In 1519, the Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernán Cortés decided that he wanted to seize the treasure of the Aztecs. He took five hundred soldiers and one hundred sailors and landed his eleven ships on the shores of the Yucatán Peninsula. Although Cortés had a large army, he was still horribly outnumbered by a huge and powerful empire that had been around for six hundred years.
Many of Cortés’s men believed there was little chance of success, and the terrified men tried to seize some ships to escape to Cuba. Cortés got wind of the plot and arrested the ringleaders. At that point he wanted to make sure that the remainder of his men were completely committed to his mission and to his quest for riches, so he did something that seemed nothing short of completely insane: Cortés gave the order to burn his own ships.
His men resisted, wondering how they would ever get home, but Cortés was ready with an answer: If we are going home, we are going home in their ships!
The path forward was clear for Cortés: it was all or nothing, 100 percent commitment. Do or die. And so after scuttling his ships, his thinking was that the option for failure was gone. They would either conquer as heroes, or they would die.
There was a time when I burned my ships, but with far less of a plan for victory than the Spanish explorer, and far less in the way of riches in my sights.
In the fall of 1973, I was a rising senior at North Carolina State University. I’d made it through my freshman depression and was now a two-sport walk-on varsity athlete and an elected officer at the Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity, with thirty-five credit hours standing between me and a mortarboard. For most people in a similar position, with a baccalaureate degree easily within reach, the next nine months would have been smooth sailing. For me, they were anything but, because instead of strolling into Dabney Hall as a senior for my first day of organic chemistry, I was cracking concrete with a construction crew on Hillsborough Road with a sledgehammer, working for C. C. Mangum Company in the shadow of the NC State University Memorial Belltower. My fellow students, my fraternity brothers, my peers, all shared laughter and a full measure of confidence as they streamed into their classes on the first day of the fall semester. I know this because I worked in full view of them, even if I was ostensibly cloaked in invisibility as I labored with my construction crew.
Earlier that morning, and an hour before sunrise, I had crawled out of my sleeping bag, closed the flaps on my Eureka Timberline pup tent, and climbed into the pickup truck that had pulled up to the northwest corner of Raleigh’s Umstead Park. With a few obligatory nods, I joined the six other men in the flatbed who sat in a storm cloud of Marlboro cigarette smoke and the putrid aroma of stale chewing tobacco. I rode in the pickup in silence, groggy from another fitful night of sleep in the pup tent, effectively homeless in a public state park.
Among the men who form this “chain gang,” I am known (through sniggers) as the College Boy, but today I’m feeling more like Henri Charrière, the main character in a movie that had just come out called Papillon. It’s about a convicted felon sentenced to live out his days in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island in French Guiana with no hope of escape. Only a few years earlier, I had been reading Charrière’s riveting novel of the same name in English class as a high school senior. Now, here I am, emotionally shackled to these co-workers who, I am sure, suspect there is some kind of Papillon-esque backstory to explain my placement amid their ranks. A twenty-year-old out-of-towner with a thick Long Island accent who turns up in Raleigh, North Carolina, with nary a trace of Red Man chewing tobacco in his cheek or calluses on his palms, isn’t supposed to be available for full-time manual labor like this. It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that there is something fishy going on. My crew mates may have been unfamiliar with the story of Cortés burning his ships to forge his future, but I’m certain they figure I must have burned a very large bridge of some kind to land here with them. And I had, both unintentionally and intentionally.
Growing up in Garden City public schools I had been introduced to music, and under the tutelage of my incomparable music teacher, Dr. Wagner, a spark had been lit in me that was unquenchable. As Daniel Coyle describes in The Talent Code, that “ignition” had shown me my identity, and my “ignition and deep practice work” together produced a “skill in exactly the same way that a gas tank combines with an engine to produce velocity in an automobile.”1
Coyle’s research led him to conclude that ignition is about the set of signals and subconscious forces that lead us to say that is who I want to be. My true purpose had been ignited, only to be unceremoniously extinguished by my father’s dictate that I attend NC State and major in textile chemistry. That’s when my spark died out and when the other, more destructive one was lit, the one that led me to that chain gang.
When I arrived at NC State as a freshman, I’d felt as though a cold blast of water from a hose had doused me. I looked down at my Monday schedule: statistics, SAF 101 (Surface Active Agents for textiles), Organic Chemistry, Calculus I, and Quantitative Analysis. No band. No orchestra. Nothing that held even a glimmer of possibility that it might fire me up. I was facing a curriculum devoid of creativity.
