The Achievement Habit (21 page)

Because we are
writing
our own life stories in the first person, we need to realize that we give ourselves and all the other characters their meaning.

T
HERE ARE MANY FACTORS
at play in determining your self-image, and you can shape and redesign that image at will whenever it doesn’t suit you. Whether that includes physical things like getting a haircut or losing weight, personality-based things such as correcting bad habits or improving skills, or changing pieces of your identity outright (like changing a name), it’s important to know that your self-image doesn’t have to stay stagnant. If you’ve defined yourself as lazy, a bad speller, messy, easily distracted, or selfish, that doesn’t have to be an eternal part of your self-concept. You can make a decision right now to see yourself differently, and then to become different.

CHAPTER 9

Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups,
parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Life on every level is full of complexity and uncertainty. As individuals we face a life of unknown duration, during which we are likely to go through periods of family, career, or personal crisis. The world around us is even more unpredictable. I am always amazed that things work as well as they do.

It’s a very good idea to have a general sense of your goals in life, and an equally good idea not to get too rigid about your path. Stay open to possibility: let other people in, and listen when new opportunities present themselves.

My life seems to have been punctuated by a set of unforeseen detours, followed by surprising right and left turns—anything other than a series of planned, rational steps. This puts me in a difficult situation when students ask for career advice.

I attempt to give it my best shot, which is a rational, linear
extrapolation from the present to the future, though I know that the chance of what I say ever becoming reality is very slight. I sometimes tell students, “Life is an adventure, so loosen up, stop trying to figure it out, and just go with the flow.” This does not seem to satisfy most of them, so I play the sage, knowing full well their lives will soon deviate from any rational life path that they may have laid out.

I do not have the time or audacity to tell the students how I ended up living and teaching at Stanford, but I will tell you here.

My wife and I both grew up in the same New York City neighborhood near Bronx Park. Despite my inauspicious start as a lazy high school student who spent his time on the streets, I went on to college locally, where I nearly flunked out. The wake-up call I needed was the letter from the dean telling me that I was on academic probation.

Wait, they can’t flunk me out! I thought. I knew I wasn’t stupid.

From then on, I was a straight-A student. I learned to love school, and I wanted to continue, so I went on to graduate school. As a grad student I also began lecturing at City College, and teaching spoke to me. I really enjoyed it. As I was nearing the completion of my PhD studies at Columbia University, I had a discussion with my thesis advisor about my future. To my absolute delight, he suggested I apply to join the Columbia faculty. He cautioned me that it would be prudent to also apply elsewhere, because there was at the time some pushback about inbreeding in the mechanical engineering department.

He mentioned that Cornell University was looking for a young assistant professor. I, in turn, recalled that several years back I had spent a summer in Los Angeles and heard that the area around Stanford University was a nice place to live. I asked if my thesis advisor knew anyone on the Stanford faculty. Yes,
he knew a Professor Arnold. Herein lies the tale of coincidences that got me to Stanford, where I have spent well over fifty years of my life.

The International Conference for Teachers of Mechanisms was held at Yale University in March 1961, under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. The organizers of the conference mailed an invitation to Professor Arnold at Stanford University.

At Stanford’s Department of Mechanical Engineering there were two people with the last name Arnold. John E. Arnold was a famous professor in both mechanical engineering and the business school; he was the founding head of the department’s Design Division. Frank A. Arnold, on the other hand, was a lecturer associated with the Thermosciences Division, who was interested in the aerodynamics of flight—not mechanisms. The conference invitation mistakenly went to Frank rather than John. Not deterred by this obvious error, Frank accepted the invitation and attended the conference, where he met my thesis advisor.

Thus when my advisor wrote about me to his acquaintance, he was writing to the wrong person. Happily, this time Frank passed the letter on to John. My advisor had a very strong reputation, and based on that, John Arnold invited me to come to Stanford for an interview.

Meanwhile, I had received an offer letter from Columbia University. I had accepted the position of assistant professor, and was to start that September. I was looking forward to teaching at Columbia, working closely with my thesis advisor. I was nevertheless glad to be offered a free interview trip to California. In late July my wife and I arranged for a nanny to watch our two young boys and my twelve-year-old sister, who lived with us, and we boarded a train for California.

At Stanford I was very impressed with John Arnold. I learned he had been a popular professor at MIT and had only been at Stanford a few years. The Design Division he had created was composed of three young faculty members at the beginning of their careers, and the atmosphere was very different from what I was used to at Columbia. John had a special slant on education and engineering that was influenced by his having studied philosophy before going into engineering. Most of all, I noticed a special twinkle in his eye that made me feel that it would be interesting to work with him.

I was thus pleased when, after a half day of interviews and a lunch meeting, the chairman of the department told me they would be recommending me for a three-year tenure-track assistant professor appointment. That evening the concern set in. My wife was very attracted to the area, and John Arnold and the job seemed appealing; however, I really liked New York, my thesis advisor, and Columbia. Besides, Columbia University was starting the fall semester in a month, and I had already accepted the appointment. What to do?

If I did move to Stanford, I would be arriving in a month with a family and no place to stay. I put down a deposit for a house rental, knowing full well that the odds were I would forfeit the deposit and end up staying in New York. My wife and I agonized over this decision during the long train ride across the country back to New York.

