by Chris Duffin
When we walk through this fire, we forge an identity of our own choosing. This is distinct from an identity that’s thrust upon us. Building anything worthwhile requires a tremendous degree of self-leadership. This may or may not mean standing in front of an audience. It can simply be the discipline to show up every day at a task that’s contributing to a larger goal.
In this day and age, it sometimes seems as though there is a tendency for people to blame circumstances or other people for their lack of success. It’s easy to focus on the bad things that have happened to us but, ultimately, we’re still responsible for our own actions. Only we have the power to select our path, separate ourselves from influences that drag us down, and reshape our lives. The stories you’ll find in this chapter reflect these themes.
The Dragon Comes into Focus
So far, this book has focused on the eagle attempting to take flight. I hope it has inspired you to begin realizing your full potential. This chapter, however, signifies a shift to the influence of the dragon, the Ouroboros. As described in the introduction, my second tattoo surrounds my entire upper body. It’s a circular design and it represents the renewal or recreation of life. As we consume our own past, we reinvent ourselves.
Unlike the eagles, however, straining to break the chains that bind them, the Ouroboros implies death and rebirth in full awareness of what we’re doing. It doesn’t only ask us what we can achieve; it asks what we want to achieve. What do we choose to create? Who do we choose to become?
This is an exciting and scary process. Unless you’re excited about the vision you choose to pursue, why would you invest time and energy into it? If it’s truly meaningful, it will push you beyond your comfort zone. To be worthy of you, your goal will inevitably ask new questions of you and take you to places you’ve never previously visited, emotionally, psychologically, and perhaps literally.
Achieving valuable goals takes time. It’s unlikely that, when you embark along a path of work, you will see immediate results. In hindsight, some of the events in this chapter formed the foundations of the life I live today. At the time, however, that wouldn’t have been obvious. Even I wouldn’t have guessed that ramping up my training would one day lead to me becoming one of the strongest people in the world. I didn’t know that going back to school and studying for an MBA would be a step on the road toward becoming a corporate executive and turning around failing companies. This is all true, and I don’t believe I could have reached the place where I am today without these years of fundamental building.
My Professional Life Moves to the Next Level
For my first three years in Portland, I worked with the manufacturer of high-tech circuit boards. I progressed to running a business unit within the company, managing seventy-five employees and six shift supervisors. Although I continued to question my own suitability for leadership, I understood that whatever I was doing was working. A lot of my leadership style involved engaging everyone who worked under me on a one-to-one basis. I made sure to explain my vision to them and let them know how they fit into it. I also took the time to solicit their ideas and feedback.
Over the course of those three years, I succeeded in reducing total labor cost by nearly half for every hole we drilled into our circuit boards, and in improving safety around the plant. Most significantly, however, I shrunk the physical size of the business unit to half its original dimensions. This involved bringing equipment and assembly stations much closer together. At first, people were resistant. They felt that they needed more space to work efficiently. As I explained my thinking, however, and we tested out the first iteration of the new space, it became clear that the redesign made everyone’s job easier.
When the first size reduction proved successful, I started a second iteration, then a third. Contracting our operations into such a compact space left a lot of unused space in the factory, which I segregated with cones and tape to keep it clear. By the third year of my tenure, I had created a gigantic free space in the middle of the manufacturing plant where I worked.
This creation of space turned out to be a huge boon. The company owned two manufacturing facilities in Portland and times were tough. The dot-com bubble had burst and manufacturers across the country were overstocked with inventory. After attempting to weather the storm, the company decided to tackle the problem by consolidating operations and laying off staff. The space I had freed up through reducing the size of our business unit suddenly presented a huge opportunity. The organization shut down its other manufacturing facility and moved it into the empty space I had created.
Needing to shed staff, the company offered employees the opportunity to take voluntary layoffs. After three years of busting my ass, I thought this was a great idea. I was finally in a position where my level of responsibility was on the decline. Melissa was living independently in Klamath Falls. I had finished my MBA, Janis had moved out, married, and become pregnant, and I had saved enough money to take an entire year off. My plan was to load my Jeep up on a trailer and take off to Mexico, where I would spend a year off-roading and camping. I was so excited to have some fun.
I applied for a voluntary layoff, received approval, and was ready to go. Then I was told that I needed to stay on for an additional three to four months in order to manage the integration of the new business unit into our facility. I took on this responsibility, along with managing the shutdown of the company’s other location across town.
The whole process had a long-term positive impact on the company, setting it up for success in the wake of the dot-com crash. It was also a great experience for me. By the time I left that organization, I had become comfortable with my personal leadership style, despite the fact that it was different from the way I initially thought I should lead. I was highly confident that I had the skills to unite employees in the service of common goals, deliver change, and execute solutions at an exceptionally high level. While my working life was progressing fast, however, the family I knew was falling apart.
