The Eagle and the Dragon

by Chris Duffin

  I quickly discovered that I enjoyed drinking. In fact, I enjoyed drinking a lot. I liked the way it made me feel. I also liked the fact that it eased my social anxiety. I grew up living in tents, cabins, and—as the classic Chris Farley skits on Saturday Night Live would have it—a trailer down by the river. In my mind, everyone in La Pine had a story about who I was, and they judged me for my background.

  At college, hardly anyone knew where I came from. I was in a new environment, where I could carve out a new identity for myself. Add alcohol and all of a sudden, I opened up. No longer did I feel different from everyone else. With a little bit of social lubrication, I discovered that I could be quite charismatic. That’s what got me hooked.

  I went from being someone who only talked to a few people, to being someone who was the life of the party. Everyone wanted to be around me and to talk to me. It was a very addictive experience. Very quickly, my alcohol consumption developed from a few casual drinks to a party every weekend. That soon grew into every weekend plus every Wednesday, which was a big bar night in Klamath Falls. From there, it progressed until drinking made up a huge portion of my life. I moved out of the house I shared with my friends from La Pine and into a big brick house on a hill, which became known as a party house. There’s an old song from the 1970s named Brick House. It became our anthem, and the Brick House was the place to be for anyone in Klamath Falls looking for a party. Anyone who was looking for something to do, any evening of the week, knew that they could drop by the Brick House and something would be popping.

  The switch flipped so fast I hardly knew myself. I went from not drinking at all to drinking heavily most nights of the week. Alcohol allowed me to forget myself and feel connected to everyone around me. It enabled me to tap into aspects of my personality I never knew existed. It was a huge contrast to my private, secluded upbringing, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

  Life at the Brick House was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t a healthy environment for me to be in. It only encouraged me to drink. At one point, I drank every day for six months straight. Even my dad, who had struggled with alcoholism his whole life, expressed concern. He came to visit me, saw the walls of the house lined with empty bottles and told me he was worried that I was embarking on the same path he had been on.

  Partying during college with my roommates at the Brick House.

  Eventually, I realized it was time to leave the Brick House. One of my roommates and I left for a smaller, two-room place, with less partying and fewer temptations. I got back into lifting weights, two years after I had stopped. Partying, travel, work, and physical pain took their toll, deterring me from entering the gym for the longest period in my adult life. In high school, I hurt myself a few times, the worst being when I tore the ligaments connecting my collarbone to my sternum. This led to a lot of sharp pain in my chest, especially when I was cold or took deep breaths. To this day, my collarbone doesn’t sit exactly where it’s supposed to.

  Without health insurance, I couldn’t do much about it. Growing up, I saw injury and illness as part of life. Pat worked for years with a broken arm. My mom got into some bad scrapes, especially after she had been drinking, and she rarely went to the hospital. Although I noticed the problem, especially when I trained, living with pain and reduced mobility seemed normal to me.

  There’s no doubt that I took alcohol consumption too far. My drinking during this time period derailed several of my relationships and nearly cost me a job. I made several poor alcohol-induced choices that could have had a significant negative impact on the course of my life. I would never advocate that you follow my example in this area.

  Nonetheless, I’m now at peace with that period of my life. I look at it as a learning experience that opened me up to a new understanding of my capabilities. Nowadays, I work as a speaker, presenter, and leader. I rely on my charisma to play the roles I’ve chosen in life. Alcohol could have had strongly negative consequences for me, but I live by the maxim that we should never regret our past, only learn from it.

  Given my childhood experiences, I’m not sure that I would ever have been able to access the confidence to stand up in front of a room full of people if I hadn’t first broken through some of the insecurities that I carried with me when I left La Pine for Klamath Falls. I drank too much, to the point where it created significant issues in my life, but I can’t deny that it also opened me up to aspects of my personality that could otherwise have remained dormant indefinitely.

  Party Guy or Smartest Kid in the Class?

  Given how much I drank, most of my peers assumed that I was flunking college. Based on my attendance records, it seemed like they were right. Every term, I started out with good intentions. I told myself that this term I would get my shit together, buy all my textbooks, and attend classes. I headed over to the college bookshop, bought a full set of books, and—for the first couple of weeks—showed up for class. It didn’t take long for my good intentions to go out of the window.

  In my defense, I was frustrated by the quality of the syllabus. I sat in class, listened to the teacher, and glanced at the homework assignments. My budget was tight, and I had no backup plan. Unlike many of my peers, I had zero financial support from my parents. There was no one I could call for a loan if I ran out of money. It didn’t take me long to conclude that I could find something much better to do with five hundred dollars than spend it on textbooks.

  The college bookshop allowed students to return books within two weeks of purchase for a full refund. After that, books were considered secondhand, and they were worth a fraction of their original value. Every term, days before the two-week deadline, I found myself returning to the store and claiming refunds on the books I had bought.

