johnmaconline

Is it someone who has been “born again?” What does that mean?

Must you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible? Does inerrancy require the seven days of Genesis, the serpent in the garden, Noah’s Ark, Jonah’s whale, the tribulation of Job, and an immaculate conception? Must the earth be around 5000 years old?

If not literal inerrancy, must you believe that the Bible was divinely inspired?

What does it mean to take Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? Must you walk to the front of a room, declare, and have hands laid on you? Can you do it on your deathbed or death row?

Must you be baptized? What if you’ve never had communion?

Is it someone to whom God speaks? What does it feel like to have God speak to you?

Must you believe in Satan as a being? What about hell as a place? What about heaven?

Is it someone who attends worship services every Sunday? What about Wednesday night services or Saturday mass? Must you receive ashes on your forehead on the first Wednesday of Lent?

Must you subscribe to a particular political view? Were any Nazi’s Christians? What about slave owners? Murderers? Tax evaders?

What if you’ve never donated a dollar to a church, another person, or an organization? What if you’ve never volunteered for a soup kitchen? What if you’ve never stopped to help someone else on the side of the road?

Who is a Christian?

Speed kills.
Haste makes waste.
Slow and steady wins the race.

But also,

First wins.
Success loves speed.
First to market, first to make an impact.

What’s the proper speed?

Regardless of how fast you are going, don’t forget to look around.

In the winter of 2003, when I was working with Apple on the iPod, I had a meeting at 2 pm in Cupertino.

I left my house at 2:30 am in the middle of a snowstorm to get to the Philly airport for an early morning flight. In normal conditions, it takes me an hour and fifteen minutes to travel from my house to the offsite parking lot I use. This morning took almost three hours. I jumped in the shuttle as the snow had already obscured my just-parked car’s roof and front windshield. 

Flying west for six hours, I watched the ground transform from the white Northeast to the patchwork green and brown of the plains, over the snow-capped Rockies, and back to the verdant San Francisco coast. I walked through the garage to the rental car pickup, feeling the mid-50s temperature around me as the morning fog lifted. As I drove the 45 minutes on the 101 south from the airport to Cupertino, I watched the temperature gauge rise to 75 as the mid-day sun beamed fully overhead. 

I met my colleague for lunch in Cupertino, and we sat outside. After lunch, we walked over to DeAnza 8 for the 2 pm meeting. A gorgeous day. 

For the next four hours, the iPod engineering team raked me over the coals, chewed me up, and spit me out. I white-knuckled it but emerged on the other side. 

Now a mental dishrag, I jumped in the car and drove to the closer San Jose airport for my trip home on the 10 pm red-eye. First stop — Vegas. I didn’t have to change planes, but we were taking on more passengers. It’s now the middle of the night. I’d never been to Vegas, so I hopped off the plane, ran down the gate hallway, and picked the first slot machine I found. Dropped my $5 in, pulled the lever, and promptly lost my $5. 

Flying overnight, I managed zero sleep in my window seat. We landed in Philly at around 6 am with the sun not yet peeking over the winter horizon. In zombie mode, I made my way through the airport maze to the shuttle pickup. Luckily, no bags except my backpack with my laptop. The shuttle deposited me next to my car in the lot as the rising sun made it just dusky enough to see without lights. 

Eight inches of snow buried my car. I grabbed the brush and small snow shovel from my trunk and spent the next 15 minutes digging it out. I drove home in the middle of the morning rush hour complicated by the weather. Another three-hour journey.

That was quite a 32 hours. Made possible only through the speed of modern technologies. Walking, driving, and flying my way across the country and back, as well as through all of the seasons and back. Even dropped a fiver in a slot machine in Vegas along the way. 

Speed is a perspective flipper. 

When trying to understand another’s perspective, you should ask yourself, “How fast are they going?”

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” 

– George Carlin

I couldn’t agree more.

More than one passenger in my car has heard me exclaim, “Do you believe this idiot? Doesn’t he have anywhere to be?” Or, “Look at that maniac! He’s gonna kill someone!”

But its not really about the other driver’s speed. It’s about your speed. Specifically, the speed you want to travel. Your own speed probably changes with context, familiarity, and time.

Whether you’re driving down the road, working on a relationship, navigating a career, writing a book, or affecting change in the world, you want to move at your own speed. 

Everybody else is either an idiot or a maniac. 

Humans run an average of 7 mph and up to 20-ish mph if they’re being chased over a short distance. I assume we’ve been running for our entire existence. 

Horses run an average of 30 mph. Humans started riding horses around 5000 years ago. 

Trains became the primary mode of long-distance travel in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, they were averaging speeds of 55 mph. Today, the Shanghai Maglev operates at 267 mph every day. 

Most cars could go over 55 mph by the 1930s. However, it wasn’t until the 1950s that the majority of the road infrastructure enabled this and higher speeds. Now, we travel routinely at 70+ mph.

The Ford Trimotor, one of the earliest commercial aircraft, first flew in 1925 and had a cruising speed of about 100 mph. Today, you’re traveling an average of 500 mph through the sky. 

