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84 Passion for statisticsme is its ruthless vitality, always rushing forward, often ending up lookinglike a garden sadly in need of weeding. I wish there were more reflection,more respect for the past. The intellectual rewards, however, have alwaysbeen largest for creativity, for those who till new soil, and so that is wheremost of the energy is spent.And to be fair, I too deserve criticism, as I have too rarely taken on therole of oversight, the role of putting an order to what is important, and sayingwhy. One of my passions is for discovering something new. It is like beingChristopher Columbus, discovering a New World. My discoveries have sometimesinvolved basic understanding of scientific phenomena, but the big magicfor me comes from the beautiful way that statistics, through mathematics, canfind the signals in the midst of noise. In whatever way I can add somethingto this, by discovery of new ways to build models, or compute statistics, orgenerate mathematical understanding of scientific questions: that is part ofwhat makes me feel valuable.However, I also have a passion for mentoring young people. After all, whyelse 30 PhD students? I therefore take on the career counselor role here.Before I describe my early career-changing events, let me touch on a coupleof personal perspectives.There is an important element of philosophy to statistics, epitomized bythe frequentist/Bayesian schism. I was fortunate to be trained by a pair ofpowerful statistical thinkers: Norman Breslow and David Cox. Their frequentistthinking definitely colors my perspective on the philosophy of statistics tothis day. However, I am not passionate about the distinction between Bayesand frequency. Although I am interested in the basic logic behind statistics,it will be a small part of my essay. This will be more about the process ofbecoming excited about the entire statistics culture, and what to do with thatexcitement.I am also someone who has learned to collaborate, and loves it. It is a keypart of maintaining my passion. For the first seven or so years of my career,I only wrote solo papers. About 1985 or so, though, I had an eye-openingresearch discussion with my colleague Clifford Clogg. We were both youngmen then, about at the point of tenure. He had a joint appointment in theDepartments of Statistics and Sociology. In our discussion we realized that we,from very different backgrounds and points of view, had just found the exactsame result by two completely different means (Lindsay et al., 1991). His wascomputational, mine was geometric. He concluded our meeting by saying, withwonder, “I can’t believe that I get paid to do this!” I wholeheartedly agreedwith him, but I must say that a lot of my joy came because I was doing itwith him. We became fast friends and collaborators.Sad to say, Cliff died in 1995, at the age of 45, from a sudden heart attack.It was working with him that I first learned, in a deep sense, that the biggestjoys in statistical work are those that are shared. Nowadays, I often thinkabout problem solving alone, but I very rarely work alone.