d need, which meant the bag’s weight also hovered somewhere in the low 40’s. I had started the ride with it strapped to my handlebar rack but found that it made the bike very challenging to control over the constant bumps and jutting roots. I scared myself enough swerving erratically along the edge of the gorge, just a few miles in, that I moved off the front rack. It hung heavy and awkward on my back, but at least I could turn.

A couple hours in, we stopped for our first meal break right before a wooden foot bridge. Looking at the pace, we thought we’d be done with the entire ride in just six hours. Our spirits were high! We wolfed down a couple peanut butter sandwiches, jumped back on our bikes, and crossed the little bridge.

We’d wouldn’t feel that good again the rest of the day.

Almost immediately, the trail changed and became harder to navigate. It became a true singletrack just wide enough for my tire. The trail wore so deep that my pedals often struck the edges of the rut mid-stroke, making even pedaling a challenge. Deep holes, sudden drops, large rocks, and other obstacles slowed our progress as we bounced over the small stuff and tried to punch up over the larger ones. More than once, we had to dismount to hoof our bikes through the roughest patches, like steep climb that looked like a rockslide with mud grouted between boulders.

A few times, the bouncing rhythm of the trail became just right to launch my heavy dry bag up over my head. The momentum lifted me by the armpits off the bike and tossed me like a rag doll right over my handlebars into the brush. The first couple times it was funny, and we had a good laugh. But as the hours passed the climbing intensified and our pace ground to a crawl. Being tossed off the bike, skidding out on mud, and failing to wheelie up and over obstacles became a bit less funny as we tired.

We stopped for our second lunch two hours after the first. The preceding 120 minutes were a mix of hiking, riding, and flipping into the bushes, but we were close to the top. I checked my watch — our pace was way off. We’d left the 6-hour completion goal behind at the fateful footbridge a long time ago. The race against failing daylight had officially begun. The air temperature dipped into the mid-30’s and the mix of rain and sweat cooled dangerously on my skin as I sat.

I remembered the pack. I had dry, warm clothes in there. But to change into them I’d need to get up, dig them out, strip down on the trail, and repack my wet, dirty clothes. Too much work, I decided. We weren’t even halfway done, and I knew once I started pedaling again, I’d warm up. We just needed to keep going.

Life in the Territory 🧘

It was at that point I think I fully entered the territory. Not the literal territory of mountains, mud, and muskeg that I’d been in all day, but the spiritual territory where we encounter our true selves — and my true self was wondering just how in the hell I was going to finish the ride when I didn’t have enough energy to put on warm clothes.

It’s a hell of a thing to be 19-miles into a ride, with 19-miles to go, and become afraid that you’re played out. Sure, there had been stretches earlier in the day — during the mud & boulder hike or while flipping over my handlebars — that I wondered what in the fuck I had got myself into. But that’s pretty typical for me. I think it every time I’m in a race or on some kind of deadline. I can mostly laugh those off or convince myself there were better times ahead. The first half of the day had been that way: I could look up the trail a quarter mile, see the course change, and picture the blistering downhills, well-groomed downhills where we’d make up time that were sure to be just around the corner. But a hope like that is thin, and it didn’t take long for it to desert me.

The next thing to go was my appreciation of the beautiful landscape surrounding me. I retreated into my own thoughts. My brother and I hadn’t spoken to each other for what seemed like an eternity. Early on the slide outs, scraping through trees, and obstacles in the trail meant a good laugh or curse or rueful commiseration. Halfway in, nothing could elicit even a curse born of some surprise showing up in the trail. Those, too, were endured in silence. There was nothing to say — we just needed to pedal.

Then even my thought-stream began to peter out. I abandoned the normal means of self-distraction: singing songs in my head, tinkering with future posts for this blog, imagining new companies I could build. Hell, even the criticisms and negative self-talk stopped! The voice that chatters near-constantly in the back of my mind 24/7 plum run out of things to say.

And through it all, I pedaled. That was the only thing that needed doing. As my legs went round, second, third, fourth, and even fifth winds hit me. Each blew through like I was a piece of wet Swiss cheese. I tried to remember movies where people find some deeper motivation, tap into it, and discover stores of energy they never knew about. They then easily montage their way to success.

It didn’t work for me. There was only pedaling. There had only ever been pedaling. There would only ever be pedaling.

That’s the true territory. Getting to that place where the only job is to move your feet in a circle, knowing you’ve done so 12,000 times and have another 12,000 to go. Being absolutely, positively exhausted, and being exactly halfway done. Feeling no emotion at that fact, because it wouldn’t change it. No clever mind, or quick wit, or derring-do would change it. Only patient forward progress.

All the while, I watched the pace and realized this ride, so confidently prognosticated to take only six hours from the comfort of my home, would require more like eight if I was lucky.

On the Other Side ✨

What I Am Left With 🙇‍♂️

1. The Territory is Constantly Changing

There are thousands, if not millions, of people who could do that ride faster and easier than I did. They’re in better shape, have stronger biking skills, or both. But we can’t do things other people’s way. We are who we are, and the trail was what it was. The way we did it was the only way it could be done. And the next time we do it, it’ll be different. I will bring less gear, pick a warmer season, and be a more seasoned rider that knows what to expect. Hopefully, I’ll be stronger.

2. I Can’t Wait to do it Again

I really can’t! Even though my hands were so stiff by the end of the ride I couldn’t shift gears and could barely brake. Even though my 28-pound bike felt too heavy to lift into my truck. Even though my ass was too sore (even with padded shorts) to sit right for a week. It was worth it. Because I set a goal, and I did it. Because I have an idea of what to expect now, and how to handle it.

3. Grounding & Gratitude

On the 60-minute drive home, I sat in a state of near euphoria. The truck was warm, I finally got into dry clothes, and the endorphins coursed through me. I sat in the passenger seat of my truck and ate a beat-up apple I found at the bottom of my bag that tasted so fucking good I almost burst into tears. I got home and the sauna was hot. I sat in there until I was jelly then took a righteous shower and crawled into bed where I slept like a damn baby.

Nothing grounds and resets me like being physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. It quiets the petty struggles and blurs the distractions. I see that no matter how well we know the map, every single moment is a new casting of lots, its own venture into the territory of circumstance.

This is at the front of my mind as my sabbatical comes to a close next spring and I consider what’s next. I am collaborating with friends new and old. For the new ones, I need to help them understand the map and how we’d best like to traverse it. I need to prepare them for the road ahead, as best I understand it. For the old friends, I must work with them to not make new adventures too much like the ones we’ve already done, and barely survived. We, too, must have the courage to chart new courses across familiar ground.

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“Anger.”

Heat blooms in the center of my chest, floods to the tips of my fingers, as I remember sitting at a long table in a nameless room on the top floor of a courthouse listening to a mad interpretation of my character, my motives, my life. For eight hours each day they goaded me with their version of events and who I was, daring me all the while to lash out, to protest, even to just break the calm expression frozen onto my face. I hid mala beads in the right front pocket of my suit pants pocket for just this purpose. I feel each one with tips of my fingers, try to connect my feet to the floor thru my boots. Every accusation a confession, I remind myself endlessly, a thin mantra with which to anchor a ragged calm.

An expert I have never met nor even spoken to is on a large TV mounted to the wall. The people sitting across the table from me hired him to as a supposed neutral expert to review the results of a 6-month investigation. Unable to address the facts of the report head-on, he has instead chosen to come after me in an attempt to earn his commission. He concludes simultaneously that I am an absent father that is also a helicopter parent. He notices his accidental contradiction, stumbles, loses his train of thought, gets flustered. Still, my expression remains flat. I wiggle my toes in my boots and map my breaths instead: four seconds in, hold, eight seconds out, hold. I remember that our turn to speak is coming.

-

“No, the anger is only a manifestation. What lies deeper?”

I hesitate, looking down. My palms lie open in my lap, facing back up toward me.

“Shame,” I whisper.

I have been living in a hotel just off the I-95 for nearly a year, consumed with a project that I ardently pray will either cure me or swallow me whole. Seven days a week I run crews to transform a common deck barge into something a rocket can land on. Seven nights a week I sit at the hotel bar. I order food from one of the restaurants perched like islands in the endless expanse of asphalt surrounding the hotel and eat it out of Styrofoam containers with plastic utensils, washing everything down with a few beers.

I bullshit with my crew, tell rocket tall tales to impress the local bar flies, and flirt with the bartender. I left home and ran to this job to escape a failing marriage strained by two years of building launch pads and the hard reality that college sweethearts rarely stay sweet once the excitement of the early years gives way to the monotony of normal life. Picking grad schools, driving across the country, finding work, and casting visions of a future are much more exciting than actually living the resulting reality day to day.

The bar winds down around 1:00 AM, and everyone staggers off to their rooms. I have to be to work at 6:00, but I don’t go to sleep. Around 2:00, I hear the soft knock at the door that comes almost every night. I open it, without looking at me or saying a word the bartender walks in. The door swings itself shut behind her.

-

“Yes, shame is there,” Mike acknowledges, “But there’s more. Drop in deeper.”

I rock uneasily on my chair, trying to ground through my sits bones. I push my toes into the carpet and curl them repeatedly, gripping then releasing small tufts. I try to take a cleansing breath, but it’s ragged and catches in my chest. A single sob tries to escape. I choke it back.

“I don’t know. I can’t name it. I don’t know what this is,” I manage to spit out.

“It’s grief,” he says.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with it?” I cry as I feel the rising flames touch me like wildfire, a kind of wide-eyed animal panic taking hold.

“Sit with it. Feel it. For once.”

I quit the job. I go to Scotland with my mom and brother to try to get my head right, to understand where some semblance of self and purpose might come from if not from work. I’m not sure. I fly back across the ocean, then back across the country, pull my things out of storage, throw them into a U-Haul, and point it north for Alaska. After one last visit, I end things with the bartender. Months go by, my first winter home arrives. I am celebrating Christmas with childhood friends when my phone rings. I step outside and answer. I notice it’s snowing. It’s her. She’s crying. Through the sobs I hear one thing only, “I’m pregnant.” It’s silent, save for the crisp kiss of wet flakes as they fall on my shoulders.

Slowly, I begin to face reality: I am not the man I want to be, certainly not the one I want my coming child to know. I wore a prestigious job like an empty suit of armor, all hard, shiny surfaces making the nothing inside. I start a business to make a little money. I rent an apartment and furnish it with a Sam’s Club credit card that promises 0% APR. I use it to buy more than plates, utensils, couches, a bed, a crib, and food. I use it to buy time. Everything is strained: money, relations with the mother-to-be, relation with myself, my idea of the future.

The months march by and spring, then summer, arrive. I am in the delivery room, and I watch her come into the world. I catch her. She is here! — but something isn’t right. Her face is dusky and blue. She has a nuchal cord; the umbilical is wrapped tightly around her neck. The universe stops turning. The doctor moves fast, taking her from me, running scissors neatly along her neck to sever the cord. She hesitates, sucks in a short breath and lets out a war cry scream declaring her arrival and intention to remain that’s so loud I’m afraid the doctor might drop her.

