I learned today from colleagues that one of my mentors had passed away. Patrick Winston was one of my thesis advisors in graduate school, but also one of the people who first inspired me to seek to go there (along with Gerry Sussman). He was also my boss as a TA, a colleague and collaborator, and also someone that I think I may have disappointed with my choices.
At first, I didn't quite engage, but a colleague and friend asked me how I was doing, and I found myself writing back much more than I had thought to, as I thought more and more about how big an influence Patrick was on my whole life, as well as my career. I learned so much from him, both his good points and his flaws. And more than anything else, I think I learned about the courage to let go of perfectionism and worry less about being right than just being better than I was before.
Patrick, in my experience, was not particularly a natural leader or a charismatic speaker or a gifted teacher. And yet he excelled at all three, at leadership and speaking and teaching, not by dint of some amazing gift but by the fact that he deeply cared to do all of these things well. To do this, Patrick collected heuristics from observing people he admired, learning not their brilliance but their ways of avoiding disaster. And amazingly, it turns out that you can go a lot farther and get a lot more done just by carefully using a little checklist of heuristics to avoid pitfalls than you can get done by being a brilliant egotist with a fatal, unacknowledged flaw. Patrick was one of the most humble people that I knew, with a quiet way of speaking and a careful attention to the big picture and just plain being effective and consistent at whatever he judged to be the most important things to do.
Patrick was generous with his knowledge too. Above all else, I knew Patrick as a teacher, a teacher in many different ways, who would smuggle extra lessons into all his actions, just because he thought his listeners might appreciate knowing these things too. I learned from him for years, and I'm still using many of the most important lessons that he taught me.
Just last week, I was talking about Patrick to a younger colleague, introducing yet another person to his wonderful heuristics on how to give a talk. I'm thinking about that as I write this, and how grateful I've been for all those lessons, and the trust and help he gave me when I was his student, even when I was on my way to make another set of interesting mistakes. But I'm also thinking about how I took his presence for granted and hadn't stopped by to visit him at MIT for years, which makes me sad.
He was not a Great Man, in the sense that I no longer believe in Greatness (partly due to the lessons I learned from him). But he was a person who achieved greatness in many different ways and, I believe, above all else in the ways he invested in teaching so many of us in so many different ways.
I am deeply grateful for the gifts that I received from him, and will continue to do my best to pass them on.
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