With an inclination toward making things, Ben Mitchell was drawn to an engineering path until differential equations came along. The promise of being able to get his hands dirty with tools right away made the computer science major more appealing. The burgeoning tech world seemed the natural fit after graduation. Luckily the ebbs and flows of that industry gave him the opportunities to get his hands dirty by other means. Find out how keeping the maker spirit alive outside the day job can sustain you in important ways.
With an inclination toward making things, Ben Mitchell was drawn to an engineering path until differential equations came along. The promise of being able to get his hands dirty with tools right away made the computer science major more appealing. The burgeoning tech world seemed the natural fit after graduation and an MBA gave him the management skills to complement his coding ones so that he could flex in product management roles. Luckily the ebbs and flows of the tech industry gave him opportunities to get his hands dirty in not only a variety of companies but also outside pursuits.
In this episode, find out from Ben how keeping the maker spirit alive outside the day job can sustain you in important ways …on today's Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Ben Mitchell has had a bunch of experiences in the online world, including product management, service delivery, and privacy in such settings as PayPal, Cisco, and Facebook. He's also gotten into lobster diving, has built a boat with his dad, and continues to build large scale mechanical contraptions for theatrical shows all in his non-working hours.
And, as promised, here's a picture of Ben with a really big lobster.
For another story about working to live, listen to our episode with (Ben’s fellow Zete) Zack Stein.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Ben Mitchell: I have always been a work to live person, not a live to work person, and that's something that I don't think you really have the ability to anticipate when you're in college, right? Like, you know, you would sort of assume that a big part of your life would be your career, and that that would be a driving motivation. The things that get me outta bed in the morning have very seldom been the things that I was paid to do.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: With an inclination toward making things, Ben Mitchell was drawn to an engineering path until differential equations came along. The promise of being able to get his hands dirty with tools right away made the computer science major more appealing. The burgeoning tech world seemed the natural fit after graduation. Luckily, the ebbs and flows of that industry gave him the opportunities to get his hands dirty by other means. Find out how keeping the maker spirit alive outside the day job can sustain you in important ways…on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with my friend Ben Mitchell, and we are going to talk about roads that lead away from home, roads that lead back to home and all the in-between. So Ben, thanks so much for being here.
BM: It's a pleasure to join you.
LJR: So I start these conversations the same way with all of my guests asking two questions and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
BM: Hmm. When I was in, when we were in college, who was I?
LJR: To me you were Beniamino because we went to Italy together.
BM: Of course.
LJR: But I think there are other parts of you.
BM: I, you know, I, there's the whole Myers-Briggs introvert/extrovert thing, and then there are true introverts versus extroverts. And I think in college I was an introverted introvert. I did not, right? I had people that I hung out with. I was on the sailing team. I was a Zete. If you were in either of those groups, I knew you very well. If you were on our Italian LSA, for at least that brief period, I knew you very well. But I was not someone that, and honestly still am not someone that has large numbers of shallow relationships. I have small numbers of deep ones. And so people, you know, play the name game when they're like, oh, you were in Dartmouth and you were there, you know, in the mid nineties. Did you know so and so? And my answer, before they even put that name out, is always no, right? Like, because the odds of the, that being one of the 10 people that I actually am going to be able to respond yes to is very, very small.
But I do think I kind of knew who I was, right? I just didn't know how it would manifest itself. I've…I feel like I've been a pretty consistent person for most of my life, and it just takes on different shapes as it goes. So, who did I think I was gonna be? That was your question. Not what did I think I was gonna do. Is that right?
LJR: Right. Who did you think it would become?
