VISION: The Value of Travel--My First Trip--Stanford University

I'm approaching 3 million miles on Star Alliance.  If you divide by 100, that's nearly 30,000 miles/trip, so certainly I've been on something in the ballpark of 500 trips in my life, and probably more.  I've been around the world more than ten times and lectured in dozens of countries.  Just interacting with this melange of Humanity was of particular import for vision-building, as you gain other points of view and varying perspectives.

Here is how vision forms.  Your senses absorb a trillion bits of input.  Your brain does what it can to discard, synthesize, store, whatever, all this data, and depending on need, the environment, timing and such, develops a panoply of responses.  The broader the foundation, the more elaborate the potential reaction.

Did someone a long time ago tell me this was so?  No.  I figured most of this out myself, and now at the age of 78, am sharing this point of view.  Mind you, I could be wrong, and, certainly, there is an infinite number of vision models.  To a large extent, you will determine your own optimal path to effective vision.  But will this lead to you becoming a visionary?

So here is my story.  These trips I took were not your traditional vacation packages, but my definition.  The first time I left Hawaii was in 1958.  While I don't think I purposefully took two years to plan my getaway, in hindsight, perhaps I should give my mind more credit, for here is how this initial journey unfolded.

Growing up in Kakaako, I was an average sophomore at McKinley High School.  Call it luck or fate, but my family was relocated to Kalihi that year.  My social interaction abruptly changed.  I was suddenly on my own, now busing to McKinley, but with a totally different lifestyle.

Talk about magnificent obsessions, and why I can't recall, but I decided to apply only to Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology.  My older brother was ten years older, and he was then in graduate school at the University of Michigan.  So I took the College Board practice exam in my junior, did well on the math section, but scored in the 200's in verbal, placing me in the bottom ten percentile.

So did I give up?  Was I disillusioned?  Nope, just a higher wall to climb.  Delusional, but is that necessarily bad, or maybe, now and then, good.  "Luckily," I broke my arm playing basketball in the Spring of my junior year.  First, I still can't believe I had the nerve to even try, but for the first time in my life I ran for an elective office, senior-class vice president, and won, but only because my three opponents were female, and they somehow split the gender vote.  In addition, the obvious cast on my arm drew sympathy votes because people felt sorry for me.  This victory meant that I would be chairman of the commencement and a bunch of other leadership roles that looked great on my college application.

The biggest benefit of a broken wrist was that, while my classmates worked in the pineapple canneries after our junior year, I couldn't, so decided to memorize the Scholastic Aptitude Test bible.  In my senior year my college board verbal score virtually tripled into the high six hundreds.

My injury still allowed me to play on the McKinley Tennis Team, for it was my left wrist, and I'm a righty.  My record looked terrific because of my slot.  I was the fifth best player on the team, with the first two playing singles, the next two first doubles, and #5, me, third singles.  We competed against mostly private schools, and they generally only gave one scholarship/year for tennis.  Thus, by the time they got to #5, my opponent was not particularly exceptional.

Stanford even then valued some athletic accomplishment on your application, and combined with that elected office and various chairmanships, with the jump in SAT scores, I snuck in.  CalTech also accepted me, but I chose Stanford because they would make me a more well-rounded product.  At CalTech, you focused too early  to become a fundamental scientist.

So the first time I left Hawaii, on Pan American, it was in June of 1958, when my brother picked me up in Los Angeles.  He got me a job at the Naval Civil Engineering Center in Port Hueneme, and I stayed with his family that summer.  He drove me up to Palo Alto in September, and I still vividly remember the sign at the entrance of Campus Drive:  Leland Stanford Jr. University.  My initial thought was that Stanford was a junior college.

I majored in chemical engineering, but took more art courses than those in my major.  I'm sure I studied harder in three years of high school than four years of college.  But the philosophy of Stanford is that if you're good enough to be accepted, you're good enough to graduate.  So students tended to shift from more difficult programs to economics and sociology and stuff.  Ironically, those who went into business probably ended up eventually making more money.  But the 75 or so who started in chemical engineering were whittled down to eight of us who graduated in 3.75 years.

How can I explain this.  All those years of college and I really did not learn that much.  Those art courses balanced my mind, but the best thing I got out of going to Stanford was gaining confidence.

In June of 1962 I shipped my baggage straight to the Hutchinson Sugar Company in Naalehu, on the Big Island, the southernmost community in the USA.  I rented a car and drove up to Seattle for the World's Fair.  Another suggestion.  Go to as many World Expos/Fairs as you can.  Me, I've found a way to go to just about all of them since '62 (every four or five years--2020 in Dubai and 2025 in Osaka).  The architecture, cuisine, ambiance...

Working in a sugar factory was the most difficult job I ever had.  That was character building.  Vision needs this.  In September of '62 the manager of the plantation, Bill Baldwin, introduced me to Pearl, and we got married in December.

What has all the above got to do with vision?  Well, you need a solid foundation to gain the respect of people, for vision best develops if those with whom you interact think you're better qualified.  Also, broaden your outlook of life.  Not close to being a visionary yet, but a necessary beginning.

My next trip began in January of 1969 to Baton Rouge, for C. Brewer paid my full salary to gain a master's degree in chemical engineering.  However, I got side-tracked, and went on for a PhD, and we returned to the University of Hawaii in 1972.  That will be trip #2.

-