  One of the reasons the bookshop offered this service was to prevent kids who changed classes from winding up with books they no longer needed. I made use of those first two weeks for another purpose: I assessed my classes based on their homework demands.

  There were two types of instructor at OIT. Some assigned required homework, others assigned recommended homework. You can probably guess which classes I sought out. If I found myself in a class with required homework, I dropped it and moved to one with recommended homework.

  It was easy to tell that the professors were working from a similar course syllabus because the overall content of the classes were similar. The homework consisted of the same assignments. The only difference was that when I took classes with recommended homework, I knew I wouldn’t have to do it.

  Fortunately for me, I was extremely good at tests. This is not to say that I was smarter than other people in the room. We all have a unique way of operating, and I constantly meet people who are smarter than me in their area of expertise. I happen to be good at tests. Really good.

  Another factor influencing my sporadic attendance in college was the lack of reliable transportation. I lived off campus and whenever my vehicle broke down, which was frequently, it was difficult for me to get to school. There were some bus lines in Klamath Falls, but they didn’t run regularly. I lived close enough to work to walk in, but college was too far to walk.

  Many of my work and partying friends thought that I didn’t go to college at all. To a lot of people, I was one of those funny, goofy guys whose life revolved around partying. They saw—or thought they saw—me skating through college, taking a class here or there. In fact, I took nineteen to twenty-one credits per term. Twelve credits was considered a full-time load.

  That perception started to change in my junior year. By this time, I was taking some senior year classes as well as my junior year ones. Certain classes were deemed especially significant, and there was one in particular—Strength and Materials, for example—that freaked everyone out.

  There were a couple of reasons for this. First, it was an exceptionally challenging class. Second, it was one of the most important things people hiring engineering graduates looked at. The class was viewed
as such a key indicator of a person’s ability that employers were more interested in how students fared in this class than in someone’s overall grade point average (GPA). Because it was such a challenging class, it was common for students to receive Cs and Ds.

  Strength and Materials was compulsory. The homework was compulsory too. To meet the college’s graduation requirements, I needed to buy the course textbooks and turn in the homework. Each week, homework consisted of a single problem. Most people got together in groups of four or five and spent hours working on the homework during the week. I took a different approach.

  I showed up at the beginning of each class, broke out my notebook, and started working. After about ten minutes, I would hand in the few lines I’d written. At first, this earned me some strange looks from people who had spent hours working on the problem and handed in three to five pages. It wasn’t unusual for people to ask, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Every week, my homework turned out to be correct. It shifted the way people saw me a lot.

  By my junior year, I had completed all my coursework for one degree, and all but about nine credits of a second engineering degree. All I needed to do was complete my senior project and I would have one degree, plus the majority of another. I picked up an internship with a window manufacturing company in my junior year, which turned into full-time professional employment when I was in my senior year.

  At this point, I wasn’t going to school very much. My senior project was still in progress. I needed to decide whether to take the last few credits of my second degree. And I was president of the engineering society, which came about as the result of a joke. Most of my peers saw me as a fun, goofy guy who liked to party. It wasn’t until I began to ace difficult classes that they began to realize I was top of the class. Most people assumed I was hardly engaged, a whisker from dropping out.

  When the time came to elect the president of the engineering society, someone suggested voting for Kabuki—my nickname. A big group of students wrote in their votes for me, never for a moment believing that I would be elected. But I was.

  The role worked out well for me. My job was to allocate some of our chapter’s financial resources, enhance the experience of our members, and coordinate events. I arranged some great trips, such as tours of related industrial facilities in the Pacific Northwest.

  In my last year, many of my fellow students shifted their perceptions of me significantly, to the extent that I became something of a folk legend among my peers. In their minds, I lived like I was in the movie Animal House, rarely attended school, and didn’t purchase any books, yet somehow I had the highest graduating engineering GPA in my year group. Nonetheless, I would never claim to be the smartest guy in the room. I’m good at tests and I know my strengths, so I positioned myself to succeed.

  Home for the Summer

  During my first couple of years in college, I occasionally made the two-and-a-half-hour drive home to work weekends at the resort in Sun River. Over the summers, I did longer stints working full time either busing or waiting tables, saving up a substantial amount of money.

  It was while waiting tables that I discovered I have an unusual ability to visualize connections. This skill, along with my ability to excel on tests, allowed me to do well in college. More recently, it’s a superpower I’ve called on many times to develop what has become Kabuki Strength.

  I found that I could visualize the entire dining room, including every order, right down to how much water was in each person’s glass. I didn’t use a notepad. I had an internal picture of how quickly every diner was consuming their food and drink. This allowed me to make quite a lot of money, because I was able to serve many tables at once.