A fierce pride, like a primal inferno, ignites in my heart and thrums through my being. A switch flips somewhere deep inside. My heart is a compass, and she is true north. She is all that matters, the single star in an otherwise barren night sky that I will forever steer toward. Tears stream from my eyes like rivers in a mix of relief, love, and joy I didn’t think possible. She is here, she is staying.

-

“Good,” my guide says, “If you can dive into that every day, till and work this fertile ground, let it sweep over you instead of numbing, something new will begin to grow.”

I think of the eight years and two weeks we have had since she arrived. Quiet moments of discovery as I followed her around the house on all fours, letting her lead, the sound of the cool, hard floor slapping under our palms as we crawled along. She explored the coffee table, was delighted to find the drawer with junk inside, moved onto the kitchen cabinets and marveled over finding the pans.

Challenging times when we were apart, as I put on a variety show night after night, bit after bit, game after game, in an attempt to keep her tiny toddler attention on FaceTime for even ten minutes. The way she’d announce, “I push da red button” when she’d had enough, and send me back into oblivion.

Wild hours just a few years later pretending to be wolves looking for our pack as I pushed her on a kick sled along a frozen trail under the full moon on a crisp December night. She held the led headlamp out in front of her like a beacon, sweeping it this way and that looking for prints, her breath occluding the light. Eventually she’d hand the light back, close her eyes, fall asleep while sitting up bundled in her winter clothes and wrapped in a blanket as the dark silhouettes of trees slipped by, the brisk swoosh of the sled the only sound.

Times of growth during the long light of summer as I ran up and down the road for hours on end pushing her bike, helping her believe she could balance, catching her before she tumbled, and cheering so loud when she took off on her own at top speed that she almost crashed from embarrassment.

Moments of shared pride as she walked up to me just before her fifth birthday and said, “watch this,” with all her cool girl attitude, then read each of her favorite picture books cover to cover.

Painful moments of shared sorrow as we say goodbye, trading bracelets with our names beaded in them, looking forward always to the next time we say hello.

Watching those eight years go by in a flash, trying to take no moment for granted.

I already know what grows if I have the courage to continue to be present, to work the earth of my grief.

Gratitude.

Hello friends!

I told myself I wouldn’t, but I ended up taking the summer off again. I said that I’d write a few posts and auto-schedule them to go out, or failing that I’d post book-chapters-in-progress, or failing that I would at least highlight some of my favorite past posts written before I had a real subscriber count.

But then I just went ahead and forgot entirely about that plan. Instead, I enjoyed the hell out of family time for eight glorious weeks. It’s important to me — summer is the longest period of time each year that my whole family gets to spend together. Over the last few years, it has become nearly sacred as we get away from work and go on adventures together. And what adventures this summer held!

My son turned three in New Orleans with my wife’s family, and we all enjoyed the city for a week. Then we went on to Legoland for roller coasters and general sensory overload. After that, we came home to Alaska where my oldest did her first singletrack rides through the woods, both kids went crazy building tools together with our new 3D printer, we went camping along a creek near an old gold claim, and where we capped off the summer with a week at my childhood home on the Kenai stocking our freezer with wild salmon for the winter (my wife Jennie even went dip netting while I played with the kids on the beach!).

A Few Fun Pictures from Summer

Alaska summer is one of those magical things you enjoy so much and so damn hard that by the end of it you welcome the slowness of autumn with open arms.

Starting Something New in Hardware

During the time off, thoughts of hardware development started to percolate up through the cracks. Longtime members of this pub know that I have been on sabbatical for just over a year and have another year to go. You may also know that the company I sold which funded this sabbatical built space hardware. What you may not know is that I have been dabbling in hardware consulting and advising during my sabbatical time. I know, I know — impure! But dammit I absolutely love building hardware!

To that end, today I launched a new Substack called . The first post is live now for your reading pleasure:

Anti-Hype Hardware

Welcome to Anti-Hype

A Little Background…

Read more

2 years ago · Ben Kellie

The Next 30 Trips

But all of that is to say: this newsletter right here isn’t going anywhere. In fact, Anti-Hype relieves an enormous amount of pressure from this pub because every time I look at my list of potential post ideas, I find that I want to explore deeper themes of grief, letting go, and how we expect too much from our careers as a substitute for the Real Work we are actually here to do.

But I also have a ton of posts in the hopper about building hardware companies, finding customers, using Excel to rough design your dream product over a one-hour lunch break, and reacting to the absolute pile of cynical vaporware I see flooding the world. Now that all those have a home, Next 30 Trips is free to be slower, introspective, and weirder.

I still don’t know what my “Next Big Thing” might be, or if I’ll even pursue such a thing at all, but I am fairly certain that if I do, it’ll revolve around steel, aluminum, copper, thermofluids analysis, and flashing lights :-). I hope you’ll check Anti-Hype out and choose to follow along!

And I hope you’ll stick around here, as well, as we interrogate the why of our work in our ongoing effort to understand ourselves.

Catch-22

I finished re-reading Catch-22 for the third or fourth time last night.1 It seems to call to me every five years or so, which I am realizing as I type this, also tends to line up nicely with each major shift in my life. The last time I read it was back in 2018. I had recently quit SpaceX (for the second time2) and was in the middle of struggling to build a remote drone data company in Alaska, which I kept afloat by doing work for space companies on the side. It hadn’t yet dawned on me that I should probably make the side-hustle that paid my bills my full-time pursuit. Oh well, it would come to me sooner or later.

At that moment, my side hustle was leading the demolition of the Rotating Service Structure for SpaceX on their then-new pad, LC-39A with a bunch of Cajuns that I met while building the barge a few years before. That’s a pretty wild story in its own right3 and is a chapter in my forever-work-in-progress book. I flew back and forth from Alaska on rotation, staying near the site a few weeks at a time during major moments in the demolition. I read a few pages of Catch-22 every night by the pool at my hotel in Cocoa Beach, which was originally opened by the Friendship 7 astronauts but had been transformed into a La Quinta during some dark chapter in its history.

There’s a different theme of the book that grabs me each time I read it. Back then, it was Snowden’s Secret4 which he spilled to Yossorian in the tail of the plane as the crew dodged flak during a mission. This time it was the absolute incompetence of the various Generals, Corporals, and other people in charge, and their manipulations of the airmen to grow their little empires. Throughout, the leaders are lost in the game and bureaucracy of war, more than they are on winning it. They’re worried about getting features in the Evening Post, sending memoranda, figuring out who is forging Washington Irving’s name to documents, and having tight bomb patterns (a concept they made up, yet which still means nothing to them).

Characters like General Peckham and General Dreedle are locked in a cold war for power. They’re ruining people’s lives — and ending them — just to try to stand out to the next person up the chain and get under each other’s skin. Worse is Lt. (later, Lt. Gen) Scheisskopf5 who couldn’t give a damn for missions and only wants to make everyone march in parade, the purest performative act he could subject the crews to. Worst of all, in my opinion, is Milo Minderbinder who is so effective at running his scammy Syndicate that he ends up supplying the Germans and quite literally bombing his own squadron.

Who Are We Building For?

As anyone who has read it knows, Catch-22 is simultaneously hilarious, horrifying, haunting, and deeply frustrating6. This time through it has left me feeling that whether we are building something in hard tech, for some other kind of startup, or are turning the crank at a day job to make more time for our writing hobby, we have to ask:

Who are we doing this for?

Now, this is different than the question of “what are we doing this for?” That’s a question that grew loud during the pandemic lockdowns. As Cal Newport points out in his book, Slow Productivity, we became expected to do everything, all at once, and right that moment. Few concessions were made for parents juggling kids or getting booked into endless zoom meetings from 0800 - 1800 each day. That sucks, and hopefully we’re coming to a point where we deal with that as a culture more wholistically. But I think, at the risk of skipping a step, that this second question just ends up begging the first: Who are we doing this for?

If we’re feeling lofty, we might say it’s for the company mission. Or we might say it’s for the team or a particularly good boss. More practically, we might say it’s for our kids, or our live-in parents, or just to make ends meet. I’ve given every single one of those answers at one point or another, sometimes more than one at a time! Well, except for the ‘company mission’ thing; I never drank the Kool-Aid at any space company I was fortunate enough to go on adventures with7. Sometimes, the answer for me has been just that: for me. Early on in my career, I made a lot of selfish choices to boost my resume and chase what I perceived as glory.

But the question of who we’re doing something for also extends outward from ourselves. Who is benefitting from your work? Whose mission are you enabling with your effort? I think about this a lot as I watch my old boss melt down on his imploding social media website on a near-daily basis. I’ve seen similar dynamics play out on much smaller scales at startups I’ve worked with around the country.

What is the story we’re telling about ourselves — individually and as a society — by who we’re championing?

And can we change it?

Low Ego, High Ability

I suppose it was an appropriate time for me to once again read Catch-22. I sold my company, and I am on a kind of self-imposed sabbatical where I’m trying to take things slow and figure out what the hell to do next. It feels oddly similar to my time at night by the pool in Cocoa Beach six years ago. I don’t know what the plan is, but the next adventure is just around the corner, I’m sure of it.

The key, I am learning, is to move in an expanding spiral instead of just going in circles through each of these cycles. Therefore, I try to do things a little bit better each time. My last cycle, which started with the barge and tower demolition then ended with Launch Co., taught me a lot about how to do the what. I got the chance to help solve amazing challenges across the space industry — and even send some stuff of our own to space — with some of my favorite people alongside. However, the work we did was pure engineering — it focused only on the how and what of a challenge. As such, to be quite frank, we enabled a lot of clients who probably shouldn’t have been enabled. It was easy to rationalize since we were bootstrapped and had kids to feed and mortgages to pay, but it didn’t always feel great.

This cycle I want to help people connect more to the why of their pursuits than the what. I have never been more disabused of the notion that some widget, gadget, company, panacea, or other deus ex machina is going to come along to save us than I am right now. Even if you disagree and think there is a silver bullet on the way, I think that we can at least all agree it sure as hell ain’t gonna come from the billionaires. Building is just as important as ever, but the who and why of the build matter much more than the what this time.

To better connect to my own why I have started surrounding myself with even more of my favorite type of people: low ego, high ability. People who have done truly amazing things but see those achievements for what they are: a mix of luck, privilege, hard work, and a dash of relentlessly practiced skill. It’s been fun to explore projects with collaborators new and old such as the Arctic Encounter Symposium, Swage Ventures, and most recently Borealis, a two-month remote work opportunity that provides everything people need to come explore Alaska8.

My hunch is that, more than anything, fixing what’s broken in our world might be more about fixing our approach: our approach to ourselves, to our world, to our work, and to one another. We have everything we need to build whatever we want. We just need to remember who we’re building for, both within and without.

