The story begins not with a bang, but with a whimper. It is high school, and my counselor is puzzled. You have so much potential, Tom. Why aren’t you using it? She probably means well, but it hurts and it makes me angry. It feels condescending to me. And it is unanswerable. I am fat, and feel nakedly aware of it. A fever-like wave of humiliation envelopes me.
I was raised not to question school authorities. It went unspoken, like so much in my house, that there was just one way to do things. Listen to the teachers, go to college, get a liberal arts education. Oh, they encourage my brother and me to pursue any job we wish. But there’s only one career path they will talk about, or listen to, or respond to.
That Big Recession
Or maybe it begins a little before that, during the last big recession, the one in the 1970s. My parents lived through the Great Depression. They try hard not to pressure me too much, but they also want the story told. The Depression rightly symbolized hard times to my parents. Hard times could come again. Never forget that.
I am puzzled, though. My parents are schoolteachers. Schools can have budget cuts. Schools can even be closed down. What if their schools get closed down? Where will they work? To me the answer seems obvious after brief reflection. If you work for yourself, you always know your boss will care about you.
I go to my favorite place, the library, and read up on how very rich people got that way. Because it is the Seventies, there are few books on the subject but I find them all. Patterns emerge. I am right. They worked for themselves. Unlike my schoolteacher parents, who believe the government is there to help them, the very rich almost never got that way by earning a liberal arts degree. In fact, most of them never made it through college. When I try to discuss this with my parents they shut me out.
Perhaps it begins a few years later in a video game arcade. It is the early 1980s and the height of the arcade craze. My friends and I are in our early twenties and a bit older than the average customer, but it is an innocent kind of fun and we are not wild kids. We play games like Joust and Space Defender with a simple joy, and maybe a bit obsessively. I am not very good at the games but they transport me.
The sounds and lights of the video arcade bring me out of a painful and difficult time in my life: my father has died, my college career is in a shambles, and I am not the working musician that I had hoped to be. I have disappointed my mother, baffled my brother, and surprised our family friends. He had so much potential, they must think. What happened? After all, I started college at 16 after being kicked out of high school. Yet after four years, no degree, partly due to a course correction to a music major, mostly because the education factory is not serving me well. On the other hand, the university library is a haven.
I am confused but buried deep beneath the would-be musician is a nascent, unformed, and self-tutored capitalist. One day in the arcade mental dominoes fall, tack tack tack. The reasoning is, as Mr. Spock would say, crude but effective: someone’s making a bundle off these games. I like creating things. Maybe I could create video games? This from a staunchly nontechnical third-rate guitarist who cannot find the clearly marked ON switch to his friend’s TRS-80 computer reliably. I ask the friend I play games with, the one who actually owns the TRS-80: How do they do it? How do you program video games? He knows where I’m going and looks at me with vast amusement. Out comes a fateful line. “You’d have to learn assembly language,” he intones. He says the words assembly language with more than a touch of respect and wonder and maybe even awe. You know what? I think that’s the linchpin of my story. That might be the real beginning. An assault on my not-so-manly manhood.
Joust
I know him better than anybody. The smirk on his face is eloquent, and here is what it says: There are 4 billion people on this planet, Tom, and about 3,999,999,999 of them are more likely to learn assembly language than you. Which is understandable. I don’t know jack about computers. I have absolutely no “natural ability”, whatever that is, and they leave me utterly mystified. The big heat comes back. I never claimed any kind of computer expertise, yet I am embarrassed and humiliated again.
And again, I say nothing. This time, though, the chrysalis of a working plan has already begun to grow. I will teach myself enough about computers to get some kind of job in the business. Once I get the gig I’ll spend nights studying even more. The successful people I read about? So many had an inflection point like this one, where they understood they would have to build the lives they wanted from scratch.
I get my hands on a Commodore 64 and I buy the September 1983 issue of COMPUTE! magazine. They publish games and simple programs you can type in yourself and, much more important, explanations in plain English of how the programs work. It is nearly impossible to understand even so, but I know one thing: There are people dumber than I am who can do this. Therefore if I study hard enough I can learn it too. I study like my life depends on it, which is sort of true. A few months later I tell my mom I’m quitting college to learn about computers. She stops talking to me.
The Happiest Place on Earth
A few months later I know more about computers than my friend does. I apply for three jobs of note after my summer of self-directed study: one at Disneyland, one at McDonald’s, and one proofreading articles at a computer magazine. Disneyland, mysteriously, says I don’t fit their image. I am young, slender (sigh), and well-groomed, with short hair and no mustache. (Disney didn’t allow mustaches back then.) (In retrospect I still can’t see why Disney said so. Thank heaven they did.) McDonald’s never calls back. The magazine does, but they say I wouldn’t be happy as a copy editor. Instead, based on samples from my college newspaper, they say I should write articles instead. Yessss! Thank you, Larry McClain, editor of the now-defunct HARDCOPY. Two weeks later I’m earning a living as a freelance writer at the computer magazine.
Less than year after that I am accepted for a programming job at a video game company. Mom starts talking to me again. The company goes under before I report in.
Within two years I become a programming columnist for several magazines, including COMPUTE!, the one that started me in my path as a programmer.
Within five years I am CEO and lead programmer of my own company, creating and marketing a computer language of my own creation. The ten-year high school reunion becomes a modest, private victory, when the class hot chick finally figures out who I am after we’ve had dinner together. She only begins to pay attention when she finds out what I’m doing. The second she perks up, I leave.
Reunion
Five years after that I am a program manager at Microsoft working on a computer language that’s even better than the one I invented. It’s the greatest job in the world at the greatest company in the world.
After four years I leave Microsoft a millionaire, at least before taxes. So, half-millionaire. I think that’s where the story might actually begin, because it is only my first million. (Half million).
