00:00:00
>> CHEN: Welcome to the Excelability podcast. This is a brand-new series of conversations on success with people who happen to have a disability. Together we’ll uncover the attitudes, habits, techniques, and practices that enable these individuals to achieve astounding success.
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>> DENMAN: I’m dyslexic with ADHD. I consider that sort of one, and then I’m also a quadriplegic. I was getting these accommodations for being in a wheelchair that were accommodations that worked for being dyslexic. People do have low expectations for people in–with disabilities, and it’s–and it’s aggravating at times because you–you show up and you blow them away, and it’s like, don’t be blown away.
00:01:07
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Why don’t you just take it for what it is, good work? I used a mouth stick, and I used those for 27 years, and then one day I noticed in the mirror that my smile was gone, that I had worn down, that I had worn down my teeth by using these mouth sticks by about 3 or 4 millimeters, and I had, like, a little O in the middle of my teeth.
00:01:39
>> CHEN: Welcome to this episode of the Excelability podcast. I’m your host, Jack Chen. Today we’re speaking with Peter Denman. Pete’s quadriplegia and dyslexia have not prevented him from serving as user experience designer for Intel Corporation, quite the opposite. Amongst Pete’s greatest accomplishments, his unique perspective and abilities earned him the lead role on the team that designed the user interface that Stephen Hawking uses to communicate.
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>> CHEN (CONTINUED): I’m excited to share Pete’s unique experiences and lessons on disability and success with you today. Please feel free to contact team Excelability to share your comments, questions, or feedback or to share your own story with us. We’d love to hear from you. You can find information about this podcast and previous and future episodes at www.teamexcelability.com.
00:02:31
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): That’s www-dot-team-E-X-C-E-L-ability-dot-com. You can follow us on Facebook at team Excelability or on Twitter, @teamxlability. Hey, Pete. Thanks for being available. I’m really excited to hear about all of your journeys through your career and the various disabilities that you face on a day-to-day basis. Thanks for taking out the time. We really appreciate it.
>> DENMAN: Sure, I’m happy to.
00:03:01
>> CHEN: Awesome. All right, well, let’s get started. Can you describe your disability and the day-to-day impact that it has on your life, say, to someone who might not already be familiar with what it’s like to have the disability?
>> DENMAN: I can talk about the two different disabilities that I have. I’m dyslexic with ADHD. I consider that sort of one, and then I’m also a quadriplegic. It’s sort of interesting when you have a disability or when you have something like that.
00:03:30
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): You don’t see it as such. It’s something that ha–that’s just part of your reality. Like, I’m sitting here right now, and everyone else who comes in to the room and sees me probably identifies me first as the guy in the wheelchair, but as I’m sitting here, I don’t feel like the guy in the wheelchair. I broke my neck when I was 20 years old, so I was a perfect example of a 20-year-old young male when I broke my neck, and then instantly I ended up being in a wheelchair, and I’m paralyzed from the shoulders down.
00:04:01
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I pretty much can’t move either arm at all. I can move my right arm to a very limited degree. I have about a 5-pound lifting capacity on my–on my right elbow, and so that means I can get my hand up to my face, but if you put, like, a can of pop in my hand, I wouldn’t be able to lift my hand, and I can use my arm to draw a little bit with and to move a cursor around on a screen and to drive my wheelchair.
00:04:31
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I can pretty much feed myself, drive my chair, and draw a little bit. As far as my dyslexia goes, this is a much bigger, deeper question. It’s a hidden disability, and it’s always seemed like a bigger issue to me than the physical disability. I can use my physical disability in ways to manipulate my environment, to manipulate the attitudes of the people around me. I don’t mean to say that I manipulate people.
00:05:00
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I mean to say that it’s an instant understanding or agreement between the person that you’re seeing in the room with you and who you are. They know about what’s going on instantly. It’s spelled out. There’s no ambiguity. When it comes to the learning problems, I’m not even sure that I’d call it a disability.
>> CHEN: What’s it like for you experiencing dyslexia to someone who doesn’t even know what dyslexia is?
>> DENMAN: I can tell you what it’s–what it feels like when I see people that don’t have it.
00:05:33
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I–people will walk up behind me, and I’ll have my screen open on my computer, and if I was to roll up to somebody else’s screen, I wouldn’t be able to digest what was on that screen inside of a heartbeat, but I know that other people can. They can wa–they can walk up right behind me and look at a–look at an open page on my computer screen and gather all the information out of it. It’s just mind-boggling to me how somebody can do that, and I just can’t do it.
00:06:01
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I can read it, but I have to stop and begin to focus. Now, the way that I’ve described it to other people before is it’s sort of like going through the gears of a car, so you start out in first gear. You begin to read, and then you get into second gear, and you start humming along, and then if any–there’s any kind of distraction, you have to go back to first, and you literally have to go word by word. There’s no skipping, scanning, and it’s not fast. It’s tedious.
