MAGIC CAN HAPPEN IF YOU TRY

 I have lived a charmed life, made so by moments of magic.

• I'm 86 years old, healthy and happy.
• I have not yet spent a night as a patient in any hospital.
• I've had two personal relationships that were important to what I am today.  I'll keep these private.
• I've accumulated more than 3 million air miles, mostly on Star Alliance.

• 
  Been on a dozen, or two, cruises.
• Have had maybe 15 around the world trips.
• Written five books.
• Worked on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence for NASA.
• Wrote the the legislation that became law for hydrogen when I worked in the U.S. Senate.
• In my 27th year of retirement.

Not sure who said SOMETIMES MAGIC CAN HAPPEN IF YOU TRY.  Checked with various AI sources and got nothing.

In a way, though, that thought has driven me through most of my life.  The first time was when I was a junior in high school.  

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  That was 70 years ago.
• Through all of my life as a student, I was just above average.  In my sophomore year at McKinley High School in Honolulu I was not in the top English/Social Studies class.
• I have noticed that I don't one day just try something new.  Something traumatic needs to happen to my life to kick me out of my normal ennui.  In 1956 my family got evicted from our home in Kakaako by Ward Estates when they began to develop what is now Ward Village.

• 
  We moved to Kalihi, and I had to catch a bus my final two years at McKinley.
• In my junior year, I had two fabulous teachers, Mildred Kosaki in English/Social Studies (I must have done reasonably well in my sophomore year because I was promoted to this top junior class) and Sueko Hirokawa in the sciences.  I have a posting about these two teachers, titled CROSSROADS:  Stanford University.
• 
  This article also traced why I chose to even try to get into Stanford.
• A second trauma occurred, breaking my wrist, which led me into more magic.  
• I end with the rest of this story from that posting.

An incredible series of luck helped.  First, my family was forced to move away from Kakaako at the end of my sophomore year at McKinley. (This was the necessary trauma.)  My gang was just a bunch of loyal friends.   There was a dozen of us and by the time everyone got together we were almost always late to our home rooms.  This meant we were penalized by being kept after school for an hour.  Frankly, there was nothing in their attitude that compromised my studies, but the physical separation I think was a factor in changing my general attitude about my future.

Second, students (from public schools in Honolulu) normally worked in the pineapple cannery between their junior and senior years.  I broke my wrist playing basketball in April.  (The trauma.)  This resulted in, perhaps, two most important consequences:

• I had never run for any kind of office in my life (and since then never did again).  I don't know how this happened, but I found myself campaigning for Senior Class vice president against three females, one who was heavily favored, and went on to later becoming Narcissus Queen.  The combination of gender ratio advantage and the cast on my wrist was just enough for me to prevail.  As vice president I also was to become chairman of the commencement and a bunch of other leadership roles.
• As I couldn't work in the cannery, I decided to memorize the words in a guide on how to do well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.  After just a couple of months of this intensive activity, my verbal score improved from the 200's to high 600's, with my math score close to 800, the maximum.

In my sophomore year some of my friends on the tennis team asked me to join them, as they were short of members.  Never having played before, from the end of my sophomore year to much of my senior year I must have spent 690 out of 700 days on the courts, which was the norm for the group.  In those days McKinley and Roosevelt were the only public schools competing against Punahou, Iolani, Kamehameha and Mid-Pac.  Those private schools gave tennis scholarships, so we should have had no real chance of beating them.  But we did, and by, again, a fate of  luck, I was the third singles, which meant I was the fifth best player on the team, as the third and fourth served as the first doubles.  Each private school only had a few scholarship players, and when it came to their fifth best, they were no better than I was.  So I proceeded to win most of my matches, if not all of them, even though I would not have been able to beat the top players from McKinley. (This was the only athletic activity I had in my Stanford application form.  This box had to be checked.)

While in my sophomore year I was a below average student, by the end of my senior year, I was among the best students in the state, for I went on to win various honors, like the Bausch and Lomb Science medal, an Elks Scholarship, a Science Fair award, had both a poem and an essay published in a national anthology and carried pretty much a straight A average.

A school like Stanford not only looks at your grade average and SAT scores.  The extra-curricula activities are maybe more important.  It was not like in high school I had reached a certain crossroad and dedicated my life to accumulating all these impacting factors like class officership, success on my tennis team and high college board scores.  Those things, mostly through luck and circumstances, just happened.  (Again, traumas and acts of magic.)

Thus, I never even bothered to apply to the University of Hawaii.  I just took a chance on Stanford and the California Institute of Technology.  CalTech accepted me, and that was my first choice, for they only accepted around 250/year and was generally considered to be the most difficult school to get into.  However, their financial package was limited.  Luckily, Stanford provided a full scholarship with tuition waiver, room and board paid and a part time job working in the library.  In follow-up discussions with teachers and counselors I picked Stanford.  CalTech would have led me into a totally different way of life.

If I had at the beginning analyzed the reality and also the economics of going away to college, any kind of common sense would have convinced me to stay home for college.  This experience of shooting for the best against all odds, and succeeding, changed my whole life attitude.  Then, graduating from Stanford provided the most important payoff:  CONFIDENCE.  

But the key combination was unpredictable trauma, followed by successful comeback, leading to a magical conclusion.  This fusion has occurred throughout my life. 

Even worked on laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  But my time there was just another eventual act of magic.

A lot more magic after I graduated, which could form the basis of a future posting.  A more recent bit of magic was moving into 15 Craigside, a senior's community.

• I've now been here 12 years.
• Life is secure and comfortable.
• Here is our meal schedule for this week.

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  Not quite CHOCOLATE, CAVIAR, FOIE GRAS AND TRUFFLES EXTRAVAGANZA ON THE SILVER WHISPER, the title of a day on our cruise from which we returned earlier this month.  And I should add champagne, vodka, wine and more.

• 
  But too much of that kind of food is just good for my body.  The five-week trip we took to the Total Solar Eclipse in Iceland and Greenland resulted in my gaining 12 pounds, which I was shocked to learn was physically possible for me.  How did that trip go?

• SO HOW WAS OUR LATEST TRIP?: Part 3
• SO HOW WAS OUR LATEST TRIP?: Part 2
• SO HOW WAS OUR LATEST TRIP?

• 
  The good news is that through simple dieting, still consuming meals like what you see above, plus a lot of soup and salad meals, I lost 12.5 pounds in 9 days at 15 Craigside.  By all measures, this was like magic, for I didn't think this was attainable.
• I also found out why my knees ached when I walked.  I was too heavy.  The pain went away when I lost 12.5 pounds.  Can you image how much added stress carrying a ten pound bag of sugar, and two additional pounds, can do to your joints?
• My next bit of magic?  

To close, a few cartoons from the Stanford Daily.

Stanford and Cal Berkely are close rivals.

You won't know what this final cartoon is all about unless you are familiar with the Stanford Marshmallow Test.

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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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