The Eagle and the Dragon

by Chris Duffin

  As Lisa and I became closer, my job with the window and door manufacturer was hitting the skids. It was a crazy environment, with an enormous amount of staff turnover. In the short time I worked there, the plant manager and half of the management staff moved on, creating a highly chaotic atmosphere. The glass department, which fed all the other departments in the plant, performed especially poorly. I noticed it was failing, and the company had recently fired the department manager, so I put my hand up and volunteered to run it. I’d already had a substantial positive impact on the department I was running, so I believed I could make a positive difference.

  The plant manager thanked me for stepping up and told me I had sixty days to fix the problems or I would be fired—an interesting way of saying “thank you.” I succeeded in turning around the glass department and reshaped the entire glass production process, reducing the total glass inventory by more than 50 percent. With less glass moving around a giant facility, we also reduced safety and delivery issues. Salvaging the glass department had a huge impact on the factory as a whole.

  Following this, the plant manager told me that he wanted me to manage the plant on the swing shift, 4 p.m. until midnight. By this time, Lisa and I were in a solid relationship. As a teacher, Lisa worked during the day. If I worked swing shift, our employment patterns would be totally incompatible. I explained this to the plant manager, but he wasn’t interested. When I started working at the plant—in different relationship circumstances—I had indicated that I was willing to work swing shift, so he insisted I take the role, claiming that I should be grateful of the promotion. I didn’t see it that way, so I found a new job.

  I went to work with an automotive company that manufactured off-roading supplies and direct factory gear-train components for the likes of Ford, Kia, and Dodge. With my burgeoning interest in off-roading, it was a fantastic fit for me. Around the same time as I took the role, I remember Lisa and I putting the Jeep on a trailer and making the twenty-hour drive to Moab, Utah, one of the hottest off-roading and mountain-biking destinations in the world, for a week with friends. That cemented our relationship, just as I was joining a company whose products coincided with my interests.

  Before long, I found myself running a sixty-million-dollar division in my new workplace. It was the most successful division in the organization, but it had been stagnating for a while and the marketplace was becoming much more competitive. Chinese knock-offs were beginning to flood the market and the quality was beginning to creep up, turning these knock-offs into serious rivals for our products. Before I took over the department, the company’s leaders had attempted to instigate changes in the department. Most of the employees had been working there for more than twenty-five years, however, and they were highly resistant to change.

  The department was large, consisting of approximately one hundred employees. Although I wanted to initiate physical changes, my first task was to influence the team’s culture, so that the existing employees would become open to improvements. That took a lot of one-on-one conversations, with the objective of communicating my vision for the department and winning the buy-in of my new colleagues. We set up small-scale example projects, scored wins, and then invited those who had participated to describe those wins to other members of the team. Gradually, we built momentum.

  Fast forward a couple of years and the department was transformed, from beginning to end. Costs were significantly reduced, and I had brought in several million dollars’ worth of new equipment. Along the way, we delivered improved performance, reduced safety incidents, and put in place a process so robust that it continues to operate in the same fashion, fifteen years after I left the company.

  With its most successful department restored to profitability, the company put me to work on one that was failing. The company leaders fired all the managers associated with this failing department and brought me and a close colleague of mine in to turn it around. At this point, my reputation was so strong that performance spiked before I even made any changes. Employees were so excited and reinvigorated to work with a leader they respected and say goodbye to the overbearing style they were used to that their motivation increased immediately.

  The department in question delivered their products with a six-week lead time. When I took over, we were only meeting that standard 50 percent of the time. Overall, we were eight to twelve weeks behind schedule. By the time I left, we were committing to deliver within between one day and a week, and we met that significantly higher standard at least 75 percent of the time.

  Sometimes work was boring or highly demanding. For example, at the automotive supply company, I had ninety direct reports. Imagine sitting down and writing ninety annual reviews, each one three to four pages long. It could take months. Nonetheless, I did it. I felt that I was receiving an education on how to run successful businesses, and I was getting paid at the same time. I knew that, in time, I wanted to run my own business, but I also knew that striking out on my own too early would be costly and slow. Therefore, I looked at every challenge as an opportunity to grow the skills I would one day employ in my own business.

  When I finished my reviews, the leadership rated them higher than any other manager’s in the entire six-hundred-person company. The HR department requested that I work with them, training other managers on the principles of writing good reviews. That led to me getting involved in a number of other coaching and disciplinary scenarios, as I became known as someone who could get the best out of employees and resolve performance issues. I sat in while they met underperforming employees and acted as a resource, coaching them on how to handle tricky situations more productively.

  I knew that I wanted to take every possible opportunity to learn and master new skills. I see a lot of people half-ass whatever task they put their mind to, often because they think it’s not cool to make a lot of effort. My view is that we learn only by applying ourselves fully to the task at hand. Time and again, I dove into challenging situations and came out the other end enriched, with a fresh understanding of my own capabilities.