>> CHEN: So it’s slow, word by word, and if you get distracted, you’ve got to start–you’ve got to go back to the slow pace?
00:06:35
>> DENMAN: Right, and there’s also the output problem. My spelling is absolutely, amazingly bad. It has always been bad. It will always be bad. You don’t need to know how to spell to tell a story, and that is the paradox about people who are dyslexic. I am a hell of a writer. I am a crap speller.
>> CHEN: Wow, I love that you said that, such a distinction between being a writer and a speller, because oftentimes I think the two are linked together.
00:07:06
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): You currently work at Intel. Can you tell us how long you’ve been with the company and what your role is and what your day-to-day work entails?
>> DENMAN: I’ve been here for 11 years, and I am currently in Labs, the R&D area of Intel, and we come up and look at products that are down the–down the pipeline. We come up with the ideas that form–form the company’s sort of strategy around what we’re going to do next, and we’re–we work on strategy.
00:07:39
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): We work on products, on the details of the things that are already out there and how we might be able to improve on that, that type of thing, and what my role here is, is I’m a–I’ve just put designer on my business card. Design is something that you’ve seen in society for as long as there has been a society.
00:08:01
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): You might call it industrial design or graphic design, visual design. There are so many different flavors of it, but really, what I do is interaction design mostly. I do it from a user experience sort of standpoint, and so what I have to do is understand what the user needs are. There’s all of these anecdotes about people don’t really know what they want. Well, that’s kind of true. I mean, Henry Ford famously said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.”
00:08:35
>> CHEN: What are some of your best success moments in your career? What are some things that you’re most proud of?
>> DENMAN: I was having some difficulty about six years ago. I started losing the–what little strength I did have in my right arm, and my manager at the time, he said, “Take what you need to get this thing taken care of,” and I had to have a major surgery done on my neck. It was called a laminoscopy. There’s these stints that stick off the back of the vertebrae. Well, basically, what they did was they cut through the vertebrae, popping those stints off, exposing the spinal cord, giving the spinal cord some area to breathe.
00:09:13
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It was insanely painful, and I had to be off–I had to be off work for about a month and a half, and my boss had told me, “Come up or think about a way to visualize that that we haven’t seen before,” and I–sort of in my delirium of pain and pain meds and getting over this thing, I came up with this idea around how biomimicry hasn’t been used to–in that particular field, and biomimicry is the act of copying nature, not actually using nature, and I’ll explain a little bit more about that.
00:09:49
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): So using nature would be to cut down a tree, turn it into a 2×4, and make a house. That’s using nas–nature. Biomimicry is taking the idea of nature, so one idea is sharks have scales, and the scales have little ridges on them.
00:10:06
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Thos ridges are perfectly separated that a bacterium will not adhere to it. If they were any further apart, it could get in between them. If it were any closer, it could stick to two of them, but it–the way that they’re positioned, they’re perfectly separated, and bacteria can’t stay on. Now medical field is now looking at how they can put that on doorknobs and handles and surfaces and scalpels and band-aids and just do this microscopically.
00:10:40
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Imagine a hospital, imagine your house that has this surface on it that is painted on to everything that bacteria won’t live on. You don’t need to kill it anymore. It doesn’t–and when–and by killing it, you actually make it evolve. It just can’t live. It just won’t be there, so that’s biomimicry. That’s one example of biomimicry.
00:11:01
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): So I was laying in bed kind of thinking about this idea, and I realized that as we’re walking down the street, you can look down at the s–you can look down and see a plant and go, “Oh, that’s a healthy plant.” You can walk even further, and you can say, “That’s a–kind of a disgusting smell,” and you can see these things in nature.
00:11:21
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): You can look down–you can look straight ahead of you and look–see all these trees and plants and animals and all of these things, and you know instantly that they’re healthy or if they’re not, and so I began to think about that and how that–how it translates back to the–to the eye, and what I thought about was that if I was to use some of those cues that we use visually to understand what this plant is doing, I can translate that into a way of actually reading data, and so I came up with a–what we call the Flower, and I drew it up, and I showed it to some engineers, and they were like, “We don’t get it,” and then I d–and then I drew it up again in a couple different ways, and they’re like, “We don’t get it,” and I was like, “Oh, shit.”
00:12:11
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): “Okay,” so I went out. I taught myself how to code, and then I grabbed some health data from some nurses that–because I was in digital health at the time, and I plugged real data into this thing that I had created and then sh–and then turned it around and showed it to the visiting nurses, and the visiting nurses went, “Eh, whatever,” and I was like, “Crap, all right.”
00:12:36
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): “Well, I failed,” but then I began to realize that in the background there were their supervisors who were opening up the Flower thing that I had created, and they had not just one open, but they had five, six, ten of them open, and they weren’t looking at–they weren’t looking at one patient. They were looking at ten patients, and they were going, “Oh, look, there’s a problem over there. Ooh, this one’s kind of interesting,” and so I realized that there was this aggregate sort of data problem that I had solved with it.
