The last lecture (12 page)

S
O MANY
of my students were incredibly smart. I knew they would get into the working world and create terrific new software programs, animation projects and entertainment devices. I also knew they had the potential to frustrate millions of people in the process.

Those of us who are engineers and computer scientists don’t always think about how to build things so they’re easy to use. A lot of us are terrible at explaining complex tasks in simple ways. Ever read the instruction booklet for a VCR? Then you’ve lived the frustration I’m talking about.

That’s why I wanted to impress upon my students the importance of thinking about the end users of their creations. How could I make clear to them how important it was not to create technology that is frustrating? I came up with a surefire attention-getter.

When I taught a “user interface” class at the University of Virginia, I’d bring in a working VCR on the first day. I would put it on a desk in the front of the room. I would pull out a sledgehammer. I would destroy the VCR.

Then I would say: “When we make something hard to use, people get upset. They become so angry that they want to destroy it. We don’t want to create things that people will want to destroy.”

The students would look at me and I could tell they were shocked, bewildered and slightly amused. It was exciting for them. They were thinking: “I don’t know who this guy is, but I’m definitely coming to class tomorrow to check out his next stunt.”

I sure got their attention. That’s always the first step to solving an ignored problem. (When I left the University of Virginia for Carnegie Mellon, my friend and fellow professor Gabe Robins gave me a sledgehammer with a plaque attached. It read: “So many VCRs, so little time!”)

All of the students from my days at UVa. are in the workforce now. As they go about creating new technologies, I hope that once in a while I come into their minds, swinging that sledgehammer, reminding them of the frustrated masses, yearning for simplicity.

S
HOWING GRATITUDE
is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other. And despite my love of efficiency, I think that thank-you notes are best done the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper.

Job interviewers and admissions officers see lots of applicants. They read tons of resumes from “A” students with many accomplishments. But they do not see many handwritten thank-you notes.

If you are a B+ student, your handwritten thank-you note will raise you at least a half-grade in the eyes of a future boss or admissions officer. You will become an “A” to them. And because handwritten notes have gotten so rare, they will remember you.

When I’d give this advice to my students, it was not to make them into calculating schemers, although I know some embraced it on those terms. My advice was more about helping them recognize that there are respectful, considerate things that can be done in life that will be appreciated by the recipient, and that only good things can result.

For instance, there was a young lady who applied to get into the ETC and we were about to turn her down. She had big dreams; she wanted to be a Disney Imagineer. Her grades, her exams and her portfolio were good, but not quite good enough, given how selective the ETC could afford to be. Before we put her into the “no” pile, I decided to page through her file one more time. As I did, I noticed a handwritten thank-you note had been slipped between the other pages.

The note hadn’t been sent to me, my co-director Don Marinelli, or any other faculty member. Instead, she had mailed it to a non-faculty support staffer who had helped her with arrangements when she came to visit. This staff member held no sway over her application, so this was not a suck-up note. It was just a few words of thanks to somebody who, unbeknownst to her, happened to toss her note to him into her application folder. Weeks later, I came upon it.

Having unexpectedly caught her thanking someone just because it was the nice thing to do, I paused to reflect on this. She had written her note by hand. I liked that. “This tells me more than anything else in her file,” I said to Don. I read through her materials again. I thought about her. Impressed by her note, I decided she was worth taking a chance on, and Don agreed.

She came to the ETC, got her master’s degree, and is now a Disney Imagineer.

I’ve told her this story, and now she tells it to others.

Despite all that is now going on in my life and with my medical care, I still try to handwrite notes when it’s important to do so. It’s just the nice thing to do. And you never know what magic might happen after it arrives in someone’s mailbox.

W
HEN DENNIS
Cosgrove was an undergraduate student of mine at the University of Virginia in the early 1990s, I found him to be impressive. He was doing terrific work in my computer lab. He was a teaching assistant in the operating systems course. He was taking graduate level courses. And he was an A student.

Well, in most classes he was an A student. In Calculus III, he was an F student. It wasn’t that he lacked the ability. He was just so focused on his computer courses, being a teaching assistant, and a research assistant in my lab that he simply stopped going to calculus class.

That turned out to be a serious problem, as it was not the first time he had a semester in which he earned straight A’s with an F.

It was two weeks into a new semester when Dennis’s checkered academic record caught the attention of a certain dean. He knew how smart Dennis was; he had seen his SAT and AP scores. In his view, the F’s were all due to attitude, not aptitude. He wanted to expel Dennis. But I knew Dennis had never received a single warning about any of this. In fact, all of his A’s offset his F’s to the point where he couldn’t even be academically suspended. Yet, the Dean invoked an obscure rule that left expulsion on the table. I decided to go to bat for my student. “Look,” I told the dean, “Dennis is a strong rocket with no fins. He’s been a star in my lab. If we kick him out right now, we’ll be missing the whole point of what we’re here for. We’re here to teach, to nurture. I know Dennis is going somewhere special. We can’t just dump him.”

The dean was not happy with me. In his view, I was a young professor getting pushy.

Then I got even pushier. I went tactical. The new semester had already begun. The university had cashed Dennis’s tuition check. By doing so, as I saw it, we were telling him he was welcome to remain as a student. Had we expelled him before the semester, he could have tried to enroll in another school. Now it was too late for that.

I asked the dean: “What if he hires a lawyer to argue this? I might just testify on his behalf. Do you want one of your faculty members testifying against the university?”

The dean was taken aback. “You’re a junior faculty member,” he said. “You’re not even tenured yet. Why are you sticking your neck out and making this the battle you want to undertake?”

“I’ll tell you the reason,” I said. “I want to vouch for Dennis because I believe in him.”