BM: Yeah. Who did I think I was gonna be. That would've been…Well, so I got my degree in computer science. You know, this was in the days of the, you know, beginning of the www, right? And so, you know, I figured I was gonna go out to Silicon Valley and, you know, make the real money. In fact, I had a friend at Dartmouth who will remain nameless, who tried to convince me to join a hedge fund. I was like, no, no, no. I'm going out to California where the real money is. Right? So, you know, I anticipated that that would be the direction that I would go. And, you know, I wrote software for six or seven years five or six years before going back and getting an MBA and, you know, learned the hard lesson that for every highly successful startup there are dozens and dozens that are not, right? But that was what I sort of envisioned and it's where I landed. I think the thing that I wouldn't necessarily have been able to appreciate at the time is that I have always been a work to live person, not a live to work person. And that's something that I don't think you really have the ability to anticipate when you're in college, right? Like, you know, you would sort of assume that a big part of your life would be your career and that that would be a driving motivation and whatnot. You know, I don't know whether it's because I never landed in a place where it felt all consuming, or if it's just that that's how I'm wired. The things that get me outta bed in the morning have very seldom been the things that I was paid to do.
LJR: Hmm, okay. And was that at Dartmouth as well?
BM: Well, you're not paid to do anything.
LJR: I know, but I mean, you think there's a payoff at the end, right?
BM: So like well, yeah. I mean, so I…
LJR: Like were you going to school in order to be in college? Or were you in college to go to school?...would be a correlate to that.
BM: I mean, I, I think I was going to school to be in college, right?
LJR: Yeah.
BM: Like, you know, I think that in, in our era, the conventional wisdom was correct that like there was no path that didn't involve going through college, right? And I think that that's starting to change today. And one of the, one of the things that it is useful to contemplate in this era is like, am I academically motivated? Am I interested in what I'm going to get out of this? You know, is like, am I going for the learning, right? You know, I think, you know, you sort of go to middle school, then you go to high school, then you go to college. And I was a good student, so I went to Dartmouth 'cause like it looked like a really fun place to go to college, right? But I wasn't there because I had a burning interest in computer science and Dartmouth was the place to get that material, right? I was there because it was a beautiful campus with lots of good sort of outdoor stuff to do and, you know what was, to me, an appealing social environment. And I'll figure out what I'm gonna do when I get there. When I came to Dartmouth, I assumed I'd probably be a mech-E. And I'm a good logic person. I'm not awesome at higher math. Right? And so like all of the math prereqs to engineering sort of bogged me down. And the computer science people were like: Build a calendar app or application in that era, right? Build a thing to do this, and you just got to go build stuff without, like all of these, like, well before we actually let you touch the tools, you're gonna have to have seven years of math, right? And so it led me down this path towards computer science because like, I like making things right. And I mean, you, your, your re— or your listeners can't see this, but I'm sitting in my shop, which is bigger than my house, right?
LJR: Yeah it’s like a mad scientist workshop back there.
BM: Yeah. And, and that's, you know, like, I have no regrets about the path that I took. But it is interesting to look back and see, you know, like what it was that triggered this departure from a path that might've made more sense for me, right?...In time. But I've, I've as we'll probably get to, I found ways to sort of come back to that over the years.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's do that. So as you were leaving college with a computer science degree at the beginning of the www period. You did Head West Young man [BM: I did.] back to where home was, right?
BM: Palo Alto.
LJR: Yep. And…
BM: Fifth Generation Palo Alto.
LJR: Wow. Wow. That's as far back as they go I think.
BM: Uhhuh my great grand…It's actually funny. So on both sides of my family, we go back like 150 years in California or more, and so people are like, where are you from? California? No Really, where are you from? No. Really? California, right? Like, I don't know where else I would say.
LJR: Yeah. So what was that first bit of the trajectory?
BM: So I'd interned with a company called Data Tools that was building backup and recovery utilities for database systems like Oracle or Sybase or, you know, I mean this was a very different era when, you know, like backup and recovery was actually not something that the database vendors thought was a feature that mattered. And so there was a whole market to build tools to do this. And so, you know, I went and took a job as a junior engineer at a startup, but a reasonably established one, writing tools to do this stuff. It was interesting. I was, by at least 10 years, the youngest person on the engineering team there, which is a double-edged sword, right? Socially, it was terrible, right? You know, I was in Palo Alto, not San Francisco. You know it…So it was sort of isolating and that's one of the reasons that I ended up going back to business school in time. But you know, I really had an opportunity to learn from people who knew what they were doing and we weren't just figuring it out as we went. And that was, you know, the upside. Anyway, I did that until that company was acquired by a large Texas company that was in the, you know, sort of mainframe industry. And they proceeded to ruin the culture, which is a common thing when small tech companies are acquired by large tech companies. And so I left Data Tools and I think I went straight from there to a company that was sort of co-founded by the guy that had founded Data Tools. And so I spent a couple years there and then that the handwriting was on the wall for this. This was in the like, you know, in the collapse of whatever it was.