00:13:07
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It wasn’t good at solving, you know, directed, “I want to see what this person’s blood pressure problem was,” but it was really good to say, “This person wasn’t feeling good over the weekend,” problem.
>> CHEN: Right, right.
>> DENMAN: So it–so I had actually came up with a new way of looking at data, and there’s–you know, other than bar charts, pie graphs, web charts, and I mean, there’s hundreds of them out there.
00:13:33
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): There hasn’t been a new one invented in decades, and I came up with one. I’m pretty proud of that.
>> CHEN: Fantastic. That is amazing, amazing that you were able to, say, in your delirium, come up with something new.
>> DENMAN: Yeah.
>> CHEN: I guess all of that paid off.
>> DENMAN: Yeah, it sure did.
>> CHEN: So speaking about dyslexia, how did you first become aware of the fact that you had this difference, and how did it affect you socially, emotionally, psychologically?
00:14:06
>> DENMAN: It destroyed my self-esteem, and it’s still a problem I face today. I have absolutely the worst problem with my self-esteem, and it’s–it was horrific growing up. I faced some really hard problems when I was in school. Like, I could not spell at all. I couldn’t read in front of the class, and these were–and these were things that were benchmarks of–of your intelligence when you’re in, you know, grade school.
00:14:41
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): If you–you needed to be able to stand up and spell, so I didn’t even listen to what was going on in class because I was so nervous about the fact that I needed to be the next person that was going to speak, or even if I wasn’t the next person that was gonna have to read out of the–out of the history book or the reader or whatever it happened to be, I was go–it was gonna be me at some point, and I needed to–and I needed to stand up and do that.
00:15:08
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It was absolutely devastating. You know, I just went–I just reverted further and further and further into a shell. It was a really traumatic experien–grade school was horrific for me. I remember that–I went to parochial school, and the priest would come in to deliver your report card, and he would call each person up individually to the head of the class, and he would give you your report card in front of everyone, and he would critique your scores in front of everyone.
00:15:42
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): So either you got the “good job” and the hug and whatnot, or you would get the–you know, you’d get the disdain and the–and the chastising and the, you know, “Do better,” and, “What’s wrong?” and that kind of thing. It was humiliating.
00:16:00
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It was punctuated every couple months inside of every year of my grade school experience.
>> CHEN: Mm. So not only did it come from just being nervous on a day-to-day basis, but it also seemed like the administration and the way that school was done reinforced that for you. Were there any other major pain points or obstacles related to dyslexia, maybe outside the classroom, that you dealt with when it came to dyslexia?
>> DENMAN: There was a lot of loss.
00:16:30
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I didn’t excel in school, and I didn’t excel in academics at all, and I didn’t read. I didn’t read a book, an actual book cover to cover until I was 21, on my own, I–you know, opened a book, read from page one to the end of the book until I was 21, so I missed out on quite a bit. I think that I could have been a lot more or different if I hadn’t been–if I had, you know, a–found some way to actually get through school.
00:17:00
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I gave up. I mean, I can talk more about how I got to–you know, got through school, but I had literally given up. There was–at the sixth grade I was done. There was no more hope. I wasn’t gonna get out of hi–if I got out of high school, it was gonna be a huge success.
>> CHEN: Got it. So your way of dealing with it was you just withdrew and decided to call it quits?
>> DENMAN: Yeah, I started smoking a lot.
>> CHEN: Well, turning to your neck injuries, can you describe the circumstances around how that injury occurred and what your outlook on life was, say, in the days, weeks after your injury?
00:17:39
>> DENMAN: Maybe I should tell you exactly what my outlook on life was right before it. I was 20 years old. I was a clerk at a grocery store in North Portland, and I was headed on a trajectory of nowhere. Probably I would have done something with my hands, woodworking most likely. I just didn’t really have much of a future.
00:18:00
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I mean, not to say that that’s not a good future. I’m just saying I didn’t have–I didn’t have a future in technology or, you know, my–I wasn’t gonna go on to school. I just wasn’t, and then on July 20th I was playing Frisbee with my Labrador and a friend of mine, and I threw the Frisbee out into the water, and the dog couldn’t find it. It, you know, was a black Frisbee, and it was kind of a little bit polluted water, and I–so I just pulled off my shirt and kicked off my shoes and ran down into the surf, and I was between knee-high and waist-high in the water, and I did a surface dive, and I caught the water wrong.
00:18:40
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): The water threw me into the bottom. I think I hit a wake off of a boat or something, and as I–as–when I went in, it was like somebody just threw me onto another planet. All the sudden it was, like, silent. I didn’t really realize where I was at. I opened my eyes. All’s I saw was green murky stuff. I could see arms, and they turned out to be my arms, and I tried to move.
