Welcome!

I never thought I would return to writing emails, but after following the success stories of Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Mark Manson, The Daily Stoic, and Morning Brew, I decided to “give it a go.”

Many readers remember the Chicago Android community I created in 2009, resulting in over a hundred technical conferences and a ten-thousand-strong member community.

I hope to build a new community based not on the youthful hunger to succeed and enthusiasm that drove me then but on my insight, experience, and desire to share.

I bare my soul and reveal much about myself in the message below.

It is a risk, but I hope you will appreciate it and understand my motivation.

When I was growing up, I did not have a mentor. 

My intelligent and beautiful mother died after years of complications when I was 12 years old.

My father and the rest of the family moved to the USA. I was left behind in gloomy, perpetually drunk, socialist Poland. At first, I lived with an aunt and later with a neighbor. 

Life back then, I can only describe as a semi-feral state of skipping classes, dating, and drinking way too much straight vodka for any adult, not to mention for a teen. My friends were my only true family; I love and cherish each of you until this day.

Six years later, I got a green card visa to the USA right before I turned 18.

In the USA, we lived in Chicago. The Carl Schulz H.S. was a ghetto with gangs fighting by hundreds. During my tenure there, three people got shot to death; their faces are still in my memory.

It was not all bad; I became a good student, which was not too hard to achieve in an inner-city public school. I participated in an Academic Decathlon and even won a medal. 

I had a couple of good teachers to whom I am thankful. However, I still needed mentors.

In Chicago, where we lived, I was surrounded by cleaners and construction workers. My father worked as a janitor until his retirement. I also cleaned an engineering office building at night on weekends, returning home at 3 AM.

Unsurprisingly, I did not see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

When a U.S. Marines recruiter called me, I said "yes" on the spot. Soon after, I was shipped to San Diego for the boot camp. I still barely spoke English. 

I excelled in the Marines. Back in Poland, I was a competitive runner; my name might still be featured on the school gym leaderboard. At the same time, I practiced Shotokan karate with the 4th Dan Sensei Rączka. This Sensei, if he were training kids in the USA, surely would be locked in prison. We feared and loved him, and his training made the Marine boot camp look easy.

I went to engineering school in North Carolina, where we learned electronics.

The Marine Corps sent me to Okinawa, Japan, which I fell in love with. 

Upon reporting to my unit in Okinawa, my platoon sergeant asked me categorically, "Are you dive-certified? You will be."

He was a PADI instructor. For the next three years, we dived into the world’s most beautiful coral reefs every weekend. For New Year's, we had a tradition of SCUBA diving to (better, not to mention) decompression depth at midnight. We even had a champagne bottle open down deep.

Marines party hard, really hard. At that time, I lost my appreciation for drinking and parties, but I never missed it.

I extended my stay twice and stayed in Okinawa for three years. I will describe my military life in future posts.

Also, in Okinawa, I studied Cultural Anthropology of East Asia at night at the University of Maryland, Asian Division. There, I met my first mentor, Dr. Janice Turner, an anthropology professor. I will describe her research on Tibetan Buddhism at length in another post. Dr. Turner-Sacherer, a Sorbonne Ph.D., would bring a meter-tall stack of books to class, some in French and some in English. For the first time, I wanted to be a scientist and a researcher.

Once I left the Marines, I went through a difficult financial time back in the USA. One night, I was sitting on the midnight shift in a highrise building in Chicago, working as a lobby doorman. I always had a pile of books and a laptop. A young Russian guy, Sergei, definitively, after having a few drinks, looked at my books and, after a short conversation, asked me to come to their company for an interview.

The company was RollingStone.com — yes, the most popular music magazine in history! In the interview, I told the panel that I did not have a degree (I was a current computer science student) and had never worked as a programmer.  My future boss asked about my Websites. It was around 1999, the year of the Internet Boom. I had about a dozen sites. He quickly checked that they were registered in my name, and I got an offer on the spot. It was a miracle for a young doorman aspiring to enter the Internet software engineering era.

I will not bore you with a long career story.

Still, three short years later, I was a director of technology in a startup we took from founders, two VPs, me, and an assistant working literally in a boiler room to a profitable 125-person business.

I had to unlearn all my bad habits, as I made all the mistakes a person can make. Habits and best practices are the underlying theme of my posts.

I experienced many companies, both very large (NTT, Sears, Harman/Samsung) and quite a few startups. 

I have organized over 100 technical conferences and spoken at as many.

I have advised and consulted many startups, to the point that I would say, “If I hear another … (same o) idea, I will … !”

I had a successful startup company with a dozen brilliant engineers. I also taught Computer Science at a local college.

So here I am now.

I want to share the lessons and try to save people decades of struggle that could have been prevented if I had mentors earlier on.

However, more than career growth is needed; you must have a mental balance.

If you let me, I want to write to you about all of that.

If you enjoyed reading, forward this email to a few like-minded friends and help me build the community.

https://ukidlucas.beehiiv.com/?via=Uki