Ship 30 for 30
What an old engineer wishes he’d learned earlier
As a young engineer, it annoyed me no end that us geeks, who did the real work (so I thought) always earned LESS (money and respect) than the apparent GOOFS who were the managers above us.
“Not fair!” yelled my righteously-indignant self.
And, to be fair, there WERE a lot of idiots, too incompetent to do the real work, who somehow wormed themselves into positions above me. Where they didn’t do much of value. And sometimes created a lot of messes for me to clean up.
(Some really were incompetent.
But more likely, they were just quicker than me to recognise the way the world really worked, and take advantage. And if they were psychopathic …. (some were) …. they REVELLED in the damage they caused.)
And how was it that the world really worked?
Good, solid, trusting human connections …. are incredibly hard to build, and hard to maintain.
Trust is like hand-blown glass — Takes a lot of energy, time and material to create. Destroyed in an instant.
Human/human connections and transactions are FAR harder to craft, and more complex, than the airliners I was designing.
Indeed, a lot of the value of an aircraft …. or of any THING (tangible or intangible) …. comes from the human connections required to create it.
If you’re just starting out, get real good at understanding how human beings work and interact.
The irony is, I was/am good at it. Just didn’t realize the gold mine I was sitting on.