00:19:04
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I couldn’t move. It was like–it was like I was being–I was disembodied in a way, and then I passed out. I woke up a few minutes later, and I was laying on the beach. On my right-hand side was a tugboat and a guy with a cellular phone, an old bag cellular phone ’cause this was the late ’80s. It was ’88, and he was calling somebody, and he had his–one of his crewmen holding on to my shoulders with his hands and bracing my head with his forearms.
00:19:34
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Now, what I had found out later was that my buddy who was with me, Jake, had seen me doing a dead man’s float out in the water, went out, flipped me over, saw I was a strange color, drug me onto shore, and when he did, he let me–he started kind of freaking out, which got the attention of everybody else on shore, and because cellular phones weren’t really popular at the time, everybody sort of ran down to where I was at, and they flagged down this tugboat that was going up the channel.
00:20:01
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): The tugboat turned in, parked right off the shore right next to us, and the guy–and the captain of the boat had a cell phone. He used it to call Life Flight. Now, after that, it was this next three years were pretty–pretty harsh. The first couple months were really bad. I went through a couple infections. I was in a hospital bed for six months trying to recover. I had a halo on. It was just basically allowing my neck to heal.
00:20:31
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I broke my neck at cervical 4-5, leaving me a complete–or an incomplete quadriplegic where I could still feel most everywhere but couldn’t move. I went to rehab, and they kind of taught me how to be in a wheelchair, but my spirits began to kind of lift a little bit. I mean, it turned out to be not that terrible in this hospital situation. I could see a little bit of life coming back, you know. Like, there are things that can happen. I didn’t know what they were, and I wasn’t fully absorbed into the fact that I wasn’t gonna ever move my body ever again.
00:21:07
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I mean, I kept trying to make deals with people, this one little thing or this other little thing, maybe I can do this little thing, and it was permanent. There was just no way around getting nerve damage fixed, and so I was–I was there for, like I said, six months, and then I moved on to my mom and dad’s house where I lived for the n–another couple years, and when I was there, my parents were really supportive.
00:21:33
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): They helped me through all of the major problems that I was having. They sort of got me metaphorically back on my feet, and then on my own I had decided that I needed to not be a burden to them, and so I started trying to figure out how to have my own life, how to get out on my own, and in Portland there’s this interesting place that you can go if you’re–if you’ve got a physical disability like mine.
00:22:02
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It’s called QUAD Inc, and QUAD Inc. is a–it’s a nonprofit organization that has housing, and it’s basically a HUD housing place where people with disabilities can go and get aide care as well as cheap rent, and so I could–I could live there, and I could get somebody to come in and help me out whenever I needed them, so I just had somebody come in and cook my meals, get me up in the morning, you know, in bed at night. During the day I was free, and I began to–you know, I was 20, and I began to have a life.
00:22:35
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I began to figure out what it was. I went to school. I took a class with my mom, and she drug me to this class. I didn’t want to go, and she, you know, said, “You can audit it. I know that you like this stuff. You’ll be–it’ll be fun.” It was an art history class, and so I went to this–I went to this class with my mom, and that was sort of the beginning of my school career, which I can explain a little bit more, but I began to actually have a little bit of sort of a social life and a real life, being able to shop on my own, and I put hundreds and hundreds of miles on my wheelchair.
00:23:12
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It was my primary source of–way of getting around, and it was sort of in the center of Portland, and I could go about 5 miles in any direction and 5 miles back and still have enough charge, you know, to not have to worry about running out, so that was–it was really sort of a–kind of a fun little existence there, and that allowed me to start going to school and to get educated.
00:23:39
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): That was sort of the beginning of it.
>> CHEN: So what really flipped that switch for you from being, say, you know, depressed and down and then saying, “Hey, I can go make a life out of this?”
>> DENMAN: It was that guy who was building the ramp at my house right after I was injured. He had this word of wisdom for me.
00:24:00
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): He said, “You know what? In a few years it’ll be normal,” and it was. It was. It just happened to get–you just kind of got used to it. After a while, your personality comes through. Whatever happens to you, if you can deal with it, if there’s no huge pro–if you don’t have an ongoing health issue, if you don’t have to battle with–you know, if you’re not battling external problems or whatever, if you get to a point where, all things being equal, you’re still healthy, things’ll get normal again.
00:24:31
>> CHEN: Now, in terms of having decreased mobility, I know there are obviously a lot of adjustments, but are there any particularly pungent ones that you think of when it comes to having that challenge, and was there anything that helped you to overcome those challenges, whether it be mental or a way of thinking or an advice that someone gave you?
>> DENMAN: I think I found some–you know, in retrospect, I think I know what they are now, that there’s a certain level of meditation that I didn’t realize I was doing, but it was, and it actually helped me through.
00:25:07
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I think that that’s a huge thing that sort of helped me bridge the gap. Like, I do this thing, and it’s not religious. I just grew–happened to grow up Catholic. You know, as an adult I’m not religious, but I will chant Hail Marys to myself. It calms me down. I can say them super fast, and it fills my brain with something, and it’s not whatever the problem is.