  Goodbye Paintballing, Hello Competitive Lifting

  Before I moved from Klamath Falls to Portland, paintballing was my primary hobby. After the move, I went out and took part in a few games, but the fire was gone. My paintballing friends lived halfway across the state and hanging out with them was the most satisfying part of playing.

  I still owned my paintball business in Klamath Falls, however. I started selling off the equipment and simultaneously purchased a commuter vehicle. My Jeep—so associated with my paintballing days—seemed bound for retirement. That is until I discovered that there was a great trail system on the coastal mountain range outside Portland, approximately forty-five minutes from home. Although my schedule was packed, I tried to set aside some time on the weekends to do things I enjoyed. Part of that involved sinking some of the funds I raised through selling my paintballing business into the modification of my Jeep. It was no longer a street vehicle, so I was free to concentrate mainly on performance.

  As I focused on building and customizing my Jeep, the focus of my training shifted. I was used to training purely because I liked the challenge. I didn’t ask myself whether training would make me look better. I only asked myself whether it would make me stronger. This distinction hit home when I noticed a couple of guys in the gym preparing for a body-building show. They were bigger than me, and they looked better, but I was clearly far stronger, and I did more work. This caused me to reflect on where the differences arose from, and to wonder whether I had the strength to compete in a bench press and deadlift meet. I decided to find out.

  Although I was entering a competition for the first time, I had about a decade’s experience of training, factoring in the two years I took off while I was drinking heavily. Initially, I thought I’d enter as a one-off. I wanted to experience something new and to say that I had competed. I found a bench press and deadlift competition that took place six
weeks later, so I signed up. This was the late nineties, when training information was much harder to come by than it is today. I got most of my ideas from bodybuilding magazines and books, which ignored numerous fundamentals. As a result, I didn’t even know what a deadlift was. I read the rules, thought I understood, and technically what I performed in that competition qualified as a deadlift. My form and the quality of my movement, however, were poor, verging on tragic.

  What I hadn’t anticipated was loving competitive lifting so much. By the end of my first day’s competition, I knew I would be part of this world for the rest of my life. I qualified for the World Championships of the federation in which I was competing, to take place in Nevada later the same year, and I decided instantly that I would go and take part. This shift gave my training a new focus. Instead of walking into the gym to train purely for the sake of training, I trained with an eye on upcoming bench press and deadlift meets. Later, I switched to full powerlifting, which includes the squat.

  In tandem with my substantial work commitments and custom vehicle design and fabrication, training and competing became a central cornerstone of my life. I set up a mini fabrication shop at home, and before long it occurred to me that I needed to do something similar for my body. I was traveling to use a public gym yet providing a lot of my own equipment. I took specialty bars and implements with me that weighed hundreds of pounds and required a heavy bag with wheels to transport. Every time I arrived at the gym, it took me twenty minutes to bring my equipment inside. Essentially, I was bringing my own gym to the public gym. It was obvious I needed to save myself a lot of time and effort and set up my own.

  One of my training buddies and I began to custom build a home gym. We fabricated our first squat rack and I said, “This is the first piece of what will one day be a massive, successful gym.” Anyone looking in from the outside would probably have been skeptical, but I had a vision in my head of what I could build. The squat rack was only the first step in that direction.

  The Return of My Mom, and a Dark Figure from Our Past

  While I was raising Amy, my mom began to reappear and become part of my life again. She had moved from Montana back to eastern Oregon, and she was living in a small community named Burns, where she worked at a branch of McDonald’s. At first, her contact with the rest of the family was understandably limited. My sisters were resentful that she had abandoned them. While I was comfortable raising them, I was angry and disappointed that she had put them in such a difficult position. Over time, however, my sisters began to reach out more to my mom, arranging meetings and moving toward forgiveness. I felt that the issue was between them, so when my sisters forgave, I followed suit.

  She later moved to Mitchell, Oregon, where she lived with a miner named Leonard Kopinski, also known as Kop. Kop was quite a bit older than my mom and his wife had passed away not long before. My mom took care of him and initially established a business partnership with him. He owned a mine, but he was unable to run it effectively. She took on the responsibility for doing this and they became partners. Over the years, their relationship grew. Eventually they married and she cared for him until his passing.

  Leonard was something of a folk legend in eastern Oregon. He walked around with his .44 strapped to his hip, confronting law enforcement officers and wading headfirst into land disputes. He had been a fixture in the local newspapers for decades, reaching back as far as the 1960s or 1970s.

  Due to his involvement with land issues and his outspoken nature, Kop had a direct line to his state senator, a highly unusual privilege for a private individual. On one occasion, when I visited Mitchell to see my mom, she told me she had run into the sheriff who arrested her for possession of marijuana, and who had subsequently taken me and my siblings into custody. He had served twenty years in prison for his part in attempting to traffic my sisters. Although she hadn’t seen him for over two decades, my mom recognized him immediately. When he realized my mom lived in the same town, he began stalking her. He drove past her house, extremely slowly. If he saw her at the window, he formed his fingers into the shape of a gun, using his thumb as the hammer, and pretended to shoot at her.