LJR: ’01, yeah, yeah.
BM: The late, late nineties and that company was, was tanking. And what I realized was that I didn't want to write software forever, right? Like that was how I got there. But one of the things that was interesting about both of those companies was that they were very engineering led, but they were also very flat. And so there was no vision for what a career trajectory in engineering would look like other than writing code, right? And I just, I didn't want to sit at a terminal cranking out C++ for the next 30 years, right? And when you knew how to write software in that era, it was very hard to get hired by a company to do anything else because software engineers were so, you know, scarce.
LJR: Yeah.
BM: Obviously very different era. And so I viewed going back to business school as a way to like create a sharp break.
LJR: Right. And so you didn't go far though.
BM: No, I actually, I so, so this is a somewhat embarrassing admission, but I have applied formally to two institutions of higher education. I applied to Dartmouth early decision and got in, and I applied to Stanford Business School and got in. I didn't wanna leave the Bay Area because a big part of what I was doing was trying to rebuild a social network, right? Because, you know, to the extent that I had a group of Dartmouth friends, they were all on the East coast and I was living in a pretty small world. And so I figured, you know, like, let's burn the ships and just send out one application and put a lot of focus on it
LJR: And it worked.
BM: I would not advocate this path for anyone, but it worked.
LJR: No, but it worked in a number of ways. Not only did the application work to get you in, it did both give you that different break or, you know, kind of a new lens. And built a different social situation for yourself because those tend, those people tended to stay. [BM: Yeah.] Yeah. So talk to me about how a coder goes into business school and comes out a coder plus something.
BM: Right. Well, so I'll start with an amusing anecdote, which is that they tend to accept a lot of people with widely divergent backgrounds. The term of art for it is they bring in a lot of poets, right? People who don't have the, this sort of, and so they have this thing called math camp that they send people to, to try and get up to speed on some of this. They actually sent me to math camp, which was rather hysterical. And everybody in math camp was like, what are you doing here? Right? Like I couldn't figure out what I was doing there. But as I said, I had some challenges with higher math at Dartmouth. And so the fact that I had a C in differential equations apparently made it look like I didn't know anything about math, when I’m like…
LJR: When no one else had taken differential…
BM: Who else took differential equations?
LJR: That’s right.
BM: Like, anyway, so I was, I, I got off to a great start with math camp. So, you know, I, your question was how, what does that add? How do you get to something plus? You know, I didn't have any designs on getting out of the technology industry as a result of going to business school. What I wanted to do was open up new roles. And, you know, it is a very well-worn path, although perhaps less so then, but it's in retrospect, very you know, an obvious one to have a strong technical background, go learn something about business management, and then come back into technology on the product management side. And so that's what I decided would be the most likely path. I was open to other things, but that worked out. I actually, I went, they have career fairs at these places, right? And so I went to a career fair during the second year and there was a table set up with like a little PayPal banner on the front of it. And there's this like sort of wild-eyed looking woman with, you know, like curly red hair. She's like, would you be interested in joining PayPal? And I said, I don't know. Tell me more. And she's like, well, here's a list of all the product roles that we have. And I said, oh, great. Like, who do I contact later with like, you know…She's like, no, no, I wanna know now. I'm like, well, fraud prevention looks at, I mean, there's this whole list of areas that they're working on. This is, this is after they'd been public and after they'd been acquired by eBay. So this is not, I have a great aptitude for joining companies right after their liquidity event.