00:25:31
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It’s just these words that are echoing around in my brain, and so it’s just–I just begin to do it. I almost do it self-consciously–or subconsciously.
>> CHEN: Yup, words have power. Talking about that art history class, what did that do for your thinking and your transition into education, as you were talking about before?
>> DENMAN: It was the pivotal point that started me on a different path. I didn’t know that I was smart.
00:26:01
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I didn’t know that taking a class like that was gonna be interesting. I don’t know that I–I don’t know that smart’s the right word. I didn’t know that it was gonna be interesting and that I could achieve something at an academic level. I just–it just didn’t occur to me, and so I was auditing this class, and when I was auditing it, I had the opportunity to actually test. Like, if I wanted to take the tests, I could.
00:26:26
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Sort of as an aside, I did, and I got pretty decent marks without studying for it, and I was like, “Well, if I can do it without studying, maybe I could do it without–or maybe I could do school,” and so I started looking into it, and college, interestingly enough, is not academic. It didn’t feel academic to me. When I was growing up, school was this thing that was–you know, everybody’s right there. It’s like a game. Everybody’s competing against each other. Everybody’s, you know, racing at the same pace.
00:27:01
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Well, college was like, “You know what? We don’t care. Yeah, here’s the bill. It would–if you’re here, you know, you can do it if you want. If you don’t, whatever,” and so–and so I started showing up, and the other thing was, is that I was getting these accommodations for being in a wheelchair that were accommodations that worked for being dyslexic, and so I was getting people who were taking the notes for me in class. I was getting my books read to me, or they were being digitized, and so I could listen to them.
00:27:36
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I had people who would write down my essay questions in tests so there was no more spelling problems, and I could do the articulation, and like I said, I was pretty good at telling a story, so all of these problems that used to be problems weren’t problems anymore, and I started rocking at school. I managed to get through school, but I had to pretty much take everything over again, I mean literally take everything over again.
00:28:01
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I had to start out at the very lowest math level, Math 20, and then–and I forget. I think there was three more of them before I ever got to college level, and so that meant I had to go through a couple years of community college just to get to college level.
>> CHEN: Amazing, though, that they accommodations from one disability just boosted you in terms of being able to handle the other one. What a great story.
>> DENMAN: Well, the other thing was, is that I had a lot of free time on my hands too.
00:28:32
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I mean, even if I was able-bodied, I would have still had to put food on the table if I was 20 years old. I would have still had other responsibilities, but as it was, the only thing I was responsible for when I was–after being injured was breathing. People do have low expectations for people in–with disabilities, and it’s–and it’s aggravating at times because you show up and you blow them away, and it’s like, “Don’t be blown away. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’m in a chair.”
00:29:02
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): “Why don’t you just take it for what it is, good work?”
>> CHEN: Can you talk about, in your younger years, if you thought or how you thought your dyslexia or your quadriplegia would impact your future success?
>> DENMAN: No one really had the expectation that I was gonna do anything, and I just kept pushing, you know? I’m just sort of happy that things keep rolling along. I’m just like, all–I get to do these amazing things. I get to–I get to go to these amazing places and work for a company who’s so forward-thinking, and I get to create stuff on a daily basis and work with the smartest people you even heard of.
00:29:43
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It’s nuts. It’s–I’m just, like, astounded at my life all the time.
>> CHEN: Amazing that you say that no one had expectations for you, yet you were still able to push. That’s–what enabled you to do that? What in you do you think kept you going despite the fact that people didn’t have expectations for you?
00:30:03
>> DENMAN: I don’t know. I think I’m–I think I’m pretty wildly impulsive, which gets in the way sometimes and helps out quite a bit too. I will buy stuff I’m not supposed to. I will agree to do things that I don’t know how to do, and I will agree to go places I have no business going to. It always seems to work out.
>> CHEN: Oh, you just kind of live and figure it out?
00:30:32
>> DENMAN: Right. I mean, I can give you–I can give you examples.
>> CHEN: Sure. Let’s hear a couple.
>> DENMAN: I had never been out of the country before. I got invited to speak at a conference in Ireland, and so I’d never been to Ireland before. I’d never been on a–I’d never been any further than, like, California on an airplane and being in a wheelchair, and so I was like, “All right, yeah, I’ll go to Ireland.” I spoke. It turned out to be wildly successful.
00:31:00
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): The trip got extended for a month. It was crazy. It turned out to be one of the things that pushed my career further than I would have ever expected because I started having other offers and not turning them down, so since then I’ve been to Europe probably ten times. I’ve been to India. I’ve been all over the world, and I don’t hesitate now to go, you know, to New York or wherever somebody’s asked me to go. I was just in Greensville, North Carolina just because it sounded interesting, and getting on an airplane and getting off an airplane is traumatic and dangerous, and flying in a wheelchair is crazy.
