THE POWER OF CONFIDENCE

Sure, there is love, security and a lot more in life.  However, after 84 years, I've found that something called confidence is key to a successful life of comfort and happiness.  The beauty of this state of mind is that you can help anyone around you--not only your family and friends, but more so, your community, local and throughout the world--to gain confidence by suggesting a pathway towards this objective.

At one point, the title of this posting today was THE GIFT OF CONFIDENCE.  This is because one grows up with no sense of what confidence is all about.  I found that someone in your family, teachers, coaches and even organizations provide you this gift that, if you learn it right, can lead to a better life.  Actually all of the, in my case, were involved.

But then, I thought about that word, confidence, and found it is a lot more meaningful to underscore the significance of power.

• 
  Confidence is contagious.  
• You can more effectively influence people and institutions if you act with confidence.
• This will lead to greater success.
• And success breeds success.
• That is the power of confidence.

But how do you gain confidence?  There are infinite ways.  As this is my blog, I'll be one example.

First of all, many thanks to everyone who helped me gain confidence.  As I reflect on my past, when growing up, I can state with certainty that I mostly meandered through it all without much confidence.  But my family, teachers and schools helped me build sufficient confidence to take me to what I am today.

A key factor to comprehend is that you really can't just determine that you have confidence.  That will inevitably lead to overconfidence.  Confidence is something that builds over time, and requires a series of successes, from small ones to what can lead to monumental victories.

So on to how I gained confidence. 

• I grew up in Kakaako, a below-average neighborhood of Honolulu in my days.  Today, it is on the periphery of the Ward Complex, gleaming with tall towers.

• 
  My family never really lacked for food and life growing up was mostly okay, although we were poor and lacked social connections.
• The one special benefit I had was that my mother was the oldest of six siblings.
• My older brother was born ten years before me.
• When I came, I was the only baby in the group.
• The youngest brothers and sisters of my mother were about same age as my brother.
• The next group of cousins, including my younger brother, came four years later.
• Thus, I was the one showered with love for almost four years.
• There is something to this advantage that builds confidence.

• 
  A second was that my brother Stan was rather conscientious and driven.  He played the clarinet and ukulele, exercised every morning, ate a lot of fruits and by the time I was approaching teenage-hood, he had graduated from the University of Hawaii in civil engineering and was in graduate school at the University of Michigan.  He later headed for a PhD at UCLA.  He asked me to join him in Ann Arbor, but subsequently, after his master's degree, moved to the Navy Civil Engineering Laboratory in Port Hueneme, California.

• 
  In the entirety of my youth, well into when I first started working in the sugar industry after graduating from college, Hawaii was a white paternal society, epitomized by what was still happening in sugar plantations.
• The manager was king, and there were camps for different ethnicities.
• I recall one reception at the managers home, where I looked around and a dozen were caucasian, with a Filipino and me, Japanese.
• 
  I actually did well in this setting, for I had just graduated from Stanford, and it was no different there.  I knew how to survive in that setting, and did well.
• Manager of the Hutchinson Sugar Company was Bill Baldwin (photo above), who introduced me to Pearl, was especially helpful, for he also paved my way towards a PhD, and later shared an office with me in the U.S. Senate.
• Can't  say enough about Pearl, my wife (with Pepper, in our Kauai backyard), who maybe was most responsible for my success.
• 
  About Stanford University, this was a miracle I can't fully understand.
• I can't call it luck that I was accepted into that institution, but there was nothing in my K-10th grade education that showed I had any potential for something greater than maybe going to the University of Hawaii and graduating with a bachelor's degree.
• My grades were good, but not outstanding, and I tended to score high in the math portion of comprehensive (nationwide) exams, and abominably low in verbal.
• So low that I was in the bottom 10% during the 8th grade test.
• So low that I scored under 300 in the practice Scholastic Aptitude Test in my junior year of high school.
• 
  But in this sophomore/junior stage of high school, several things happened to change my life.
• My brother went to the University of Michigan's graduate school in civil engineering and suggested I join him there.  I could live with him.  However, I needed to improve my application to add a few activities and show some potential.
• I had a friend who said he would be going to college on the mainland, a huge departure from the University of Hawaii in those days.

• 
  He, I think, encouraged me to apply to the best schools, so learning that my brother had moved to California, I arbitrarily picked the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University.  I had no idea that this was delusional and ridiculous.  If you make a mistake on your way to success, you need a lot of luck and high ideals to get anywhere great.
• Bishop Estate kicked us out of Kakaako, and my family moved to Kalihi, forcing me to catch a bus to McKinley High School.  This broke my ties to my boyhood gang, and for the first time I had a chance to plan my own life.  

