By Randal Chinnock, Founder/CEO

Engineers aren’t generally thought of as a particularly passionate lot. (There’s that pocket protector stereotype and all). I beg to differ. Passion defines how I live my life—I tend to walk, drive, dance and work at a fast, intense clip as people who know me well will attest. Even when I’m sleeping, I’m thinking, moving, inventing, and dreaming of my next project. Passion also defines the team at Optimum, whether we’re designing the world’s smallest high definition 3D camera for a medical device or searching out ways to diagnose cancer with a flash of light. But, as I’ve learned over the years, not every person, whatever his or her field, defines passion in quite the same way.

I discovered one memorable definition of passion recently, when I traveled from Optimum’s headquarters in Southbridge, MA, to Babson College in Wellesley, MA for a two-day CEO retreat. The featured speaker was Benjamin Zander, founder and conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, Ted Talk superstar (more on that later), and coauthor (along with his wife, psychologist Rosamund Zander) of the best selling The Art of Possibility.

The 75-year-old British-born Zander is best described as irrepressibly exuberant. With wild-gray hair, he bounces around the stage, his stories, reflections, anecdotes and musical wizardry creating an energy that makes it impossible for his audience not to feel transformed, in big and little ways. Watching him, I understood why Zander is hired for gigs like talking to world leaders at Davos. Our group was a small one, but Zander was still firing on all cylinders, and he expected us to do so, as well. At the start of the session, he urged – no, COMPELLED — the CEOs who were hiding out in the back row to move up front, as close as possible, then invited us to stand (in front of) the lecturn, one by one, to talk about our passions.

I thought about what I’d say for a minute, then quickly realized that I’m happiest when I’m building something—a window perch for our cat, a gazebo with a soaring ceiling  and a glass floor that straddles the tiny stream on the property around my home–so it wasn’t tough for me to decide to get up there and talk about my “edifice complex.”

I told the group how, at 14, I built a three-room tree house in our yard in Katonah, New York, complete with brick fireplace and beds that hung from the ceiling, an edifice so complex (at least from the perspective of an inexperienced a 14-year-old boy) that it eventually became a feature story in The New York Times.

I’m still building every day, but Zander reminded me that as head of Optimum Technologies, I am also very much a conductor—directing my team toward the right rhythm, fine-tuning the harmonies between engineer and client, and creating beautiful, useful, life-changing medical devices by the melding of all of our efforts.

But Zander’s anecdotes also helped me to look at the work we do from a new perspective. At one point, he recounted the famous story of the sculptor Michelangelo being asked of his art: “How do you do it?” Purportedly, the sculptor replied, “It’s easy—the sculpture is in the block of stone all the time. I just chip away until it’s revealed.” The anecdote made me realize that we engineers, too, start with what often feels like a formless block of marble. Maybe it’s an idea for a new kind of medical device, maybe a conversation with a surgeon that unveils the need for a new kind of snake robot. From the outside, the challenge looks complex, almost impossible, but like the Renaissance artist, we chip away, passionately, transforming ideas — our “marble”— shaping it, and eventually turning it into something potentially life-changing.

Speaking of life-changing, I urge you all to take a look at Zander’s passionate Ted Talk.  It’s called the Transformative Power of Classical Music, but it’s not so much about Beethoven as it is about leadership, and about how to lead a zestier, richer life. I promise you’ll walk away from this 20-minute clip with more ideas for bringing passion into your every day.