An old friend recently sent me a LinkedIn post that has been doing the rounds and getting a lot of traction among the space community. It was a story from someone lamenting that they had spent their entire career watching Falcon 9, Dragon, Falcon Heavy, and now potentially Starship happen while they sat on the sidelines at NASA for over 30 years.1

My first reaction (and my friend’s, too) was that it was a damn shame this guy sat idly by for nearly four decades and never jumped onboard. But the more I thought about it, that didn’t seem to tell the whole story. Lord knows jumping into a career at a New Space startup that runs on a continuous stream of people being hoovered in, ground up, and then spit out as bonemeal isn’t exactly a guaranteed path to a fulfilling life.

Indeed, I’ve watched many friends and peers be turned into dust this way before being cruelly jettisoned at speed from many of these VC backed space company companies as they barrel down the track towards their supposed glory. It’s unpleasant for them at best, and career ending at worst. For those of us who stay, it’s often more about one’s ability to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ than anything else.2

So, I wasn’t sad because he sat at some desk job at NASA and made (presumably) a good salary for his entire career. He probably owned a home, raised a family, and then retired with a pension. That’s nothing to gripe about! Hell, that’s supposed to be the American Dream — and it’s one that’s increasingly out of reach for my generation. Many people my age would kill to know that they have three straight decades of steady salary and medical lined up. Plus, I know lots of people who are very fulfilled with their careers in and around the NASA sphere. I have buddies who have helped put rovers and helicopters on Mars for heaven’s sake. Nothing beats that!

So, what gives with that LinkedIn post?

Two Types of Knowing

There are two types of knowing, broadly speaking. There is knowing in the mind, and that’s most of what we deal with day to day. Then there is knowing in the body, which is what we might better call experience.

Brenee Brown has a great synopsis on the difference:

Mental knowing is the cheapest, because it’s really an illusion. It’s stuff like our opinions which, by and large, are as changeable as a spring breeze. Plus, even most of our so-called facts are generally based on conjecture and bias. The majority of what we think we know is simply the result of narrowing our aperture to provide the illusion of a controllable life.

Aka, we don’t know shit, and the sooner we all realize that the better life will be. Instead, many seem to be in a hurry for their proverbial clay to dry3 to more easily settle into a life of undisturbed comfort. Even my knowledge of engineering is being corrupted by the decay of my memory over time; I find myself returning to my textbooks more and more often.

But there’s that second kind of knowing, which is much more valuable. It’s the knowing that’s in our hearts, our guts, or even as deep as our bones. What’s the difference? It’s this simple:

You hear the stove is hot and you think, “Yeah, ok, got it.” Then you accidentally touch the stove. “God damn! The stove is hot!”

At the risk of giving blanket advice from the vantage of point of my mid (late) thirties, I think a lot of life is about being disabused of as much of the former mental knowing as possible, while racking up as much of the bodily knowing as we can.

You Might Not Actually Want That

Other than the SR-71 Blackbird, which was retired before my time, I think the A-10 Warthog is the baddest ass airplane on the planet. Tough, tactical, and immediately recognizable it checked all the boxes I wished I could check for myself in my teenage years. I remember telling my Dad, a bush pilot, how bad I wanted to fly them sometime around my senior year of high school, when the war in Iraq was happening.

“Do you want to go to the Middle East and shoot people?” he asked curiously.

“No!” I replied, horrified.

“Ok, well I don’t think they’re gonna let you just fly it around.”

That was the end of that dream.

I don’t think we talk about it, but that’s how a lot of life goes. Get an idea, try it out, note our reaction. We’re good at focusing on one element of a dream (or outright fantasy, frankly) and pretty bad at placing that element in the context of reality. In short, we suck at understanding what things would actually be like.

It was like that during the early days of the SpaceX barge. We had people constantly begging to come with us on mission. I’m talking grown-ups kneeling in a parking lot with their hands clasped. It was wild. But I couldn’t understand it. From my perspective, the missions were a ton of work and completely exhausting.

We usually spent around a week out at sea per mission. During that time, we were waiting on the launch pad, so we always had to be ready. There was no telling when they might scrub a mission or move a launch which extended out time at sea. All day we rocked out on the ocean fixing parts of the barge that broke down, getting tossed off the toilet by an errant wave, and staving off boredom. At night, we were racked and stacked in bunks on our small support vessel listening to the snores and flatulence of our coworkers.

At least once a mission, there would be a few hectic hours as we prepared for a rocket to come in for a landing, but just as often in those days we’d swing over the ropes between the boat and barge to shut everything back down again. Also in those days, when the rocket came it tended to explode on the deck which meant clean up duty once the fires subsided. If at any point you were seasick, you had to deal with it. If you didn’t bring the right gear you went without. If the weather turned (as it so often did) we hunkered down in misery until it passed.

Whenever I explained all this to whomever was asking, whether begging on their knees or over the phone4, invariably a change would come over them. This change happened at various points of my lecture, but by the end each person had been completely transformed. All of a sudden, the barge mission didn’t sound so good anymore.

Same goes for the 30-year NASA veteran, I’d wager. I don’t think he actually wanted a career at SpaceX or wherever else. What he was really lamenting, I think, was never getting the chance to know what it would have been like to be part of something like that. A weeklong internship would have cured the itch and provided all the bodily knowing required to return to his NASA desk with a deep and abiding gratitude.

But Still…

At some point, for something, the desire to find out must prevail over the fear of trying. Certainly not for everything. It is important to discern the false calls to adventure to ensure that we have the energy, space, and willpower to answer the true calls when they come. For most things, the first type of mental knowing is enough to pop the fantasy bubble and strike them off our list. But for the others, where our appetites are only whetted by hearing the complex reality of living them, we must push on.

There are those things that haunt us, that lie just over the horizon or just beyond our perception. We can feel them call to us, tugging on our hearts, in the moments when our jabbering minds quiet down. It is for those that we must take the risk to pursue true knowing, to relinquish the illusion of safety and comfort, and step into the unknown. That is the only way we might move true knowledge from our minds to become the unique experiences that live in our hearts.

I have a love / hate relationship with the concept of perfection. I love the chase of perfection, when I can go deep into a task and spend as much time there as I’d like. Write and rewrite a post (or my book) a dozen times.1 Or tinker on a design problem to get it to the most optimal result. Or even just play a song through with the right timing and expression. These are all things I used to have a lot of time for but didn’t do because I was focused on a result, then for a long time had no time for and was still focused exclusively on results, and am only now discovering how to do for their intrinsic joy.

Two thirds of that list, when I focused on results, represents the times I let perfectionism be wielded against me, and they just so happen to line up well with the first two thirds of my life. The first phase of misusing perfection as a motivator started pretty early in my life. I don’t have a firm timeline, but one memory with my grandfather still stands out clearly:

“Huh, I guess half-ass is twice too good for you.”

This was his assessment of the result of some simple job he’d asked me to do. If the syntax is a little hard to follow, he was saying that if I’d set out to do a half-ass job, I had managed to half-ass even that. In other words, I’d done a quarter-ass job. My grandpa was full of helpful little nuggets like this.2

I received that first “quarter-ass” grade when I was around eight or nine years old. I don’t even remember what I’d been working on to elicit such a reaction, I just remember losing a feeling of pride in the work I’d done and having it replaced with with: “Do better, which I won’t bother explaining.”

Still, I looked up to my grandpa as a master carpenter and veteran, and wanted his approval; even if I’d need telepathy to nail down what he even wanted. It’s no wonder I ended up nurturing perfectionist tendencies3 and tying a perfect outcome to my self-esteem. My Dad, who spent a lifetime receiving similar guidance from grandpa, turned out with many of the same tendencies, but much less harsh. In his defense, near-perfection was required for his line of work, running a small family business that flew cargo, fuel, and food through the mountains of Western Alaska to villages off the road system.

A mistake in that situation, across any number of facets from weather planning, to payload weight, to balance, or maintenance might mean death. Hell, even just taking off in the wrong mood can cause pilots not to come home.4 This made him obsessive in his approach to all aspects of flying because it directly impacted his (and his family’s) survival. Some things really do just have to be right, or things are going to go wrong in a hurry.5

Rockets Ain’t Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

After over a decade in the space industry, I have to admit that I not only understand both my Dad’s and grandpa’s push for perfection, but I also crave it. Funny how genetics and parenting work. Somehow, I found the aerospace industry (or maybe it found me) and fell into work that required an absolute best effort, constantly6. The funny thing about the aerospace industry is that it’s one of the few industries in the world that’s truly binary:

• The rocket launches, or it doesn’t.

• The payload gets to orbit, or it doesn’t.

• The payload achieves its mission, or it doesn’t.

This is what makes aero engineering exciting! There isn’t any almost or partial credit — it ain’t horseshoes and hand grenades. The interface created between your product, reality, and the mission they go on together is all that matters. The relationship between whatever you made, and the rest of the world is supreme. The bad news for your pursuit of perfection in this dynamic is that you/me/we are all quite fallible and bad luck is a real thing that stumbles along to fuck up your day.

For a lot of companies (especially startups, especially mission-oriented startups) there is a tendency to believe that luck has nothing to do with the outcome at all. By remaining in a state of perceived perfection (i.e. a hyper attentive adrenaline fight or flight state) bad luck can be prevented. Simple mistakes can be prevented. Humans making silly human errors can be erased.

In this way, the pursuit of perfection turns from a noble goal on the horizon into a blunt instrument wielded to squeeze more out of less. Less people, less money, less time. I have been in that seat many times, as both an engineer and a manager, and it sucks. Sometimes it’s born honestly from a need to take a big swing at a hard goal, but more often than not it is simply assholes weaponizing the need of perfection in a lofty mission7 to keep young engineers scared, adrenaline dependent, and on their toes.

Reclaiming Perfection

This is how most space companies run, and a big part of the reason I started to turn into a major crab. Even still — I feel the pull! Oh, I how I feel the pull. I love when things come together in some delightful way that we decide to call perfect. It feels like we tap into the base rhythm of the Universe.

The good news is that I think perfection can be reclaimed. The way to do so is deceptively simple: focus on the approach, not the result.

This is the heart of Dharma. Working with what the Universe gives us and doing our best to make something of it. By not focusing on the result, sometimes delightful things happen that are much better than what we initially imagined. Working in this way honors both our gifts, and our challenges. Move forward, with the resources you have, in the time available. Bring your absolute best (dare I say, perfect?) self to this task each and every time. Then, let the results be what they are.

This is how perfection becomes a dynamic rhythm instead of a fixed state. Not even moment is perfect. Instead, perfection becomes like a star above the horizon, guiding us toward our ultimate potential. We all know that feeling when everything is going your way, when luck is on your side. The feeling of playing a tricky song for the first time all the way through, the feeling of nailing a job interview, hitting every green light and having traffic part in front of you. It’s flow. Perfection can be found in presence with any task.

That’s something I wish I could have told my grandpa almost 30 years ago when he called my efforts quarter-ass. Compared to what he could do as a veteran, master carpenter, and full adult, I am sure whatever I produced sucked! But the result shouldn’t have his focus, or at a minimum that result should have been normalized against what a child could be expected to do.