When I arrived back at Columbia, my thesis advisor asked what had happened, and I told him I had been offered the job. Without hesitation he told me he had been discussing that possibility with his colleagues, and that they had heard that Stanford was going through a large building up of faculty. They believed Stanford was headed toward a new era, and felt it would be in
my best interest to accept the offer. Furthermore, I should not be concerned about my last-minute reneging at Columbia. In an instant the problem with Columbia was resolved. That only left the task of informing our families that we were leaving and taking the children three thousand miles away. And, yes, my twelve-year-old sister was horrified at the prospect of having to leave her girlfriends.

I have had a long and satisfying career at Stanford, and it took a host of improbable events for me to get here in the first place. My life is punctuated by milestones that would have never happened except for the combination of unplanned and improbable chance events.

Most people I know have similarly nonlinear life trajectories. How about you? Have you had enough unexpected developments in your life to sign on to the life-is-a-chance theory? If yes, learn to enjoy the trip and don’t waste your cross-country train ride worrying about what to decide.

Some people almost never need to make agonizing decisions; life for them just seems to flow along, and when the big transitions happen, they notice they were big only in hindsight. I am one of those people; I consider myself lucky to have had that type of a career. And thinking about the many crossroads in a long and full career, I now see that if I had not responded to certain opportunities, my life would have been quite different. I will never know, of course, what might have been. Still, I have no regrets.

There are two extreme types of people in the world—those who say yes to every opportunity, and those who say no. I place myself in the middle.

I have found it is important to be mindful of my reactions to opportunities. There is no way to know in advance where these will lead. Some may lead nowhere, and some to disaster. Yet when opportunity presents itself, we have no choice but to respond. (Ignoring opportunity is itself a response.)

Several life-changing opportunities have come to me in the form of out-of-the-blue phone calls. The first came in my second year at Stanford. I answered my office phone and was asked to hold: Dr. Terman wanted to talk. Of course I knew the name—Fredrick Terman was Stanford’s provost, a legendary electrical engineer who had been the mentor of Bill Hewlett and David Packard—however, I had never met him. What could he possibly want with a young assistant professor?

Terman informed me that he was calling to suggest that I provide some expertise in the design of machines to John McCarthy, a mathematician who had just won a large government grant to found the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Part of the grant was to go toward the development of robotic devices. Terman had been told that John was too mathematical to handle the design of actual devices, and that I could provide necessary engineering skills.

Terman’s phone call led to my close collaboration with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and my immersion in robotics, which became a major part of my creative work for over forty years. I became one of the founders in the new field of robotics, and John grew to be a lifelong friend. He was one of the main creators of the field of artificial intelligence, a true genius with an incredibly inquisitive and creative mind. I soon found out he was much more practical than Terman had been led to believe.

John had a charming belief that he could solve any problem.
In the early days I traveled with him to Houston, where the two of us met with oil-company executives in a fancy conference room near the top of a large skyscraper. John was trying to convince them to fund the development of a robotic coal-mining machine. We had never done anything remotely like that, but John described in detail what he imagined such an undertaking would accomplish. He showed a film our students had made of a robot arm assembling a tower of blocks. The background music on the film was Scott Joplin’s ragtime melody “The Entertainer,” which had been used in the film
The Sting
. In the film, two hustlers (played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford) con a mob boss out of a lot of money. As I sat there, I realized John was not aware of the strong parallel between our fanciful request and
The Sting
’s plot. We never got the money. To this day I am sure the oil men saw the irony and had a good laugh.

I remember that my initial reaction to Terman’s phone call was at best neutral. At first I felt that the opportunity presented was a distraction from my main research. However, it turned out I was able to bring my unique perspective to what John was doing, and the robotics work in turn enhanced my main area of interest, kinematics.

Another phone call that changed my life was from my friend Mike Rabins, a professor at Texas A&M University, who wanted to know if I’d organize a summer creativity workshop. My immediate reaction was an emphatic “
No way
,” but just as I was about to hang up, I realized it could be a good opportunity for my friend Rolf Faste to build up his reputation and get promoted. He and I wound up leading these workshops for ten years.

The opportunity I reluctantly accepted—for reasons that never materialized (Rolf never applied for the promotion)—ended
up having a major impact on me. Teaching methodology and experience-based learning became a big part of my life, and I had a new basis for interacting with colleagues throughout the world.

These two big changes in my career were instigated by phone calls that I had no idea were coming. I immediately accepted the life changes offered in the phone calls. In retrospect I had no idea how large a change was to come. Each started out as just another everyday occurrence. There were no agonizing decisions, no long-term life plans—nothing other than the ordinary flow of my life. I was not looking for change, and would probably have had a fulfilling and rich life without those changes; happily they were more than satisfying.

Looking back and thinking about those phone calls, I realize that I could have just as easily said no to both of them, and in so doing missed two of the most gratifying developments in my professional life. Life is full of junctures and opportunities, and it is impossible to know in advance which way to go, and which chances to take. I feel very lucky that I said yes to these opportunities.

Much has been written about automation and the replacement of human workers with machines. Two main justifications are usually given for mechanizing jobs once done by humans: first, that the work is tedious and dangerous, so it’s better to let machines do it for the workers’ sake; and second, that workers are expensive and unreliable, so machines can save money while retaining or improving quality.

These ideas are basically derived from the context of
blue-collar factory work. They do little to address the computer revolution and the great changes that have occurred across the workforce, replacing a large number of highly trained and educated scientific and technical workers with machines. This trend toward more and more automation brings into play the question of what meaning we give to work.