It was not that this course load was cognitively difficult, though it certainly was no cakewalk. I had been educated at Garden City High School with college-prep, highly technical course material. Calculus I and II. AP chemistry and physics. At the same time, though, I never thought of these college courses as contributing to my future job. Moreover, I held the opposite opinion of my high school humanities courses, which my father only considered hobbies but which I saw as a possible ticket out of obscurity.
Thanks in no small part to the efforts of Steve Thomas, my extracurricular life was on solid footing, but my decline on the academic side was precipitous. If you graphed my first month at NC State, it would look like a hockey stick. I quickly fell behind. I cut classes, lectures, labs. Homework assignments were late or just plain missing. In a university the size of NC State (enrollment in 1970 was north of thirteen thousand) there was no parental figure hovering over you, ready to administer encouragement or threats. You were on your own. It was very easy to fall hopelessly behind.
With my academic life spiraling downward, I lived for the joy of the afternoon soccer practice. The workouts kept me engaged mentally and physically. I thrived in that structured, coached environment. Often, after workouts I would sneak an hour or two in the music school’s piano practice rooms, writing songs. Then I’d eschew studying for a trip to the local pub.
In the 1970s, long before one-third of North Americans would be diagnosed with depression or bipolar disorder, I was headed for what could reasonably be described at that time as a nervous breakdown. I was ignoring my responsibilities. I was drinking to mute my predicament. I was sleeping ten to twelve hours a day. The result was self-loathing. The golden ticket in this environment was a university diploma. Nothing less could be counted as gain. And still, in my heart of hearts, I could not be made to care. My nights in the dorm were filled with nightmares. I endured this torture for five maddening semesters. It nearly ended me.
After two and a half years of suffering through the textile chemistry program, my grade point average hovered around 1.9 and was falling. I was placed on academic probation. I was faking swagger on the soccer field, trying to send a message of bold confidence, but one more semester on probation and I’d be suspended from the team. Adding to that stress was the fact that I was carrying this burden alone. I told no one. I dared not call my parents. I was living a lie.
Few people in my life at the time suspected that inside me was a locomotive already off the rails. I was consumed by the recurring vision of my future self back in Winston-Salem, living in my parents’ basement, working the graveyard shift at Hanes. Forever. My own personal hell. One I’d actually had a taste of the summer before coming to Raleigh for school.
Remember when my dad said, “We will move the day after graduation”? Well, he wasn’t kidding. Graduation was on a Saturday. Mom and I were in the car pointed south at 8:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Five days later I was sitting on a metal stool at Hanes Dye and Finishing Company, watching giant sheets of cloth go by on an enormous machine. When there was a hole or a tear in the cloth, I pushed a black button. The machine would stop, an alarm bell would ring, and a guy with a mouth bursting with chewing tobacco would run over and sew a patch over the hole. I would then push a large green button, one more alarm bell would sound, and the machine would roar back to life.
I was in need of a miracle. It came during a conversation with Steve Thomas.
Since Steve was the one responsible for the only present joy and purpose in my life—the soccer team—I felt I needed to confide in him about the possibility that I might get benched next semester because of my grades. He had an idea. Steve suggested that in the spring semester we both pick up a course elective called Radio and Television 101. The course was worth 4 credit hours and included a lab. This certainly sounded more interesting than matching shades of cloth, but it was Steve’s big pitch that really sealed it: “It’s supposed to be an easy A!”
I was in.
On the first day of Radio and Television 101 the following semester, I was, as my uncle Charlie would have said, “a blind dog in a meat house.” Professor John Malcom believed in immediate and total immersion. Within the first hour of the class Steve and I were creating radio and television news programs. The course also gave us access to the production studios at the campus radio station (WKNC). We were rotated into news-reading duties on the station’s live hourly news broadcasts. Steve, I think, could take it or leave it, but I fell in love. And I fell hard.
It was reminiscent of the joy (and the mischief) I found in those early years in the family basement: disassembling electronics; wiring up Mr. Pumpkin for what were, in effect, live radio plays; assembling my mail-order Remco Caravelle radio transmitter and then broadcasting into all the car radios in the neighborhood on Halloween. There was even an upright piano in the WKNC studios where I could dash off news-theme music for my fellow radio lab students. Organic chemistry? Calculus? Wool and cotton blends? One hour in the radio-TV lab as a second-semester junior and I was done with all that. I had become transformed. It was another paradigm shift, but back toward the version of myself I actually knew and liked.