• 
  I also learned that opportunity can come from disaster.  There is something about calamity that forces you to respond.  Similarly, you will fail a lot on your way up.  Learn from them.
• 
  I broke my wrist playing basketball in the spring of my junior year.  In Honolulu in those days, people like me tended to work in the pineapple cannery during the summer.  This I could not do, and my sudden life readjustment led to my decision to improve my verbal score on the upcoming real SAT.  I essentially memorized that red and blue book about how to pass the SAT.  Spent my whole summer doing it, so that when I took the real SAT early in my senior year, my verbal score jumped from 280 or so to 650, placing me now in the 90th percentile.  My math score was in the  high 700s.

• 
  My biggest decision in my junior year was to run for vice president of the senior class.
• No one knew me, and I had never run for any office before, even in any classroom.  
• I can't believe I did this, but two things led to my victory

• 
  I was running against three females.  This had to be an advantage for me.  I might add that the favorite was a very popular Linda Tom, who went on to become a Narcissus Queen.
• I was photographed wearing a cast and arm sling during my Daily Pinion announcement and introduction, and I think some felt sorry for me.

• 
  The vice president of the senior class is automatically chairman of a wide variety of activities, like commencement, etc.  I was suddenly in charge of a half dozen things.  From nothing to most responsible person in the class for my college application.
• My writing ability was embarrassing, and I knew nothing about poetry.
• But if you keep adjusting something you write and take a chance on writing a poem, sometimes good things happen.
• I entered an essay and a poem to two different national anthologies for essays and poems.  I was selected for both, and they got published.
• 
  I asked my English/Social Studies, Math and Biology teachers to write letters of support for me.
• My E/SS instructor was Mildred Kosaki, who herself quit teaching soon after I left McKinley, and eventually became a board member of Hawaiian Electric Company.  Her husband, Richard, was a new political science professor (who much later became chancellor of the campus), I selected to become our commencement speaker.  First time a true unknown ever was given this role.
• This is a photograph half a century later.
• 
  My science instructor, Sueko Hirokawa, regularly was named teacher of the year.  In my senior year I won a science fair on campus and was given the Bausch and Lomb Award for Best Science Student.
• My math instructor, Morris Pang, went on to become a high level administrator in the central education office.  I just happened to make a perfect score on one of the math comprehensives, a first for the school.
• If not for these teachers, and my older brother Stan, I would not have even applied to Stanford.

• 
  Some athletic activity was also necessary, so in my late sophomore year I tried out for the tennis team.  Played something like 750 out of 760 days in high school, and became third singles.  We actually beat more high schools than not.  Had the best record on the team, and I won a letter, two, actually.

• 
  Oh, I was accepted to both CalTech and Stanford, but chose the latter because they offered a full ride:  paid for the tuition, room and board, plus gave me a 10-hour/week (M-F from 7-9PM to watch the rare book room of the library, into which no one comes, so I could study) job.

• 
  Getting into a school like Stanford, gives you confidence.
• Later, after graduating, I realized that maybe I was pretty capable, so that was the confidence base I used for the rest of my life, leading to:
• Gaining a PhD in biochemical engineering.
• Becoming a Professor of Engineering with tenure at the University of Hawaii.

• 
  Director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute.
• Worked:
• NASA's Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion, twice.

• 
  U.S. Senate for Senator Spark Matsunaga, and drafted original bills which became law in Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion and Hydrogen, plus was the lead Senate staffer in the passage of the Wind Energy and Deep Seabed Mining legislation.

• 
  Combined much of the above into a plan for the Blue Revolution, and in December of 2022 gave a TEDx talk on the Blue Revolution.  Watch also this Podcast from the Seasteading Institute.
• Turns out that you don't brag about confidence.  This comes when people respect you.

From Better Up:  Build self-confidence--These tips get beneath the surface.

• What is self-confidence, anyway?
• What are the benefits of developing self-confidence?
• 3 downsides of excessive self-confidence
• Are self-confidence and self-esteem the same?
• How to build confidence
• What are some tips to be more confident?
• Go forth with confidence

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LIFE AT STANFORD

Four years ago I posted on:

     HOW TO GET INTO STANFORD

Let's start with one discouraging statement:  if you got perfect Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, you only had a 41% chance of being accepted.

