Interview 2: Charles Hadrann

Charles Hadrann is the very friendly, very talkative, and very opinionated owner of Wright Bros. Cycles works in Fremont, where I spent a lot of time over the summer. I wanted to interview Charles because his generosity and sense of humor, among other things, endear him to me, and also because he always seemed to me to be annoyed by crappy stuff, like I am (in the shop, he would sometimes call me over to a bike he’d be working on to make an example of it: “Look at this! It’s a piece of shit! A Sears bike! Factory made crap! It’s doesn’t deserve to be called a bike, it’s a bicycle shaped object!”). He also often said that patience was the most important tool in the shop, which always stuck with me.
I met Charles at 10:00 on a Friday morning at a coffee shop to do the interview. I started off by explaining what the whole interview thing was supposed to be about, and without my even asking a real question, he launched into his worldview and all I had to do was absorb what he said as he talked for a straight half hour. The very first thing he said was about keeping a positive outlook. What good will bitching and grumbling about something really do for you, anyway, he said. Having a problem solving approach to things instead is important to him, because bad things are going to happen no matter what, things that aren’t in your control, so what’s the use in griping? What can you do to make the situation better for yourself? How can you fix this thing that’s broken? Where’s the silver lining?
Something else Charles placed a lot of importance on is learning and knowledge. Particularly the passing on of it: connecting to people by teaching, mentoring, sharing skills, etc—he thinks that people shouldn’t keep it all to themselves, because then it’s as if it’s not even there at all. I can really jive on that, especially because those kinds of personal connections are important to me, and perhaps a bit because of the “passing down knowledge and skills” phrase. I don’t know what it is about it that draws me in so much, maybe it’s that it somehow implies tradition, which I find comforting. Doing things the same way they’ve been done forever, the way people have taught them to other people, provides roots to the past, which is important to me. I know that sounds tacky, but there ya go.
As much as I embrace learning and knowledge that way, it’s also something I struggle a little bit with. I firmly believe that people don’t need to know everything about everything, and am comfortable with common sense knowledge that people gain from experience of the world and people around them, and that isn’t necessarily always backed up by science. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake and progress for progress’s sake aren’t good things to go after all the time, because then it gets us too much power and we just start trying to fix what’s not broken, and do things just because we can. This really freaks me out, and might explain part of my resistance to fancy new science and technology.
Anyways, back to Charles. He talked about how looking at and taking things in baby steps is important. A big project, for example, should be broken down into lots of little projects, and that way it’s not so daunting. To illustrate this, he used a bunch of marble cubes as a metaphor. “Take a cube, and carve and wear it down until it’s a perfect sphere. Then throw it over your shoulder and move on to the next one.” Small habits also seem to be important to him. When he was talking about learning, he said he tries to make sure he learns one new thing a day. Reading something everyday, something he really wants to read, not like the newspaper or things like that, is also something he makes a habit of. I can connect this to my appreciation of simple pleasures. Every once and a while something of grand proportions is always good, but really, what makes me smile are the little things. A good cup of cocoa, the satisfaction of doing laundry, a nice pen, a really good song or piece of art…these kinds of small things provide sort of an underlying foundation of satisfaction and happiness that everything else rests on.
Two words that Charles came back to several times were patience and perseverance. When I asked him about his thoughts on quality, he looked at the question from the perspective of fixing something and doing a quality job. “Do a good job the first time,” he said, “or you’ll have to take more time to fix it the next time.” This often means taking time and having patience with it. And if you get frustrated with it, take a break, come back to it and keep trying. Patience is something that’s really important to me to have, and I like to think that I have it when it counts, even though I can be impulsive at times. Perseverance I’m not as sure about, I haven’t really thought about it much. If there’s something I want or a goal that I have, I think that I’m usually able to go for it and keep at it until I get what I want, but I also know about myself that I’ll give something up pretty fast, or just flat out refuse to do it, if I think I’m going to be bad at it. I like to be good at whatever I do, so if something doesn’t come naturally to me, I tend to be stubborn about not doing it for the sake of my large and fragile ego, even if I know it’ll be a rip-roarin’ good time.
Given how much I like and respect Charles, I took pretty much all of what he said during the interview to heart. He didn’t so much change my beliefs as much as reinforce them, but he definitely gave me a few new things to think about, most importantly perseverance, and caused me to mull over things that have been floating around my head for a while, like the knowledge and learning thing.