by Chris Duffin
By the time I reached fifth grade, I began to play more with other kids. During winter, for example, a group of us went out during lunch breaks and built giant snowballs together. There was a camaraderie in being part of a group and playing together that I enjoyed.
During the spring, we played another, albeit more dangerous, game. The game went like this. One kid got on the floor to lay on his back, with his legs bent and his feet cocked. Another kid climbed onto his feet, held in place by several others. The kid on the floor then pushed with all their strength, throwing them as high into the air as possible.
When it was my turn, I got up on a kid’s feet and found myself thrown far into the air. I felt as if I was flying. That feeling soon ended and as the ground rushed toward me, I thrust out my arm to break my fall. Bam! I felt the impact and heard one of the bones in my arm break.
I got up and when I told them what had happened, a lot of the kids around me started to freak out. To calm them down, I remained cool and collected. “It’s okay. I broke my arm. I’ll go see the nurse.”
As I wandered into the school nurse’s office, I held the broken arm with my opposite hand.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I broke my arm,” I told her.
She looked at me strangely. “No, no you didn’t.”
“I did. I broke it right here.” I pointed to the place where I could feel the break.
The nurse still wasn’t convinced. “No,” she said. “No, you didn’t break your arm.”
A little exasperated, I tried to show her the break. “It’s right here. Can’t you see where it’s swelling?”
“You probably sprained it. If you’d broken it, you’d be crying.”
We went back and forth for a while longer when I finally told her I needed to call my mom. My mom picked me up and took me to the doctor’s office. Sure enough, my arm was broken, exactly where I felt it break.
You might think the nurse should have listened to me, but I understand her response. I walked into her office, perfectly calm, and told her I had broken my arm. A perfectly calm fifth grader with a broken arm wasn’t a sight she saw every day. For me, chaos was a part of daily life. Breaking my arm didn’t seem like a big deal. I also didn’t feel any pain.
The doctor set my arm in a cast and my mom took me home. She wanted me to take ibuprofen; I chose to drink a Coke instead. The next day, I was back at school.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I discovered I actually have a disorder of the nervous system. My sensitivity to pain is very low; some I don’t even feel. This disorder was diagnosed several surgeries later in life, as it became apparent that my responses were highly unusual. Obviously as a kid, I knew none of this.
Breaking my arm posed other challenges, mainly because I broke the arm I used to write. I tried to write with my left hand, but it didn’t work out. A friend of mine ended up helping me with all my writing while my arm was broken. Unfortunately, I have almost no memory of him; I don’t even remember his name.
Pat’s Final Estrangement from His Siblings
Pat rarely spoke about the rest of his family. I heard little about them throughout my childhood and following the death of his mother, which happened while we were living there, he never spoke of them again. While we were living in La Pine, however, as it became clear that his mother was losing her battle to cancer, he began to talk about them. Presumably, he was in discussions with them about how to handle her impending death, which brought them to the forefront of his consciousness. It was plain to me that he saw his siblings and their families as urban and pretentious, in stark contrast to our rural, self-reliant existence.
His brothers were attorneys and accountants, roles which Pat evidently found highly distasteful. He mocked them because they didn’t work with their hands, and because they supposedly wore silk underwear. This was a major point for him, a symbol of their apparent degeneracy. The more he discussed them, the more obvious it was that he respected physical work. In many ways, Pat’s sensibilities lay in the arts. He loved to read and write. Despite this inclination, he believed strongly in the value of work. It was important to him that I developed practical skills. Among other useful skills, he taught me how to hunt, fish, take apart and clean a gun, sharpen a knife and a chain saw, and split wood quickly and efficiently. His father, he said, had won a Golden Gloves trophy as a military boxing champion. The same man had built the house we occupied at the time. It was clear that these were achievements Pat recognized and valued.
Shortly after her death, Pat’s siblings arrived and began to divvy up her possessions, seemingly oblivious to Pat’s wishes. There was a lot to divvy up. Pat’s mother liked to collect things and had an entire room full of brand-new appliances. They were unused, still in their boxes. She was a woman who loved to shop and had the means to do so. Her affluence was reflected in the décor of the house: the main living and dining area was lit by an enormous chandelier.
Not everything in the house belonged to Pat’s mother, but his siblings behaved as though it was all fair game. One of them walked into my room and told me he was going to take my pillows. I tried to explain that the pillows were mine—we had bought them ourselves—but he refused to listen. In his eyes, anything in his mother’s home belonged to him.
Pat didn’t fight him. Quite the opposite, actually. He told me to let him have the pillows. It soon became clear that Pat found the whole situation despicable and had already made a decision to have no part of it. After his siblings had left, he gathered the family together and told us we were moving. “They’re taking the house,” he said. “They’re splitting everything.” He viewed what was happening as ugly and demeaning, and the only way he knew how to handle that was to get as far away from it as possible. Pat wanted no part of this transaction and, it turned out, no further interaction with any members of his family. After we left La Pine, I never saw any of them again.
