Inspiring anecdotes

1.  “You don’t pay back, you pay forward.”

  from an article written by Jerry Pournelle

 …I met Robert Heinlein years later, and through some kind of rare magic we became instant friends. We corresponded for a decade. In those days I was an engineering psychologist, operations research specialist, and systems engineer in aerospace. Most of my work was military aerospace, but I did get to work on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We were helping to make the dream come true! 

 I went from there to a professorship, and then into political management and city government. Robert visited me when I was working for Mayor Sam Yorty. “You probably don’t know this,” he said, “but my political career ended when Yorty beat me for the Democratic nomination to the State Assembly.” When I finally decided to get out of politics, academia, and the aerospace industry and try my hand at writing, Mr. Heinlein was enormously helpful.

Years later, when I was an established writer, I asked him how I could pay him back. “You can’t,” he said. “You don’t pay back, you pay forward.”