LJR: Got it.
BM: She she was like, what do you wanna do? And I was like, well, fraud looks interesting. She said, why fraud? I said, well, it seems like a fun game. You're like, You know, fighting against the Russian mafia and stuff, and it's like a, you know, a little war.
LJR: Cat and mouse.
BM: And she's like yes, you're exactly right! I lead the fraud product management group. And so I ended up working for her. And so that was an amazing run. It was after a lot of the, you know, sort of leadership changes, so, you know, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and all, well he had actually left a lot earlier, but none of these people was there anymore. But the entire…they had built what remains like one of the strongest teams ever assembled in Silicon Valley? I mean, there's, you know, this adage about the PayPal Mafia, it remains close to this day. I mean, I go to, probably every six months we'll have, you know, sort of a mini reunion that no more than a year where, where people, some fly in, a lot of us are still local, and we get together and hang out and catch up and see what people are doing. And the things that that group has gone on to do, you know, some of them are well known, a lot of them are not. But it's, it's a really, really impressive group. And that's, you know, I learned that's where you sort of apprentice as a product manager, right? And that was a a great place to do it. Of all the disciplines you might choose, it is the one with the most varied definition from company to company. Because it's kind of a white space role. So there's a core piece of it, but then you sort of flex into wherever the gaps are in the company. So there are a lot of different flavors of this discipline. And so, you know, I learned the core of the job there and also, a lot of pieces that, in retrospect, I think don't need the live in product. But it was a good way of fostering that understanding for what other disciplines would do, right? In particular design, right? Like we would write specs at the level of like, there will be a button, it will be blue. It will say, okay, it will be in the bottom right hand corner of the page when clicked, the following 17 things will be recorded in the database, right? So it's a very detailed oriented version of product management. I don't love that model, but knowing all of those things was subsequently very useful in other contexts.
LJR: Right, because you could translate that for the teams that would do that work. Yeah.
BM: Exactly.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. So we don't have to go place by place because I know you were dabbling and had like lots of different experiences. Probably not.
BM: About every two years.
LJR: Yeah. Not just because you wanted that, but probably because of the market and what things happen in Silicon Valley as we know. But more recently you've had some spins that we might, you know, find interesting. So tell us more about those.
BM: Sure. So I found myself working at a company that I never should have been working at and should have quit early. But it was a video gaming company building basically a casino around a car racing game. And I won't bore you with all the reasons that this was a terrible idea and a terrible place to be, and terrible execution and all kinds of other stuff. But that company crashed and burned both literally and figuratively. The CEO had lined up an investment from a…we were sucking wind. We were down to no money, and he had, or he had, He was really good at selling people on an idea that shouldn't have been sold. And so he had managed to line up a, a, an investment from a Swiss private equity fund that was gonna put in like $8 million, and he was on his way to the airport to get this money in Switzerland. When he gets a call from that fund that says, as it turns out, two of our LPs have died in a private jet crash leaving a ski resort in the Alps. And because they owned more than like X percent of the fund or be.. I don't, I don't know what all the Swiss law was around this, but basically we are locked down and can make no investments. And so we went from like, we're about to have $8 million in the bank to, we have three weeks of money. So the whole thing basically shut down overnight and, you know, deprived the opportunity to look for a job while you have a job, I decided I would…and I was exhausted from this thing that, that CEO was an interesting guy to work for. And so I was like, ah, you know, I enjoy boats. And there's actually like a whole triggering thing that, like way back earlier than that when I was back at PayPal that we can get into if you want, that like triggered a giant story arc that led to this. But I said to my dad, you know, while I figure out what I'm gonna do next. I, I think I might build a boat, you know, or at least get started on it. And my dad, who is not the fabricator that I am, looks at me and says, well, that sounds like fun. I'll help. I'm like, when do you get to build a boat with your dad? Right? So I'm just like, eh, job search on hold. And I took a year and a half off and built a boat full-time with my dad.
