I joined the Navy at eighteen and spent six years on a nuclear submarine. A captain handed me a job I had never heard of: vibration analysis. Find the machines whose noise could give away our position.
The analyzer the Navy had was German. I wanted an American one. I wrote handwritten letters to manufacturers until one of them shipped me a $15,000 unit on a try-it-and-keep-it basis. I learned the machines. I earned a letter of commendation. And I learned something that has followed me for fifty years: unusual initiative gets noticed.
The skill was not the point. The point was that a problem nobody had explained to me became a craft I could carry off the boat. When I left the Navy I did not have a degree. I had a way of listening to machines, and a habit of starting before I was ready.
This chapter is part of Failure Is Always an Option. The full book is still a free PDF, and the voice-over still plays on the book page: the book page