Not By The Hair of My Chinny Chinn Chinn

Yesterday was my momma's bday and we took her out to eat at Bob Chinn's Crabhouse in Wheeling. It's supposed to be one of the best and most well known restaurants in the area, if not around the country, but if you've never heard of it, don't worry cause neither did I up till last year and I've lived in Chicagoland my whole life.

So the restaurant is owned by Bob Chinn (go figure), who is this Chinese-looking man that was born in Minnesota. The guy is almost 80 years old, but he still looks young, healthy, and he's friendly enough to be roaming his restaurant on a Tuesday night to talk and interact with his customers. Plus I bet that 2003 Mercedes SL500 he drives keeps him pretty young too.

Anyways, we were just about finishing up our dinner when he came by and started talking to us at our table, and this ended up being almost an hour long conversation. He was telling us about how he started the restaurant, about business and the economy, and just joking around about stuff, but I have to say that just listening to the guy talk was quite a learning experience.

Besides the fact that he wanted to "introduce" me to his granddaughter who is around my age (uhhh.....) I've gotta say that he is pretty full of genius and great things to say. He never went to college, yet now he owns a restaurant worth about $25 million that entertains about 3000 customers a day, including some of the world's richest and most powerful men, like casino owners or billionaire law-firm executives. The college thing has always intrigued me. Many of the world's most successful men either dropped out of college or never attended, such as Bill Gates, Michael Dell, or Tiger Woods (ok, Tiger doesn't count). Now, I'm not saying you and I shouldn't work to attend college and get a degree, because not all of us are as smart, business-savvy, and motivated as those guys. Also, the world needs both businessmen and scholars to exist. But if you think about it, going to college and earning a degree, whether it's a B.S., M.S., or Ph.D, probably means that you will eventually be working under someone else. And the fact is that most people would rather work for themselves or have people working for them than to work for other people.

Now, this doesn't mean that you can't graduate college, work for a large company, and work your way up. I mean, this is what I originally planned to do 4 years ago when I entered U of I, and I haven't abandoned this plan all of a sudden now. My dad, who now works for himself, spent many years working in large corporations before becoming well-respected in his field and moving to management positions, and he would not tell you that his time in school or in those corporations was worthless. But, I am willing to say that if you are satisfied with following the crowd to college, getting a degree, etc., you will end up where the crowd is at any given time, whether it's up or down.

A few years ago, the crowd was high and rising, and following the lead of most people was probably not too shabby of an idea. But today, this same exact crowd is suffering. College graduates with supposedly respectable degrees are having trouble finding respectable jobs. Meanwhile, hardworking people who have been loyal to their companies for years are being screwed by greed in the higher ups. Put simply, it sucks to be in the crowd today. It's not right or fair either, but what can we do about it now? Throughout life, most of us have acted passively thus far in going through school and doing as we're taught by others to do. We learn from textbooks written by others, containing knowledge that is usually at least 15 years old at best. Many enter jobs straight out of college blindly without really knowing or understanding what the job is about, if they are good at it, or if they will enjoy it. Rarely is this prototypical college graduate appreciated in what he/she does, nor is he/she living up to his God-given potential. Sadly, this is the life we choose to live.

When we were young, people always asked that question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Most kids said they wanted to be firemen, teachers, doctors, or the President of the United States. Snoop Dogg wanted to be "a muthaf*ckin hustler. u better ask somebody!" As for me, I wanted to be an astronaut and my sister wanted to be a librarian or cashier at Dominick's (because she liked to read to kids/stuffed animals and she thought operating the cash register was the coolest thing ever... kind of like my Air Jordan shoes). Now, I don't remember what everyone else said, but I can tell you one thing: I never heard anyone say they wanted to be an engineer, accountant, or software designer, or patent lawyer. Not that there's anything wrong with those jobs, but what changed since then? Thankfully, some kids did grow up to be firemen, teachers, and doctors. Snoop Dogg indeed became a muthaf*ckin hustler. But where did all the engineers and consultants come from? I can only guess that somewhere along the way, they learned from someone else that these were better jobs and decided to abandon plan A. Again, I'm not saying it's bad to choose these professions, because I didn't even know what an engineer was until senior year of high school, and then proceeded to take 4 years in EE in one of the toughest undergrad curriculums in the nation.