For Stanford's Class of 2021:

• applicants:  44,073
• admitted:      2,085 (4.7%, or one in 21 applicants)
• enrolled:       1,708
• women:         51%
• men:              49%
• 69 countries and 48 states

For the first time in history (380 years), Harvard's Class of 2021 has a majority of minorities (50.8%).  Can't yet find Stanford's percentage, but of 7,034 undergraduates, 2,545 are White / non-Hispanic, placing the minority representation at 64%.

Cost?  $69,109 (tuition, fees, room, board and expected expenses)/year.

Under Stanford’s generous financial aid program, which the university expanded in 2015, families with total annual income below $125,000 and typical assets for this income range will pay no tuition. Parents will be ensured that all tuition charges are covered with need-based scholarships, federal and state grants and/or outside scholarship funds, so that the expected parent contribution is only for room, board and other expenses. Typical parents with annual income below $65,000 are not expected to contribute anything toward educational cost.

Best as I can determine, in my freshman year (1958), the tuition was $1005.  The total cost, using tuition as the ratio factor, then would have been $1418/year. I think my scholarship essentially waived the tuition, and, in addition, they provided a 10 hours/week job to man the rare book room.  No one ever went into that room, so I could study and get paid for it.  I don't recall finances ever being a real problem, for I spent my summers working at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (thanks to my older brother), and lived with his family in Oxnard, California.  My parents provided any necessary extra needs.

Before going into my life at Stanford, let me summarize the lead article in the September issue of STANFORD, where, on the cover, was a quote:

     IF I SAW ANOTHER BLACK PERSON, WE'D STOP AND HAVE A HOLIDAY.

The first couple of paragraphs indicate the social state of the USA was during that period:

By Roy Johnson

In September 1962, a student named James Meredith showed up on the campus of the University of Mississippi to register for classes. Although it had been eight years since Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Ole Miss still admitted only white students.

Meredith, a native Mississippian and an Air Force veteran, was African-American.

Segregationists blocked the entrance to the administration building and a white mob surrounded Meredith, taunting and jeering him. In the following days, President John F. Kennedy sent federal troops to the Oxford campus to quell rioting and enforce a Supreme Court ruling that upheld Meredith’s admission. On October 1, Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the school.

But, mind you, I began my Stanford education in 1958, and the first Stanford Black class above started in 1962, the year I graduated.  That is not how they looked then, of course, and there were seven, by far the largest African-American (A-A) group of freshman in Stanford history.  To summarize (the blue remarks are by me):

• They experienced little outright hostility (same for me).
• While they mostly felt isolated, they found their time on campus to be fruitful and enjoyable (I never felt isolated, for I was always part of some group--Asians in those days were considered to be White).
• Note that two are missing in the above photo because they did have problems and declined to be interviewed.

• By 1968 A-A enrollment increased ten-fold.  That was the year when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, and the Black Student Union presented ten demands, nine which the university met. Which one wasn't met?  Read the 9April1968 Stanford Daily.
• For the freshmen who arrived at the Farm 55 years ago, though, there were no such milestone moments, no organized activist movements around race issues. They were pioneers, lonely swimmers in a sea of whiteness, doing their best to coexist — and succeed — in a world that did not always want them.

• Sandra Drake (photo when she was on the faculty):  did not recall even meeting with any A-As in her class, remained mostly reclusive, went on to a doctorate and until 2004 taught A-A studies in the Stanford English Department. (Once a girl came up to me and said: “I’ve never talked to a Negro.” We were “Negroes” back then.)  One male colleague, who was supposed to vote on my entry into the department, walked up to me and said: “Do they read in the Caribbean?” I just didn’t know what to say. (I was doing poorly in my English composition class as a freshman.  My teacher called me in and asked if English was spoken in Hawaii.  I indicated, well, it is a kind of Pidgin English.  I only got A's and B's after that discussion.)

• Paul Rose:  had mixed feelings about his student experience, made no real friends and went on to become a lawyer. (My closest friends on the mainland are my freshmen dormitory floor roommates.  We get together frequently.  All are, of course, White.  I don't remember even one  Japanese colleague in my Class of '62, and don't recall ever seeing an A-A on campus...ever, in four years.)

• Ira Hall:  I did not go to Stanford for love. I did not go for the social life. I was not surprised that I did not find a welcoming environment ready to love me. I came to learn about the kind of environment I would probably go into as a professional. I didn’t expect it to be welcoming, either. I wanted to be an executive, so I knew I would be in charge of people not like me. I had to get to know about them, and I expected them to learn about me.  Hall is the person quoted on the front cover.  Had a successful Wall Street career and endowed a scholarship at Stanford.