This Radio-TV course was created for someone like me. You work all day on a project and see the finished product take on form and substance right before your eyes. It was that beautiful combination of creativity, purpose, and accomplishment that I still enjoy to this day.
The next morning I stopped by the registrar’s office to pick up the drop-add forms I would need to drop three of my courses and prepare the way for a new communications curriculum. I did this without my parents’ consent. When I shared my passion and vision for this new world with my professors, most caught my excitement and signed my drop forms without hesitation. (I’m sure that more than one was glad to be rid of me!) My statistics professor, on the other hand, insisted that, because I was one week beyond the drop-add deadline, he would not sign the form since it would be against university policy. I pleaded. He refused and would not relent.
Back in the dorm my buddy Steve listened as I outlined my dilemma. When I was done with my sad tale, which included tears and resignation, he smiled, armed with another miracle solution.
“C’mon, Tesh, you’re crazy. What are there, a hundred people in that statistics class?”
I nodded.
“The teacher is being a jerk. Everyone just drops courses when they need to. The professors don’t even know. The classes are way too big to keep track.”
“What are you saying?” I asked somewhat expectantly.
“I’m saying, if you sign the guy’s name to the form, who’s gonna know?”
“But that’s forgery,” I said. “Have you ever done that?”
“No . . . but . . . you know this textiles thing is not you, right?” Steve had expertly boxed me in. He knew the answer to his question. It was undeniable.
Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”
—Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos2
By the end of the day I had signed my professor’s name to the drop form. What’s the worst that could happen? was my thinking. Maybe he makes me stay in the course? Maybe he fails me? I already had a low C average. I was a stone’s throw from an F anyway.
When the end of the spring semester arrived, I traveled back to Winston-Salem from Raleigh and resumed my annual summer position at the foot of the giant textile machine at Hanes. I knew that my report card from State would be forthcoming, and for the first time I was feeling no trepidation at all. According to my computations, my Radio-TV grade (A on both lecture and lab) plus the dropped Statistics would bring my GPA up to at least a 2.5. I would be off probation and I’d be impervious to suspension from the soccer team.
I needed just one more minor bit of good fortune (or subterfuge, depending on how you look at it). I needed my dad to not look too closely at my report card. I knew that the textile courses would be missing, which would be a huge red flag. I felt pretty secure that he would only look at the grades and not the course names—TX 301 or SAA 202. As it turned out, he would see neither, because he never saw a report card at all.
In late July, in the heat of a North Carolina summer, I was called into my dad’s downstairs office in our home. He was seated behind his desk. To his right, next to his gold-plated letter opener, was a copper table lamp. There was the faint smell of whiskey and a stronger smell of cigarettes. He appeared as a human leviathan, seated behind that enormous oak desk. He was holding a letter, which he began reading before I could sit down. It was from the chancellor’s office at NC State. My statistics professor had filed a complaint against me. He had, indeed, spotted my forgery.
My dad’s voice boomed with the remainder of the chancellor’s letter. I was being “suspended indefinitely” from the university for breaking the honor code. I would receive an F for the statistics course.
I did not sit down. Without looking up from the letter, my dad continued extemporaneously. He told me that I had shamed him and our family. He called me a liar and a cheat. He told me I was no longer welcome in his home, and that I had to take my belongings and leave. Immediately.
Early the next morning, I pack up my 1967 Volkswagen Fastback and drive out of the city limits of Winston-Salem on my way back to Raleigh. On the seat next to me is a brown paper bag with a sandwich my mom had handed me before I’d pulled out of the driveway. She had hugged me and then kissed me on the cheek. She had been crying. I’m feeling horribly guilty for leaving her alone, for making her life worse than it already is.
In that moment of deep shame and moral failing, I still have enough awareness of who I really am to know that I would much rather plot a course back to Garden City, to relive my life before all of this and pursue those things that Radio-TV 101 had reignited, but I barely have enough gas money to make the 110-mile trip to Raleigh.
