Tenacity: My Journey Through Life

Book excerpt: As a farm boy from northern Iceland, Eystein Thordarson achieved prominence in the world of international ski racing and competed in the Olympics. He did not even speak English when he arrived in the United States. He had to compete effectively with far more educated people. His experiences with international ski racing made that possible for him. Those experiences spanned five years and included two Winter Olympic Games. From 1960 into the early 1990s, the United States electronics industry was not only the fastest growing but also the most competitive in the world, where thousands of well-educated and qualified people desperately battled to climb the ladder of corporate success. During those thirty years, technology advanced from the use of vacuum tubes in electronic circuitry to highly integrated micro technology and computer software applications, far beyond the greatest imaginations of the late 1950s. The public hunger for new and better mousetraps appeared insatiable, thus fueling the market continuously. The enormous industrial revolution that took place from 1960 into the early 1990s is one of the greatest that mankind has ever experienced. Follow the authors highly successful career through the maze of the high-tech industry. Tenacity: My Journey Through Life chronicles the life of a boy from a farm in northern Iceland, to the ski slopes of the Olympics, to the boardrooms of major international corporations.