In this installment of Jerry’s Story, I’m not going to risk turning a lively discussion into a pile of sterile facts. I’ll present the email discussion we had with little editing.

We were talking about whether having unlimited access to ice cream might lead to weight gain, and how he gained so much weight he was offered a football scholarship. But it wasn’t just the ice cream.

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(Jerry Weinberg) I was a champion eat-contest participant. My specialties were watermelon, pie, and hot dogs.

(Danny Faught) You’re still full of surprises! What age did that start, and what got you started?

I must have been 15. In Omaha. The first one I recall was at a birthday party. I ate 36 hot dogs.

Then, at the University of Nebraska, they held these contests fairly regularly.

I imagine that this was a cultural trend at the time. Seems that would make it expensive to throw a birthday party, though, supplying all that food. 

What kind of prizes did you win from competitive eating?

I don’t recall. They must have been insignificant. Besides, it was the glory that I was after.

How long did you continue to compete before you lost interest?

I never lost interest, but once I had Crohn’s Disease, my eating habits had to change drastically.

How did you feel about winning? (Or in other cases, not winning?)

Mostly I won. I was very good, and knew the secrets. Like not worrying about seeds in the watermelon, and managing to spill most of the melon on the floor as I swung my mouth back and forth.

This would be a very different kind of watermelon time. 🙂

Indeed.

How did I feel? I expected to win, so it was no big deal. I suppose I would have felt bad if I had lost, but if I lost, I must have felt so bad that I erased all memory of it.

How did you learn the secrets that helped you win?

Through experience, I guess.

So nobody cared that so much of the watermelon was on the floor rather than in your stomach?

Not at all. Watermelon spectators expect a certain amount of slop on the floor. In fact, that’s one of the attractions, different from polite everyday life.

Was this an attraction to you, to have permission to make a mess?

I don’t think I ever needed permission for that.

Awesome. Tell me more about messes you made.

While eating?

Whatever you were thinking about when you said you never needed permission to make a mess.

In general, I’ve lived by the credo that it’s better to ask forgiveness after than permission before. I was always doing new things that people didn’t understand until after they’d seen the results.

Who else do you know who follows this credo? Any examples of them having similar successes as you, or ever having big regrets about it?

I recall discussing this with Ken Iverson, creator of APL (and a good friend). He was certainly successful.

I think I may have learned it from Jim Turnock, my boss for a while at IBM, who headed the Mercury (IBM) projects.

Have you counseled people to stop asking for permission?

Many.

I can recall cases of you telling me *to* ask for permission, like when asking someone for a hug.

Yes, that’s definitely a case where you should honor another’s personal space.

Examples? Well, there’s all the many experiential exercises I’ve concocted. People generally didn’t understand why I didn’t just lecture, so I never asked permission, and some of those exercises definitely looked like messes.

And that’s just one example, with dozens of sub-examples.

Are these the attitudes of the people participating in the exercises?

Well, I should correct myself a bit here. I always ask permission of the participants. As you may recall, before any exercise, but with particular emphasis on new, untried ones, I always remind people of their right to refuse or to drop out. That way, I always have permission, because they have permission to take care of themselves. And, I make sure they don’t have to ask permission if they want to drop out. Nor do they have to explain why they want to.

How does it go from looking like a mess to being a great success? (Depends on who thinks it’s a mess, I think.)

You’re right. But, for example, in some exercises we make a great physical mess (as in House of Cards, which winds up with cards all over the walls, floor, and even ceiling). Even then, make the mess part of the exercise, and try to make it reversible (no permanent damage to the premises).

Sometimes, though, an exercise makes a “mess” of a participant’s model of the world. That’s really the point of the exercise, but I always try to work with that participant to make a new model to replace the mess.

What’s another example of not asking permission?

One great example was in the Mercury Project. To do a real-time system on the IBM 709, we needed an interrupt clock, and there wasn’t one on IBM’s machine. We did ask for one to be built, but IBM refused. So, we just snuck into the factory and soldered in our own interupter without telling anyone.

The funny part of this story is that when a machine arrived in Bermuda, it was a different machine, so we had to put in another interrupter. And we never did find out who got the other machine, and if they even noticed the non-standard interrupter.

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And that’s where we left it. Several months later, Jerry sent me a news article about the winner of the Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest, adding “I was never in his class.” This prompted me to try several different angles to learn more about the context of his competitive eating experiences. I got a few more facts, but nothing that really furthered the story. I searched the student newspaper for the University of Nebraska to see if he was ever mentioned as a winner, and I came up empty, but I did uncover several other interesting things about his college experience to talk about. And that’s how the stream of consciousness of our discussions went.

The next installment is Jerry, The Student (Undergrad Years).