By the time we reach this age, practicality has all but crushed the spirit of idealism that we all once had. When we look for jobs, it's all about the benefits, the pay, the job security, opportunities for advancement; all good things, of course, but what about "doing something meaningful" or "doing something I enjoy"? Consider the following words written by the fictional Jerry Maguire from the movie titled Jerry Maguire (again, go figure), a successful sports agent but failing person:

"How can we do something surprising, and memorable with our lives? How can we turn this job, in small but important ways, into a better representation of ourselves? Most of us would easily say that we are our jobs. That's obvious from the late hours we all keep. So then, it is bigger than work, isn't it? It is about us.

How do we wish to define our lives? So that when we are sixty, or seventy, or eighty and we're sinking down onto that cool floor of O'Hare airport, with playoff tickets in our pockets, perhaps we too can know that we led A Happy Life? Is it important to be a Person and not just a slave to the commerce of Professional Sport? Do we want to be Remembered?

Or do we just want to be the guy who sold the guy who sold shoes that came with the little pump?

Recently I was asked by the son of a client, in so many words, "what do you stand for?" I was lost for an answer. At 14, I wasn't lost for that answer. At 18, I wasn't lost for an answer. At 35, I was blown away that I had no answer. I could only look at the fade of a 12 year-old boy, concerned about his dad, needing my help, just looking at me for the answer I didn't have."

Back to Bob Chinn. Here he is, nearing age 80, working 5 months a year and spending the rest in Hawaii. He drives fancy cars and rubs elbows with important people regularly. I don't necessarily envy any of these things. But I am quite impressed and I do admire his life, for all that he has accomplished. For whatever reason, he did not go to college and earn a degree. This world tells us that we need a degree to succeed, but Bob proved them wrong. A degree may help you succeed, but not if you are intent on relying on it to get you where you want to go. Not if you are satisfied with being a follower of the crowd. And certainly not if you don't know what you want in life.

At age 22 and a half, I honestly don't think I know what I stand for, what I want in life - at least not just yet. I still believe that I could be a good electrical engineer, technology consultant, or patent lawyer. I just don't know what God put me here on this world to do. Maybe it's for the better that the economy continues to sputter. If it hadn't, I might very well be sitting in one of those jobs right now and have continued on that path to end up wasting 40 years of my life. Right now, I still have my whole life open to me. By age 30, Bill Gates had made himself a billionaire by pursuing a vision he had conceived perhaps 10 years before. Props to him, I know I'm no Bill Gates and never will be. But if Bob Chinn can open a restaurant at age 60 and succeed, I might be able to say that I've got 30-some years to discover my calling and find a niche to succeed in my own life. Hopefully, it won't take that long.

Last year, we were all discussing how much the job-hunting sucked, when one day, Chras said something like "I should just teach tennis camp for a living." He was probably half joking, half serious, but we all just laughed and never took the thought for anything more. What a silly idea, to waste a perfectly good degree in Mechanical Engineering to teach tennis! But, maybe we all need to step back for a moment and consider why it is that we think this is such a universally silly idea. Is it really common sense to choose Mechanical Engineering over tennis? What if one can make a living teaching tennis, and be doing something that makes them happy? Should we rip on him for not taking the ME route, which might pay him twice as much but probably won't leave him as much time and freedom, and may even leave him on the street in 10 years if the economy dumps again? Maybe, maybe not.

Let's not ignore the recent experiences of all those Enron, Anderson, and WorldCom employees. We can never blame them for being screwed over by bad bosses, but if they made one critical mistake, it was trusting the corporate system a little too much, following the crowd a little too blindly. If you get nothing else out of this long blog, remember this: A foolish man never learns from his own mistakes. A normal man always learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of the normal and foolish men.

While we are still young, we may be able to learn from the "mistakes" (if it can be called that) of those poor employees and avoid a similar fate. You don't have to buck all the trends, you don't have to drop out of school and start a business right now. But you (and I) should never be content to follow in the steps of others; we should never make the unforgivable mistake of trusting our life, our livelihood, and our happiness to the ebb and flow of economic and social trends, or worse yet, place these valuable things entirely in the hands of a large corporation, its greedy executives, and insensitive stockholders. While we have a choice of what path to take, and the luxury of time, lets use the opportunity not to continue blindly down a path leading nowhere, but instead to figure out what you are heading for, and whether you are working towards what you really want in life.

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