About Sorrel Jakins

The first thing you notice about Sorrel is how happy he is. He’s always laughing about something and has one of the most contagious smiles I’ve ever seen. You’ll also notice how very open, blunt and honest he is. When I asked about this, he said:

“I grew up living with my older brother. I was the youngest of seven children and I was totally ignored. No one ever asked my opinion. No one ever wanted to know what I thought about things. So I kind of learned to fend for myself. I’d head down to the beach and I would be hungry. But I wouldn’t have any money. I’d see people eating sandwiches and I’d approach them and say, ‘I’m hungry. Are you going to eat all those sandwiches?’”

When he finished high school, Sorrel went to the government employment office and was randomly assigned to be a punching and balancing clerk. This didn’t particularly interest him, so he asked if he could switch jobs with the guy just before him in line who was assigned to be a ground controller at the airport (much cooler, he said). The answer was no, so he went to manage punch cards.
From there, Sorrel joined the South African army for a year and then was indentured to the railway for another year. At 19, Sorrel used the money he had made in the military to pay to serve a religious mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and served as a missionary in South Africa.
When his mission was over, he went to college and studied civil engineering. He worked in a factory, and then as a consulting engineer. While he didn’t mind being assigned to clean and un-jam the sewage plant sump pumps (thanks to his background in delivering messy baby animals on the farm) it was the management of property lines that turned Sorrel away from civil engineering. He realized he liked the idea of an air-conditioned office much more than using a machete to chop through fields of control-burned sugar cane to find a property line. So he set out to find a comfortable office job.
Sorrel found every business in the area that had a mainframe computer, and applied to be a programmer at each one. With no previous experience as a programmer, nobody would hire him. As luck would have it, Sorrel was talking to a bank teller one day, and the teller mentioned that the bank was short-staffed in the computer department. They hired Sorrel on the spot as a mainframe operator.
It wasn’t long until he realized that being an operator was “really boring,” so he brought some light reading to pass the time. His supervisor discouraged this – “We’re not paying you to read cowboy novels!!” – so Sorrel pulled the mainframe computer manuals off the shelf to read instead. Before long, he knew more about computers than anyone else at the bank.
At the time, his wife worked during the day and Sorrel worked through the night. Sometimes, he said, he would go weeks without seeing her. One day, when Sorrel was home alone, he heard the doorbell ring, and after answering the door heard his wife say,

“Hi. I’d like to introduce myself–I’m your wife.”

Sorrel got the message. He contacted IBM and started working more consistent, normal hours. But in 1985, congress mandated that businesses pull out of South Africa – immediately vaporizing his job. Sorrel had been doing a lot of international travel for IBM – work that was based out of Colorado – so he called up a coworker in the Boulder office who said he’d hire Sorrel right away.
On a trip to the United States to explore his job options, Sorrel visited his uncle in Salt Lake City. He took a tour of Brigham Young University, at that time, and learned that BYU’s data center only guaranteed an up-time of 75% (meaning that in any given week, the computer system would be down one full day, and one quarter of another day!) Sorrel promised them he could get that to 95% overnight because of his previous experience with IBM mainframes. They gave him an ID badge for the project and then hired him on full-time after he delivered on his promise. “The rest is history,” Sorrel says.
Some of the best advice Sorrel ever got came from a Born-Again Christian who tried to help Sorrel through some of the negative feelings he held about the harsh political climate of South Africa. The advice was:

“God doesn’t judge you for how you react to your friends and your colleagues–he judges you by how harshly you judge those you perceive to be your enemy.”

When we asked Sorrel about his definition of success, he paused, thought about it for a second, and said:

“I look at success as understanding the processes that surround you, . . . and having clarity of purpose and clarity of communication.”

He went on to admit that clarity of communication is something he’s struggled with his entire life (though you would never think it, yourself!) He explained that, after expressing disappointment with a high school English teacher who had sworn at him, he was forced to sit in the hallway during his English classes for the rest of 10th grade, and throughout 11th and 12th grade. Because of this, Sorrel feels like he didn’t get to hone the skills of writing and communicating. What got him through high school, he says, was his love for reading.

“You’d get a list of twenty classics, and they’d say ‘pick three.’ Well, I never knew which three to pick, so I’d just read them all!”

Despite his perceived shortcomings in communication skills, Sorrel is always trying to learn. He mentioned that he recently signed up for a workshop with the Arbinger Institute (authors of The Anatomy of Peace and Leadership and Self-Deception) aimed at helping people communicate more effectively. If that’s not an example of life-long learning, I don’t know what is.
Sorrel seems to literally have “done it all.” From growing up on a farm, to serving in the military, losing his parents, completing a religious mission, surveying land, having a family of his own, living in South Africa during troubled times, navigating through the immigration requirements of the United States and more – it seems there isn’t something Sorrel hasn’t seen. He is a true inspiration – a stalwart example of wit, wisdom and perseverance.

Source: The Luncheon Project

My views on terrorism: 'we' are right and 'they' are wrong.