The Easiest Story Ever Told
I remember back in college I wanted to major in Cognitive Science at UCSD, which was a combination of philosophy and hardcore computer programming and artificial intelligence. I was gung-ho, and at first all was right with the world.
But there was one class in the program that was legendary and loomed on the horizon: EECS 70. Which basically stood for two things:
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences 70, and -
You, Chris, don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.
This was basically a weeding out course. A way of telling students and professors that ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’. I entered all bright-eyed and ready to roll, and for the first week I managed to skate by. What we were learning was Assembly Language, which is just a step above 1’s and 0’s, and it first it all fascinated me. Hey, I was built for this.
It was the first Saturday of the quarter andI decided to get some studying done. But first, I slept in a little, went surfing for about an hour, then had a nice mid-morning breakfast. After all that, I sauntered over to the computer lab, my hair still wet from the Pacific, to really start digging in.
What a good boy, I thought, studying on the weekend.
When I opened the door to the lab, I got my first punch in the face. Everything here was lit 24/7 by fluorescents, and under that grey light was a room full of people, most of them with sleeping bags pulled up around their waists and coolers of of food next to them. It was packed, and I couldn’t find a workstation for the first 30 minutes.
Those 30 minutes is when the truth began to set in. These people were a different breed. These people, they were sleeping here to get their assignments done. These people, they loved EECS 70 and everything beyond that much more than I ever would.
But I hung on to my old beliefs as hard as I could. When I couldn’t figure something out, I dug through the trash looking for code other people had written. When that didn’t help, I tried to team up with someone much smarter than I was, who at first was amused then quickly became bored by my lack of skills. Again, I went back to the trash cans to see if I could recycle code. My shame knew no bounds, and for six weeks I struggled on.
Then I withdrew rather than take the fail.
One of the great tragedies we’ve been sold is the belief we don’t have a story to tell. Or that we don’t know how to tell it. The truth is, it’s right in front of us. So though I didn’t become a programming ninja, I did come to realize that story is one of the greatest super powers of them all.
My quickest jumpstart will work for anyone: tell your origin story. It’ll stick, people will love it, and it will open the gates to other great stories piling up right behind it.
Oh, what a world. I could have become a tech bro. Instead, I became a storyteller.