However, the thing I think he had right all those years ago, is that something worth doing is worth doing the best we can, which in his grumpy way is the lesson he wanted me to take. Christian Bale, explaining the chase for a perfect lap as race driver Ken Miles in Ford v Ferrari, explains that concept… well, perfectly:

The pursuit of perfection is something personal, to be shared with others who are like minded and not to be weaponized against them. It is to be practiced in a craft, not on people. It is the perpetual chase for something that’s always just over the horizon. That’s what makes it a rhythm, and not a result.

Far from an industry leader, the company I worked for was regularly panned by industry experts, lobbied against, and outright maligned in the press; a complete 180 from where they are today. We were young, brash, and out to change the world.1 I spent the first year at that company thinking I wouldn’t last another day. Months passed like stressful years. After surviving the first year, I then spent the next nine convinced I’d never last a decade! Then one day I woke up, went to work, and released I’d passed that milestone, too.

And though many of the memories from back then only sweeten with time — adventures on launch sites with friends, the first time the company’s cargo capsule ever docked with the space station, watching rockets come down and blow up on a barge in the ocean — I realize how important it was that I get out of the New Space industry and started a long sabbatical last June.

In an industry where every year feels like ten, an actual decade is more than a career, or even a natural lifetime. Last year my heart joined my body in strongly signaling it was time to be done. Call it a felt century of chaos, adrenaline, pain, vigilance, and growth. The biggest thing I learned after my first hundred years? Only that I didn’t have another hundred in me.

I was burned out. And no matter what I tried to do to reset or recover, I felt a kind of shell hardening around me, a carcinization of self that I refused to let proceed. I needed a change, and left Launch Co., the company that I’d started and personally grown with, that had provided for my young family — and the families of my friends who worked there — through thick and thin. It was by no means an easy decision, but it was the necessary one.

The Journey Started with Wonder

A certain kind of magic surrounds the aerospace industry, and that magic is even stronger within the growing offshoot we call New Space. There are few places better suited to test one’s limits and there’s truly nowhere else you can have an outsized, sustained, and lasting impact while sending things (and sometimes humans!) to space. I often felt a deep wonder in some ancient part of me knowing that we can reach beyond the edge of our planet to sail the seas that would leave our ancestors speechless.

I felt connected to that wonder from a young age. When I was not yet even five, I treasured nestling in the safety of my Dad’s lap to watch PBS’ Nova as it rippled through space, shook down our roof mounted antenna, and came out our little TV. I’m too young to have seen Carl Sagan in his prime, but my Dad passed his same infectious spirit of wonder and exploration on to me. We’d lay at night on the frozen lake, down at the bottom of the hill below our house, letting the dust of galaxies gather in the corner of our eyes. I marvel, still, that a photon could travel millions of light years through space, wiggle down through our atmosphere, and somehow land right on my retina.

I believed that space exploration brought out the best in us, as a nation and as a species. It was just as much an ideal we worked to understand the shape of, as it was a place we actually sent humans and machines to grow our understanding of the universe. Only the best people worked on these systems, and only the best of the best rode them up past the sky. Of course, I had the movie Apollo 13 memorized.

As I grew older, my views sharpened a bit. I allowed that, sure, the early days of space were an overly romanticized veneer pulled over a brutal cold war and a weaponized race to the stars, but the wave of New Space that I’d been pulled into was different.

Right?

Everyone Becomes a Crab

Carcinization is a natural phenomenon by which any crustacean, given enough time, evolves into a crab. I learned this term when it popped up in the news cycle a few years ago, and I realized it perfectly described what was happening to me in the space industry. From the first moments of my first job a decade ago, I grew a hard shell to withstand the constant attacks that ostensibly centered on my work yet often turned bizarrely personal. I passed a few years, safe in my shell, continuing my journey peacefully.

Over time, my responsibilities grew, and I found that it was easier to play offense than defense. No one attacks someone they think might hit back. In that spirit, I grew pinchers and learned how to use them. I also developed a strong radar for the type of people around me. To this day, I can still see an insecure tech boy coming from a mile away. To mask his own insecurity, he’s going to be the loudest, brashest, most confrontational asshole in the meeting. I used my pinchers, innocently at first, to drive those people away. Later, I began to use them to mask my own insecurities in my work and self.

As more responsibilities landed on my plate — running systems, to running teams, to running entire projects like the landing barge — I had less and less emotional reserves left to deal with the human element of my role. Further, as the pace ramped up, I didn’t have time to properly guide people or care for myself. There was never enough time to properly explain things, to onboard people into new roles, to even stop and have a complete thought. I ate my meals on the go, doled out my orders on the go, and meted out my version of perceived justice on the go. Where once there was space for thoughtful conversations and advice, there remained only room for curses and rushed impatience with everyone and everything around me that wouldn’t match the speed with which I conducted my life.

Adopting this attitude was the final step in becoming a crab.

Trying a Different Path

Look, I hope it goes without saying that I don’t want to be a crab. It’s exhausting and, though I was unfortunately damn good at it, it’s not my natural or best state of being. As much as I wanted out, I didn’t know how and I didn’t think I was worth making the change for. But I watched as my friends, one by one, changed too. Giving in to the evolutionary pressures, they began to strafe and pinch, and to subsist greedily on whichever of our peers’ careers washed up on the proverbial tideline. This was enough to force a change.

I left the company entirely and set off on my own2. The first business I tried failed, and I found myself as a single dad in dire need of diaper money. So, I went back to the New Space industry. I didn’t have much choice, it seemed. However, instead of joining a space company I started my own, one that would solve problems for the majors. I figured that degree of separation might be enough to keep the crab at bay. I vowed that “this time would be different!” and, though it was, new pressures restarted my personal carcinization in ways I never saw coming.

For a while, my team and I became lost in the doing, joyously discovering we could support ourselves on our terms doing work we cared about and understood. I marveled as we quickly went from one person, to two, all the way up to our high point of 30 team members as we solved problems for space companies across the United States. We designed and built hardware from our home in Alaska, showing our neighbors that new industries are possible here. Our core driving principle, our oft-repeated mantra, was “there’s no point in going to space if we’re all miserable when we get there.” We fired clients that were impossible to work with, and worked hard to push back on ridiculous requests. We took Fridays off in the summer, and mostly worked 40-hour weeks. I thought I had it solved.

Though we fostered joy inside our company and in relationship with one another, my work as the primary interface to the wider industry exposed me to new pressures that mounted and inexorably restarted my crabby metamorphosis.

Pressure from clients that wanted us to perform miracles for low wages and, by God, right this minute. Clients that tried to talk us into cutting corners on the design process due to their tight budget or artificially compressed schedule, only to lambaste us eight months later for letting them take such a shoddy approach.3

Pressure from running a bootstrapped company in an industry that was artificially propped up by free-flowing venture capital in the single longest bull market in the history of the stock market and watching as it began to teeter. Every slide in every pitch deck that talked about future customers looking like a multitudinous “Spiderman-pointing-at-Spiderman” meme of every venture-backed company incestuously indicating one another as their core future clientele.

Pressure from watching the trickle-down of benefits to friends and colleagues slow, then stop, as once hot companies folded, and the value of their stock options dove toward zero. Some friends close to retirement left with nothing, while their executives drifted back down to earth on golden parachutes. The way my friends inevitably discovered the limits of the supposed human-centered vision of their company; where the slogans about working for all humanity stopped and the need to exploit the well-being of actual humans began.

Pressure from navigating the tiny, closed ecosystem of New Space, and realizing that even for my small company, the only source of sustenance, the only real, long-term, viable customer in the industry, is a government department that innocently claims defense while seemingly fixating on just the opposite.

Pursuing Wonder

Alright, deep breath, woosah, et cetera.

I promise I don’t have an axe to grind.4 If I get too fired up or come off as too critical, just know that it’s because I care too deeply. I am not a cynic. I truly love building things. I love the process, the alchemy, and the satisfaction that comes from building things — and most especially from building them well.

The long story above is meant to set the stage, and to provide a shared context before bringing things back to the realm of the constructive. In short, I think there is a path before us — but it is a narrow one and I am still struggling to discover it myself. If we continue to use space and the space industry as our example, we can pose the dilemma as the difference between what I’ll call the “Sagan view”5 of exploration, and the “billionaire view.” And we can tap into the dichotomy with one simple question:

When was the last time we pursued wonder for wonder’s sake?

Don’t scoff at the question and move on. Stop, and sit with it. When was that, really? When was something so worth doing that you did it to the best of your ability with no regard for what it might do for you?

Look at the images in the gallery below. What do they inspire in you? Even in this new age of CGI, AI, and deep fakes, these photos from deep space inspire absolute wonder in me. I can’t believe that in my lifetime I am able to see high-resolution images of the aurora on Jupiter, gravitational lensing of countless distant galaxies spun out on infinite axes, methane ice caps on Pluto, and more dramatic pictures of Saturn’s rings than I can fit in a single Substack gallery.

We respond to images like this with our hearts. I would wager that the majority of people who end up in the space industry end up there because of their hearts, rather than their minds. Don’t get me wrong — a strong and trained mind is required! But it can’t be the only thing, and increasingly I don’t think it should even be the leading thing.

It’s strange to see the future we were warned about in sci-fi from people like Asimov become heralded as the next great advancement for society. As eloquently wrote in last month, progress is not progress unless it helps humans to flourish. Everything these days seems to be designed for just the opposite. It’s even become a meme (see below). Which of the next slew of “advances” now tottering over the distant horizon truly excite? And do they remain exciting when we realize how they’ll make money, and who they’ll make it for?

Like I’ve written before, everything is a scam.6 I am not naive enough to think that’s unique to our present time, but the sheer scale that scams can be perpetuated on likely is. We are awash in utter bullshit designed to separate us from our dollars either in a single bulk transaction or slowly over many years by exacting endless $5 per month service tolls7.

In my world of building big, complex hardware scams show up as flashy pitches, big rounds of cash, and then perpetual crickets.8 I worry what this does to us as a species. What happens when this current hardware-rich blip produces nothing? When, inevitably, the hype meets reality and vaporizes in a flash? Where do we go from there? What do we place our hopes in? There isn’t another convenient vessel to transplant humanity’s hope into. If, and when, this current New Space fever breaks, I fear we’ll be left with little. That may (rightly) cause people to throw up their hands, and perhaps even argue that we cannot build anything anymore, and therefore that we should not even bother dreaming.

The Narrow Path

And yet, despite these scams, and my own lived experience on the front edge of New Space, I, too, dream of humanity moving out among the stars, setting foot on the moon or the Red Planet and building some kind of presence there. Exploration lives in our DNA, and I am no exception. I feel the pull of the new and the unknown, that same wondering force that sent me out over frozen inlets on dark winter mornings in my childhood and keeps pushing me to find the edges in everything I’ve done since.