I spent a lot of time attempting to reconcile Pat’s love of family with his attitude toward his siblings. He came from a large family—he had at least five brothers and sisters, maybe more—and he was the youngest. Everything he had taught me, everything I had experienced, told me that family was sacred. It was our one anchor in a confusing and sometimes hostile world. Pat was so committed to this belief that he never allowed me to refer to my sisters as half-sisters. In his world, there was only family. My sisters were my sisters. He was my father. I was his son.
Simultaneously, however, he was willing to separate from his blood relatives, telling me that I didn’t need to know who they were because they would never be part of my life. To me, this seemed like a paradox. If family was so important, how could he sever all communication with his siblings? My one experience meeting them was in the wake of his mother’s death, and despite their apparent greed, I had no other context to judge their characters. Admittedly, they didn’t present themselves in a positive fashion. On the other hand, the death of a parent brings a lot of emotion to the surface. It can bring out the worst in people. I’ll never know how the relationship deteriorated so badly that they felt able to walk into our home and treat us with total disrespect.
Lesson: The Power of Relationship
Relationships are the cornerstone of every element of life: from family, to social life, to business. A lot of people pay lip service to the value of relationships in business without truly understanding how essential they are to success—and how satisfying it is to build strong, trusting relationships. Relationships are the fun part of life. It’s tempting to become caught up in entrepreneurial ideas and technical progress, only to forget that it is our relationships that put a smile on our face and give our work meaning.
Real relationships take work. Your decisions about which relationships to invest in could be the single greatest determinant of your happiness and success. The best relationships in our lives help us become more than we are, perhaps even more tha
n we believe we can be. Achieving these kinds of results takes commitment to seeing and bringing out the best in one another.
Sometimes, building life-enhancing relationships requires difficult conversations. It’s not enough to stay on the surface and skirt around our true emotions. In my relationship with my biological father, there were many occasions when I saw his pain and despair in close quarters. It was, at times, a heartbreaking experience. Yet, I always knew that we were committed to each other. We had conversations that caused me to question my deepest beliefs and reassess my path in life.
We also argued. When I saw him behaving in a way that I felt was detrimental to his health or didn’t meet his ambitions for who he could be, I told him so. It’s difficult to argue respectfully, and it takes a lot of emotional strength. By definition, due to the sheer energy involved, it’s a commitment reserved for a few people in our lives.
You’ll meet many people in your life and career with whom you don’t feel such a strong connection. For whatever reason, you’re not drawn to invest in them. Perhaps you feel that, if you do, the investment will be one-sided. Perhaps their interests are different from your own. Perhaps you get along on a surface level, but don’t feel drawn to dive in more deeply. That’s okay. Discernment is a key part of cultivating healthy relationships.
There may be times when you need to cut people out of your life because staying connected to them is dragging you down or leading you in a direction in which you don’t wish to travel. That’s okay too. Whatever you want to accomplish in life, relationships are the vehicle that will get you there. Make sure that you surround yourself with people who want to see you succeed, and who you want to see succeed. Ensure that your values match. Invest your energy wisely.
Having read these first few chapters, you might be questioning the values Pat and my mother lived by. They grew weed, which was illegal at the time, and it was a choice that had painful consequences for the entire family. Nonetheless, they lived by their own unshakable moral code. Family was their top priority in life. They cherished self-reliance and hated to feel that they were indebted to anyone. They strove to deliver value in the world, whether that was through baking pies, chopping down wood, or performing some other task.
My mom refused to take a diamond ring from my cousin John when she suspected it was stolen. She told Pat that they could only be together if he stayed away from hard drugs. Her choices may not match your own personal values, but they emanated from a strong set of beliefs about right and wrong.
By way of contrast, consider Pat’s siblings. While he broke the law, they were all law-abiding people, many of them in respected professions. Yet, they did nothing to support their mother while she was battling cancer. When she died, they arrived to take whatever they could from her estate. For all his faults, Pat was incredibly loyal. He made sure to remind me at every turn that he saw me as his son, irrespective of whether we were related by blood. When his siblings showed up and started to raid his dead mother’s property, he preferred to go into the unknown than stay and participate in behavior that he considered undignified and demeaning.
Whose values are right? That’s not for me to tell you. What I can tell you is that making sure I have the right people in my life has been absolutely essential to my success in both business and life. I surround myself with people who share my vision and values, and—in the alchemy that we create together—amazing things occur. I encourage you to think very carefully about who you invest in, and who you ask to invest in you. Relationships are the rocket fuel that propels you along your chosen path.
From La Pine to Where?
We packed as many of our belongings as we could fit into our tiny Toyota pickup, piled in, and hit the road. The Toyota was a tiny two-seater with a small bed and a canopy in the back. My three sisters and I climbed into the back and rolled around as the vehicle bumped along the road into the desert.
