S6E7 Michael Hadley | A Thirst for Learning: Becoming An Engineer 20 years After Graduating

kind of thing. And I got wrapped up into that in towards the end of my college career, which we may discuss again later, but and so as a as a result of that, I even though I had a degree and a graduate degree in engineering. I left engineering school and went into the human development movement, where I was a seminar leader, where we would put people in hotel rooms and yell at them all weekend. And that's, that's a that's a poor

representation of it. What would the seminars were about accountability, responsibility and and finding out who we you know, who we really are, and who you know what, what is our what is our contribution and our worth on the planet? And are we doing that? Are we living up to ourselves? And so I did that for years, and that kind of culminated in a rather large tangent, which was me being the business manager for Tony Robbins for about seven years.

And when that relationship ended, I returned at that point to engineering for the first time in 20 years, 20 more years since graduating from college. And so after that, my engineering career has been greatly varied as well, from plastics to renewable energy to medical to defense. Pretty much as a mechanical engineer, I think I've had my fingers in just about everything.

self actualization. And both of those organizations, the goal was about the same, which was to to get people to really look at their belief systems and how they they are their own worst enemies in most cases, and through the years, I've had dozens, if not hundreds of letters from people telling me that the seminars completely changed their lives and they're happier and Their relationships are more fulfilling and like

that. So to answer your question, specifically, I had just about come to the end of my time in the human development method, because one of the things that I came to realize is that most of the people that needed this information. The most, and it really is. It's great freeing information that's available, but the people who need it the most would never come to one of those seminars.

So I was basically teaching preaching to the choir every weekend, and I got to a point where I wanted to find a better route, and I thought, you know, the people that could use this, as most, are probably working eight to five, then going home, opening a beer and sitting in front of the TV. So maybe that's where I should be, is in the TV, talking to them. And I realized that, also that a straight up approach would not be would not

work. It has to be hidden in some sort of other entertainment, but to entertainment that is educational. At the same time, at the as I was coming to that realization, a person that I had worked with in the past was leaving the Robinson organization, and she recommended me to Tony. And so Tony invited me to come out. I really didn't know anything about him at the time. I'd never heard of the fire walk or unlimited power, or any of that. In fact, unlimited power hadn't

been published yet. And so Tony invited me to come out on his dime and spend a week with him in California. And, you know, from from Nashville, Tennessee, that seemed like a really fun idea, so I went out to California for a week. And from the moment Tony and I met each other, it's like we had been long lost brothers. And at the end of the week, he invited me to join him in the Robbins research and the Tony Robbins show, basically. And I turned

him down. I said, you know, after watching you for a week and seeing you in several of your seminars, this is the Tony show, there's no room for Michael in the Tony show. He's I said, but having been here and you kind of showing me what you're doing and showing me your books, I realized that what you really need is a business manager. And he said, well, great, do that. And I said, I don't know anything about business. He said, Neither do I. And it occurred to me that I was

his best option. And so I accepted, and I became a business manager and co author of his seminars, and participated in his his second book, standing the giant within us. And so that's that's how I got to meet Tony and and hey, he and I had a great friendship relationship through all of it, and I'm not going to speak ill of him, but towards the end of it, our paths just diverged. We, we. We both saw the future in different ways, and it was time

for me to move on. And I didn't really know when I left the Tony Robbins organization what I was going to be doing, but it became clear later on, after being after doing a number of things, photography, graphics, design, rewriting, post script for

people, I finally realized, you know what, I got this great degree I should use it. And so that's how I got back into the engineering world. It's actually a sort of serendipitous I there was a article in the newspaper I was as as a graphic designer. I was always looking for work, right? That's what graphic designers mostly do. And so I was perusing an art history major. Yes, right, exactly. So I was perusing the newspaper, and there was a there was an article, or there was a little

ad in there. Said, Hey, designer. Wanted at this mold shop. And I thought, hey, great. You know, they need some advertising or something. So I showed up to this mold shop to apply for the job of designer, and they didn't mean graphic design. They meant mold designer. And the interview with the owner of that company went so well, even though I had no experience, he wanted to teach me how to design molds. And that's how I got back into the

engineering world. And from there, it became more and more engineering and less and less graphic design.

