Making connections -- life fulfillment

I guess the combination of this being a Friday and the fact that I’m about to start a new job on Monday has put me in a reflective mood. I have been pondering what motivates me to help friends. Where does it come from? What is the payoff?

These thoughts came to me because I was recently on the phone with an executive coach friend who said she was inspired by the help I have given others. She is aware of this because I’ve referred several of them to her for her executive coaching services. At that time I was calling her to ask for help in advising someone who was at a tricky transition point in their career. She unexpected and spontaneously offered to provide them with a free coaching session to help them explore their true goals.

This made me reflect on having had a life of sometimes surprising impact. Hopefully that statement will make sense as you after you read this story. One of the things I’ve come to learn is that I have a knack for connecting people—it isn’t always successful, but I am one of those folks who serve as connectors. At this stage in my life, I realize that this is a real skill.

So, the story starts with seeing a college classmate some 10 years after our graduation. I happened to encounter him (I’ll call him JB) on the streets of New York. He called out “Hey Chris, you’re the guy that set up my entire life!” I was honestly bewildered.

About 12 years earlier, we were both in our junior year of college. I happened to be working part-time at a technology company—but that is a bit of a grand misnomer. Said company consisted of 2 full-time employees (the CEO and an executive assistant) and 3 part-time college students from Harvard and MIT. The CEO, M, had previously made a small fortune being the head of an early home computer company.?

M was truly a visionary person, but ironically unfamiliar with the intricacies of computers. However, he realized that department stores were excellent at keeping track of inventory in their warehouses with computer systems and databases, but they had no idea at the individual unit level what happened after delivery to the stores. After all, department stores had old-fashioned cash registers, and their procedures were to have staff manually assess what had or hadn’t sold, and to put out orders for supplies periodically.

At that time, a typical department store cash register was actually a PC and potentially could be linked into an inventory control system. no one had yet taken advantage of this potential. What he decided to do was offer a computer system to department stores that would allow management of their in-store inventories using the cash register as a data entry point.

My role was to pretend I was some super genius who could program said system. My qualifications were woefully inadequate but remember, this was the late 80s. I did have SOME qualifications: in high school I had learned programming sufficiently well that I helped several small businesses by coding simple software to conduct their business. I also had taken some courses in computer programming in college, although that wasn’t my major. My real role was as a prop: I was the “whiz kid” from Harvard at our meetings with executives who simply accepted the proposition that I could whip some code to take care of their needs.

I remember getting dressed in my one suit to join M at these business meetings and thinking that there was no way anyone would hire us. However, I was wrong, and we got our first contract in the spring of my junior year. The problem was that regardless of whether I had sufficient skill to code this project, I had neither the time nor the interest. I was a biochemistry major headed to medical school and had committed to doing research in a laboratory that summer.

I reached out to JB as I knew him as an acquaintance who was a computer major in school. I asked him what his plans were for that summer, and I remember him answering, “Gee, I don’t know. I guess maybe find a job near home (in Maryland).” I told him about the opportunity, and he thought it was both interesting and, while a bit of a challenge, something he could tackle. Within the week he met the CEO and was hired on the spot.

The next thing was to find housing. Like many lab rats in college, I had gotten used to a dance where the summer undergraduate research students took on sublets from the law students who typically spent the summer working in various other cities. I happened to know that a group of such summer research undergraduates had rented a magnificent 8-bedroom house but were having trouble finding enough roommates. “Hey, JB, now that you have a job, where are you going to live over the summer?” JB predictably had no idea what he would do. I offered to introduce him to my lab rat friends, and soon he was all set.

I was happy that all was arranged, but never kept close track of what happened until that encounter some 10 years after graduation. The project was a total success, the CEO eventually retired, and at the time I ran into JB, he had become the CEO of a fast-growing small tech company in Boston.

I was rather amazed by what came from my efforts to help a classmate—a new successful tech company with a classmate as CEO. Of course, I got no monetary award due to his and the company’s success, but the happiness I felt at contributing was more than enough reward for me. Ever since my rule has been to do my best to reach out to others when I perceive a need where I might have a solution to put people together, and it has been a rewarding way to approach life and nurture many relationships.