It’s precisely because I am no exception that I feel so burned by the priorities of the tech industry. It’s precisely because I subscribed to the mythos of the solitary inventor, the chosen one who could solve humanity’s struggles, that I now strongly warn others against it.

I don’t think we need to give up exploration or progress. There’s a middle path: Choose the path of serving humanity in whatever way you can and walk it with wonder. That means instead of focusing on doing the flashiest thing possible, find something you’re good at, let go of any preconceived ends, and instead surrender entirely to the means.9

We each know those places we get lost in the doing. You know your places. Mine are playing music, writing, and building things. From those simple things, more complex things arise, much the same as simple machines work together to make more complex ones. Flying as a private pilot is one such thing for me, a complex task built from a love of rhythm, order, and working with my hands. If you don’t know what those things are for you, maybe you’ve just forgotten. That’s ok, I forgot for a long time, too.

Doing this work, and the imperfect attempt to walk this path, has helped me shed the pinchers and shells and crabby attitude that once defined my existence. I have been able to break free of the carcinization that once threatened to swallow me whole. Now the work of showing others, and building new things the right way, begins.

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That’s a real shame. And I see a lot of the entrepreneurs I work with struggle similarly. Maybe it was the deluge of near-free money that flowed as a result of the longest bull market run in U.S. history, but I’ll be damned if a lot of founders don’t act like the steps to entrepreneurial success are:

1. Come up with a random idea.

   1. Bonus points if you can mix a few elements from the zeitgeist.

2. Tell two college friends and one investor.

   1. Mandatory: over drinks. Preferably: somewhere obnoxious (e.g. club on Vegas Strip)

3. Receive investor check.

   1. Hire engineers and buy white board. Let your college buddies manage both.

4. IPO 🤑

This seems to be especially true for hardware engineers.2 It’s wild to see their reactions when after a few months of getting firm no’s from customers and VC’s alike they are ready to hang up their hats. Failed company, they decide.

Sure, if they say so. But I don’t think it has to be. The truth is that starting new things is just uncomfortable. There’s no way around it. No matter if it is a company, a hobby, or some other habit. Even Batman had to go through it3 and honestly, if Batman had to go through it, then so do you. It’s going to be work, and the work will be difficult.

And I think that difficulty may be by design.

Beginner’s Luck

In Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist he talks about the power of beginner’s luck. The Universe wants us to begin, so it lures us in with some early success. It whets our appetite, or primes the pump, so to speak. In the world of hard tech, this early momentum could be anything from sharing an off-the-cuff idea with an interested investor at a mixer, to meeting the perfect future cofounder over coffee, to having a customer call out of the blue begging you to build them a product. I’ve experienced all of these. They’re great. It feels amazing. But then after that, things stop coming so easily.

All of a sudden, the investor doesn’t return your emails or phone calls. The perfect cofounder oversold their resume or turned out to be a megalomaniac-in-waiting. The customer calls back and says they’ve decided to build the product in-house. I have experienced all of these moments, too. They’re less great, honestly.

I have experienced this often enough to have a hunch that something4, somehow, is testing our resolve in these moments. It asks, “Was that inspiration just a flash in the pan? Or can you find a reason to continue?”

Now, that doesn’t mean you must continue blindly (or even at all)! It’s simply a great opportunity to practice a little discernment and decide if, as my good friend likes to say, the juice is worth the squeeze.

If you decide the juice is worth the squeeze, here are some tips for making the most from it:

Start Close In

David Whyte has a great poem that I think of anytime I am trying something new. It’s called “Start Close In” and I’ve shared a few lines below:

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Too often we start with the second or third step — the cool ones, the fun ones. We want to do logos and swag. We want to make fancy renderings, get offices, hire people, and generally head off to the races. Also, too often, we don’t yet know what the race really is.

It’s important to start with the first step. As David says, the one you don’t want to take. Do a strategy analysis. Call customers to understand their problems. Attend a conference or two to make sure you understand the industry. Work on mission and conceptual designs for ideas you have, instead of another pitch deck.5

It might not be the most fun thing, but it is the most vital to progress.

Get Curious About Difficulties

I’ve written a lot about my ugly early attempts at business and in the aerospace industry, so I thought that this time I’d share about my ugly early attempts at mindfulness instead. I spent a long time in my 20’s being reactive, impatient at work, and juggling racing thoughts. Over the last half decade or so, I have worked to understand those tendencies a bit and work in a calmer way.

Last fall, I signed up for a weekend meditation retreat. I thought I was ready. I had a clean diet, good exercise, a strong journaling habit, and slept like a rock in the weeks leading up to it. I ended up starting at the wall & ceiling of a cottage in the woods for six straight hours each day over a weekend. The entire first day my mind raced with judgements: This is such a fucking waste of time. I was so stupid to come here. Everyone is bugging the shit out of me. I am bugging the shit out of myself. I’m not going to get anything out of this.

How’s that for an unglamorous start?

I came apart almost immediately! But I sat with that voice so long, I got curious about it. The damn thing just wouldn’t shut up! I finally thought to ask that voice, “Who are you and what do you want?” and guess what — it went silent immediately! It didn’t want to be examined. Now that was an interesting development.

The next day I learned to be curious about that voice, and I realized how often I let it lead in my life. I worked with that idea at home over the months afterward and, just this last weekend, returned for another retreat ready to go deeper. I was able to uncover many interesting things and learned that voice wasn’t an enemy, it was actually trying to protect me.

I feel like I am starting to get somewhere with the work, which is nice. But it required getting curious about the difficulties. Instead of pushing them away, sometimes we need to hold them close. Examine them and try to see what they’re made of. This can be everything from why you cannot find a cofounder, to why the product doesn’t get traction, to why thinking about work makes you tired all the time. Don’t reject it. Look at it. Remember that we make the work, but the work also makes us.6

It took me a long time, both in the sense of that meditation weekend and in the sense of my entire life, and it might not have happened if I hadn’t spent two days literally staring at a wall, seemingly getting nowhere.

Don’t Be So Self Conscious

When my 7-year-old pulls a book off the bookshelf that’s too advanced for her, I don’t tell her to put it down. When my 2-year-old mispronounces a word, I don’t roll my eyes at him. They don’t mind messing up, or potentially looking silly. Crucially, we make a home where they are encouraged to experiment and push their limits.

How can you create the same environment for yourself (and your team)? Try asking “dumb” questions. See if you can write out your entire idea without skipping any steps or leaving any fuzzy white space. If a potential client, collaborator, or competitor says something you don’t understand, ask them about it (especially if you feel like you should already know it). Some of the best engineers and managers I’ve ever worked with did this all the time. And the majority of the time one of two funny things would happen:

1. A few other people would admit they had the same question.

2. The person who brought it up admits they don’t know either!

Sometimes, it was both.

Toolkits to Fight Distress

I am working on some toolkits to help get hardware entrepreneurs through the Valley of Death, that place between inspiration striking and securing that first customer or critical investor.

If you’d like to learn more, leave a comment or drop me a line! I have teamed up with some old friends who have developed everything from rockets, to nuclear reactors, to medical devices (and about a million other things in-between). We’re cooking up some cool stuff and I’d love to share it with you when it’s ready!

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On the launch site, failure stalked us at every turn — vendors that wouldn’t deliver parts on time (or even at all), small electrical connectors that broke as we tried to plug in some final piece of critical instrumentation, and even bigger things like multi-month detailed designs that failed to operate after they’d been deployed on the pad. That’s life on a launch site; a new disaster is always lurking around every corner.

That first year, I constantly thought to myself, “What in the hell do I know about any of this? Nothing!” I could see the same thought written across many of my coworkers’ faces, too. Building a launch site is like hitting a constantly shifting target; one that moves side to side, up and down, in and out of sight. Despite the changes in focus and direction, and the intense Doubt we each experienced individually, we never doubted as a group that we would figure it out.

A belief like that is both powerful and dangerous. Taken to an extreme, it’s the type of hubris we see wreck lives and legacies.1 But our surety didn’t come from blind faith or drinking of company Kool-Aid. It developed slowly as our team solved problems that had seemed impossible just the day, week, or month before. We saw that each of us possessed a piece of the puzzle and had a part to play. Something beyond my reach was simple for others, and vice versa. Over time, a vague but inexorable sense that the Way would eventually become clear took over. It was our job to discover that invisible Path, channel that Energy, or otherwise summon “It” into existence — whatever “It” might be.

In the years that followed on the landing barges and in building Launch Co., I continued to run into Doubt on a daily basis and kept learning how to work with it. But in the six-plus months of my sabbatical, a different kind of Doubt has started to creep in.

It Ain’t Taught in School

First, I want to acknowledge that dealing with Doubt was not taught in engineering school, and certainly neither purposefully, nor explicitly, at SpaceX or any other aerospace company I worked with. No one went around smiling and blessing us, acknowledging our struggle and making conditions ideal for the infinite path to unfold before us. No, it was pretty much the exact opposite of that. A constant deluge of phone calls, emails, instant messages, and in-person meetings demanding to know just what-the-fuck-we’re-gonna-do-about-this-and-why-isn’t-it-done-yet-and-it-better-work-or-we-have-a-real-fucking-problem-and-one-more-thing-while-I-have-you.

It was sink or swim, and by the way please hold this bag of concrete, I’ll check on you at this afternoon’s tag-up. Learn to live with Doubt or lose your job. Learn to live with Doubt or go live somewhere else, far away from the cool kids building the cool stuff. I don’t think it was healthy, but damn if it wasn’t effective. I didn’t want to miss out. I wanted to belong, I wanted to measure up. Hell, I wanted to kick some ass.2

Working with Doubt

If I couldn’t escape it, then I’d have to work with it. How do to that? Well, I realized early on that I couldn’t stay frozen, hoping enlightenment would find me. I had to get out there and look for answers. I started to cobble lessons together by reviewing old designs across the company server for the existing launch site at the Cape, as well as the integrated test site in Texas. I spent countless hours shadowing technicians around our own developing site, learning how systems further along than mine were put together, how they were tested, and how they performed. Some things went well, some were disasters, most were somewhere in the middle.

Still, I couldn’t shake that hunted feeling. Like a wounded impala that escaped a cheetah, only to have to then evade a pack of lions, and finally a cackle of hyenas, I stumbled from failure to failure, lesson to lesson, and all the while shook the “little t” traumas of each fuckup out of my trembling hands, singing curses like prayers all the while. Through each fuck, shit, dammit uttered to process each run in with hard reality, I began to realize that I was just going to have to get comfortable with not knowing much — and even more comfortable with being willing to make choices with incomplete information.

As I made that peace, quit fighting against Doubt all the time, a funny thing happened: I started to treat Doubt more as a friend. I renamed it my “Spidey Sense” to make it a little more digestible when speaking about it to others, and whenever it spoke up, I paid good attention. I learned, too, that dealing with Doubt rarely brings us closer to Certainty; in fact, done properly, I believe it takes us even further from it.