• Alexander Lewis Jr:  was a military brat who was the first A-A to join a fraternity (Phi Sigma Kappa), loved the experience, went on to Harvard for an MBA, ended up in Hawaii in special education and never went to a Stanford reunion (Never met him in Hawaii, and also never have been to a class reunion, but that is because there is small group of classmates living around San Francisco I see annually, and they all don't like Stanford reunions.  I'm trying to get them to one next year, our 60th reunion when we first met as freshmen.)

• Roger Clay:  played football, and thought John Ralston was racist, but not Bill Walsh.  I didn’t expect a lot of black people to be at Stanford, but I expected a few. When I went home, I told my mother everyone was white; even the ditch diggers were white.  Eventually got a law degree and become a prominent member of the Stanford alumni.

How did I get into Stanford?  That was a miracle.  No doubt my current proclivities with fantasy and Saving Planet Earth and Humanity can be traced back to this point in my life.  At Central Intermediate School, if I had to place myself in the 9th grade graduating class, I would have been below average.  1956-1957 was a pivotal period:

• My family moved from Kakaako to Kalihi.  I lost contact with my neighborhood gang.
• I began to make perfect scores on standardized tests and my teachers encouraged me to become the best.
• I was elected vice-president of the Senior Class.

• I became a successful tennis player for the McKinley High School team.
• I scored in the bottom 10 percentile in an eighth grade verbal exam, and this was confirmed in the Fall of 1956 when I took the practice College Boards, and my verbal score was somewhere in the high 200's (200-800 range).  I was expected to work in the pineapple cannery between my junior and senior years of high school, but I broke my wrist playing basketball in the later spring.  I made the best decisions of my life:  memorize all those words on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and apply only to Stanford and the California Institute of Technology. I was always near 800 on the math section, but my verbal score jumped from 200 something to near 650.  YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR SAT SCORE WITH ONE SUMMER OF INTENSIVE STUDYING.  I got accepted at both universities and selected Stanford because it offered a more attractive financial package.

Here is my transition to Stanford.  I was out of my element, financially, socially and intellectually.  I was below average.  However, it turned out that Stanford tended to coddle their kind of average student.  

I studied more in my sophomore and junior years at McKinley than four years at Stanford.  Even though I was poor, that was not a social factor here.  It's almost like 15 Craigside, everything is pretty much paid-for, so we are all almost equal.  

While I majored in chemical engineering, I ended up taking about as many art classes as ChE courses.  My charcoals were great.

In our junior year, David Mason, our department chairman, rushed into one our classes and proudly announced we got accredited.  That was a shock, because none of us had ever thought to ask.  Ten years later the Stanford Chemical Engineering Department became #1 in the nation.  We started with 75 or so as freshman, and most transferred into the social sciences, so we only graduated something like eight.  In the beginning I was about average, and at the end, I was till average, except that the bottom 65 or so dropped out of chemical engineering.

I graduated (freshman roomie Jim in the middle, and John, who also lived on our floor, to the right) in less than four years, and in 50th Reunion Class of '62 Book, I said:

MOST VALUABLE THINGS I LEARNED AT STANFORD:

Upon graduation I observed that my high school classmates were better engineers from their education at the University of Hawaii.  However, I was able to communicate at a higher level--better appreciated music, art and culture in general--had a more worldly view of things--and, most important of all, had the confidence to be innovative and enterprising.

The key word is confidence.  I don't recall having any classmate or professor ever helping me in my professional life.  But Stanford kept getting better, Silicon Valley blossomed from cherry orchards, and just my presence there as a student did wonders for my career.

To the right is Jim today for our mini-reunion at Cathy's Napa home, with Bill, our next door neighbor, and his wife Sue, who was in our class.  John went on for a PhD and worked for a while at the East-West Center.  He now lives in Austin, Texas.

To the right, Jim and Cathy with family and friends, when we earlier this year visited Naalehu, the site of my first job in 1962 with the sugar industry.  We've met for lunch at Tadich Grill several times.

So how important was Stanford University?  Four years in a White-only environment trained me well, for my future jobs after graduation were mostly at the University Hawaii, and most administrators were Caucasian, while my stints in the Hawaiian sugar industry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center and U.S. Senate all were equally dominated by Whites. Success is closely related to social comfort.  Stanford well prepared me for the rest of my life.  On the other hand, I'm now at 15 Craigside, where there are more than 90% Orientals, about the exact percentage I grew up with in Kakaako, so I am fine here.  Heaven?  I should do well there, too, if there is one.

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