How’s the Family?
Meanwhile, my mom was still cycling in and out of mental crises. Unfortunately, she was in contact with my sisters at this time and some of her behavior still has a negative impact on them to this day. Pat was living in absolute squalor and drinking himself to death.
Prior to coming to live with me in Portland, Janis spent some time in a juvenile detention center. Mark, my brother, was in prison and would be for a decade to come. The choice he made to live with his father and stepmother scarred the rest of his life. By the age of fourteen he was doing crystal meth at home with his parents. By eighteen he was in prison, never having fully experienced adolescence or adulthood. In later years, he confessed that he has been plagued with mental health issues, both from these episodes and due to the guilt he carries with him as a result of the lies he told in court about being molested in our household.
My biological father was clean and sober while this was going on, although he had burned through the remaining money he had earned from the sale of his parents’ properties. Therefore, he was living in a low-income apartment complex in Santa Rosa.
My older cousin, John, became a prostitute in San Francisco, contracted AIDS, and died. Stoney, his younger brother, disappeared. To this day, we’ve never heard from him again. I can only guess that he died. My mom’s sister, Stoney and John’s mother, embezzled my great-grandma’s retirement savings. She too disappeared and we’ve never heard from her again. I imagine that her addictions got the better of her and she has passed away.
It was obvious to me that, if I didn’t bust my ass to take care of myself and my sisters, no one else would. I was all they had.
Two Christmases, Two Farewells
It was the Friday prior to Christmas 2002. I was in the gym training, as I did every day by this time in my life. I had finished my final sets for the day, and I was sitting in the locker room, getting ready to change back into my street clothes. With Christmas around the c
orner, I was planning a vacation and looking forward to a week off.
My phone rang. It was the Santa Rosa Sheriff’s Department. I picked up and spoke to the sheriff. He told me that my biological father had passed away.
As I listened, the sheriff explained that my father had actually died a few weeks earlier, but it had taken a while for the sheriff’s department to locate contact information for his next of kin. As the only remaining family member, the sheriff asked me to head back to Santa Rosa and take care of my father’s personal effects. I hung up the phone and sat down on the bench in the gym locker room, digesting what I had just heard.
Canceling my vacation, I jumped on a flight and flew into San Francisco. My childhood friend Ganya drove a couple of hours to pick me up from the airport and transport me to his parents’ house. They had moved off the mountain—although Ganya was working on building his own homestead on the property where we had lived as children—and I stayed with them for a few days, using their home as a base. From there, I drove to my father’s apartment complex in Santa Rosa.
At the time of his death, my father shared an apartment. He had spent most of his money and he was living in a low-income complex, populated mainly by recovering addicts and alcoholics, so sharing was part of the deal. The guy he lived with hadn’t been a close friend, but I stopped to talk to him, and he told me about my father’s last hours.
My dad’s roommate said that he had been sitting on the couch talking to my dad one morning. He got up and went into his room. When he came back out to the living room a few hours later, my father was still sitting in the same position, but he had passed away, of heart failure.
My father had suffered from heart problems for a while before he died. A few weeks prior, he had apparently undergone an operation to put in a stent. Following his release from the hospital, tests showed no abnormalities and he was recovering at home. Sadly, his heart wasn’t as strong as his doctors had believed.
I stood in my father’s apartment, surveying the few things he owned. He died with little to his name, and I couldn’t bring myself to take possession of what he left. Instead, I took everything to the commons area of the apartment complex and let everyone there know they could take what they wanted. For the people who lived there, my father’s books and other worldly goods were a bonanza.
When I was taking care of my father’s effects, I found all the drawings and letters I sent him in a suitcase in his apartment. He had kept every single one. He printed out every email I ever sent him and filed it away. They formed a detailed record of what was happening in my life over the course of years, reminding me of events and stories that I had long since forgotten. I spent hours reading through them and dissolving into a mess of tears. I also found a letter from my mother, sent while she was in jail, telling him not to come after me. It struck me as a powerful example of both her strength and her determination to get her way.
My letters to my father—along with his own writings—are the only things I have kept as a memento of our relationship. He was a prolific writer who penned his reflections on his travels and always anticipated that he would one day write a book. Although he never succeeded in that goal, I found a large box of both typed and handwritten pieces in his home after his death, that he had hoped to publish one day.
He had an old station wagon from the early 1970s, with stickers from South America plastered to the bumper and a big set of cow horns tied to the front hood. I loaded his writings and his guitar into the Volvo, jumped in, and made the long, slow drive back to Portland. I still had some remaining vacation, so I took a week for the drive, visiting friends along the route.
My father, Daniel, in Santa Rosa, California, with his Volvo. Note the cow horns tied to the hood.