00:31:39
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): As far as, like I said, buying stuff, I bought a house and moved away from that perfectly good, safe living situation that I was in at QUAD for a couple decades. I lived there for 18 years, and it was safe. I could always count on having healthcare or aide care being there whenever I needed it, and I decided, “You know what?”
00:32:02
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): “I need to buy a house. I need–this is gonna offer me freedom. It’s gonna allow me to do other things,” and it did. It was huge. It allowed me–instead of having built-in aide care, allowed me to have aide care that could go with me on these trips, so within months of me moving out of there, my career exploded. My opportunities exploded, but my safety level went from one place to another, and the house that I bought for $350,000 seven years ago is now worth almost $700,000, so the economics of it turned out to be really good.
00:32:36
>> CHEN: Awesome, though, that it was independence and boldness, from what I’m hearing from you, that really allowed you to take it to the next level.
>> DENMAN: It always seems to be, right? It just seems like you make these leaps of faith. Oh, I guess the other thing is, is that even if you don’t know how to do something, if you’re–if you can get there from here, I always say yes to stuff.
00:33:00
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I just–you know, if somebody asks me to do something, I say yes, and then I figure out how to do it. It just always seems to work out.
>> CHEN: Right. You say yes, and then you figure it out, absolutely. In your career, can you describe how your disability played a part in either needing to overcome it or serving as a driver of your work or some other influence in terms of your success? How would you characterize it?
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It’s directly impacted my work. Just the fact that I’m in a wheelchair has gotten me work.
00:33:31
>> DENMAN: We haven’t talked about the work that I did for Stephen at all, but I was asked to work on that project because I’m in a wheelchair. I mean, there’s just–just there’s no other way to put it. I have a level of empathy that no one else can touch, and so they asked me to go to work for the–on Stephen’s project with him, so that was one thing that actually, you know, kind of changed things for me ’cause that put me in the spotlight more than anything else in my career ever has.
00:34:00
>> CHEN: Yeah, and so talk a little bit about what that project was you’re talking about now.
>> DENMAN: It was redesigning how Stephen Hawking communicates with the world. So I was working for Digital Health. That part of Intel was closing. I had an opportunity to go with the part that was being sold, or I could stay with Intel. I chose to stay with Intel, and I was at the going-away party for Digital Health.
00:34:26
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I was sitting at the table with the CTO of Intel, at the time Justin Rattner, and he and I were chatting, and he had gotten an email from Stephen Hawking saying that his rate of speech was slowing down and that he was scared that he was losing more of his function and that he wouldn’t be able to even speak anymore unless something happened and somebody sort of took steps, and so at that point Justin had began to assemble a team. Now, we assembled the team, and we were going to go over and sort of figure out how to swoop in and solve Stephen’s problems for him.
00:35:06
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I was a designer. We had an engineer and a few other people. I think there was a team of about six of us. On that trip I told you about to Ireland, I got diverted on that trip, saying, “Stephen’s ready to see you,” and so people were flying in from America, and I was in Ireland. I was like, “Well, okay, that’s great. He’s in U.K,” so basically I made my way over there. When we saw him, we realized this was a–you know, this was really serious.
00:35:31
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I began to look at his old system and what systems were available and how Stephen used his system, and over the course of the next few years we worked very closely with Stephen Hawking to actually redesign his system in a participatory way with him.
>> CHEN: Well, I love the fact that, you know, you had the skills just alongside, you know, any other folks that had the skills, but it really was you who was in the wheelchair with the other disability who had the empathy that could really help to lead and drive the project.
00:36:02
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): It’s amazing. You’ve said this quote, “When need meets motivation, people do amazing things,” and I love that quote. Can you talk a little bit about what you meant more in depth?
>> DENMAN: Sure. People have problems, and they solve them all the time. You see it every day. I mean, you need to draw, and somebody invented a pencil. That’s a need to motivation right there, but if you’re talking about a wheelchair, people who are in–needed mobility, needed some way to get around, and at some point somebody just–somebody invented a wheelchair.
00:36:40
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): They just–you know, it was like, “Okay, I need to get my son, daughter, grandpa, whoever up the street,” or they had to get themselves up the street, and they did it. I just recently saw this guy in India who had two bicycle wheels that were strung together with a bar across the center, and he was balancing on that, and he looks like that was what he used on a daily basis to get around, and it was–you know, it was low tech, but man, it got–it did the job for him.
00:37:11
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Now, I have examples of things I did way before ever coming to Intel which are, you know, really low tech, but they got the job done for me, like a specially-designed bent fork that allows me to feed myself, and the way that I draw, I just–I have a pen that I strap to a piece of steel that goes into a splint on my hand, and it allows me to interface with the computer.
00:37:40
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): People come up with amazing ideas and tools to help themselves, to help their loved ones.
>> CHEN: So it sounds like this is something that you’ve employed pretty extensively in your own career, in your own life.
>> DENMAN: Right, and, you know, living at QUAD Inc, when I lived there it was like gladiator camp. You learned how other people with disabilities did their shit, and you built off of it.