As we rolled out of La Pine, I had no idea what to expect. The previous two years, first with my grandparents in Sand Point and then with my family in La Pine, were two of the most stable years of my childhood. I lived in a safe, warm environment, surrounded by care. Then, suddenly, it was time to move on. I didn’t know where we were going, but it seemed a safe bet that it wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable as our cozy cabin in La Pine.
Despite this premonition, I felt no anxiety or sense of foreboding. Deep in my heart, I trusted that we would survive and do fine, no matter what happened to us. I was certain that we would face new environments, new circumstances, and new challenges. Equally, I felt a sense of readiness. Following my interlude with my grandparents, I was excited for a new adventure.
I remember as we drove past the sagebrush, watching herds of antelope grazing in the distance. If they could survive in such a harsh environment, I felt sure that my family could meet whatever came our way.
Chapter Four
5. Perseverance
1987–1989 (Age Ten to Twelve), Paulina, Oregon
The trailer we lived in when we moved to Paulina was originally only intended for camping in the summer. It cost $375 and measured sixteen feet in length. It served us reasonably well when we moved in during our second summer in the area, but by the following winter, it was a different story.
Most of eastern Oregon is a desert. Prineville, the closest town to where we settled in Paulina, is a farming and ranching community on an open plain, dotted with homesteads from the 1800s and early 1900s.
Over the years, the area had been subject to significant logging. As we drove through the mountains, we saw big swathes of territory that had been logged out, along with some areas where only the largest trees had been removed and the rest remained, testimony to the ways in which logging methods had evolved over the years.
We were about forty-five minutes out of Prineville, in the Ochoco Mountain range, nestled among big, beautiful ponderosa pines and firs. Our sixteen-foot trailer was located next to a small stream, by the side of a road leading deeper into the mountains. It was winter, and the stream was completely frozen.
The area was formed by volcanic activity. The stream and the road wound through a ravine heading up into the mountains while on either side, the mountains jutted up exceptionally fast, creating a wall of rock by the side of the creek and right across the road.
In eastern Oregon, the many mountain ranges capture most of the precipitation as the clouds come off the coast. Most of the rain and snow falls over the mountains and central Oregon. By the time the clouds reach eastern Oregon, the clouds have dropped the majority of their payload. Outside our trailer, the ground was covered in only four to six inches of snow. Without cloud cover, however, the temperature plummeted. It was extremely cold.
Six of us—Pat, my mom, my three sisters, and me—huddled around propane heaters in our sixteen-foot trailer. You may struggle to visualize how small a sixteen-foot trailer really is, so allow me to paint a picture. There was one dining room table that seated three people. The table could be pushed down, and the seats rolled out so that it became a small bed, smaller than the average twin-sized bed. That’s where my sisters slept.
Next to the dining table stood a mini stove, a mini sink, and a mini fridge. The fridge was roughly a foot high and a foot deep, about the same size as an Igloo freezer—the kind you may have used on a camping outing.
In the back of the trailer was the bed where my parents slept. It was technically a double, although it wasn’t full length. Above my parents’ bed was another platform, and that’s where I slept. There was no bathroom or shower in the trailer.
With the six of us, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to sit. My parents sat on the bed. My sisters and I squeezed around the three-person dining table. We had two options: stand up or sit down. There was no space to do anything more.
The platform I slept on creaked and rattled with every move I made, disturbing my parents and my sisters. Every time I rolled over, they com
plained. For a couple of nights, I tried not to move, which was extremely stressful. I found it difficult to fall asleep and, when I did, I inevitably moved, causing the bed to creak loudly.
It was so bad that my parents eventually told me to go sleep in the back of our Toyota pickup. At first, I thought this was a good solution, until I realized how cold it was outside. I had one thin sleeping bag that I climbed into, with another one laid on top of me, but that wasn’t enough. The sleeping bags weren’t suitable for sleeping outside in such biting temperatures. We had found them at the Salvation Army used-goods store or inherited them from people who no longer needed them. Every night, my toes froze, and I shivered as I slept. When I complained to my parents, they gave me an extra blanket and told me I’d be fine. After that, I dealt with the cold as best I could.
During the day, there was nothing to do in the trailer but read books, so that’s how we spent our winter, huddled in our sixteen-foot trailer, reading. I also went out and hiked the frozen creek, walking for miles in either direction. Sometimes I pretended I was skating, sliding first on one foot, then the other, as far as I could go.
Theme: Learning to Persevere
Living in Paulina was a difficult time for our family. We were scraping by, barely making ends meet, attempting to put our lives back together after leaving La Pine. It was also a difficult time for me personally, as I struggled with the cold and with the feeling of being a social outcast.
As painful as it was to feel the lack of acceptance from my schoolmates, however, I never allowed myself to give up and allow their negative perceptions to define me. On the contrary, the hardship brought out grit and perseverance in me, as it did in the rest of my family. No matter what happened, no matter how tough our circumstances became, my parents never gave up. They kept putting one foot in front of the other, attempting to make good things happen. They faced setback after setback, yet they picked themselves up, came up with a new approach, and strove to move forward.