Vietnam, I would join. My father was a naval officer, so I joined the Navy and reapplied to all my all the colleges that I could apply late to that would offer a navy scholarship so I could go as an NROTC officer, junior officer cadet, and that's how I ended up at Vanderbilt. But what was going on that was so, I mean, when I got to, when I got to college, there's a lot here that I don't know how to even begin to explain it all. I grew

up in the military. My father, as I said, was a naval officer. We went lots of different places, often, when I say often, I went to 22 different schools before I graduated. Graduated from high school, and one of those schools was a boarding school in England, where we were allowed the under the English rules to advance per our capability, regardless of our

age. So in the three years that I was there, I went through six grades, and when I in, and at the end of that time, I was speaking French and reading Latin and Greek and doing pre calculus. This is at the age of 1213, and I came back to the United States and went into the public school system the United States, and they said, Oh, he's 12. Put him in the sixth grade.

So my history from sixth grade through high school was, I'd seen it already, and I didn't really I wasn't the best of students, although I always made A's, but not by putting in any effort, just because I'd already seen the material. And so when I got to Vanderbilt, when I got to college, everything changed. Suddenly, I wasn't the smartest person in the room anymore. In fact, almost everybody was smarter than me, and that was a

huge wake up call. The other thing that happened is Vanderbilt had, and I'm sure most colleges just have so many amazing options and courses available. So under the Navy scholarship, I took every course they would allow me to take. So for three years, I took math courses and English courses and sociology and psychology and and all the science courses I could take. In history, there was a great history professor there, and I love that, and and I just

ate everything I could. And at the end of three years before I was going into my senior year, a couple of things happened. One of them was the war in Vietnam came to an end, and because of that, there were too many junior officers, and I was given an opportunity to not continue in the Navy, which I accepted

me. And I learned a really important lesson that sort of pervades politics and sociology and economics throughout the world, and that is Ivy League schools. And this is a broader than the specific topic I'm about to tell you, but the specific topic is Ivy League schools do not like dropouts because it makes them look bad. So given that they go backwards to try to help you to finish

your degree. So lucky for you came, Yeah, lucky for me, so they came up with a lot of grants and and scholarships and a work study, and I ended up only having to borrow about $10,000 for the last two semesters total, and everything else was somehow magically, they found money for so I was able now now, but suddenly I'm going back to school, not under a. The Navy auspices, and not under somebody else paying the bill,

but I'm paying the bill. And now that, even though there were scholarships and grants and everything, but it was, it was more it was more personal. And now I had to think, what, what do I really want to get out of this? And the answer was, I want to know how the world works on a functional level, on a mechanical level, on you know, how do things actually happen? How do things get made? How to

how does stuff get done? And mechanical engineering seemed to be the place that would have the answers for that in in a way, it did, in a way, it just opened up more questions. But that's how I ended up back in school in mechanical engineering, and when I finally got so I had and I had enough credits that all I had to do was focus on the engineering, and I actually managed to do it.

It was took me three semesters not to to get my degree, and then I had a number of minors that were already taken care of because of all the hours I put in before when I graduated, I had no idea what I was going to do, but one of my guidance counselors, or one of my professors suggest that I take the GRE, you know, why not? You know you're here. You've all this is fresh in your head. Go ahead and take it. So I took it,

and I did well enough. I'm one of those people that I kind of goofed off in school, but I always did really well on standardized tests, and I did pretty well in the GRE standardized test. And so well that Vanderbilt came back and offered me a full ride in a little office a little computer back in 1977 that computer was a PDP, 11. Very exciting, very exciting to have a computer in 1977 so I took him up on it. They also paid me the lofty sum of $400 a month. I was rich.