Avoiding Certainty

Finding it hard to live with Doubt? Well, imagine the nightmare it would be to live with absolute Certainty instead. First, turn yourself off from the neck down. The brain is in charge and everyone else is just along for the ride. Then, pick the moment in your life when you felt safest, happiest, fittest, wealthiest, or whatever else seems cozy and freeze yourself there. For lots of men3, that’s sometime vaguely after high school but before college got too serious. Old enough to drink every night at the bar, young enough not to know any better.

Then adopt one, or some combination of all, of the following: withering cynicism, seething irony, or simmering anger threatening to erupt as rage. Anything new that comes along that doesn’t fit your worldview is dealt with by one or all of these, depending on the scale of the perceived threat. Don’t get the message of a book? It was garbage. Can’t figure out some sticky technical problem? It’s bullshit. Significant other unhappy with you? Well, you’re even more unhappy with her! Something inconvenient conflict with your world view? Distract, ignore, belittle.

This isn’t some made up character, this is largely how I operated from college until I finally couldn’t take it anymore in my late 20’s. Judging only by my experience with it, I can say that this approach to life majorly sucks and is no way to live. It’s a small, confusing, and highly unsatisfying existence completely at odds with the way we’re designed to live.

As I continue down my path, I’ve noticed a funny thing happen: the game has actually become avoiding Certainty.4 I don’t trust anything I’m sure about. I’ve just experienced too much of my own flawed thinking; the gaps, the fuzzy areas, the places I’m willing to make jumps without showing my work. It’s funny to say, but the surer I am about something, the more I doubt my own certainty.

Expanding Along the Path Ahead

I am writing about this because, as I mentioned up top, I again feel Doubt creeping in. I learned to deal with it in highly technical situations, like being launch sites or running an aerospace engineering company, but it’s harder to digest when I also don’t have a clear direction at the moment. Put another way, a sabbatical is an amazing place to come face to face with Doubt in all of its forms:

• Doubt that I can write, edit, and publish a book? Yeah, probably a tall order! Better find some help5.

• Current newsletter issue doesn’t feel right? Hm, read it again and be willing to kill the darlings that don’t fit.6

• Don’t believe that I can expand to other callings, and different work? I couldn’t build launch sites when I started, either. Treat this like the launch site and lean on peers for help.

This last point has been the most powerful realization for me already this year. A sabbatical, especially one where I am trying to recast what I do for my work, and the way that I do it, can feel isolating and lonely. It feels too personal. But it’s crucial to share the vision, the goals, the concerns, the fuzzy areas of weakness with others; especially those that will play a part like family, close friends, and long-time collaborators.

To that end, I have redoubled my efforts to articulate what I think I am doing, before I feel ready, just to see how it lands, all the while being ready to iterate as I learn. Just like back on the launch site a decade ago, the key is not to freeze in place and expect enlightenment to find me.

This practice helps me to remain humble, to slow down, and to stay present with a complex set of work in front of me7. Still, I try to treat Doubt as a friend bringing a warning whenever it arises, trusting that it has something important to tell me.8

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Reckless & Risky

The first job I was offered toward the end of graduate school was at an engineering company in Florida. After the process of sending out dozens and dozens of applications, it was a relief just to find a company interested in hiring me. They flew me down to their offices, poured endless glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice, and grilled me in an interview. I can’t give too many details, as a quick web search shows they’re still up and running, but from the moment I walked in the vibes were off, as the kids say. I never had a good feeling about the people, the work, or their process.

After the interview I sat in the conference room for over an hour while they deliberated. Despite my increasingly desperate reminders that I had to get to the airport to make a flight, they had me wait, alone, while they came to some kind of decision. Finally, they walked in and offered me the job.

It should have felt like a win, but it didn’t — and truth be told it didn’t seem like they were very excited either. On the flight home (that I barely made), an elderly man saw me slouching in my aisle seat, dressed in my cheap taupe suit, and asked what was up. I told him I’d been offered a job, and that I was going to turn it down — even though I wasn’t quite sure why and had no other prospects.

In a near-perfect foretelling of a future meme, he looked at me in shock and said in a thick accent, “You’re turning down a job? In this economy?” He shook his head, returned to his book, and left me alone with my thoughts. As we deplaned a couple hours later, he told me in passing that it was simply too risky to be picky about work. Honestly, in that moment I agreed. It felt reckless to turn down a job. Hell, I’d never made it to the interview stage before. How could I be sure it would ever happen again? I couldn’t.

Yet I did turn them down, and one month later I got an offer from SpaceX. The rest is history.

Living Authentically

I struggle to share stories like this, because they can come off as a case of survivor’s bias. I took a risk, I made it, therefore so should you, dear reader! But that’s not the point. I don’t think you should take risks for risk’s sake. That truly is reckless.

During my sabbatical, as I try to figure out how to keep living a life of spontaneous opportunity, I realized that turning down a job while having no other prospects is just one of the dozens of big risks I’ve taken over the last decade. However, from my point of view, none of them were actually risks; they were each simply radical demonstrations of living authentically.

Even though I couldn’t articulate it back then, deep down I knew I wouldn’t be my best self at that random engineering job on the Space Coast. I would have had to act inauthentically, been around people I didn’t mesh with, and generally changed who I was to succeed. Is that success? For me, it is not.

Does that mean I had to get the SpaceX job to make everything alright? No. I didn’t even know about it yet when I turned down the other job. And if I had never gone to work at SpaceX, I still would have been fine — just as I was fine when I realized I couldn’t be my authentic self at SpaceX anymore and quit that job too!

After I left and moved home to Alaska to be an entrepreneur, I found that I woke up happier each morning on an air mattress, surviving by eating sandwiches out of a cooler in the back of my car, than I ever did waking up in a hotel to build barges to land rockets on. That might sound weird to you, but that’s ok because it was true for me. Things change, people do too.

Enumerating the Risks

What’s funny is that the same people who told me taking the SpaceX job was a risk (a space startup? Are you nuts?) also told me I was risking too much by quitting (leaving a stable well-known company? Doesn’t seem smart!). The change in perspective is enough to give a guy whiplash! It makes no sense! But for people living in fear and scarcity, everything looks like a risk.

To keep this post semi-short, I will now enumerate some of the major “risks” I’ve taken over the last decade, along with an italicized sub-bullet of the kind of feedback I got on those decisions:

• Going to graduate school across the country, in a new place where I didn’t know anyone:

  • So far from home, you’ll be lonely!

• Not taking the first job I was offered after graduate school:

  • In this economy?

• Not taking the second job I was offered after graduate school:

  • It’s a good company with a long history!

• Accepting a job with SpaceX:

  • What? You’re not going to work for GM or Ford?

• Quitting that job with SpaceX:

  • You’re too good to launch rockets? Or you can’t hack it?

• Leaving a first unhappy marriage of convenience:

  • No one is happy in their marriage, that’s why every sitcom shows bored married couples.

• Moving home to Alaska to start a company:

  • SpaceX will hire you back! Don’t throw that opportunity away!

• Shutting down that first company and starting a second:

  • Okay, you tried the entrepreneur thing, and it didn’t work. Don’t dig a deeper hole!

• Trying to bootstrap an aerospace hardware company as a freshly single dad:

  • You can’t build an aerospace company in Alaska. No one has done it. It’s just not possible!

• Inviting a woman I’d just met to road trip around Alaska with me:

  • Are you insane? You don’t even know her.

• Inviting her to move in with me during the road trip and getting married the next year:1

  • (I didn’t get much feedback on this one, everyone figured I’d truly gone insane).

• Selling the aerospace company I’d managed to build in Alaska:

  • You finally got this company going the way you want it; you can’t sell!

• Quitting that company to take my present sabbatical:

  • Launch is all you know! What else will you do? How will you pay the bills?

That just about brings us up to the present moment. What strikes me reading that list is that on the surface, and from the outside, each of those decisions looks insanely risky! But from my point of view, it was much riskier not to do them.2 Not because I knew they’d all work out (some surely didn’t!) but because I actually couldn’t risk not living as my truest self in each of those moments.3

Even the things that didn’t work, or went away eventually, were chances to practice living as authentically as I knew how at that time. Each step was required to find something a little truer further down the road. I couldn’t have built a space company that worked, without first trying to build a drone company that failed. It’s just part of the game. We can’t skip any steps to get to the end, we have to start with the next best move and go from there.4 I’ll admit that as I’ve built the muscle it’s gotten easier, but it’s still not always easy.

“So, What’s Next?”

During my little sabbatical, I’ve been catching up with friends, colleagues, and mentors, as well as coaching new entrepreneurs, which has been a ton of fun. But no matter who I am speaking to, the question everyone inevitably asks me is: What’s next?

I don’t know. Truly, I do not know. But the question I’m pondering isn’t “what’s next?” That question implies more, bigger, better, or all the other adjectives generally used to impress others and secretly disappoint ourselves. I think I’m finally learning that life is less about outward success, and more about learning to live as authentically as we can. I also realized that, up to this point, I’ve only truly harnessed that energy in the big moments, like the ones listed out above.

Now the question I ask is, “I wonder what might happen in this new chapter if I learn to practice each moment?”

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Most of our dreams end at the moment of attainment. Many of us organize our lives around these singular moments of fulfilment: graduation, the first job, a wedding, getting a promotion, buying a home, etc., so on, and so forth. I, for one, have spent countless hours thinking about just how much better my life will be whenever X1 happens. Then, repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

While we spend the countless hours imagining getting these things, we don’t spend nearly as much time considering what happens after they arrive; let alone why the things that fulfilled us just a moment ago cannot seem to do so long term.2 But that’s how the majority of our stories we tell each other work too — the hero (hopefully us!) slays the dragon, gets the treasure, and rides into the sunset as it all fades to black. Roll credits, that’s a wrap 🎬.

Except that’s not how life works.3

There’s a great book that deals with this called, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield. In short, it explains how Jack could spend years pursuing enlightenment with some of the world’s best teachers, but still get pissed off in traffic.4 In short, we learn that enlightenment is not a permanent fixed state that we can achieve, much like the idea of being a success or a failure. Instead, it requires continuous presence and grace.

The Trap of Terminal Dreams

Speaking personally, my first job, my first marriage, and even the sale of my first company were all what I call “terminal dreams.” Simply, they were not at all what I imagined (and in the case of my first marriage, nor was I what she’d imagined). In short, all of these things were imaginings; not reality. Only my conception of what they should be mattered, the actual reality of what they would take to get and maintain wasn’t considered. That’s because they were all status symbols that were intended to signal to other people, rather than open goals that could evolve over time.

Here’s what I mean:

• Instead of saying, “I want to be married” which is a moment in time, I could have framed it as, “I want to be with the love of my life”5 which I’m now lucky to be enjoying.

• Instead of saying, “I want a cool job” which is hard to evaluate before joining a company, I could have said, “I will do work that explores the interactions of deeply technical challenges with high performing teams” which I do now through entrepreneur coaching, engineering consulting, and even writing this newsletter!