Up front in the trunk of my Volkswagen is my vinyl record collection, a pile of jeans and T-shirts, and a few 8-track tapes. My Boy Scout pup tent and a sleeping bag are lashed to the roof. There’s a strong smell of burning oil as I sequence through the manual gear shift and merge onto Interstate 40. I have no plan. No family. No future.
My 8-track tape player pauses to switch tracks, and for a brief moment I’m left with the unmistakable whine of the VW engine calling for a new gear. The solenoid in the 8-track clicks over to channel 2.
Two hours later, I find myself back in Raleigh, parked in Umstead Park, untying my tent and sleeping bag, preparing to forge my way in and set up my “home” for the night. Or nights.
Fortunately, the experience of crawling into a sleeping bag in a pup tent is not unfamiliar to me. I am an Eagle Scout, after all. I have spent many summers at Boy Scout camp and have my Operation Igloo patch from a week of winter camping in the mountains during a blizzard. Still, pitching a tent in a public park without promise of a merit badge is quite different. I think it wise, for instance, to make camp near a pay phone, in case my mommy calls.
When I was living in New York and didn’t have a penny to my name, I would walk around the streets and occasionally I would see an alcove or something. And I’d think, that’ll be good, that’ll be a good spot for me when I’m homeless.
—Larry David3
As comfortable as I was in a tent, I had no grand plans to stay in that park for longer than was absolutely necessary. And while the camping fee was negligible, without the weekly allowance I was getting from my parents as a student, I would not have enough cash for food. That meant finding work. I already had connections at College Esso, where I had pumped gas part time during the school year. I figured I could pick up some hours there, but ultimately I ended up with a Monday through Friday gig working for a construction company called C. C. Mangum.
Since I had no experience operating a front-end loader or with carpentry work, I was hired as “utility.” A utility worker did a little bit of everything—breaking up concrete with a pickax, hauling trash, making runs to the liquor store for chewing tobacco.
Other industries have this type of role in their hierarchy as well, just under different titles: assistant, runner, gofer. The only difference between my job and all of those was that by the time my day was done and my construction crew buddies had dropped me off at the southeast corner of the park, I was usually too exhausted to join them for a beer.
Alone at night with the crickets and my Coleman lantern, I tried to visualize a future. Perhaps I could get trained on the backhoe loader. Perhaps I could work my way up to construction foreman. Then I laughed. If I hadn’t wanted to manufacture underwear, why was this now an option? No, if a passion for being a musician or broadcaster had put me in this tent, then I needed to somehow manifest that.
The next morning I called my friend Howard Stanis at WKNC Radio, the campus radio station. This was the studio where we had our Radio-TV 101 labs with Professor Malcolm. From the park pay phone I explained my predicament and my desire to use the campus facility to produce a demo tape. I pleaded with him, outlining why I needed only a few hours in the studio to produce the tape. I knew that if I was going to try to get a job at a local radio station, my only chance was to go in with something more than an empty résumé.
“But how are you going to produce a demo tape if you’ve never been on a commercial radio station?” said my friend.
“Please, can you just get me into the studio after school hours tomorrow night? You could meet me there and let me in. I’ll lock up before dawn when I’m done.”
There must be something about getting thrown out of school and being forced to live in a tent that softens people up, because Howard agreed to help if I promised I would be out of the studio before 6:00 a.m. when the cleaning crew arrived.
Obviously, since I was no longer registered as a student, this was highly irregular. It was definitely trespassing. And since I was using their tape, it might have even been theft. But since I had already been “convicted” of forgery, what was a little more criminal activity to add to my growing rap sheet? Howard let me in the following night.
In front of me in the WKNC college radio studio is an Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder, an Olivetti manual typewriter, an Electro-Voice RE55 microphone, and an old Wurlitzer spinet upright piano. Finally in my element, I grab the nearest sheet of paper and jot down the news copy for my demo.
With the recorder rolling I play three syncopated notes, in octaves, on the piano: G-E-C. It is the NBC News theme. (That should get someone’s attention!)
This is John Tesh, WKIX 20/20 News.
(Typing on the Olivetti, creating the sonic illusion of a teletype machine.)
This is all the news you need to hear at twenty minutes before and after the hour. Today, Dr. Henry Kissinger told reporters that he thought we would finally see peace in the Middle East. Correspondent Maurice Ghindi has more from Cairo.
(Holding my nose and with an awful imitation of the CBS correspondent.)