00:38:04
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): They had, you know, how do you get your wheelchair fixed? Where do you get it fixed? How do you do this? I mean, the way that people modified their own life to make it work, you look at any one given person’s wheelchair, and the way that they’ve modified and outfitted their particular situation is going to be completely unique to anybody else’s. The only thing that’s unique between two disabilities is that they’re inconsistent, and their inconsistencies have to allow–or that person has to adapt to them in some way.
00:38:37
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I can literally not grab a cup of coffee and bring it up to my desk, but I also have a huge problem with bladder infections. Like, I need to be able to drink a large amount of fluids every single day, and for 11 years I have been asking friends and colleagues to go downstairs with me and grab a cup of coffee a couple times a day, but it just occurred to me that why don’t I just get the cafe to do it?
00:39:04
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): And they just fell over backwards, and I get to work every morning, and I’ve got two–I’ve got three hot tumblers of fluid sitting on my desk.
>> CHEN: Amazing.
>> DENMAN: So that–yeah, so that worked out really well. I have a sit-stand desk even though I only need it to move an inch at a time, but I have two wheelchairs. One of them is my backup chair, my other–and this one is my primary chair, but the difference in height on them is about an inch, and that inch makes all the difference in the world, so I have this articulating desk.
00:39:37
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Not only do I have one here, but I have one at home, and not only do I have a computer that I can carry with me everywhere, but I have one on my desk. All of these things are accommodations that Intel had made for me which are absolutely outstanding.
>> CHEN: So that inventiveness and that creative problem-solving, is that something that you’ve applied to your own work?
>> DENMAN: That’s 90% of my job, is coming up with a solution for a problem you didn’t know existed.
00:40:03
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I mean, first we have to identify a problem you didn’t know was there. Then you have to solve it.
>> CHEN: Right. And so it sounds to me like the fact that you had a disability and the fact that you needed to creatively problem-solve actually played right into the exact thing that you do for your job on a day-to-day basis.
>> DENMAN: Right, and I think there’s a big, major difference between, like, what I do and what an engineer does. So an engineer, there is a list or a tool bag that they reach into and grab the right tool for it, and they fix it with that tool.
00:40:39
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): What I do is I go, “I need to create a tool.”
>> CHEN: So typing, drawing, and writing are three of the key things when it comes to design work. Can you share your journey of how you’ve been able to overcome and find ways to do those things and be so successful at what you do?
00:41:00
>> DENMAN: So typing, I use a mouth stick, so I have a stick that I grab and I type with. Now, the one that comes right out of the box, you know, you buy from the medical supply store, I break those pretty frequently, so I don’t even use those. I mean, I got a few of them. They’re, like, 50 bucks a piece. You know, the first time you try to pull a book off of the second shelf and it snaps in half as you’re trying to lift a dictionary, you’re like, “Oh, well, that didn’t work.”
00:41:30
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I came up with my own solution, which was a brass tube with a piece of surgical tubing at one end and an eraser at the other end, which works great, and I used those for 27 years, and then one day I noticed in the mirror that my smile was gone, that I had–I had worn down my teeth by using these mouth sticks by about 3 or 4 millimeters, and I had, like, a little O in the middle of my teeth, and I was like, “Oh, you got to–this is a little embarrassing,” and I started looking into what it was gonna cost to have my teeth fixed, and it was gonna be pretty expensive, and then just sort of on a whim one day I rolled into the health center here at Intel, and I said, “Would this happen to be workman’s comp by chance?” and the nurse looked at me and got really excited, and she goes, “Yeah.” [pause]
00:42:33
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): And so I spent the entire summer last summer getting my teeth fixed, so that’s how I type, and sometimes I find it really kind of tedious when you’re trying to get a quick message out, but when I’m writing, when I’m trying to deliver a message, when I’m trying to actually articulate something, it’s not slow at all. In fact, I find writing as being one of my more cathartic things that I do, and then drawing, I–like I said, I have a Wacom tablet, and I stuff a pen into my splint.
00:43:05
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Now, I don’t draw one to one. I draw mostly vector shapes, and so I’m always working in Illustrator and that kind of thing, so I’m not, like, sketching-sketching. I’m–but I am drawing, and I do a lot of that.
>> CHEN: So for many young people who work at companies, they struggle with the question about whether they should talk about their disability or how to talk about it.
00:43:32
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): What advice would you give to someone who’s struggling with those issues?
>> DENMAN: It’s all about showing off, really. I mean, your work precedes you, right? So I wouldn’t go into a room of people and just say, “I’m dyslexic,” but I would go into a room of people that I’ve worked with for a while and, you know, “Hey, I’m dyslexic.” I would because the thing is, is it kind of blows their doors back. You know, it blows their hair back or whatever.
