“When Mommy’s happy, we’re all happy.”

There are certain books that we read and we are forever changed. One of the first books that I had that experience with was Cosmos by Carl Sagan. In ninth grade, I took that book to my classes and read it instead of paying attention to my teachers. Cosmos actually describes the greatest men and women of science and their contributions. Each of those scientists discovered a simple truth about the nature of the world. The ideas were so simple and beautiful. However, grabbing those ideas from the ether took a great intellectual leap. These leaps are non-intuitive and these great men and women are honored as geniuses for doing it. Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion exemplify this concept. The three laws are so easy to understand, elegant, and obvious. However, discovering the three laws of planetary motion is considered one of the great intellectual leaps in the history of science.

Another event, like reading the book Cosmos, where I felt forever changed is when I took a three day Robert McKee Story Seminar. In that seminar, I found not just new insights about film and story telling for script writers, but deep insights on the human condition. For example, when making a film, the audience is extremely savvy. They will quickly lose interest if the characters in the story make choices that are not creditable. To make characters believable, you must have them do the minimum under each beat in a scene where they have to make a choice. Now each character has a different minimum and for the axe murderer, the minimum may very well be to chop off the head of his victim. I believe this is the same concept of path of least resistance and why building mechanisms to drive progress is the best way to modify behavior. Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great is a proponent of this concept. If we are the protagonist in our own movie that is our life, then we are going to do the minimum based on our environment. Mechanisms change our environment and make our minimum actions align with our preferred behaviors and outcomes. But the one line from Robert McKee I remember above all else is that art is considered a classic when it expresses an eternal truth that does not lose meaning or diminish over time. A classic stays relevant over the years, much like the great laws of science.

Am I passionate about science or am I passionate about film? I realized after some consideration that I am actually passionate about what is common in my approach to both film and science. In fact it is how I approach software engineering and everything else in life. I am passionate about finding the simple structure and truths hidden behind complexity. I am passionate about thinking about the essence of things and having the epiphany and deep insight of a simple truth. I must then be able to express that truth in the physical world in order to be satisfied. With software, I am in bliss when I can do this. My success with software is that I have the ability to reach a point of knowing the deep meaning of a design prior to the actual implementation. When I have been miserable is when we are stagnated and are not moving forward or building software without thinking it through. I am a fan of Joseph Campbell who said “Follow Your Bliss!” which perfectly describes what this seeking a truth and expressing it the world means to me.

The morning of 9/11 my wife and I woke up to a phone call from my mother in-law in distress. She told us to turn on the T.V. and she said she thought my wife’s brother worked in the world trade center. I’ll never forget that morning with my wife and the stress and tightness we had waiting to hear from him. We were fortunate. We reached him later that day and found out his train never made it to work that day (he was running late). We also later learned that he actually worked at world financial across the street from the world trade center–though he often had breakfast in the restaurant in the word trade center. It is one of the moments we all share that divides our lives with a before and after.