I spent a lot of time with Chad for a couple of years. He was pretty quiet and reserved and had a very unassuming look and presence. The trucker hat, tattoos and scruff gave him the appearance that he was average at best. But after you got to know him, it became obvious that Chad was not to be underestimated.

One day (1996) he was suddenly producing some pretty impressive 3D animations and incorporating those animations into websites that he made.

At the time – Almost was doing that sort of thing. I had thought of theses skills as being incredibly complicated that only computer scientists developed after graduating from MIT.

His brother Todd had gone to art school and spent a few years working as a graphic designer for a large accounting firm and was very motivated to improving his skills the entire time.

Somehow Chad was able to catch up to Todd’s skill level and even exceed him in several areas in a short period of time.

There he was, cranking out the web pages, one line of code at a time and incorporating graphics and animations into them like it was nothing.

This got me pretty excited. Chad didn’t go to school for this. He had no programming experience and I though to myself that it must be a LOT easier than I thought. If Chad can figure this stuff out so quickly then I should have no problem. This is going to be easy! LOL!

So I started asking questions right away.

“That’s cool! How did you learn how to do that?”

He just shrugged and said he got book. Then he reached over to get the book and gave it to me. He said I could keep it. AWESOME!! Thanks!

I thought I was going to simply go through the book like he did and start writing HTML code within a few days. LOL! NOPE!

That book was about two inches thick and it WAS NNOT written as a How-To guide for beginners with step-by-step instructions or anything like that. It was written for programmers who wanted to pick up another programming language. WTF?!

Reminder – This was 1996. This was all very new to everyone.

Somehow Chad was able to comprehend and memorize that book. Same thing with the 3D animation and video editing software. He learned all of this at once. He mostly just read the books that came with the programs, clicked around on the programs and memorized all the keyboard shortcuts. It was truly impressive how quickly he got good at things that were incredibly complicated to most people.

He was also smoking a lot of weed and drinking a lot of beer at the time which made it that much more impressive.