  My mom decided that she needed to leave town, so she left her job, packed up her things, and drove away. Before long, she noticed that she was being followed by an associate of the former sheriff. An hour or two out of town, the same car was behind her, keeping its distance. The roads in eastern Oregon are quiet and there wasn’t a lot of passing traffic, so it was clear that the driver was traversing the same route as my mom. On reaching a fork in the road, she pulled off the road, exited her vehicle, and pulled out her rifle.

  On such a desolate road, in the middle of the desert, there was no telling when someone else might show up. She was completely alone. Moreover, visibility was exceptionally high. Anyone approaching would be visible from miles away. My mom crossed the road to the opposite side, set up her rifle, and stood by the side of the road, waiting for her pursuer. When he came close to her position, he saw her, pulled his truck off the road, and sat there, waiting.

  My mom had him at gunpoint, but she didn’t know what to do. She told me later that although she never wanted to kill someone, she wasn’t sure what she would do if he got out of the car. She told herself she could run into the desert, where it would be nearly impossible for him to find her. Nonetheless, she was known as a wild, self-sufficient, and extremely stubborn woman. There was a possibility in her mind—and probably in her pursuer’s mind too—that she might kill him if she felt she needed to.

  Eventually, he gunned his truck, made a U-turn in the road, and drove back the way he had come. She jumped into her truck, waited until he was totally out of sight, and drove to Mitchell to meet with Kop.

  While she was living with Kop in Mitchell for a couple of months, my mom had an eerie experience. She heard a knock on the door and opened it to see a couple of hunters standing outside. They told her they were lost and asked to use her phone. My mom, ever hospitable, agreed to let them use her phone, but was highly skeptical of their story. She suspected they were connected to the man who had been stalking her in Burns. To convey her distrust, and the fact that she was armed, she pulled out a gun, sat down, and dropped her gun on her lap. Kop was also in the house and registered her response.

  She explained the situation and, before long, the police showed up at the former sheriff’s home in Burns. The most likely reason for this is that Kop pulled some strings, perhaps by calling his senator, and persuaded the police to search my mom’s stalker’s home, although I don’t know this for certain. The police told the former sheriff that they wanted to search his property because they suspected he was complicit in poaching. Instead, they found the remains of four women he had killed and buried on the grounds of his property.

  It turned out that, not only was my mom’s stalker heavily involved in human trafficking, he was also a serial killer. In 1985, when my mom sent me running down the street to make sure there were witnesses present as he took her into custody, it’s very possible that her request saved her life.

  The American Dream, but Was It My Dream?

  Home has always meant a lot to me. I want to know that the place where I live is beautiful and that it belongs to me. I want the freedom to customize my living space. When I’ve found myself living in a rented duplex or a shared apartment, I’ve noticed that I feel unsuccessful. Perhaps I feel an echo of the transitory life I lived with my parents when I was a child. While I was working at the automotive supply company, I wasted no time in buying a home in Portland, where I lived with my girlfriend and Amy. Amy stayed with us until well into her nineteenth year, a little longer than her two older siblings. Fortunately, Lisa was very supportive of the process, guiding Amy as she found her direction in life and never attempting to push her out before she was ready. The large size of the house eased that pressure, too. Amy wound up making snowboarding and the mountains a cornerstone of her life. To this day, s
he, her husband, and her children work year-round for a ski resort in Oregon. Lisa was the one who bought Amy her first snowboard.

  Me, my sisters, and my youngest nephew in my back yard on the day I married Lisa. You can see the pride in my face at the people they have become.

  When Amy moved out, Lisa and I decided that we wanted to marry. In conventional terms, I had achieved the American Dream. I was successful in my working life, I owned my own house, complete with a white picket fence, and I was getting married. It was my vision of success at the time, and I made it happen. I felt that, by becoming a normal, productive member of society, I’d proved something to anyone who thought I would never amount to anything. During this period, I was also dialing back the off-roading and focusing primarily on my career and marriage.

  Lesson: Conscious Self-Reinvention

  Following my move to Portland, I fully reinvented myself, taking on new professional challenges, leaving behind my excessive drinking, and getting married. It would be true to say that I wasn’t fully aware of my authentic self. My reinvention was based on my beliefs about who I should be, rather than on my authentic identity. Nonetheless, I was able to separate myself from negative aspects of my identity, build a strong foundation in my life, and become highly successful—at least, based on my definition of success at that time.

  Anyone can do the same. You can do the same. The only question is whether you’re willing to make the hard decisions that will move you forward. You may need to draw a line between yourself and some aspects of your current life. For me, those hard decisions required me to cut ties with a number of friends and family members. I deepened my self-discipline, cutting down on play time and pouring my energy into training and studying for an MBA. It’s easy to fall into day-to-day habits. The question is whether those habits are creating the foundation of the life you want for yourself.