00:44:00
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It sort of–people think of it as a negative, you know, pejorative maybe, but if you show them something different, if you change the conversation, then that’s what’s really important, I think. I mean, you’re changing attitudes. You–people have–I hear people talk about, “Oh, don’t call this person a little–or don’t call him a little person anymore,” or, “Don’t call him disabled,” or, “Don’t call him whatever.” You know what? The sentiment will always be the same eventually. You know, they’re just gonna change the meaning of it.
00:44:31
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It’s like–you need to change what it means, not what it–not what the word is. You just need to change people’s attitudes about what dyslexia is, not don–you know, I mean, I don’t think of it as being a negative anymore. I used to, but I don’t anymore. I think of it as being a strength.
>> CHEN: And it’s really changing the attitude that’s really gonna make the difference. The words will help, but the attitude change is really the key.
>> DENMAN: Right.
00:45:00
>> CHEN: So is there anything that you didn’t know in the beginning of your career as someone with a disability that you learned later on that you feel like contributed to your success?
>> DENMAN: Never give up. I mean, at some point you’re gonna find this thing that’s gonna click or work out for you. Just keep plugging away. You never know where it’s gonna lead to.
>> CHEN: Hey, Pete, is there someone with a disability who you most respect, and if so, is there something that our listeners can learn from that person?
>> DENMAN: Stephen Hawking, you know, after meeting the guy and really–I mean, I know–I’ve met him, and I know him not super well, but, you know, I’ve had dinner at his house and spent quite a bit of time with him.
00:45:40
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): This is an extraordinarily unique person in so many different ways, not just that he has changed the way that we look at the universe and the way that we think about it, but him sitting in the chair has done a lot of good for the way that people think about people in a wheelchair, and the way that he’s done it all these years, I can’t attribute the fact that he’s lived so long with something that’s supposed to kill you so quickly other than his mental capacity.
00:46:16
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): It’s astounding the way that–if you track his disease and you track his work, the two of them are correlated. It’s unbelievable. You look at–his disease has slowed down almost every single time he’s gotten focused on solving a problem.
00:46:34
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I don’t want to say that he has slowed his disease down with his brain, but it kind of seems like it.
>> CHEN: Great way to keep yourself alive is keep yourself focused. So we’ve been talking a lot about disability and success. Hey, Pete, any other thoughts or ideas for listeners out there on that topic?
>> DENMAN: I struggle with dyslexia every single day. It is–I struggle with, you know, my personal self-worth on it and everything, so I mean, even when you do reach some sort of level of success, and, you know, it’s arguable that I have, but it’s still–every single day I struggle with it.
00:47:15
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): I–it’s painful, and, I mean, it’s just–it’s–you know, it’s heart-wrenching, so, I mean, don’t give up. You know, the thing is, is that everybody’s journey’s–is so completely different, and I have so many friends who’ve been in a wheelchair and haven’t been able to break loose.
00:47:34
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): Luckily, I don’t know that many people who are dyslexic and have been stuck in a problem. Most of the people that I know who are dyslexic are crazy successful. The other thing that I was gonna say about Stephen that is sort of remarkable is that having a degenerative sort of issue is also incredibly difficult to have a life around because there is no certainty about what tomorrow brings.
00:48:03
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): When you’re–when you have a concrete injury like myself where there’s a–there is a limit and a–and there are guide rails all around you, like, I know what this is today. I know what it is tomorrow. I know what it’s gonna be in ten years, but when you’re dealing with ALS or MS or CP or something like that, that’s incredibly difficult to be able to target your goals and know how to–and know what–you know, we were talking about converging lines around technologies and that kind of thing.
00:48:38
>> DENMAN (CONTINUED): How do you know where those lines are going to converge? How do you know where your ability line is gonna converge with things in the future? And I would say that just keep plugging forward because you never know what the opportunities are. Just, you know, always set up the goals and always keep trying to reach something.
00:49:00
>> CHEN: Awesome. Pete, thanks so much for being available and taking out your time. Really had some amazing things to share with our audience, and I really hope that folks out there will be able to learn many things from your life and continue to keep kicking butt out there.
>> DENMAN: Well, it’s really an honor that people think enough to actually ask me about these things.
>> CHEN: Thanks, Steve, again, and I’ll look forward to our next meeting.
>> DENMAN: Yeah, you bet.
00:49:33
>> CHEN: This concludes the conversation on success with Peter Denman. Pete has shown us that never giving up and pressing forward for the breakthrough opportunity that will come, always finding creative solutions to overcome your challenges, and always saying yes even if you’re not quite sure that you can do the thing that you’ve been asked because you always find a way have enabled him to achieve incredible success. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and that you’ve learned a lesson or two for your own life.
00:50:00
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): Please feel free to contact team Excelability to share your comments, questions, or feedback or to share your own story with us. We’d love to hear from you. You can find out more information about this podcast and other resources by visiting at www.teamexcelability.com, on Facebook at team Excelability, or on Twitter, @teamxlability. Thank you, and have a blessed day.