but I did. I was mechanically inclined, I guess so. I put together this crazy system with paper clips and tape and like a bell and things. And when someone lifted this Michael Jackson tape out of its holder, Rube Goldberg happened, and a big Gong would sound at the end. But my point is, I don't know why anyone would ever want to take my Michael Jackson tape this eight year old kid with it, but that was I was convinced that was going to happen anyway. I was always into mechanical

things. And what do you think opinion here people that become mechanical engineers is that an aptitude that is developed at some point, or do you think that's just kind of innate, that's, that's who a person is for, you know, a long, long time.

opinion I have. I don't know that I have any evidence to back that up, except that I have, through the years, done things that I'm hugely unsuited for,

and yet seem to by applying myself a. Long enough turn it into something that I'm okay at and maybe even pretty good at. A great example is music. I can't carry a tune, I can't sing, but I love music, and have learned to play a number of different instruments just through pure stubbornness. And so to answer your question, specifically, I think that if anybody is interested in something like engineering, they don't have to already be a nerd, that they can, they can become a nerd. Well,

So another data point that tells us, people can learn new things even if they don't have the aptitude to begin with. Okay, I was part of this program for a year or so called Strategic Coach. It's, it's an organization that teaches entrepreneurs and business owners how to be better entrepreneurs and better business owners. And it's run by a guy named Dan Sullivan, who's really interesting. His big thing is he just spends all of his time thinking about entrepreneurs and how to help

them. And one of the one of the principles that he's come up with is this idea called unique ability. And it's this idea that everyone has something that they're really good at, and if you focus on that thing, it is the thing that will a give you the most joy in life and in what you do, but also B have the most impact, because you're just already so good at it, you know, it's this thing that you don't understand why other people can't do it, because it's so easy and come so naturally to

you. Do you think that you have a unique ability, or a few unique abilities, or do you think that the idea that people have, you know, one or two things that they're just exceptionally good at, is that just a load of rubbish.

ability. And so I think, you know, for me, I remember we, you know, we did at pipeline, we all did that unique ability those exercises. And I kind of came away from it thinking, Well, I

don't know. You know, to me, I know, particularly in this world where there's more and more and more to know about everything, I still value the idea of the renaissance person, somebody that's that's pretty good at lots of different things, and I know that my interests are hugely varied and and span lots of things way beyond engineering and mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering and and I'd like to think that I'm pretty good at some of Those things that don't that are not

part of my regular routine.

say abysmal failure. But if you can learn something from it, it's not abysmal anymore. But can you share one success and one failure that you've had in your career and maybe talk just a little bit about the lessons that you've learned from each

device. Interesting. We come back to engineering again, but it's a medical device that a physician we were working with had this idea of combining a bike block and an airway, and the design would such that when you put the two of them together, it wasn't immediately obvious that there was any way to injection mold this, and this had to be made out of PTFE or some other bio compatible material that was, at one time, at one in the same, soft enough to go in a patient's mouth and

be bitten down by their teeth, but also stuff tough enough, sturdy enough that they couldn't crush it with their teeth, and since it's providing an airway, it had to stay open, even if there were things pushing against it. So the wise people in the room all said it couldn't be done, which was all I needed to hear. And so I went off and figured

new. And he made me go back and read those books, even though you would think, Oh, that's really old information. For example, if you read a book about computers from the 60s, it would be pretty old information, and maybe not relevant. But it turns out that the injection molding books are still relevant, the ones from the 40s and 50s. Nothing really has changed. They've come up with a few new gizmos, but more or less

it's exactly the same. And what it did was it gave me a broad understanding of what people were looking for and how they were figuring out how to do these things in an injection mold. Injection molding is there's a little bit of magic to it, and so applying it to this bite block airway combination, I figured out how to make it even an automatic. This wasn't even a hand load. It was an automatic tool that could function, and it was a it was a variation on a very weird unscrewing tool, but

it worked. And so that was, that's a pretty big win for me.