• Instead of saying, “I want to sell a company” which I couldn’t even begin to understand the full consequences of, I could have said, “I want to grow my company to be sustainable and find the right partners to achieve our goals.” Now, I am starting and advising new companies with that in mind.

In short, in each of those first statements, I focused solely on discrete outcomes instead of open goals. I so narrowly defined the scope, there was no room for the mysteries of life to get in and work their magic on the outcomes.

The Importance of Evolving Dreams

Instead of terminal dreams, we can instead try engaging in dreams that evolve alongside us. For instance, we probably always want to do cool work, but what that work is will likely change as we do. Speaking personally, there was a time when living in a hotel for a year and building landing barges for rockets was really cool; and there’s absolutely no chance I’d go and do it the same way now.

Terminal dreams are something we die for. We hold tightly to them, we don’t let them change, and we don’t let ourselves change. We use up our willpower, ability, and gifts wrestling the entire universe to see things our way, to give us just what we want, and what we imagine we need. But the only things in nature that don’t change are the things that are no longer living. In other words, they’re dead. Terminal dreams lead to death, one way or another.

Evolving dreams, on the other hand, move with us. They do not come at discrete moments in time; instead, they unfold naturally as life does through milestones. For instance, one of my evolving dreams is to positively impact my home of Alaska through entrepreneurship. Even when my first business was doing poorly, I was still able to volunteer, mentor teams, and talk about the ecosystem we were all building. When my second company, The Launch Company, took off, I was able to help in all the same ways. The work is never done, but certain milestones allow me to check in, examine the course I’m on, and make any necessary adjustments.

This get us comfortable with the change of life, and apprenticing to the small deaths of seasons, pursuits, and ideas that are required in order to get comfortable with the overall ephemeral nature of life itself. It keeps us present, and prevents opportunity from passing us by.

The best part of evolving dreams is that after we are gone, either through change of course or the ultimate passing, others can more easily pick up the work and continue it in their own way. They aren’t burdened by the heavy legacy of running companies with your name on the building, or your gilded portrait in the hallway, or your 58-step plan to success; they are gifted the chance to do what you wanted to do: pick up an evolving dream and move it forward hand-in-hand with the changes of the world.

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Job Hunting & the Universe

I stared at the blinking cursor. The hopeful title “Cover Letter” adorned an otherwise blank page.

“Why do I want this job?” I mused.

I had been at this for months, writing cover letters for every job I applied to. Grad school was winding towards the final spring, and I needed a plan. Writing a custom cover letter for every job posting had started out easy enough, but after the first dozen yielded no results, I cast my net wider. By the end, I’d identify around 500 mechanical engineering job postings across the country, review over 300 of them, and finally apply for around 150, each with tailored resumes and cover letters.

Most elicited no response whatsoever. My desperation deepened as most of the responses I did receive were robotic rejections with no explanation of how or why the algorithm had culled me from the prospective herd. To say that I was burnt out was an understatement. The cursor didn’t care about any of that. It kept blinking.

Why do I want this job? I had to be honest with myself. Other than a need for income and a desire to be seen as a contributing member of society, I didn’t really want any of them. Engineering, especially at the entry level, is a fairly monotonous trade consisting of juggling various sheets: mostly spreadsheets, cutsheets, and timesheets.

It drained me to spend so many late nights staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page trying to write a cover letter for jobs that I was wholly uninterested in. Hundreds of times, I tried to answer the question “why do you want this job?” and failed to muster any optimism whatsoever. Deep down, I nurtured a naive but earnest wish that I would find something exciting, challenging, and which would let me contribute to something bigger than myself.

That wish, like most of my job applications, was met with a long silence as I continued to spend night after night hurling more cover letters and resumes into the aether. And though the silence felt like an eternity to me, I am sure it was but a blink to God, or the Universe, or my Fairy Godmother, or whatever we want to call whatever watches over us. I like to think that in those months, the Universe was just collecting Itself, gathering It’s thoughts, and nodding thoughtfully as It considered my plight, as well as It’s options for my future.

My version of this deity is not a typical one. I picture the Universe taking a long, thoughtful drag on Its cigarette as It ruminates on my plaintive prayers, all the while staring off into the middle distance as job applications pile up at Its feet. Blowing out the smoke, It shrugs as if It decided that we’ll just have to agree to disagree on what I really want or need. It picks idly at Its chipped fingernail paint as It decides that direct experience is the shortest path to revelation, pulls down resolutely on the hem of Its ragged leather jacket, and finally concludes, “Hm, you think you know best. Let’s see about that.”

The Interview

That is, I believe, how my phone came to ring one winter afternoon, with an unknown number from an unfamiliar area code. I answered and was greeted by a recruiter from SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies, which was a fairly small upstart in the aerospace industry. They had launched a few rockets, the first few were unsuccessful, but the next few got to orbit. They’d just won a demonstration contract for their space capsule to take cargo to the space station.

I had sent in an application on a whim along with a deluge of others, and just like the others got no response. Of course, I hadn’t got a rejection, either, but I’d long ago given up hope of ever hearing from them.

“Hi, Ben. I'm calling from SpaceX about an application you sent in to be a Launch and Test Engineer and I’d like to conduct your behavioral interview for a position at our Vandenburg Launch site in California.”

“Oh, cool, sounds great. When you want to do it?”

“Well, right now. Are you ready?”

Of course, I was not ready, but I figured this was my only shot and agreed. We ran through a basic set of questions about school, my opinion of the company, and my interests. I guess that my answers were satisfactory, because she concluded by asking when I’d have time to meet with the engineering team. I checked my calendar and offered the afternoon of the next day.

“No,” she replied flatly, “I mean today. How about in an hour?”

I didn't see how I could say no, exactly, so I hung up, packed up, and flogged my dilapidated secondhand mountain bike back to my apartment. By the time I got there, I only had about twenty minutes before the interview. I didn't know the best way to prepare. So, I burned through the time by fretting and pacing the tiny apartment, occasionally opening some random textbook to an area of study that flashed through my mind.

My phone rang. It was time. It's hard to capture the frenetic, unyielding pace of the interview that followed. After brief introductions from a handful of people, most of which I couldn’t hear, we jumped right in.

“What's the Reynolds number?”

I managed to rattle off the equation.

“Okay, that's the equation but what does that mean physically?”

I tried to explain how it was a ratio that measured whether inertia or viscous forces dominated in a given fluid flow.

No confirmation of right or wrong, just a different voice chiming in with a fresh question. “If I slowly let the air out of a balloon, what does the graph of radius versus time look like?”

I rattled off an answer. Then the first voice popped back in, “I noticed a bead of water forms on the top edge of my windshield when I drive my motorcycle to work on foggy days. Where does that water come from? And why does it gather at the top edge?”

I answered as best I could, talking about temperature, dew point, and cohesion picked up during my youth flying, but I was reaching — both back in time, and for facts I didn’t have. I hadn’t been prepared to think about this stuff. I figured we would talk about rockets, though I didn’t know anything about those either.

I concluded my rambling response on the beading windshield water. There was a silence, then he said, “Yeah, ok, cool. I buy it. I was kinda thinking the same thing.”

The questions continued on in this way for over an hour. Finally, I could tell they were running out of ammo. A third voice piped in to ask one final question, “Would you expect the exhaust gas temperature of an aircraft’s turbofan engine to trend up or down over the life of the engine? Why?”

At this point, I had my head down on my desk with my eyes closed, phone pushed hard to my ear with one hand. I rambled a bit about seals, enthalpy of reacting flows, and concluded that the temperature will probably go up. They seemed somewhat satisfied. We said our polite goodbyes and ended the call. I opened my eyes and noticed that my girlfriend had come home at some point during the interview and had settled in on the futon silently watching it all unfold. She looked confused.

“That was SpaceX,” I said. “Let's go get drinks and celebrate getting an interview with them because that was brutal and they're never calling back.”

The Dancing Dinner Party

We went to the basement of our local watering hole and hung out for a couple hours. Apparently, there wasn't much for cellular service down there because after coming out that evening, my phone buzzed with a bunch of voicemails hitting my phone all at once. They were all from the recruiter and each was more annoyed with me for not calling her back than the last.

She wanted to know when I could come to California for an onsite interview. I called her back immediately. It was a Friday night and I had to be back to teach by early Tuesday morning. So we decided, right there on the phone in the parking lot of the bar, that I would fly out on Sunday, interview Monday morning, and then hop on an afternoon return flight.

We got the travel together and a couple days later I flew out, collected my rental car, checked into the hotel, and collapsed on the bed. Google Maps revealed that my hotel sat only a mile from Manhattan Beach. Maybe I could find some food and destress on a beach walk, I thought. I was just starting to wrap my mind around that plan when my phone rang with another unknown number. I answered.

“Hi, Ben. I'm the site director up at Vandenberg,” came the friendly greeting. “I wanted to check in and make sure you got to town alright and were ready to come on site tomorrow.”

Vandenburg Air Force base was the location for the new site the company was building. In my talks with the recruiter, I deduced that I was interviewing to be a Launch Engineer and help build, then operate, that pad.

“I did, thanks, but I'm down in LA. I’m actually not scheduled to come up to Vandenburg at all.”

His tone changed, “What. No, that's bullshit. We have to meet you. That's the whole point of an on-site! You shouldn’t be in LA.”

“Well, yeah, I agree. But they only scheduled me only to interview here and I’m in town less than 24 hours.”

“Well, you got a car, right? Why don't you drive up here for dinner tonight. I'll get the team together over at my house. We'll all meet, chat, and then you can drive back down to LA for your interview the next morning.”

I obviously couldn't say no. I had no idea at the time that constantly changing plans and last-minute travel were standard operating procedure. He sent his address. With a deep breath, I cleared my relaxing beach walk out of Google Maps and punched in the new destination. His house was about three hours away by car; I had to get a move on. I took a quick shower, jumped in the car, and got on the 405 North just in time to get my first taste of evening rush hour traffic.

Eventually, the gridlock relaxed, and I enjoyed a gorgeous drive up the coast before turning inland towards Lompoc. I arrived at the site director’s house, up in the hills above town, and met a small motley crew of eight engineers and former Air Force officers. We stood on the back deck and looked down over the rolling tan hills mottled green with brush, out toward the coast. In the fading light, I could make out the lights at the top of the towers next to the launch pad they were working on.

We ate dinner and made polite conversation, everyone trying to get a feel for me, and I for them. As the evening progressed, some unspoken message was sent, or invisible threshold crossed, and out of nowhere one of the managers produced a couple jugs of homemade wine. The volume immediately rose as everyone began laughing, shouting, and competing to be heard over everyone else. Between quips, the engineers would look down at their phones, knit their brow in worry, fire off a message, and then rejoin the fun.

Through it all, I kept waiting for some kind of formal interview, but it never came. Instead, the site director’s youngest child threw down an open challenge to the room in “Dance Dance Revolution.” Of course, I was offered up as tribute and everyone gathered around the TV to watch as the kid kicked my butt with a perfect score, while firing off trash talk in perfect rhythm.