The best way to understand speed is to look to the side. The objects you see and how you see them are defined by your speed and their relative distance to you. 

On the maglev train (I’ve been on this train. It’s crazy.), anything within 100 feet of the track is unseeable — just a blur. But look out toward the tall buildings across the city, and they just slowly march by. 

As you travel at 500 mph across the sky at 40000 feet, the quilted patchwork of the country and tight-knit circuit boards of the cities crawl slowly past you on the ground. 

Driving 40 mph down the country road, each mailbox zips by as an unseen blur, but the tree-filled hills in the distance stand almost still as the barns just a few hundred yards away slide between the mailboxes and the hills at their own in-between pace.

Run down that same country road, and now each and every mailbox shows its own unique personality. The barns and the hills sit together as stationary overseers.

Today’s world provides a myriad of paces at which you can take it all in. The pace at which you travel provides perspective. Because perspective isn’t just about what is. It’s also about how you see it.

Whatever your pace at any given moment, don’t forget to look. 

I finally started putting all the lessons together, as well as learning the last couple during my third semester.

It wasn’t perfect, and I still had a ways to go to perfect them, but I cracked 3.00 for the semester with a 3.01. That gave me 2.76 as I applied to be an Electrical Engineering major. I was nervous. In fact, I had started to work on what would happen if I didn’t get in.

I don’t know where I was ranked. I may have been the very last out of 300. But I got in. And now, I’ve spent over 30 years working in the tech industry as an Electrical and Software engineer. I can’t imagine what my career would have been without it.

I never got my cumulative GPA over 3.00. My high water mark was 2.99, and I graduated with 2.96. But it was enough. Later, I went on to get a master’s degree in EE. By then, I had armed myself with the lessons of my best learning methods, which paid off right from the first class. I graduated with a 3.65.

Part of growing up for me was learning that my capabilities aren’t fixed. Success or progress isn’t just about talent or inherent ability. It’s about learning, growing, and putting the work in to get better.

Learning itself is a skill. Once I learned how to learn, I filled my quiver with a bunch of arrows.

I learned the most valuable lesson of how I learn during my third semester.

This was the most critical semester yet because it was the last set of grades to go into my cumulative GPA prior to major entrance. I had piled up some spectacularly mediocre grades so far. With an A- in a four-credit Physics II class over the summer, I was now at a 2.64 GPA. 

Unfortunately, I was taking the hardest math course I had ever, or would ever take — Math 250: Differential Equations. 

I struggled right out of the gate, but within a few weeks, I was regularly working with a friend of mine (thanks to the lesson I learned about conferring with others). And he introduced me to the best lesson of all — go talk to the professor.

I can remember exactly one professor’s name from my entire college career: Dr. Crichton Ogle (now at Ohio State — the traitor), assistant professor of Math. My professor for DiffEq. 

Every Tuesday, after the first few weeks, my friend Mike and I visited him in his office hours. He patiently spent an hour or more each time giving us his undivided attention and working through our individual struggles. His attention and care is the only reason that I not only passed but semi-thrived. I came out of that class almost sort of knowing what I was doing.

At the end of the semester, he invited Mike and me to be his guests at another math professor’s house for a little gathering of professors and some special student guests. We were his guests. It was, quite frankly, an honor. 

The lesson I learned is that professors are people, and many of them care. Go see them. They’ll help you. They want to help you. They want you to succeed. 

I came out of that class with a B. The only reason was Dr. Ogle and the fact that I went to talk to him. 

I came out of my first full year of college reeling. Even after putting my mind to getting better, I had done worse my second semester.

I knew I was in trouble because in the late 80s in Penn State engineering, you applied for your specific major (EE in my case) after your third semester — 40-60 credits into your college career. To get into EE, I would need to be in the top 300 applicants. I didn’t know how many were applying, but I knew it was more than 300. I had to figure this out.

My third semester included my first course specific to my intended major — Computer Engineering 271: Digital Design. Even though I had been writing computer programs since 4th grade, I had zero ideas how the hardware operated. This course would be my first step on what would eventually be my career journey.

One month in, I was flailing. I didn’t understand the terminology, the symbols, or even the basic concepts of boolean logic. And I was really trying. I just didn’t get it.

The week before the first mid-term, a guy I met in class invited me to a group study session. I had never studied or even worked together like this before. Certainly not in high school. I was hesitant, but I went.

A group of five of us sat around a table and collectively worked through a bunch of the practice problems. At first, I was silent because I was self-conscious about my ignorance. But then, the smartest person at the table said to the group, “OK, I don’t get this one here…”

And the veil came down.

It seems simple; dumb even. But I was too embarrassed by my lack of understanding to even open my mouth until that very point. We studied together for a couple of hours, and I started asking my own questions. I came away from that single session having learned more than the previous month of lecture and solitary struggle. 

I had unlocked the next lesson on learning how to learn. 

Confer with your classmates. Study with your classmates. If you don’t understand a problem, work through it together. I still ended with a C in this class, but I felt like I had made a turn.