LJR: Okay. Well wait, wait, wait, wait. So let's go back to that precipitating event. [BM: Okay.] What, what was that?
BM: The precipitating event. It’s a bit circuitous, but, but here we go. So in probably 2005, a childhood friend of mine who I'm still close with said, Hey, I'm going on this trip down to Santa Barbara with some guys to go out and dive for lobsters. So unbeknownst to many people, California has lobsters. They're not the Maine lobster. They do not have claws. You cannot get them in the United States 'cause the vast majority of them are sold in China. So basically the only way you're gonna eat a California lobster is if you catch it yourself or if you happen to be at a restaurant like at a harbor in Santa Barbara. Or you know…
LJR: Right.
BM: Okay. So I go on this trip and I have the time of my life and become addicted to diving for lobsters. And then…
LJR: How far down are they Ben? Is this like skin diving?
BM: We scuba dive for them, but you can free dive for them. They could be anywhere from well, I mean, they'll, they'll go deeper than you can dive, but I catch them anywhere from 110 to four feet of water.
LJR: Okay.
BM: I mean, I spend a lot of time diving with my tank up outta the water, like diving, you know, like getting rolled around by the surf. There are times when you look at it and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna wear the helmet for that one 'cause I'm gonna get rolled around in the rocks. It's an, it's an insane activity. Like we do…I don't know how much you know about diving, but I have like a 20 foot long hose on my regulator so that I can take my tank off and shimmy into little holes in the rocks to grab lobsters and then come back out. Like we go deep into caves alone. 'cause you can't keep an eye on a buddy while you're looking for lobsters. We do things that no dive agency would suggest is a good idea. But we catch a lot of bugs. I mean, I get lobsters that are over 10 pounds on a regular basis, so it’s fun.
LJR: Okay. Okay.
BM: Anyway, so I fall in love with this activity and that led me after a few years of it to decide that I wanted to be able to do it on my own because I, I don't generally like charter fishing and charter anything because I feel like basically it's the captain of the boat that caught the fish and I was just the instrument for doing it. I bought a boat. I bought a 42-foot fishing boat. That was big enough that, you know, I live up in the San Francisco Bay area. You know, Santa Barbara's a long way down and it's a big ocean out here. Our ocean's a little different from the Atlantic. There aren't a lot of places to pull in, so you need a boat that you can actually weather a fair bit of storm in. So I bought a pretty big boat and it was something I could afford. So it was a little old and derelict and I spent a lot of time fixing it up and getting it right. And that sort of led me to really enjoy working on boats in addition to the diving, right? So this is this sort of path that I was on. Ended up getting a Coast Guard captain's license. I can take people out for money if I want to, although I'm not sure I would pass their drug test right now. You can decide whether or not you wanna put that in there.
LJR: Yeah, we'll decide. Yeah.
BM: It's legal in California. I can I've got six where I've got six plants out there in their juvenile stage.
LJR: You also like gardening. Good. Good.
BM: Yeah, it's, it's, we, I'm just a gardener. So I really started enjoying boating. Above and beyond, and I've always been a fisherman, but like a, you know, fly fisherman in freshwater and I started fishing for tuna out here and, you know, salmon and rockfish and all these things and I was really having a good time with that. And so that got me, you know, sort of down this boating path. And one of the reasons I wanted to build a small boat is that this was around the time that all my friends started having kids and crewing a 42-foot boat. You're not gonna take this. I mean, I did, but it's a pain in the ass to take it out by yourself, right?
LJR: Right.
BM: Like, and it burns a lot of fuel and you wanna divide that up amongst more guys and all these things. So, It's like, you know, I need a boat that I can single hand because that's what I'm gonna be doing most of the time. So I started looking at boat designs and found one that I liked I'm the only person I think that has ever actually built this boat. 'cause the, the guy that designed it died reasonably shortly after I finished it. But it was a, it's a, it's a beautiful design. So I did that. And so as part of that, So, to take you through this story arc, right? Like I learned a lot about how to make stuff as part of this process in including a lot of digital manufacturing things like CNC routing, CNC machining in investment casting because I needed to make parts to make this boat. [LJR: Yeah.] This is something that, you know, if you have both technical aptitude and mechanical aptitude it comes very naturally. And it just, like, I got good at this stuff. So I had no idea that like how or where I might use that professionally. But, you know, I added that a lot of this stuff to my toolkit, or at least my intellectual toolkit.
