Book.
The Discus Thrower and his Dream Factory
Chapter 22. The end but not The End
This is the end of the book but it’s not the end of anything else. We keep selling our APAS system round the world. I spend countless hours on the phone helping customers know how to implement their software. I am once again asked to join in partnerships to bring my technology into the whole arena of Workmen’s Comp and Insurance settlement cases and to assist in large scale health programs.
I don’t need to do this but my life has always been about exploring opportunities. My technology, unlike so much technology, has not become outdated. As long as there are muscles, bones, ligaments that need to be studied – for athletic purposes or for health reasons – my technology is needed.
It is odd and right that a man who grew up running in bare feet in another part of the world should end up in California able to provide shoes – that he designed or just income for others. It is meaningful that a man with a thirst to study biomechanics and the body should take his thirst and build a career out of it that created endless products that help people win awards, get stronger, or simply enjoy their lives more. And that success came from actualizing what was in my own imagination.
What was the drive? Yes to prove to my father I was worthwhile. It started that way. And then it became a drive to help people. An inner knowledge, born out of Hadassim, that if you try for it, work for it, you can achieve it and achieve more than you expected. If I had an idea – from a variable resistant exercise machine to going in and seeing the president of Data General without an appointment – I acted on it. Never did I see myself as a man on my deathbed thinking, I wish I had done that.
I had my dreams as a child. The Olympics. A Cadillac (I shelfed that one). America. A PH D. And these I accomplished because I first envisioned them and was willing to risk for them. Took a plane and got myself to Wyoming which was god knows where in my mind. Starting the Olympic Training Centers led me to travelling for Data General and on it went. I made my dreams tangible. I knew how to bring others into help and I knew how to pick people well. Ann in my love and business life. Jeremy, Dr. Dardick, Roberto Muller, and others in my business life.
But mostly I saw work as enjoyment. There was no differentiation in my nights and days. I made sure I worked in the arenas that held meaning for me. I loved being at the Olympics and I found work that kept me going to the Olympics. I loved athletics and I found work that made me live with athletes and coaches and kept me studying the mechanics of the body and the games. I fell in love with Coto de Caza and then I imagined a lab there and that imagination became reality. Some of it was luck but it was always opportunity and my asking, and my going toward it.
Yes, this book tells my story. But it also tells a story of how to live a life that is full and rich and wild with imagination. How? By doing what you want to do, doing it with all your heart and all your hours, and never saying No. Always saying I WILL do it and I CAN do it. If you do that, as Goethe said, Life will assist you in your dreams. And as Beckett said, No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. One computerized exercise machine was too expensive. The next one was not.
Life must be full. With learning, with doing, with beauty, with risk, with love. Each chapter shows you how life came to meet me when I was willing to meet it. May you too go to meet life and then life will come to meet you too.