My father’s death stirred something in me. During the summer of 2003, I decided to go visit Pat. I scheduled a trip with friends and did some four wheeling in the central Oregon mountains, driving my Jeep off-road before landing in La Pine to see my stepfather.
We met outside the old mobile home where I’d lived when I was in high school. He didn’t invite me in, probably because both he and the home had deteriorated significantly since I’d last seen him. After his death, I found out that he had converted much of the house into grow rooms, by covering the floor with dirt and setting up a small weed-growing operation.
Despite his poor condition, and the poor condition of the mobile home, it was good to see him. As always, he was in great spirits. He seemed oblivious to the hardships of his situation—to the filth of his home and the lack of a vehicle. He had a bicycle, and he used to load his pockets with beers, carry his fishing pole in one hand, and cycle down to the river almost every day. There he would spend his days fishing and drinking. Although his sanity levels had slipped further, he seemed happy.
Pat was so pleased to have me around that he took me to see a couple of his friends to show me off. Bizarrely, his friends—both of whom had spent time behind bars—kept telling me that, due to my size, I wouldn’t have any problems if I wound up in prison. They continued to repeat this assertion even after I assured them that I had no intention of taking my life in that direction, and that fighting wasn’t the purpose behind my training.
The following December, a year almost to the day since I had received the call informing me of my father’s death, I was in the locker room of the exact same gym. Once again, I had just finished my workout. I had just completed my last shift before Christmas, and I was looking forward to taking a week off. As I pulled my street clothes out of my locker, my phone rang. This time it was the sheriff’s department from central Oregon.
The sheriff on the other end of the line told me that Pat had passed away. He explained that, although he knew I wasn’t a blood relative, he was led to believe I was the best person to take care of Pat’s affairs. The sheriff told me that Pat was sitting on his couch, in front of the television, just like my father a year earlier. Even more strangely, it seemed that Pat, too, died of heart failure. The story of Pat’s death was nearly identical to the story of my father’s death, a year apart.
I drove to Oregon to meet my sisters, who had taken the lead organizing Pat’s cremation. I never asked them to do that and I was proud of them for taking the initiative. At this time, I was about a month from packing up and leaving for Mexico. My youngest sister, Amy, however, found herself in a difficult situation. For a number of years, she had been officially under Pat’s care, while actually living with friends. With his passing, that illusion could no longer be sustained. Unless I stepped in, she would become a ward of the state, so I took custody of her, too.
Pat’s death brought my father’s death into sharper focus. Although I was less deeply involved in the practical aspects of handling Pat’s affairs, it sparked a lot of emotions. I watched my sisters process the death of their father and listened to the stories they shared—some joyful, some wacky, some flat-out insane. The emotions these stories provoked were an extraordinary mix. It was clear that Pat had loved his daughters deeply, yet he had also bequeathed them a lot of pain.
As I reflected on the roles both Pat and my father had played in my life, I found myself thinking about how incredibly talented they both were. From the perspective of their IQ, both were geniuses. They were both brilliantly intelligent and artistically talented. Yet, they left nothing behind but a mixed bag of emotions. Neither Pat nor my father received a proper funeral. My father had no one in his life. Pat had purposely estranged himself from everyone beyond his immediate family. When they passed away, they disappeared. No one but me—and, in Pat’s case, my sisters—mourned their deaths. They drifted away like dust in the wind.
As I reflected on the way Pat and my father left the world, I realized that I didn’t want the same fate. I wanted to leave my mark on this world. I understood that the positive impact I have on the world, and the people around me, will live on when I’m gone. At that moment, I knew, with great certainty, t
hat when my time comes to go, everyone who has known me, worked with me, or otherwise been part of my life will be able to say that Chris Duffin was a part of this world, and that the world is a better place because of it. That message struck home in that moment and has stayed with me ever since, impacting my goals, my approach to leadership, and—most importantly—my parenting style.
New Jobs and More Responsibility
After Pat passed away and I took custody of Amy, I realized that the trip to Mexico wasn’t going to happen. Although I had significant savings, I couldn’t live in Portland and not work. I would have been bored. I began working with another window and door manufacturer—the same industry in which I had worked in Klamath Falls, although not the same company. The dot-com boom and bust had radically altered my group of friends. When it was at its peak, lots of people with whom I had graduated college had moved to Portland to work in the dot-com industry. When the bubble burst, most of them lost their jobs and moved on to different roles, with different companies, in different states.
That left me with few friends and a desire to make new connections. Through Greg, I met a woman named Lisa who I was attracted to. I had seen her at parties and knew that she worked as a teacher, and that, like me, she enjoyed the outdoors. In fact, we had once spent a day snowboarding together. Outside of that experience, however, we hadn’t spent much time together. I called her up, asked her on a date, and we hit it off.