Homemade wine, good cooking, great conversation, and absolute humiliation in the art of dance at the hands of an eleven-year-old combined into a very fun but long evening. It was well past midnight before I got back on the road with a paper cup full of coffee and the well wishes of my new friends.

As I got on the car, the site director called out to me from his front porch.

“Hey, go kick ass in LA tomorrow.”

I promised I’d do my best.

The Rocket Factory

All my life, I had been searching for “my people.” I was lucky to have close friends from high school, but I hadn’t found anyone similar in professional pursuits. Looking back, I was searching for people like me — earnest, outgoing, driven, loud, not afraid to look kind of stupid, and a little bit crazy to boot.

I wasn’t sure what the next day would hold, but driving back to LA that night, I knew that at least I had found my people. Looking back now over ten years later, I can say I was right. Many of the people I met that night have become my closest friends and mentors, and we have stood by one another through some of the biggest trials of our lives.

I flew down the 101 back toward the 405 and my hotel, mesmerized by the stars out over the ocean off my right side. I arrived back in LA around three in the morning and climbed into bed just before four. I dozed fitfully for a few hours before giving up around 7:30, showering, and making the quick drive over to Hawthorne, a city inside the Los Angeles metro, where headquarters was located.

Obviously, I was nervous. Every step along the path thus far had been intense in one way or another. That morning, I was heading into ground zero. I arrived, checked in, and was escorted into a meeting room. After a moment an engineering manager walked in.

I must have looked a little worse for the wear because he said sympathetically, “Hey, I heard you had a long night.”

I smiled and nodded.

“I have a test you're supposed to take. Here.”

He handed it to me. It was a single sheet of paper with questions about thermodynamics, fluids, pump curves, general math, all the stuff you'd expect. I looked it over.

“You probably don’t want to take it, do you?”

I laughed and said, “No, I really don't.” I could feel my head pounding, the wine, caffeine, and lack of sleep all catching up to me.

“Well,” he said, “Why don't you just work through it a little bit and then we’ll discuss it.”

Nervous about another trial, I took the test quickly and handed it back. He silently looked it over, casually aloof, and completely at ease, in perfect contrast to my misery; a hungover, pinched, anxious ball of nerves dressed in cheap khakis and a Wal-Mart button down.

After a long silence, he nodded and said, “Okay, cool. So, yeah, you understand pumps, cryogenics, stuff like that and I heard the Vandy guys love you. I don't really have any questions.”

The shock that shot through me upon hearing those words cleared my head and sat me up perfectly straight. This had to be some kind of trick!

Just then the door to the meeting room swung open and a man everyone called “The Buzzsaw” breezed in. He was the fearsome Vice President of Launch, SpaceX employee number five, and a legend in industry from well before his time there. In the years since, we’ve collaborated on a handful of projects and I’ve found him to be brilliant, intuitive, kind, and funny. Back then, though, it seemed like he was none of those things, or at least he couldn’t show it. That’s because he wasn’t a person; he was a symbol of the unyielding, efficient perfection SpaceX demanded. And he was busy.

“What do we think?” he asked the engineering manager briskly, as he sat down.

“He nailed his phone interview and the Vandy crew likes him. He drove up there and back last night. He also did well on his written test.”

The Buzzsaw hurriedly glanced at my paper exam.

“Okay, great,” he said, “Hire him.”

With that, he stood up and stepped smartly out of the room, his open Tesla zip-up billowing in his wake. I don’t think he ever looked at me, and he definitely didn’t speak to me. It was nothing personal, of course, there was just an ungodly amount to do. I certainly don’t think he saw anything special in me, just the chance to get another body in the door helping tackle the mountain of work. If it didn’t work out, they’d find another.

“Great!” the manager said brightly, “I guess that’s it. Do you want to eat sandwiches and walk around the rocket factory?”

I told him that, yes, I would very much like to do that. The elapsed time from me entering the room to us departing with sandwiches in hand was about 20 minutes. There were no more interview questions, just polite conversation. I guess he wasn’t trying to trick me after all.

We toured the factory floor, munching on Quiznos subs. It was a flurry of activity. We paused by an early cargo space capsule under construction, preparing for a demonstration flight with NASA. In another part of the factory, some huge sheets of metal were being rolled into tubes that would form the tanks of future Falcon rockets. In another area, Merlin engines were on stands being hand-assembled while their nozzles were spin-formed. While I’m sure the experience was amplified by my stress and lack of sleep, I remember my jaw dropping at every turn. It was surreal to see a wide-open factory jammed with space hardware at every turn.

We wrapped up and I headed off to catch my one o’clock flight. The official offer letter hit my inbox by the time I landed. Now, I had a reason to focus and get through the remainder of grad school. I prepared my thesis, executed my defense, and was back in California to start work less than five months later.

My First Day, aka Welcome to the Thunderdome

I did a quick orientation at headquarters in Hawthorne. A bunch of people were there, but most were heading for the Cape, or the test stand in McGregor, or staying at Hawthorne headquarters. I was the only one in a room of 50 or more heading to Vandenburg. The human resources lead told me that I should hit the road because, if I hurried, I could still put a half day of work in after I got there.

I again made the drive from LA up to the Vandenburg Base, registered for my badge, and drove out to SLC-4E, or South Launch Complex 4 East, on the south end of base for the very first time. It wasn’t much, a launch pad on a hill dotted with beige buildings, some old and some new. I was shown to a cubicle that was bare, save a simple desk and an unassembled office chair still in its plastic wrap.

I had been fumbling with the chair for a few minutes when a thick stack of paper landed on my desk. These were schematics, design documents, for the two fluid systems I would be taking over. Eventually, these systems would be made up of tanks, piping, pumps, sensors, and valves that would be used to prep the rocket for launch once it came to the pad. At that moment, though, they were mostly just blank paper.

I got invited to an afternoon tag-up at a whiteboard in the kitchen. A tag-up is a meeting, but we weren’t allowed to have meetings, so we tagged up instead. There were lots of idioms like that I had to learn. For instance, “circling up” is an impromptu tag-up, usually called because something needed immediate fixing.

If during a tag-up someone said they had to “run the numbers” that meant that they were currently bullshitting and needed to go do some math. If someone needed to “sharpen their pencil” that meant running the numbers had gone poorly, someone else had caught it, and they needed to go try again.

If something was “notional” that meant it didn’t exist at all, even as a bounded concept, and hadn’t been thought about in a real way for more than 30 seconds before someone had asked about it. I learned that my systems were mostly notional at that point.

I attended that first tag-up and listened to each system update, trying to learn what they all did and what state each was in. Everyone was early in the design and not a lot of build was happening yet, so that gave me hope that I’d have time to patch all the missing pieces in my two systems.

At an extremely high level, most everything made sense. Our team was designing and building the systems that would fill the rocket with fuel and other liquids it needed to make its flight to space. We were going to build a giant gas station, essentially. Easier said than done, of course, but at least the broad strokes made sense. One system, however, called for something I’d never heard of before.

I leaned over to the engineer who owned it, Chris, and whispered, “Hey man, what is TEA-TEB?”

“Oh, it’s triethylalumina-triethylborane,” he responded politely. I nodded like that answer meant something and decided to let it remain a mystery for the time being.

As I was pondering this, the pad manager, Zach, asked me for an update on my systems. I recognized his voice as the one I’d heard most during my phone interview. The room went quiet, and all eyes turned to me. I was a little shell-shocked; I’d been there a grand total of about two hours, not counting my drive from LA that morning. I reported that I’d received my system schematics and, once I got my chair put together, I’d be taking stock of where they were at. He nodded and moved on. It worked for day one, but I was positive it wouldn’t work for day two.

After the meeting, Zach realized I hadn’t even been up to the launch pad yet, my day consisting solely of a drive up the coast, a fight with a chair, and the afternoon tag-up. Since my interview had just been a drunken dance off, he felt it would be good for me to go up and get acquainted.

The site director, Lee, whose house had been the site of the dance off, joined us. We drove up the hilly, winding road to the pad. At the top, I could see the gutted remains of what had been there before. This pad had launched a rocket called the Titan IV years before. The old concrete bones of that pad had given us something to start with.

We parked the car and got out. As we walked around what looked to me to be a parking lot, Lee pointed to all the empty places where things would be someday. We imagined that the dirt path, freshly cut into the hill side, running from the newly constructed hangar up to where we were now standing, was a big concrete road called Rocket Road. We imagined a giant steel frame structure, over a million pounds and 200-feet long called the ‘transporter erector,’ that would roll the rocket down the road. We imagined a giant pit at the end of that road filled with three-foot diameter hydraulic cylinders that would lift the whole transporter erector from horizontal to vertical so the rocket could launch.

As we imagined, we strolled and soon arrived at the edge of what looked like a portal to hell, opening up right there in the middle of the parking lot. It was a huge hole, big enough to swallow a truck, that went straight down about thirty feet before turning out 90-degrees into a tunnel. This was the flame duct. Someday our rocket would stand right here. We peered down cautiously and imagined 1.1 million pounds of thrust blasting through this duct as the new rocket took flight.

Honestly, though, I only pretended to imagine. I must confess, it was too much for me, standing there surrounded by rotten asphalt, dirt, and steeped in my lack of knowing what any of those things were or what it would take to build them. I couldn’t picture anything very real at all.

Everything was pure abstraction, like knowing that TEA-TEB is triethylalumina-triethylborane. Sure, that tells me what it is, in a way, but it doesn’t tell me what it does, or how we handle it, or what it takes to build a system that moves it around, or what the hell we need it for in the first place. Understanding these things in general is a long way from actually getting any of it built or operational. It almost felt too big to believe. But they were going to have to figure it out.

No, we would have to figure it out.

We stood there for a moment, each kind of nodding and looking around, hands on hips, soaking up the portrait of possibility that had been painted in our imaginations. Like the schematics, mine had a lot of blanks. We finished the tour by going down into the pad building, a kind of concrete bunker, beneath the launch pad itself, and stopped in the Tube Shop.

This is the place where miles of stainless-steel tube would be bent, flared, plumbed, and mounted on panels with valves, gauges and other instrumentation. These panels would be mounted around the pad and control all the systems we were designing. I’d be working closely with these technicians to get my own panels made, once I could imagine them a little better.

As we walked in, I noticed that a group of technicians were huddled around a small-scale model of the pad we’d just been up on. They were trying to attach a miniature flame duct. Lee introduced me briefly as a new engineer.

“Haha, fresh meat!” the lead technician exclaimed.

I didn’t really know what to say so I just stood there and nodded a little bit, a stupid grin plastered on my face. I think he was hoping for a reaction, so he continued on gamely.

“You know that it’s about to get fucking real around here, right?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said plainly, “There is quite a lot to do. We've just been up top imagining it in detail.”

He stared blankly at me for a minute, then shrugged.

“Huh, yeah, well, welcome to the Thunderdome, bitch.”

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