Engineering an Adult Life

A few weeks ago I was watching the Military channel, a show about engineering weapons, robots, etc. Not an engineer myself, I surprisingly became glued to the program. I even took notes! Most notably, this is what I learned about engineering life from a genius MIT graduate who was working with his team to engineer a robot that can go rescue people from tragic situations. He said this: "Engineering is the process of doing something poorly, and then doing it again less poorly." Throughout the episode, I was able to see the struggle of the team investing everything they had into this robot (literally millions of dollars as well) just to test it and see that things didn't work quite right. Actually, the main feature of rolling up stairs actually did not work at all...so it was a total bust. He then said this: "Now we have to clean up and design it so this doesn't happen again. There is a big difference between finding the problem and solving it."

For anyone who really knows me, (and for the record I am pretty sure that the two or three of you know who you are) or for anyone who doesn't know me very well yet, including people in my own family, it should be common knowledge that I am basically obsessed with studying relationships. The sooner everyone embraces it, the better it will be for all of us. For the record, the ratio of human-relationships books to novels on my bookshelf is literally 20-1. Sometimes I am known to poke around and press every annoying button, usually with a really good friend, just to see what will happen if I do this or that, or see what the other person does given their gender and/or personality type in a certain scenario. What can I say? I just want to know how it all works :)

My fascination can be comparable to my brother Greg's obsession with fast cars, or my brother in law Doug's obsession with Speech Language Pathology. Greg, if I remember correctly, totally ruined his first attempt at rebuilding an engine, and Doug hesitated to follow through in finishing his Master's thesis. Now Greg owns one of the best BMW's in the country and several other exotics, and Doug is one of the top researchers in his field at the Doctorate level.

I graduated a few years ago from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in Sociology, where I first learned that if you wonder what a passer-by's life is like when they get home then you are a sociologist, and on my mission in Hawaii I actually got to live my dream of being a fly on the wall in people's homes by people who invited me in. Of course, I loved everyone who invited me in, but I got the special bonus of observing things I have always wondered about. What I learned as a result changed everything in my life.

Here is what I learned: People are usually what they seem to be, but you have to make sure to open your eyes and see what is really there. Don't only see what people want to show you, and don't only see what you want to see. Don't be fooled. If a person seems phony, stay away. Everyone has problems, and sometimes the best looking packages have the worst insides, and the worst looking packages have the best. That is probably why Jesus rejected the pharisees and spent all his time with the genuinely downtrodden...it was probably more enjoyable for him. When you see what is really there, even if it is only a little bit good, you can enjoy what is good and love what is lacking; then real joy comes when that love is received where it is needed. By love, I don't mean bask in or get excited about or praise, I mean endure or supplement from your great supply of obvious superiority or excess blessings. To me, that is true Christianity. Sometimes people we are in the same room with or on the same team or committee with have great deficiencies. It can be tempting to pretend to not see the weakness, or see it and not address the oversight appropriately, or worse, intervene in the wrong way thus impairing good feelings in the relationship. Don't give in to the temptation. Just give the love and move on to bless others by how great you are.

I live in a family of high expectations and great demands for success. All of my best friends are happy and successful in their chosen fields and relationships. In a lot of ways this is a wonderful thing, but occasionally it hurts to be the engineer that put everything into a dream that failed, and now to be stuck with the dreaded "now we have to clean up and design it so this doesn't happen again" phase. I wish that I would have known at 15 years old or 20 years old what I now understand at 25, but I always tried my best, and I do not regret trying and failing. I am in complete control of all of my affairs, and I would have learned these lessons no other way. It's all mine, and I own it. The myth that perfection must be had the first time around no longer haunts me, or rules me. We are all pretty crude, imperfect individuals who have never done what we attempt to do before (unless you are boring and never try to stretch yourself and grow.) Demanding perfection and not giving necessary forgiveness of errors that come up along the way is like telling those MIT engineers to pull the plug on their robot because of the glitches that occur ed, flushing down the millions of dollars and hours spent to build the first model. That is simply ridiculous. Fortunately, by the end of the episode, the engineers did find the solution to the engineering problem, and the million dollar robot prototype functioned! I know that my fate will likewise be so favorable. Don't worry, I know what I am doing poorly. My greatest aspiration is to do the same things less poorly today and tomorrow.