Beyond the Drawing: How One Decision on a Shop Floor Built a Global Career

Picture a shop floor in Atlanta, 1979. A college kid who just had a rough first year at Georgia Tech is wiring gas turbines for Baker, CAC. His parents told him he needed to contribute more to his education, and his experience working restaurants and amusement parks in New Orleans wasn't going to cut it anymore. So a friend got him the job. Electrician. Wire what's on the drawing, collect a paycheck, get back to school.

When Eric Fidler told us this story on Wisdom at the Wellhead, I just smiled. I'm in the same vintage. I know what 1979 felt like in this industry. You showed up, you did the work, and nobody cared about your resume. What mattered was whether you could figure things out with your hands.

But here's what Eric did that most guys in his position didn't. He said, "I didn't just wire things that were on a drawing. I started asking how it worked and taking things apart." Those controls were a mix of pneumatics, hydraulics, and whatever early electronics existed at the time. He didn't have to learn any of that. His job was the wiring. But he couldn't leave it alone. He had to know what the whole machine was doing.

That one decision, made on a shop floor before he had a degree or a title or anything to his name, is the reason his career went where it went. And I've been thinking about why that matters so much, because I've watched the same pattern play out for forty years.

The Door That Curiosity Opens

Here's what I've seen over the years building Total Stream and working with engineers across this industry. There are people who are excellent at their job. They do the work, they do it well, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But the ones who end up leading, the ones who get pulled into rooms they weren't invited to, are almost always the ones who understood more than their job required them to understand.

Eric is the clearest example I've come across. Because he understood the pneumatics and the hydraulics and the electronics inside the equipment he was wiring, he started getting pulled into problems other people couldn't crack. He was given opportunities to tune processes that weren't working. Things teams were struggling with. And those weren't assignments he applied for. They came to him because he'd already proven he could see more than just his piece of the puzzle.

That deep knowledge of how production processes interact with one another is what eventually sent him overseas as a young man, working for a small enterprise where he was given big responsibility and a huge delegation of authority relative to the company's overall revenue. That's not the kind of opportunity you get by being good at following drawings. That's the kind of opportunity you get when people realize you understand the whole system.

I've Seen This Work Both Ways

I'll be honest. When I was coming up as a petroleum engineer, I had plenty of moments where I could have stayed in my lane. Just run the numbers, hand off the report, move on. But the times I actually grew were the times I stuck my nose into something that wasn't technically my problem. Data management. Financial integration. How the production decisions we were making upstream actually showed up downstream in somebody's accounting.

That's how Bob Baldwin and I ended up building Total Stream. We kept seeing the same gap. Engineers who understood the well but didn't understand the data. Financial people who understood the numbers but had no feel for the operations. Nobody was connecting the technical to the financial in a way that let a smaller company actually make decisions in real time. And the only reason we could see that gap is because we'd both spent years understanding more than our job descriptions required.

So when Eric talks about not just wiring what's on the drawing, I don't hear it as a nice career story. I hear it as the single most reliable predictor of who's going to build something that matters. The curiosity comes first. The career follows it.

The Guy Who Stayed on the Drawing

Think about this for a second. There were other electricians on that shop floor in 1979. Some of them were probably faster than Eric. Some of them probably had cleaner wiring. But they followed the drawing, did the job, and went home. Eric took things apart. Eric asked questions. Eric learned how the performance controller talked to the rest of the system.

Forty-five years later, those other guys had careers. Eric led the design of a complete production facility in the Xinjiang Province of China. First project in the country that flowed first oil on the promised date, on budget, with the automation working. He said they'd never done that before. He said they still haven't done it since.

That's not luck. That's not connections. That's the compound return on a decision a twenty-year-old kid made to understand what he was building instead of just building it. And the gap between him and the guy who stayed on the drawing didn't show up in year one. It showed up in year ten, year twenty, year forty. That's how curiosity works. It compounds quietly until the day somebody needs a person who can see the whole picture, and you're the only one in the room who can.

What This Means If You're Building a Team

Watch who asks questions that aren't part of their job. I've hired a lot of people over the years. I've gotten some of those decisions right and plenty of them wrong. But the ones who surprised me on the upside were almost always the ones who were poking around in things they didn't have to understand yet. That's the signal. Not the resume. Not the degree. The appetite to know how the machine works, not just their corner of it.

Give your curious people real problems early. Eric was handed broken processes to fix. Not as punishment. Because somebody noticed he could handle it. That's how you develop the next leader on your team. You don't shelter them from complexity. You throw them into it and see what they do. If they come back with questions, not just answers, you've got somebody worth investing in.

Stop rewarding only compliance. We build training programs that teach people to follow procedures, and that's necessary. Safety depends on it. But if the only thing you're measuring is whether someone followed the steps, you're going to miss the person who could have told you the steps were wrong. The best teams I've seen reward the question as much as the answer.

Final Thought

My dad was a farmer and a carpenter. He taught me that you learn the most about something by getting your hands dirty in it, not by reading about it from a distance. Eric Fidler's career is the industrial version of that lesson. He didn't read about turbines. He took them apart. He didn't study production systems from a textbook. He tuned the ones that were broken until he understood how every piece talked to every other piece.

The drawing tells you what to build. Curiosity tells you why it works. And in this industry, the people who know why have always gone further than the people who only know what.

If you're early in your career and wondering whether it's worth learning the things nobody's asking you to learn yet, it is. That's the foundation. Everything else gets built on top of it.

Eric Fidler traces the full arc on Wisdom at the Wellhead, from wiring gas turbines to leading global automation teams to designing one of the most successful production facilities in China's history. It's a conversation about what happens when curiosity becomes a career strategy.