Doing What Makes You Happy

My paternal grandfather was, for lack of a better term – a mechanical and mathematical genius. He dropped out of school in the 6^th grade to work by collecting driftwood under Brooklyn’s famed Coney Island boardwalk for $1 a day.

He later fished out a worn calculus textbook from a trash bin and taught himself how to determine such esoteric things as critical numbers and average function values. At 16, he built his fist car from scratch and as an adult earned seven mechanical patents from the U.S. Navy in World War II.

He later became the chief mechanic at the old Topps Factory – best known for their packets of Major League Baseball cards. Needless to say, as his first grandson, I had more MLB player cards than any 10 kids in the neighborhood.

I always maintained that had he been born in say 1951 or 1961 instead of 1911, he would have easily been in the same software development arena as a Gates or Jobs, he was simply that smart.

But for all his accomplishments, do you know what he really wanted to do?

Operate a hot dog cart.

Let me repeat that for emphasis – a hot dog cart. You know those stainless-steel contraptions on two wheels that serve up water-soaked hot dogs with your choice of side condiments like relish, mustard, onions and sauerkraut. Why he never did it in his later years I will never know. Tragically, 40 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes and a penchant for eating fat-laden meats ended his life all to soon at age 55.

I mention this only because a similarly intelligent gentlemen I know from my health club recently quit his job as a mathematics professor at a local college and decided to open a food truck – the next iteration of hot dog carts and one of the chic food trends today. While in my grandfather’s generation, coffee and food vehicles offered plain vanilla fare, now their respective menus offer scores of ethnic cuisines ranging from Korean to Peruvian.

My gym mate’s truck serves Southwestern fare with a bit of Tex-Mex thrown in and to tell the truth, I have never seen him happier. He makes his lunch rounds beginning at 11 and his work day ends at roughly 3:30. He sometimes adds a dinner shift in as well for those businesses not on a 9-5 schedule.

One day I went to see him in action, and with snaking line of customers awaiting their orders he turned to me and said in 30 years of teaching rarely did his students ever thank him for anything and now he gets kudos all day long not to mention terrific customer reviews on Yelp.

I was sad that I never once saw that same look of content on my grandfather.