And so coming out of the boat building process, as anybody who's taken a break before knows you have to like demonstrate your relevance to the professional world again. I had a friend that was running McKinsey Digital Lab, which basically is a software development shop that's attached to McKinsey that was doing work on behalf of their clients.
LJR: Okay.
BM: And so I joined that because I could, right? It was there. It was an interesting role. My job was basically to help build some of the infrastructure to support that practice. So technically I was a consultant, but the firm was my client and I was on like a year-long project to like figure out how we bring in third party vendors to support this stuff. And it was a fun job. But after that year, and we sort of got that to where it needed to be, I was either gonna need to transition over to being an actual consultant that had to like get on airplanes and find business and do all of these things or leave the firm, right? And I was my plan was to, to do the former, right? And try and figure that out. It wasn't entirely clear how to do that because most of the partners saw me as like an internal ops guy, not as a consultant. And so like I was gonna have to go through this whole rebranding. And about that time, a good friend of mine who is a recruiter and was an in-house recruiter at PayPal called me up and he is like, Hey, you built a boat. Do you know anything about CMC machining? And I said, you mean CNC machining? He said, yeah, that. And I said, yes, I have three CNC machines in my garage. And he said, Ah, You gotta talk to these guys. And so he introduced me to the founders of a company that was then maybe like 15 or 20 people that were trying to automate G Code generation for prototype machining. And that's a lot. That's a mouthful. But basically if you wanna make a part for a prototype that might be made by a variety of other processes in production, it is frequently machined, which is unlike additive or 3D printing, you take a block of material and you remove, you cut away the pieces. You don't want leaving you with the part like, you know, sort of what was, was it Da Vinci's thing? Like I envision the, the sculpture and I remove everything that isn't part of it, right. [LJR: Okay.] Or I don't remember exactly what that quote was. But there's some adage about that. And, and this is a lot harder to automate than three d printing for reasons that I will spare you. And so we set about to do that and I spent three years leveraging like the MBA and you know, sort of all this manufacturing expertise that I had accumulated. Ultimately for naught. The way that I would describe that project is that it is a DARPA moonshot-class undertaking that we were trying to do on a shoestring budget, and we just…we couldn't get there. Like it is an achievable goal in my opinion, but not one that, that anybody's gonna. Get to without a ton of money and commitment.
LJR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BM: So it died, but I had a ball doing it.
LJR: Yeah, it sounds like it. And as you say, like pulls together so many pieces of the things that you'd learned as a consequence of all these other experiences that you had said yes to along the way. So I think that's great. And then you've been…parlayed that in and other relationships and things into more product roles and kind of bigger things. But I am kind of struck by this thread that runs through of you still are working to live and it just so happens that every once in a while, the working part is part and parcel of living and kind of gets to meld them. But it's all these other things that you are just soaked into [BM: Yeah] in your workshop and
BM: No yeah. I marvel at the number of colleagues that I've had over the years who accumulate vacation days to the cap and then are like, they lose them or they're forced to take them, and I'm like, I have never had this problem, right? Like, my problem is having enough vacation days to do all the stuff that I want to go do. I don't know how you, you, you have that problem, so Yeah. No, I there are whole other passions and pursuits that I continue to do. I still build a lot of sets for theatrical productions. I…
LJR: It's amazing. I mean, and I get it. 'cause I think you can in, as you said, my listeners can't see this, but all of the things behind you look like you could do anything. There could be things bubbling up or being fabricated or anything. And I love that that, too, is still in that like, I don't need the math, I just wanna go build stuff, right? So you said you did kind of know who you were all along and so much of it is that maker at the core.