This is Maurice Ghindi in Cairo. Today, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had this to say about the possibility of peace in the Middle East.
(Now with an even worse imitation of Kissinger.)
I think there is a possibility of peace in the Middle East.
(Pinching my nose again.)
This is Maurice Ghindi in Cairo. Back to you, John, in the studio.
(Typing again as I continue my “broadcast.”)
Thank you, Maurice. Now let’s get a check of traffic with our eye-in-the-sky reporter, Captain Johnson, in Skycam 5.
(Now I’m beating my chest with both hands to simulate the sound of a helicopter. I speak with a touch of a southern accent.)
Well, John, traffic is quite heavy on Interstate 40 with a fender bender at Hillsborough Road. We’ll keep an eye on it for you. Back to you in the studio.
(Typing again.)
Thanks, Captain. Up next . . . President Richard Nixon faces more impeachment proceedings as we update you on the Watergate Hearings. I’m John Tesh, WKIX 20/20 News.
I reach for the piano . . . G-E-C.
On the tenth take, I’ve got it. I rewind the demo tape, box it up, and lock the studio door behind me. My goal is an entry-level radio job, so I assume that my best shot is to drop the tape off at the station I had mimicked in the demo: WKIX.
WKIX-AM radio was my favorite station in town. It was saved on my first radio button on the Volkswagen. The 20/20 News was incredibly stylized and unique. I enjoyed the music (Rick Dees in the mornings) but tuned in for the newscasters. Scott White and Bill Leslie were the lead newsmen. When they came on, they would shout—with intense drama—one-word teasers and then play the commercials.
“Watergate? Nixon? Guilty? I’m Bill Leslie. Details next on WKIX 20/20 News.”
I arrived at WKIX two days later, tape in hand, wearing flip-flops and hair down to my shoulders. Fortunately, the receptionist was not put off by my appearance. She was wearing a tie-dyed tank top and had a neck tattoo featuring her boyfriend’s name. So when I told her that I had created a demo tape for Mr. Scott White and that I was looking for my first job in radio and that I was living in a pup tent in a park because NC State had thrown me out for forging a professor’s name . . . she was instantly Team Tesh.
I could tell from her expression that I had just become the scraggly-haired shelter puppy that no one would adopt. She promised she would get the tape to Mr. White. I handed her a piece of paper with my phone number on it. It was the number of the pay phone in the park.
Two weeks later “my” phone rang. On the other end was Scott White. He asked if I had done all the voices and production on the tape. I wasn’t sure what the right, best answer was, but deceit had landed me in the tent I was trying to hustle my way out of, so I opted for the truth. It worked.
The next day I was in Scott’s office, reading copy for him and taking direction. He told me it was tough to hire someone with no experience but that he felt I had some potential and would like to train me. In the meantime, he could only offer me four hours of work on Sunday mornings, playing the religious tapes. That was fine with me. I had my foot in the door. And when that door gets cracked open, opportunities are often what come through next. Someone leaves. Another gets promoted. Within a few months, Mr. White’s training and providence, along with the support of WKIX program director Ken Lowe, combined to land me a job as the weekend newscaster on WKIX radio, which was my ticket out of Umstead Park and off the C. C. Mangum construction crew.
To this day I can still remember the weeks of irony, triggered by the Papillon movie marquees along the drive from Umstead Park to our construction site in Raleigh. The C. C. Mangum project was my own Devil’s Island, and my decision to lie and cheat in contravention of my father’s wishes was the crime that sent me there. The marquees were staring back at me as a grim reminder of my own self-inflicted exile; the result of the worst decision since they decided to fill the Hindenburg with hydrogen.
And yet, here’s the rub: if presented with the same set of circumstances again, and the same choices to pick from, I’m not sure I wouldn’t make the same decision, because I’d found something that many people in this world spend their entire lives looking for and never finding: I’d found purpose, passion, and direction.
Does that justify my lying or cheating or violating the university’s honor code? Of course not. But it does highlight the importance of finding purpose and then working relentlessly in service of it.
When you have your why, you can endure any how. And when you’ve renewed your mind to eliminate external doubt and resistance, all that is left is vision and purpose. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God” (Rom. 12:2).
I also now have revelation and even a measure of respect for the decisions my dad and my statistics professor both made. They were, at their core, acting honorably. I respect that. And I believe it made a man out of me.