  Testing myself became a fun, challenging sport for me, much like playing a video game. As other waiters started to freak out, they handed me one of their tables. I kept taking on more and more tables, to see how far I could push it. By close of business, I was usually working half the dining room, while the other half was split between three or four other waiters. It was an experience that clued me into the fact that my ability to visualize scenes and connections is highly unusual.

  My parents knew that I was working. If I saw them, they asked me for money, so I chose not to go home. Instead, I camped out with some friends, outside La Pine and Sun River. From years of living in the area, I knew all the best camping spots. In fact, I wound up revisiting many of my childhood haunts as an adult. My first move when I returned home to familiar terrain was to pitch a tent in a spot I knew as a kid.

  Those first two summers back from college were a lot of fun. I worked with my old high school friends and we partied by the river at night. Looking back, there was a part of me that still wanted to maintain the connections that linked me with La Pine and Sun River. I hadn’t fully accepted that I was building a life of my own, separate and distinct from the life I had known prior to leaving.

  By my junior year, however, my mentality had shifted. Klamath Falls felt like home and I no longer felt the same pull to return north.

  Combining College and Work

  Throughout college, I worked at a job that evolved into a full-time role. As mentioned earlier, during my junior year, I was hired as an intern for a door and window manufacturer. The company was a huge, multibillion-dollar organization that owned several major assets in the area. It was easily the largest business in Klamath Falls.

  A role with the company was considered a premium placement because it was a secure job with excellent benefits. Even people who worked in production, a relatively low-level position, were respected within the community. When I arrived as an intern, I expected to work under a manager whose job it was to train me.

  Within two weeks of my arrival, however, he was promoted to one of the company’s facilities in California. When he received this news, he vanished. I never saw him again. Two weeks into an internship, I suddenly found myself managing his team of thirty to forty people, all of whom were long-term employees. Most had been with the company for several decades, yet they were expected to answer to me, many years their junior and totally inexperienced. My promotion occurred partly by default. The manager above me was still technically supposed to be mentoring me, but when he left, he was never replaced. I was performing the job well, so I simply stepped up in his place.

  It was a trial by fire, to say the least. I stayed on and managed the crew for about a year, all the while being paid as an intern. Then, a scandal broke. Several employees accused their peers of harassment, which triggered an internal investigation. Over the course of the investigation, it became clear that there were a lot of unethical activities taking place at the plant. This led to the firing of approximately half the plant’s managers. The general manager, who had been in his position for about twenty years, was reassigned to a department known as “special projects.” Moving someone to special projects is a euphemistic way of shunting them out of sight when they have incurred disciplinary action or performed poorly, but they’re too experienced, respected, or connected to fire.

  Naturally, the company hired a lot of new staff and a new general manager, who came from another state. For some time, the environment was highly stressful and chaotic, especially for those of us in a management position. No one was certain what to expect, or who knew what. Some people were attempting to cover their tracks, in the hope that their role in the unethical practices that had been uncovered would go unnoticed.

  In my very early twenties, I was caught in the crossfire. When the period of my internship was up, I met with the new general manager and he offered me a job. In the circumstances, he asked me whether I was certain I wanted to accept the role. I did so without hesitation, which appeared to surprise him. As I look back now, I think that no sane person would have been willing to take on a managerial role in a company in the midst of so much drama, with so many members of staff losing their jobs. I think that because I grew up surrounded by chaos,
I found it easy to accept the situation in which I found myself. It seemed normal to me.

  I was placed in charge of a different department. As I watched how the plant was run, I noticed a huge opportunity to improve on the operational side of the business. I put together a proposal and presented it to the new general manager, and he agreed to give it a try. The improvements worked. Prior to enacting my suggestions, it took us months to turn raw materials into the engineered component we shipped out to window assembly plants. Afterward, the lead time was cut to weeks.

  Recognizing the success of my initiative, the general manager came back to me and asked me to take over two more departments, apply a similar process, and come back to him with recommendations. My proposal involved integrating the two departments and streamlining workflow, a move that proved equally successful. The next thing I knew, at the age of twenty-one, I had a third of the largest manufacturing plant in Klamath Falls reporting to me. I was responsible for a hundred employees, three managers, and three supervisors who oversaw the three different shifts I managed.

  By this time, product throughput was down to days, sometimes even hours. The plant had existed since the late 1960s with little process innovation. By improving throughput, we succeeded in significantly reducing inventory levels, creating millions of dollars in positive impact for the company.

  The whole experience gave me a new perspective on myself. I was only twenty-one and I still had a limited amount of social confidence. I still saw myself as quite an introverted person—except when I was drinking—and I didn’t fully understand how I was able to succeed. Technically, I was still in college, although with the exception of my senior project, I had the credits to graduate. I was able to generate a significant positive impact for both the company and the employees, and I loved it. I enjoyed the feeling of leadership and the sense of purpose that came with fixing problems and improving processes. I found it fascinating and rewarding to be an agent of change.