My friend Al was a bold and difficult man with many demons. He was also one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, with an uneven brand of wisdom that either left you in awe or in furious anger. The son of a US Army general, he was an attack helicopter pilot in Vietnam, shot down in combat only to volunteer for additional tours. His career as a military pilot was extraordinary, qualifying in multiple aircraft, fixed-wing and rotor, single and multi-engine, jet-powered and propeller. He raced Porsches and had a penchant for fast motorcycles. He loved big dogs and fine alcohol and gourmet tacos. When he retired from the military, he became a gold-miner in Oregon, a collector of rare fossils and artifacts, a lighthouse historian and eventually a founding partner of a multi-million-dollar aviation firm.
Al was at times extraordinarily sensitive and kind, and at other times a raging, hard-headed bully, but once he’d accepted you as a friend, his loyalty to that friendship was monolithic and overwhelming. He was the guy you wanted at your side in a bar fight, even though chances were that it had been he who started the fight.
In business, where flexibility and agility were key responses to changing market forces, Al’s steadfast nature was both a blessing and a curse. Changing Al’s mind on a subject was like changing the course of an aircraft carrier in a hurricane. Once diverted, though, the strength of his revised conviction was just as unwavering and powerful as before. Al was a difficult team member, but if he could be re-aligned toward a set of shared objectives, his powerful intellect became the team’s greatest asset.
Al believed that every person should create their own reality through a combination of imagination and bold action. The extraordinary achievements of his life were testaments to that belief.
To Al, life could be boiled down to a simple, two-step process:
- Imagine it
- Do whatever it takes to make it happen
To achieve his goals, Al surrounded himself with innovative ideas and people. He had absolutely zero patience for the ordinary. He was an early-adopter of ideas and technology, always collecting the latest gadgets and inventions, which he nicknamed “jaspers.” His desk was filled with jaspers, he wired jaspers into his vehicles and his home, the shelves of his study were cluttered with forgotten jaspers. He found ways to use jaspers for purposes they were never designed, and looked for ways to combine jaspers to solve intractable problems. At his core, Al was an artist/engineer, with a rare and uneasy balance between the left-brain and right-brain disciplines of creativity.
As for his colleagues, if you couldn’t keep up intellectually with Al, he had no use for you. He was a freight train, and if you were blocking the tracks with what he perceived to be ignorance or stupidity he would try to slam you right out of the way. If, on the other hand, he perceived the bright spark of creativity in you, he would gather you up and invite you aboard his locomotive. He would become your fiercest proponent, and the strength of his will would inspire you to even greater achievement. You loved Al or you hated him, and usually your feelings were a grueling combination of both.
Of the many lessons I learned from Al, one stands out head and shoulders above the rest. Al was a visual thinker. His mind was a cauldron of boiling thoughts and ideas over which he had no filters or control. For him to make sense of the madness in his head, to focus on one idea and disregard the raging sea of all the others, he needed to pluck it out of his head and turn it into something real, something physical, like words on a page, or a doodled sketch on the back of a napkin. Once the idea was so represented, he could focus on it, examine it for merit and feasibility.
My role in Al’s life was to help him capture and translate his raging thoughts into something that others could comprehend. Usually that meant spending hours (and sometimes days) with Al sitting in a chair spouting his thoughts while I stood at a gigantic whiteboard and frantically tried to capture and portray them using visual tools like flowcharts and mind-maps. Together we made a powerful team, the guru and the translator. The ideas that flowed from Al’s head and that were filtered and organized by myself using a whiteboard marker more often than not eventually became policies and procedures that meant millions of dollars in savings and efficiencies for our clients. It was a difficult, stimulating and exhausting process, but it taught me a valuable lesson, one best summed up in Al’s own words:
“Be very careful what dreams you write on a whiteboard, because more often than not, they come true.”
He was right. It was a phenomenon I witnessed over and over, in brainstorm session after brainstorm session. Ideas that got put on the whiteboard had an alarming tendency to cross over from the world of possibility into the world of the achievable, as if the simple act of depicting them in words and diagrams gave them some magical energy of self-manifestation.
Crude jottings on whiteboards have changed my life on many, many occasions. In fact, every big leap taken in my entire professional career began as a rough idea captured in a whiteboard scribble. To me, the smell of a dry-erase marker equates to opportunity and success. The flow of thoughts from the ethereal realm of the mind through the hand and into a flow of ink on the hard surface of a whiteboard is pure, unadulterated magic. It is the first step in making tangible reality from nothingness. It is, more than anything else I’ve ever witnessed in my life, a miracle.
From the tip of my whiteboard marker I’ve germinated the seeds of far-flung dreams and then watched as they’ve sprouted into reality. From the simple flow of ink I’ve seen enormous business ventures conjured out of thin air. A crude diagram becomes a billion-dollar government program. An award-winning architectural triumph started from a rough sketch. A global software juggernaut grew from a purple, grape-scented marker.
Once I learned the truth of Al’s lesson, I tried it on my own life. Ten years ago I stood at a whiteboard with the goal of imaging a perfect life. Along with my wife and life partner, I jotted down ideas and thoughts and dreams until the whiteboard was filled with exciting possibilities.
And you know what?
It worked.
The act of moving our thoughts and dreams from the insubstantial vapor of our minds onto the real and tangible surface of that whiteboard set into motion a mysterious and inexorable cosmic power. It took years and a lot of effort, but almost all the ideas we put on that whiteboard have indeed manifested themselves in one positive form or another. I still have a photo of that whiteboard, and when I look at it now, it’s with a sense of awe and wonder.
Al is no longer with us, his health eventually broken by the flame of passion that burned so brightly in his soul. His legacy, though, lives on in all those whose lives he touched. Love him or hate him, more often than not he was infuriatingly right, and he’s one of the handful of men and women from whom I’ve learned life’s most important lessons. I very much miss the raw excitement of those moments as the two of us entered a room filled with empty whiteboards, prepared to change the world. Him, with his gigantic thoughts and aspirations, me with my whiteboard marker filled with the magic ink of creation.
Al was right. Be very careful when you pick up a whiteboard marker, because that’s how you make the future.
