There was a period in my life when I spent a lot of time staring at numbers.
Not the kind of numbers that build wealth. The kind that determine whether you can make it to the end of the month. The kind that decide whether the rent gets paid, whether the lights stay on, and whether there’s enough money left over for groceries.
At the time, Debbie and I were young parents. Sean had just been born, and not long afterward, I lost my job. Like most young families, we didn’t have a financial cushion large enough to absorb a setback like that, so we did what families have done for generations when life takes an unexpected turn. We asked for help and moved in with Debbie’s parents in Sierra Vista, Arizona.
Nobody plans for that chapter of life. When you’re young, married, and starting a family, you picture yourself moving forward. Moving back into your in-laws’ house usually isn’t part of the dream. But responsibility sometimes requires humility, so we regrouped, tightened our belts, and started looking for a way forward.
I searched everywhere I could think to search. One lead sent me driving across the Arizona desert to a prison that I had heard might be hiring. I remember making the trip with more hope than confidence, convinced that maybe this would be the opportunity that turned things around. It wasn’t. The jobs were scarce, and the opportunities seemed even scarcer.
Eventually, Debbie and I made a decision that felt both risky and necessary. We packed up what we had and headed to Southern California. We weren’t moving toward certainty. We were moving toward possibility.
For a while, possibility looked a lot like exhaustion.
I worked wherever I could find work. At different times I worked security, stocked shelves at a 7-Eleven, and sliced meat in a deli. Sometimes those jobs overlapped. Sometimes one shift ended just in time for another to begin. Seven-day workweeks became normal, and sleep became something I squeezed into whatever hours remained.
Then our station wagon failed.
When you’re already living paycheck to paycheck, losing your transportation feels like far more than a mechanical problem. I started riding buses to get to work. Southern California looks very different through a bus window than it does behind a steering wheel. Trips that should have taken minutes stretched into hours. Missing a connection could disrupt an entire day. But when your family depends on your paycheck, you figure it out and keep moving.
One of my security assignments was at an abandoned cable manufacturing plant in Chula Vista. The place was enormous, but what I remember most was the emptiness. There wasn’t machinery sitting idle. There wasn’t production waiting to restart. The building had been stripped bare. If I entered one end of the factory and started walking, it could take nearly twenty minutes to reach the far wall. It was nothing but empty space beneath a roof that seemed large enough to cover a small town.
At night, the emptiness changed the way sound behaved. A footstep echoed. A door closing carried farther than expected. Most of the time there was nothing to hear at all. Just silence and a building that felt far larger than any one person should be responsible for watching.
My world was a small guard shack near the entrance.
Inside was a desk, a chair, a lamp, and whatever paperwork needed to be completed during the shift. Most nights were quiet. Sometimes painfully quiet. When everything that needed doing was done, I would sit beneath that desk lamp with a pencil and a stack of paper and start working through numbers.
I wasn’t studying engineering. I wasn’t solving technical problems. I was trying to figure out how to support my family.
I would write down every source of income and then every expense I could think of—rent, utilities, insurance, groceries, gas, and everything else that came with supporting a young family. Once the numbers were on the page, I would start moving them around, looking for a combination that somehow created enough margin to make the future feel manageable.
What if I picked up another shift? What if I found another part-time job? What if I got a raise? What if I worked more overtime?
Then I would erase part of the page and start over. Maybe I had missed something. Maybe there was a combination I hadn’t considered. Maybe one more pass through the numbers would reveal an answer I hadn’t seen before. Night after night, the exercise always seemed to end in the same place.
The math wasn’t wrong. The income simply wasn’t enough.
Looking back, I can still picture that circle of light from the desk lamp. Everything outside the window was dark, but inside that small circle of light I was doing everything I knew how to do. I was working every job I could find. I was showing up. I was taking responsibility. I was searching for answers.
What I didn’t understand then was that I was trying to solve a problem with information that didn’t exist yet.
At the time, I assumed the answer had to come from one of the numbers already written on the paper. More hours. More shifts. More income. Some combination of effort and arithmetic that would finally make everything work.
What I couldn’t see was that the opportunity that would eventually change my life wasn’t part of the equation yet.
The General Dynamics opportunity wasn’t on those pages. The aerospace career wasn’t on those pages. The leadership opportunities weren’t on those pages. The people who would influence my life weren’t on those pages. The future Debbie and I would eventually build wasn’t on those pages.
From that guard shack in Chula Vista, none of it was visible.
That’s one of the strange things about life. Looking backward, the path often seems obvious. Looking forward, it rarely does.
What I remember most about that season isn’t the struggle itself. It isn’t the bus rides, the multiple jobs, or even the constant exhaustion. What I remember most is that every day I got up and kept looking.
Every day I went to work. Every day I searched for another opportunity. Every day I tried to move the ball a little farther down the field.
I didn’t know where the breakthrough would come from. I only knew that if I stopped looking, I would never find it.
Eventually, the opportunity appeared. Not because I had calculated it. Not because I had predicted it. Not because I had discovered some secret formula.
It appeared because I was still moving when it arrived.
Today, decades later, I can look back across more than forty years in aerospace and see experiences, friendships, leadership opportunities, and accomplishments that the young man sitting in that guard shack could never have imagined. None of those things were visible then. But they were coming.
That realization has stayed with me because life has repeated the lesson more than once.
Sometimes we work hard and see immediate results. Sometimes we work hard and see nothing we can measure. Those are often the moments when people become discouraged. They assume the effort isn’t working because the answer hasn’t appeared.
But sometimes the answer isn’t missing because you overlooked it. Sometimes it isn’t there yet.
Sometimes the opportunity that changes your life hasn’t arrived.
Your job is not to predict exactly when it will appear. Your job is to keep looking until it does.
Still Moving.
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