Like @RegionRat, I'm curious as to your background.
I don't tend to go into a ton about myself here, but here goes (it's a bit of a story - but you asked for it!)
When I was six years old, my mother got me up in the middle of the night to watch one of the moon landings on our 19" black and white TV. There are only a few things that will keep in someone's memory throughout their life. For me, that was one of them. I decided right then and there that I wanted to be in the space program - later I would add to that that I would also fly a plane to work - I was six, what do you want?
Everything I did in my education from that point was geared towards landing a job with NASA. I got into AP math classes in high school, and landed in a top engineering school in college. I got an aerospace engineering degree and immediately started looking for my dream job. Along the way, I turned down a few gigs, including one with a defense contractor, and another testing air-to-air missiles at Patuxent. Finally, due to luck as much as anything else, I got a call from NASA at Kennedy Space Center and landed a job as a Spacecraft Payload Operations Engineer. It was okay, but just okay. Operations wasn't what I wanted to be doing.
Eventually, I met someone from the Space Shuttle Experiment Engineering group and I transferred over. In my opinion, it was the coolest job you could have at NASA. We were hands on - installing every experiment that flew on the Space Shuttle. We would train astronauts, perform experiment testing, and put in any time-critical science as close to launch as possible. We were the second to last people onboard the Orbiter prior to launch - the last being the folks who strapped in the crew. On landing, we were the second people back onboard - the first being the same folks who put the crew in taking them out. We'd take all the time-critical science back out and deliver it to the experimenters. As an aside, my coolest "delivery" was at Edwards AFB. The Orbiter would land on their 15k-foot long strip on the dry lake bed, but the experimenters for this one experiment were in a hangar were at the aux base to the north. They didn't want to wait the amount of time it would take to drive the science all the way around the lake bed, so they chartered a Lear that took off from the south base and flew the few miles to the north base - I got to ride along in what was probably one of the shortest charter jet flights ever.
Anyway, fast forward a number of years and I found myself getting bored. It was still pretty cool work, but one mission to the next was essentially the same thing. None of my "next jobs" at the Space Center were all that appealing. We had been doing some cool stuff at the Space Center over the internet, so I got into that and eventually started a one-man company doing internet development. I paired up with another engineer and we started a company together. This company sold a couple years later to one in the payments industry. I've been working in that space ever since.
Now, you might say, "payments? Really? You went from climbing around spaceships to working in payments?" It took 17,000 people working in various capacities about nine months to prepare and launch a Space Shuttle. Two-hundred and fifty thousand parts went into it. It has nothing in complexity over payments. I've been in the industry as a product executive for 25+ years and I've never been bored - I can't stand being bored.
On the personal side of things, I've tried to satisfy my insatiable anti-boredom by doing one complex thing (usually expensive) after another.
- Skydiving: it's the same frikking thing over and over - BORED!
- Scuba Diving: Yeah, different destinations, but the same - BORED!
- Instrument-rated Private Pilot: story for another occasion, but after 1000 hours in... BORED! - I did end up flying to work, though
- Written/been issued 5 patents - BORING FROM THE BEGINNING!
- Written 2 novels and 2 non-fiction books - not exactly boring, but really tedious
- ELR Shooting: NOT BORED!!!
With ELR, there's always something else to learn, and there's no better way to learn something than to teach it. That's why I do the videos. It's like product development, it forces you into thinking about all the angles, all the reasons why. It makes you look at things in ways you haven't before. As an example, on this last video, I always knew low SDs were important, and strived for ways to bring them down, but I had never taken the time to think about what the actual impacts were. Visualizing it brought it all home. The same thing goes for my recoil videos. I had known much of this stuff and was pretty good at recoil management, but going through the process of making the videos caused me to look at a whole different side of it and substantially changed my approach to setting up behind the rifle for ELR.
You can always look at what other people do and try to emulate them to get better results. But if you don't know the reasons why they do the things they do, you can never surpass them. I try to arm people with the knowledge to make themselves better, and in the process, make myself better as well.
/WALL OF TEXT
