Recently, I posted a list of “Edge of the Bed Advice.” One critique from my kids was that yes, they had heard much of it before and knew the stories behind many items, but without that context, they seemed like bromides or proverbs with no real depth. So here’s my first attempt to put some flesh to those bones.
I am currently going through a so-called pilgrimage, Find Your Inner Monk, from the creators of the Monk Manual. Much of the process is about decisions. How to make the right decision, how to make sure you are intentional about decision-making, how to decide out of love instead of fear. I’m also a fan of Jesuit spirituality. In The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Father James Martin, SJ, describes several methods within the Jesuit tradition for discerning the right decision.
That’s all fine, but mostly, all decision-making literature and methods address the decisive moment. What happens before? What happens after?
In 1996, I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finishing up my MSEE. I had every intention of continuing on with doctoral studies and had even passed the qualifying exam. I pulled out of one job search, too. But then, my relationship with my advisor went through one of those down phases common to every graduate student’s academic career. I applied for a job at Motorola in Phoenix and received an offer ($46,400, above my minimum threshold for consideration of $45k). Now what?
I talked with my dad about it. He counseled me to stay for my Ph.D., but more importantly, he gave me these two pieces of advice:
Beware of making a series of small decisions that add up to a big one.
Make a choice, then do what’s necessary to make it the right one.
Bill Kimball, 1996
The first piece of advice relates to what happens before the decision. It’s easy to drift along, semi-consciously choosing what seems right all the time, and then look back and discover that you’re on a path that you would never have chosen had you fully considered all of the options. In 1996, I had not actually made an inadvertent decision, but was close to it. I think my dad was trying to get me to see the magnitude of the decision I was facing. If I left grad school, would I ever go back? How would it impact my relationship with my girlfriend at the time? What kind of life was I choosing?
Ultimately, I did decide to take the job at Motorola. Now the second piece of advice came into play. Once I left UIUC and moved to Arizona, I couldn’t go back. I had to fully inhabit that life, and do what was necessary to make that the right decision. I discovered life without my girlfriend was not good, so I proposed to her. (We now have two grown kids.) I embraced the challenges of my job and learned as much as I could—not only about MOSFETs, IGBTs, diodes, and semiconductor packaging, but also about professionalism and business practices.
That wasn’t such a good time to be working for Motorola. They completely owned the analog cellphone market, but bet heavily on satellite telephony (Iridium) instead of digital cellphone technology. Bad move. They ultimately spun off two companies out of the Semiconductor Products Sector, Freescale (now part of NXP) and ON Semi. So, here was a time when the first piece of advice came back into play.
My product group was eliminated, and ultimately sold off to a company in Tucson. I could have moved with it; if I were an Arizonan, that might have been a compelling opportunity. I had an offer to move over to the part of Motorola that made communication satellites, but the work sounded incredibly boring. A colleague and I had an offer to move together to a Motorola semiconductor group in Austin, which was really tempting. But then I received an offer from Baldor in Arkansas (now part of ABB), with work that seemed more aligned with my future.
The easiest choice would have been the communication satellite business. My wife could have kept her job; we could have kept our house, which was beautiful (if a little excessive for a family of two). But that would have been a case of making a small decision that would set us on a path we didn’t necessarily want. I ultimately took the job at Baldor, which set me on a path that, a few years later, took me back to UIUC.
The reason I had that opportunity at Baldor, and the reason I ended up back at UIUC and eventually Missouri S&T as a professor and chair, is because at each step of the way, I made the most of the opportunity. While I was at Motorola, I was inexperienced, but learning every day, working hard, and doing my very best. When I was at Baldor, I quickly became one of the best engineers, at least in the middle power range. When I returned to UIUC as a research engineer, I made sure that I met and exceeded all of the expectations of the job, so I had the flexibility to join a startup company and get my Ph.D.
Two weeks ago, I officially became the chair of my department. I don’t know if it was the right decision, but I went through some discernment and ultimately decided to apply and then to accept the offer. Now, there’s no going back. I am the chair, for better or worse. So, I plan to do whatever it takes to be the best chair I can be. I’ll take advantage of opportunities to learn and grow, and to lead our department to be the best it can be. And in the end, it will have been the right decision because of my commitment to making the most of it.