On Life Lessons from Four Gregs
I’ve known four Gregs in my life and learned something important from each of them before we lost touch.
I met my first Greg at the age of twelve, when my parents sent me to the family farm in North Dakota for two weeks. It was where my mother was born and raised in the forties and fifties, until her father decided to pass the farm on to her eldest brother, Kenny. I remember the trip to Bismarck as my first commercial flight, on a shiny silver Boeing 727.
My cousin Greg, who was three years older, taught me how to drive the tractor (pictured above). It started with a crank, belching smoke as it sputtered to life. Working the clutch and the gears made it a challenging first drive, and I don’t think I moved it more than a hundred feet in a circle before he took over to show me its top speed. I remember feeling small and scared, perched high up on the tall, lumbering machine, hoping I could stop it. Heavy machinery wasn’t for me.
Greg and his older brother Dick baled hay for a day or two while I was there, and they showed me how to lift and toss the bales onto the flatbed trailer as one of them drove the tractor slowly across the field. So, in addition to my mind learning to operate an automatic transmission, my body experienced the sweaty satisfaction of hard work.
I met my second Greg at age twenty-seven when I moved to Seattle for postdoctoral research. Like the other Gregs, he was more experienced than I was, about five years older. Our supervisor paired us together on a long-term, monotonous project that would later be called foolish when it came time for other scientists to eulogize him, but none of us knew any better at the time. Working together at the bench one day, Greg calculated that after he found a faculty position, he’d only need to apply for six or seven grants until retirement.
I hadn’t yet thought of science as a line of work with a regular rhythm like farming, and still had my head in the clouds, dreaming of flashy discoveries that would change the world. Greg plugged away day after day, making new molecules for me to test, and our publications built into a portfolio that led to faculty positions for both of us in 1998. We both grew up in the Midwest, and when he returned there, we lost touch. I read that his family faced tragedy seven years later when a drunk driver struck their minivan, causing it to burst into flames. The crash killed two of their three children and left them with severe burns.
He and his wife turned to their faith to forgive the driver, who was on his third drunk-driving conviction. He was also a father of three and would spend twenty-five years away from them in prison. Their forgiveness made me realize that I needed to release any anger I held against my father’s second wife and the program heads I felt had wronged me at work. Bottled-up anger would only shorten my life. Reading about their experience reminded me of a song by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, released in 1997, when Greg and I worked together. “The Impression That I Get” was a number-one hit that year and was about being close to those who have faced tragedy and wondering whether they themselves can endure the challenge with grace. “Knock on wood” that I never need to find out either.[i]
I met my third Greg at age thirty-four when I left academia to work at a small biotech in Vancouver. Before it turned dark, there was a honeymoon year or so when Greg, my supervisor on paper and who had been with the company for four years, gave me some advice on project management. He said, “Do what makes you angry first.” He was a local Canucks fan, and it struck me that it might be a regional sentiment rooted in hockey culture.
My first reaction was that it wouldn’t help me because I wasn’t angry about anything they’d asked me to do. My second reaction was a question: “What have I gotten myself into?” I would soon discover that our president was prone to angry outbursts that made the office staff weep, and he had a way of setting impossible deadlines for those beneath him. Greg’s advice was an important survival skill in an unsettling place.
My approach was to go after low-hanging fruit instead and work my way up to more challenging tasks when my brain could handle them. His was the opposite, and not something I could do given my lack of emotional range for work tasks. Greg’s technique may have been inspired by another Vancouver local, Brian Tracy, who popularized an approach called “Eat the frog” in his 2001 book “Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time.” Brian cited Mark Twain as inspiring the title with the quote, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” A thorough investigation reveals that Nicolas Chamfort was the first to publish the saying in 1795.[ii]
Greg and I parted ways after two years, and I listed him as a job reference until I returned to teaching in 2007. I congratulated him on getting European approval for the drug we worked on, but plans to meet afterward never materialized.[iii]
I met my fourth Greg at age forty-one when I took over his desk, telephone number, and most of his teaching duties. He had worked at the British Columbia Institute of Technology since August 1972 and was the last of the old guard to retire. At his retirement party, our new dean looked at the two of us and said to me, “You’ve got some big shoes to fill.” I gulped and wondered what I’d gotten myself into again. He was a veteran of political battles between the faculty and administration, and rumour had it that he was part of the group that forced the president to fire the previous dean. During my interview, he asked me which teaching areas were my weakest, and I admitted that I hoped to avoid teaching gross anatomy. In fact, I had never studied gross anatomy, and neuroanatomy was my worst subject in graduate school. He reassured me that our department had a dedicated anatomist who taught all of those courses.
As fate would have it, our anatomist went on leave shortly after I started, and the department asked me to take on part of her course load. Greg came in once a week to tutor me, and it motivated me to study beyond his old lecture notes before we sat down. Despite his mentoring, the program was unhappy with my performance and complained to my supervisor. When I asked Greg what I could do, he said, “Unfortunately, sometimes people cut you off at the knees.”
I wasn’t familiar with the expression, but I understood the meaning. It wasn’t my teaching that was the problem; the program head didn’t like me, and no matter what I did, he would find reasons to make my life difficult. He had been one of Greg’s students, though not one of his best, and I was repeating the cycle by giving some of his students low marks. Another instructor in the program told me, “I don’t spread their grades out as much as you do.” I got the message and handed those courses over to others in the department, learning that some battles weren’t worth the fight.
I like to think of the four Gregs in my life as guides who appeared when I needed them most—to borrow from the Hollywood trope. “Greg” comes from the Greek word for "watchful" or "vigilant," leading them to become guides or protectors, if you believe that a name influences personal development. They helped me build skills and delivered poignant lines like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” Thank you, Gregs, wherever you are.
Any thoughts? How are you doing? I’d love to chat…
[i] The band reportedly broke up twenty-five years later when the lead singer refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and used their music to promote a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccination mandate rally.
[ii] Mark Twain is a popular choice for misattribution due to his prolific witticisms.
[iii] I reached out to him a few times after I transitioned, and he never replied. Curious whether it’s a case of missed connections or if he’s reluctant to meet me post-transition, I discovered that he is an active member of a local evangelical church. I don’t know whether it’s an affirming congregation, but few fundamentalist churches that speak in tongues are. I still have hope we’ll reconnect someday. Brian Tracy is affiliated with the Heritage Foundation in the U.S., the organization responsible for Project 2025, which inspired many of the Trump administration’s anti-trans and anti-feminist policies.