![[Slash Life] Give Your Passion a Fulcrum! Garmin Engineer: Diving Helped Me Build a Brilliant Slash Life](/_images/5042dd752fdd-1440w.webp)
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Sometimes, the vibrant life beyond a business card is far more compelling than the professional image it represents. Whether your title reads CEO or bears a prestigious brand name, people today are no longer satisfied with a life that revolves solely around work. What does it mean to truly live? For the well-dressed man standing before us, living means striking a balance between work and leisure — channeling focused energy at the office, then, after hours, throwing himself into sunshine, ocean, and schools of fish to build a life of his own making. Leon is a father, a Garmin engineer, and a dive instructor.
As a true slash-lifer, Leon continually deepens his expertise in both his career and his hobbies. The slash lifestyle has become a philosophy of survival — branching out horizontally, drawing on his own strengths and passions to master multiple fields, and moving fluidly between work and life with ease.
Slash Life! Discover How Far Your Life Can Go
Leon has endless diving stories to tell. Having been involved in diving for over a decade, he began to see life differently three years ago after experiencing some health challenges: "Getting older and dealing with work stress made me fall ill easily. I tried running and cycling, but diving was always where my passion truly lay, so I decided to go and get my dive instructor certification." Diving not only helped him regain control of his health — it opened the door to a whole second life.
At Leon's company, he is far from the only one who has pursued a hobby so seriously as to earn a certification for it. Plenty of his colleagues also seek out a multifaceted lifestyle, and the company hosts a wide variety of club activities. "We have professional runners and people involved in other competitive sports. Everyone thinks about what kind of life they actually want to live." In the age of the slash, defining yourself beyond your job title has become a necessity.
Is it really possible to stay passionate about the same career for over a decade without burning out? Leon believes that living with passion is the best way to achieve peak performance at work: "I still think it comes down to that old saying — life is short, so seize the moment. Find your way to decompress. People who know how to live are the ones who can truly let go and give their all at work." He sees the freedom and stress-relief that diving offers as tools that help him break through professional obstacles. After earning his dive instructor certification, he started a club at his company and found more friends to plunge into the sea with, turning the post-youth years of office life into something vibrant. Leon keeps expanding himself and sustaining his energy through a slash lifestyle, finding his own sense of happiness in the ocean.
Creating More Freedom Beneath the Waves
As a professional dive instructor, the greatest reward Leon's slash life has given him is the sense of fulfillment he gets from his students: "When I'm instructing, I get to lead students to explore the beauty and vastness of the ocean. If they come away thinking diving is fun and the sea is beautiful, that's all I need." What he loves most is guiding divers who once struggled to move freely underwater, teaching them to master neutral buoyancy so they can truly appreciate the world beneath the surface.
The other force that keeps drawing him back to the sea is the sheer vitality of it — richly colored sea anemones, all manner of marine life drifting past. Leon, who almost always wears a sunny smile, grows quietly moved: "The ocean is vast. When you see how immense it is and how small you are, there's nothing left to fuss about. Go look at the creatures inside it, and by the time you surface, all the pressure you've built up is just gone." Leon's deep respect for the ocean also leads him to regularly take part in ocean cleanup and beach cleanup activities, collecting abandoned ghost nets from the seafloor.
Diving, it turns out, is not about conquest — it's about pursuing freedom in life through the process of letting go and releasing the self. Leon acknowledges that growth comes with its share of challenges, including the physical demands of the sport: "Your gear plus your weights adds up to at least 20 kg. You're hiking over rugged terrain, and when you come out of the water your kit is waterlogged and even heavier. But it's all helped me build my stamina."
Time Management for a Reliable Man
Beyond using rest to recharge his work energy and deepen his appreciation for life, Leon believes his job also actively supports his slash lifestyle. During the development phase of his company's dive computer, for example, he frequently wore the watch underwater to conduct user experience analysis — then brought that feedback back to the office to refine it into a timepiece that is truly dependable in both performance and reliability. "This watch has all the core features of the Garmin fēnix series — sports tracking, training, fitness, and outdoor navigation — plus it supports decompression mode, GPS surface positioning, and smart mode, none of which you typically find on regular dive computers on the market."
His firsthand product experience during leisure time directly informed improvements to the product. Leon explains that the goal was to give divers a better way to track their activity through the dive log in the Garmin Connect app: "Being able to see your depth, dive time, temperature changes, and heart rate for every dive — whether you're descending slowly or pushing through a strong current — gives you a much clearer picture of your own technique and condition."
One watch to manage it all. The time management a slash-lifer needs, along with the energy management of staying in tune with your own state, are both realized in this single device. Because he can focus more fully on enjoying his leisure activities, work and life have entered a positive, mutually reinforcing relationship. Unwilling to waste a single moment, he flows purposefully through his time — maintaining high productivity at work while bringing the same drive and passion to everything he does, whether professional or personal.
Throughout the conversation, Leon keeps coming back to the word "reliable" — a core belief he holds as an engineer, whether he is endlessly testing hardware current consumption to extend battery life, or checking every hardware component to achieve the highest possible reliability. As both one of the developers and a devoted user, he has poured into this watch the same care he would give his own child — and out of that devotion has come an ideal timepiece and an ideal life.
For Leon, life always holds the possibility of something more brilliant. Just as diving has broadened his horizons, a feature-rich dive computer has accompanied him in pursuing diverse activities — scuba diving, skiing, SUP, and more. The slash life has gifted him a wealth of lived experience, and the balance between work and play enables him to work hard and play even harder. He is not only a dependable, professional engineer — he is a man made for the sea and for freedom. The slash life begins with mastering the art of managing your time, then sets out toward a richer, more complete existence. We'll be bringing you more stories of people creating their own value through the slash life — stories to help you shape more of your own future, seize every moment, and get ready to Slash with us!
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