The dean took a long look at me. “I’m going to remember this when your tenure case comes up,” he said. In other words, if Dennis screwed up again, my judgment would be seriously questioned.

“That’s a deal,” I told the dean. And Dennis was able to stay in school.

He passed Calculus III, did us all proud, and after graduating, went on to become an award-winning star in computer science. He’s been part of my life and my labs ever since. In fact, he was one of the early fathers of the Alice project. As a designer, he did groundbreaking programming work to help make the virtual reality system more accessible to young people.

I went to bat for Dennis when he was twenty-one years old. Now at age thirty-seven, he is going to go to bat for me. I’ve entrusted him with carrying Alice into the future as the research scientist designing and implementing my professional legacy.

I enabled Dennis’s dream way back when he needed it…and now that I need it, he is enabling mine.

I
GOT TENURE
a year earlier than people usually do. That seemed to impress other junior faculty members.

“Wow, you got tenure early,” they’d say to me. “What was your secret?”

I said, “It’s pretty simple. Call me any Friday night in my office at ten o’clock and I’ll tell you.” (Of course, this was before I had a family.)

A lot of people want a shortcut. I find the best shortcut is the long way, which is basically two words: work hard.

As I see it, if you work more hours than somebody else, during those hours you learn more about your craft. That can make you more efficient, more able, even happier. Hard work is like compounded interest in the bank. The rewards build faster.

The same is true in your life outside of your job. All my adult life I’ve felt drawn to ask long-married couples how they were able to stay together. All of them said the same thing: “We worked hard at it.”

N
OT LONG
after I got tenure at the University of Virginia, I took my entire fifteen-person research team down to Disney World for a week as my way of saying thank you.

A fellow professor took me aside and said, “Randy, how could you do that?” Perhaps he thought I was setting a precedent that other soon-to-be-tenured professors would be unwilling to equal.

“How could I do that?” I answered. “These people just worked their butts off and got me the best job in the world for life. How could I
not
do that?”

So the sixteen of us headed down to Florida in a large van. We had a complete blast, and I made sure we all got some education with our entertainment, too. Along the way, we stopped at various universities and visited computer research groups.

The Disney trip was gratitude easily delivered. It was a tangible gift, and it was perfect because it was an experience I could share with people I cared about.

Not everyone is so easily thanked, however.

One of my greatest mentors was Andy van Dam, my computer science professor when I was at Brown. He gave me wise counsel. He changed my life. I could never adequately pay him back, so I just have to pay it forward.

I always liked telling my students: “Go out and do for others what somebody did for you.” Riding down to Disney World, talking to my students about their dreams and goals, I was trying my best to do just that.

A
S PART
of my responsibilities, I used to be an academic reviewer. That meant I’d have to ask other professors to read densely written research papers and review them. It could be tedious, sleep-inducing work. So I came up with an idea. I’d send a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints with every paper that needed to be reviewed. “Thank you for agreeing to do this,” I’d write. “The enclosed Thin Mints are your reward. But no fair eating them until you review the paper.”

That put a smile on people’s faces. And I never had to call and nag them. They had the box of Thin Mints on their desks. They knew what they had to do.

Sure, sometimes I had to send a reminder email. But when I’d ping people, all I needed was one sentence: “Did you eat the Thin Mints yet?”

I’ve found Thin Mints are a great communication tool. They’re also a sweet reward for a job well done.

I
’VE ALWAYS
felt a need to be prepared for whatever situation I’ve found myself in. When I leave the house, what do I need to bring? When I teach a class, what questions should I anticipate? When I’m preparing for my family’s future without me, what documents should I have in place?

My mother recalls taking me to a grocery store when I was seven years old. She and I got to the checkout counter, and she realized she’d forgotten a couple of items on her shopping list. She left me with the cart and she ran off to get what she needed.

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

She was gone just a few minutes, but in that time, I had loaded all the items on the belt and everything was rung up. I was left staring at the cashier, who was staring at me. The cashier decided to make sport of the situation. “Do you have money for me, son?” she said. “I’ll need to be paid.”

I didn’t realize she was just trying to amuse herself. So I stood there, mortified and embarrassed.

By the time my mom returned, I was angry. “You left me here with no money! This lady asked me for the money, and I had nothing to give her!”

Now that I’m an adult, you’ll never catch me with less than $200 in my wallet. I want to be prepared in case I need it. Sure, I could lose my wallet or it could be stolen. But for a guy making a reasonable living, $200 is an amount worth risking. By contrast, not having cash on hand when you need it is potentially a much bigger problem.

I’ve always admired people who are over-prepared. In college, I had a classmate named Norman Meyrowitz. One day he was giving a presentation on an overhead projector and in the middle of his talk, the lightbulb on the projector blew out. There was an audible groan from the audience. We’d have to wait ten minutes until someone found a new projector.

“It’s okay,” Norm announced. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

We watched him walk over to his knapsack and pull something out. He had brought along a spare bulb for the overhead projector. Who would even think of that?

Our professor, Andy van Dam, happened to be sitting next to me. He leaned over and said, “This guy is going places.” He had that right. Norm became a top executive at Macromedia Inc., where his efforts have affected almost everyone who uses the Internet today.

Another way to be prepared is to think negatively.

Yes, I’m a great optimist. But when trying to make a decision, I often think of the worst-case scenario. I call it “The Eaten By Wolves Factor.” If I do something, what’s the most terrible thing that could happen? Would I be eaten by wolves?

One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. There are a lot of things I don’t worry about because I have a plan in place if they do.

I’ve often told my students: “When you go into the wilderness, the only thing you can count on is what you take with you.” And essentially, the wilderness is anywhere but your home or office. So take money. Bring your repair kit. Imagine the wolves. Pack a lightbulb. Be prepared.