Five People Who Created the Monster

None of them know my name. Not one of them has ever sat across from me, shaken my hand, or offered me advice over coffee. Four out of five I have not met in person, though I got the chance to speak with one on the phone over a decade ago. One of them spoke to a room full of high school boys in 1990 and has almost certainly never thought about it since. And yet between the five of them, they are more responsible for who I am professionally than any manager, colleague, or formal mentor I’ve ever had.

I’m not sure whether to thank them or warn them.

The first one is C.G. “Coke” Roberts. Evergreen Boys State in 1990. I was seventeen years old sitting in an auditorium at Evergreen State College when he delivered a keynote built around a single thesis: “I will do what I say I will do when I say I will do it.” Eleven words. He said it like it was obvious, like everyone in the room should already know this and he was just reminding us.

I memorized it. I’ve never forgotten it.

At age 17 it felt inspiring in the way things feel inspiring at Boys State, which is to say genuinely but temporarily. Then I went back to my senior year, took a restaurant job, and discovered that the motto had teeth. Showing up on time. Finishing my side work. Not quitting when a Friday night went sideways with dropped plates of food and impatient customers. The philosophy didn’t wait for a meaningful career moment to prove itself. It went to work in a burger joint first.

Years later I signed a mortgage. I was twenty-four, barely keeping an apartment clean, suddenly owing a very large sum of money to a bank that would take my house if I stopped paying. Exciting and terrifying in equal measure. And somewhere in the back of my head, Coke Roberts was still talking. I will do what I say I will do when I say I will do it. The mortgage made it survival. Survival made it identity. Identity made it the foundation everything else got built on.

Coke Roberts has no idea.

The second one is Will Guidara. I came to Unreasonable Hospitality the way most people come to books that change them: I wasn’t looking for it to change me. I was nodding along, recognizing scenes and principles I thought were specific to fine dining, and about a third of the way through the book I realized I wasn’t reading about restaurants at all. I was reading about every Canvas consult I’d ever run with a new faculty member three days before their first term began.

Those consults are the ones I care about most. New faculty arrive at a university with their heads already spinning: policies, handbooks, HR forms, curriculum decisions, and then the department chair assigns them three Canvas courses and tells them they’re teaching in seventy-two hours. They’re not frazzled, they’re drowning. I don’t put a white tablecloth on the table for those conversations, but I meet them exactly where they are. I find out what they already know about Canvas and what gives them anxiety. I build the session around their specific situation, not a standard onboarding. I encourage them to email me a week after classes start, because I’ve learned from experience that’s when the real questions surface. I send them a recording of our consult so they can replay the parts that mattered at two in the morning when they need them.

I was doing all of that before I read a word Guidara wrote. What he gave me was the language to understand what I was doing and why it worked. “Service is black and white. Hospitality is color.” I paused my reading and put the book down when I read that sentence. I stared at the ceiling for a while. Yahtzee.

Will Guidara has no idea.

The third one is Simon Sinek. I found him through his TED talk on leadership, which reframed something I’d been quietly confused about for years. I’m not a leader on any org chart. I have no direct reports, no budget authority, no title that signals leadership to anyone above me. But I lead the people I serve every single day, and I lead some of the people I work alongside, too. Sinek gave me the language to stop apologizing for that and start owning it.

Then he closed the talk with a framework that stopped me completely: start with a personal statement, build toward your professional purpose, strip out the jargon, and end with “wanna hire me?” I dove into Start With Why, then Find Your Why, then The Infinite Game. And I went to work on my own Why until I found it.

“I am fueled by sharing information with people. My area of specialty is sharing information about technology. Through focused attention on their unique issue, and with a customized resolution that is both informative and entertaining, I help people de-stress their relationship with technology and get them to happy hour sooner. Wanna hire me?”

Whether or not someone drinks in a bar, everyone understands happy hour. Nobody hears that phrase and pictures a long painful tech support session. The expectation is set before I’ve touched a keyboard. That’s the Why doing its job.

Simon Sinek has no idea.

The fourth one is Patrick Rhone. I found him on minimalmac.com sometime in 2010, a Tumblr blog about living deliberately with technology before that was a category anyone had named. Before Rhone, I was chasing the new shiny. The latest device, the freshest app, the upgraded version of everything I already owned. It cost a lot of money and burned hours on learning curves that reset every product cycle. Rhone showed me it was okay to stop.

He wrote about his Hobonichi Techo journal. He developed a dash-plus system for analog note-taking years before Ryder Carroll turned Bullet Journal into a publishing phenomenon. He posted about his Red Wing Iron Ranger boots with the same quiet devotion he brought to his iPhone, which he used as his primary writing and publishing tool. Buy the right thing once. Learn it completely. Use it until it becomes part of you.

I took that technology philosophy and made it my own. A modded iPod Classic with a 1TB internal drive and a custom Rockbox OS, a diminutive XTEINK x4 eReader, a burly Casio G-Shock on my wrist. None of those choices happened by accident. Rhone planted something in me about intimate knowledge and deep use of a few things you own that produces more satisfaction than any upgrade cycle ever could. I’ve been living that ever since.

Patrick Rhone has no idea.

The fifth one is Seth Godin. A friend recommended I read Linchpin after noticing something about my approach to tech support that I’d been quietly second-guessing for years. The honest version of that internal narrative went something like this: nobody else here is caring for clients the way I do. Some techs prefer to sit behind a monitor screen rather than in front of an actual person. I’m doing something different, and it feels wrong when you’re the only one doing it.

Linchpin quieted that voice. Not by telling me the contrast wasn’t real, it was real and visible every day, but by telling me the contrast was valuable. Being the one who does it differently isn’t a liability. It’s a strength, almost a competitive advantage. Then Tribes extended the argument: find the community of people who believe what you believe, because they exist, and internalize within yourself that you’re not a freak for believing it.

I’ve spent the years since building exactly that. This essay series, a Substack blog, a LinkedIn presence, the conversations that keep happening with people who recognize something in the writing because they’ve felt it themselves. Godin told me the tribe existed before I’d written a word for them. Turns out he was right.

Seth Godin has no idea.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about these mentors, these men who never knew my name. They didn’t build me, they revealed me. Each one arrived at exactly the moment I was ready to receive what they were offering, and the reception was always the same: not discovery but recognition. Not learning something new but finding the language for something already running.

Coke Roberts gave me my IntegrityOS. Guidara connected the fine dining experience with relational tech support. Sinek gave me a framework to articulate my Why. Rhone gave me permission to stop chasing and start committing. Godin told me I wasn’t a freak.

I’m still the monster they made. I’m still carrying all five of them into every consult, every essay, every conversation with a new faculty member three days before their first semester starts.

They have no idea. And I’m grateful every day that they did the work anyway.

More later...