Yeah, an ultra marathoner. And and he says in his book that most people, when they get to that point where they feel like they've given everything they have to give, there's just, he's talking about, well, not just physical, he's talking about physical mostly, but but mental as well. And he says that once you reach that point where you're kind of just done, right, you don't have anything left to give. You actually have another

40% to give. That's what he has learned with these ultra marathons, you know, running 150 miles and 24 hour period, or something like that. So I think that's applicable or related to what you're saying, is that maybe it's not universally true all the time, but a lot more often than we think, things that seem impossible maybe aren't as impossible. Cool,

can tell you. But poetry forces one to to to really condense, at least the way he taught it, to condense an idea into just a few syllables, and to get it so that it's you convey the whole of it in just a few words rather than many paragraphs. And it's a tremendous discipline, and I really appreciated that class so

much. And one of the things he would almost always write on my poems, when he turned them back to me, is there'd be a somewhere on it, there'd be a sentence that said, this is interesting, Michael, but what else? That was his thing? What else? Well, what else is there? What else could you think about what how else could you have said this? And you know, it's like we're taught in school that, you know, to get

the right answer right. That's the whole point of school, for many of us, is to get the right answer right. Yeah. And the problem with that is it teaches us that two things that are incorrect. One is that there is a right answer, and number two is that there is one right answer. And I worked for years with a guy named Warren Starnes, who I think you've met, I have, and he was never satisfied with the right answer. He wanted 10 right answers, or better, 50

right answers. And then choose, then he would choose the best of those right answers to move forward. And I, I kind of like that idea. I like, I like the idea that there isn't a right answer, but there may be many. And it's, it's, it's sort of

taking the easy way out, to stop at the first right answer.

toasters. They wouldn't allow us to put it on the grid because we were too unstable. But we demonstrated that it could be done, and not only that, we demonstrated that it could be done at a at a price that was competitive at the time with oil, which, when we were doing this, oil was $150 a barrel. And this was a lesson, because by the time we got it done and demonstrated and working, oil was $30 a barrel, and nobody was interested anymore. And so the failure was the failure to

anticipate that. I mean, I think eventually somebody, I mean, but the Chinese bought the dish and shipped it to China. But I think that the the lesson learned there is one is, if you're doing something that's working, do it faster than you think you can do it. And the other is to that there's there's so much more than simply being able to accomplish a task and accomplish a task on budget. That's not enough for a device, for a consumer product, for anything it. It has to there. There has

to be a fit. It's almost Darwinian. You know, a lot of people misunderstood what he said, but if you read his book, Darwin didn't say the survival of the fittest. He said survival of the fit. And what he's talking about is is the niche that things that different species fit into, and if they fit in a niche that works, they survive. If they don't, they

they are gone. And the same is true with engineering products, whether it be as something as small as a little consumer item, or as huge as a 72 foot or a field of 72 foot reflective solar dishes. If the niche isn't there, it won't survive.

you have a device that actually fits the market that people want? Yeah. Okay. Last question, what advice would today's Michael give yourself when you were a brand new engineer that you wish you had known back then?

for them at the time. And I think that one of the things that we all tend to do, and corporations cube farms encourage, is special specialization and getting to be really good at one thing, and I don't think that's enough, and I spent a lot of time getting really good at plastic injection molding, but what it really didn't come together until I was able to design a part for plastic injection molding, including the electronic components, the mechanically functioning and moving

components, and when I was able to do all of that together, I suddenly became, I suddenly realized I had more value now to offer than I had as just an expert in plastic injection molding. Because it turns out, as time goes by, anybody can be an expert in any one thing, and actually, Google is an expert in everything. But what what we have, I think too few of in the engineering world or in any professional world are people that have a broader vision and are pretty good at at a lot of

different things. And I think that that's so my advice to me back then would have been to more quickly and sooner, start branching out into divergent elements of the fields around me, electronics, mechanics, thermal transfer, You know, all of those things that I know that certainly thermal transfer. I was so relieved when I was done with that. Course, I thought, Oh, I'll never have to do that again. Well, turns out it comes up a lot, and we're dealing with

it right now. I dealt with it a lot in the injection molds, and so it you can never know enough about enough things. So I just, I think it's important to keep and it's also important not to just focus on on engineering things that you need to know about. You need to know about psychological things, and you need to know a lot about sociological things and economics, and, you know, there's, there's so much to know, and we have such a astonishing resources available to us now that we never had

before. It's, there's no excuse for not continuing your education forever.