BM: Well what's funny is I'm a lot better at math than most people that build things, which makes it easy to like be very helpful in contexts where people are trying to figure out how to get stuff built.
LJR: Right. So I guess the classic question that I ask here, I feel like I already know the answer, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. So you go back and you find your 20-year-old Ben, and you give him a preview and say, Hey, look, this is all the things you'll be doing, and by the time you're 25 plus years out, this is what life will have looked like. What would he say to you?
BM: Hmm. It's, it's not the question I thought you were gonna ask. I thought it was like the, what advice would you give? What would he say to me? I think, I think he'd be happy. This is a different lens on it. I was at an event last weekend that, for me, always stimulates a great deal of introspection. So as I was driving home, you know, I was thinking about the fact that I have tried sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes just it just happens, to live in a way that if I were told I had a week to live, that I wouldn't feel like I had mortgaged my present for a future that might not happen. And, and so, you know, I check in with myself every once in a while to say, you know, do I feel like I'm still on that? That if I were presented with that circumstance, right? Like you've got three weeks to live, that I would have regrets. And you know, I mean, I have, I would have minor ones. You know, I really wish I hadn't, you know, said that thing to that girl way back when or whatever. But like, you know, from a balance of life perspective, I feel like I've explored the things that I've wanted to explore and I hope to have the opportunity to keep doing that. I have great friends who I see regularly. It's a small group, but it's a strong group. I have a wife and dog that I love. I have a family that I'm still close with. Ironically, I'm the last one that's still in California. Everybody else moved to Idaho. You know that to me is, I guess the question that I hope I would've asked as a 20-year-old would've been, do you feel like you've lived well? And the answer would be yes.
LJ:R Yeah. Yeah, I think that's totally right Ben. And I wasn't actually expecting that question to land as a value judgment. And when I said I thought I knew your answer, I thought it was going to be the Yes, I get to keep doing the stuff I love to do and great, yeah, the, the job is a byproduct, but like I, I get to keep exploring and doing these things and to know that you were. Diving for California lobsters like that seems really cool and unanticipated.
BH: And so that's the thing is like, I don't know that, I don't know that at 20, I would have predicted that all of the things that I'm doing now would've been on the list, right?
LJR: Yeah.
BH: So if you told me I was building a boat, my might or might not have said, well that seems like a waste of time. I probably would've thought that it was a good time. So, so I don't know that, that I would've predicted the passions, but I, I am glad that I've had the. Really the privilege and the luxury of being able to explore those passions, right? Like you know, again, I, I, I gotta work for a living, but like I am, you know, I have the ability to do stuff and it's nice.
LJR: Yeah. And you might not have been able to anticipate the individual passions, but you would've known like, I'm gonna keep being passionate about stuff. And if that gets squashed by like life and the man, like, that's not cool. And to see that it hasn't, I can only imagine is like, oh. All right. That sounds good.
BH: Well said, well said.
LJR: So, I am so glad, Ben, that you shared this with us, and we just can't wait to see where the next passions bubble up from and how you take them, I'm sure with both hands and feet. And I hope you keep us posted.
BM: I hope too as well. It's been far too long, Leslie.
LJR: Yeah. All right. Thanks, Ben.
BM: Yeah.
LJR: That was Ben Mitchell, who's had a bunch of experiences in the online world, including product management, service delivery, and privacy in such settings as PayPal, Cisco, and Facebook. He's also gotten into lobster diving, has built a boat with his dad, and continues to build large scale mechanical contraptions for theatrical shows all in his non-working hours.
We often talk about how you can engage with our show in ways other than listening and this is a banner example. Check out the show notes in your podcast app or go to RoadsTakenshow.com and search the episodes tab for Ben Mitchell to find all sorts of extra goodies, including a link to Ben's chronicles of his boat building adventures with his dad and an awesome picture of Ben with an absolutely gigantic lobster. Whatever you have in your mind's eye, I guarantee it will be bigger than that. So thanks for listening and continuing to tune in for more surprises like that on future episodes with my guests and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.