![[Slash Career] Give Your Passion a Foothold! Garmin Engineer: Diving Helped Me Build a Remarkable Slash Life](/_images/5042dd752fdd-1440w.webp)
Sometimes, the vibrant life beyond a business card is more compelling than the polished professional image it represents. Whether the title on that card reads CEO or bears a prestigious brand name, people today are no longer content with a life that revolves entirely around work. What does it mean to truly live? For the sharply dressed man standing before us, living means spending time in a way that balances work and leisure — unleashing focused energy during office hours, then, after the workday ends, surrendering himself to sunshine, ocean, and schools of fish, crafting a slash life that is entirely his own. Leon is a father, a Garmin engineer, and a dive instructor all at once.
As a slash-career individual, Leon continuously deepens his expertise in both his profession and his leisure pursuits. The slash lifestyle has become his philosophy — branching out horizontally, drawing on personal strengths and passions, honing skills across multiple disciplines, and moving fluidly between work and life with ease.
Slash Life! Discover Just How Wide Your World Can Be
Leon has more diving stories than he can count. After more than a decade in the water, a health scare three years ago prompted him to think differently about life: "Getting older and the stress of work made me fall sick easily. I tried running and cycling, but diving was still where my passion truly lay, so I decided to go after my dive instructor certification." Diving didn't just help him take charge of his health — it opened the door to a second life entirely.
At Leon's company, he's far from the only one who has turned a passion into a credential. Many of his colleagues pursue diverse lifestyles, and the company is home to numerous clubs and activity groups. "We have professional runners and people involved in other competitive sports. Everyone thinks about what kind of life they want to live." In the age of the slash career, defining yourself beyond your job title has become a necessity.
Can you stay genuinely enthusiastic about the same job for over a decade? Leon believes that living with passion is the most effective way to stay productive: "I keep coming back to that timeless saying — life is short, so make the most of every moment. Find your own way to decompress. People who know how to live are the ones who can truly shine at work." He sees the freedom and stress relief that diving provides as a catalyst for breaking through professional challenges. After earning his instructor certification, he also started a club at the company, finding more friends to dive into the ocean with — reclaiming the spirited post-youth of the office worker. Through a slash life that constantly pushes his boundaries and keeps his energy flowing, Leon has found his own sense of happiness beneath the waves.
Creating More Freedom in the Ocean
As a professional dive instructor, the greatest reward of Leon's slash life is the sense of accomplishment he gets from his students: "As an instructor, I get to lead students into the beauty and vastness of the ocean. If they come away feeling that diving is a blast and the sea is magnificent, that's more than enough for me." What Leon loves most is guiding a student who once struggled to move comfortably underwater — teaching them to master neutral buoyancy so they can finally take in the splendour of the deep.
The other force that keeps drawing him back to the sea is the sheer vitality of the ocean — vivid sea anemones bursting with colour, marine life drifting gracefully by. Leon, who almost always wears a sunny smile, turns unexpectedly reflective: "The ocean is so vast. When you see how immense the sea is and how small you are, nothing really feels worth fretting over. You look at the creatures living inside it, and by the time you surface, every bit of pressure you've been carrying is gone." With deep respect for the ocean, Leon also regularly takes part in ocean cleanup and beach cleanup events, collecting discarded ghost nets from the seafloor.
Diving, it turns out, is not about conquest — it's about pursuing freedom in life through the process of relaxing and letting go of the self. Leon acknowledges that growth comes with hardship, including the physical demands of the sport: "The gear plus the weights adds up to at least 20 kg. You hike over rough, uneven terrain, and when you come out of the water there's the added weight of everything soaked through. But it's also what's built up my stamina."
Time Management for a Reliable Man
Beyond rest as a way to recharge and gain a deeper appreciation of life, Leon believes his work actively supports his slash lifestyle. During the development phase of the company's dive computer, for instance, he frequently wore the watch in the water to conduct user experience analysis — feeding his real-world insights back into the design process to forge a timepiece that is absolutely dependable in both performance and reliability. The result is a watch that has genuinely enhanced the balance of his own life. "This watch has all the core features of the Garmin fēnix series — sports, training, fitness, outdoor navigation — and beyond that it supports decompression mode, GPS surface positioning, and a smart mode that ordinary dive computers on the market don't offer."
Experiencing the product firsthand during leisure time gave him direct, actionable input for improvements. Leon explains that in order to give divers a richer way to log their activity through the Garmin Connect app's dive log: "Seeing the depth, dive time, temperature changes, and heart rate for every single dive — whether you're descending slowly or pushing through a strong current — they're all different. That data helps you understand your own technique and condition so much better."
One watch to command every situation — the time management and personal-energy management that any slash-life practitioner needs are both realised in this single device. Because he can focus more fully on enjoying his leisure pursuits, work and life have entered a positive, mutually beneficial cycle. Not wanting to waste a single moment, he moves purposefully through his time, maintaining a higher level of efficiency at work and bringing sharp passion and drive to everything he does, both professionally and personally.
Throughout the conversation, Leon repeatedly comes back to the word "reliable" — a conviction he holds as an engineer, reflected in the way he relentlessly tests hardware power consumption to achieve longer standby times and rigorously validates every hardware component to reach the highest possible reliability. As both one of the developers and a devoted user, he has poured the care of a parent into crafting both the ideal watch and the ideal life.
For Leon, life always holds the potential for something more remarkable — just as diving has broadened his horizons, and a feature-rich dive computer has accompanied him in pursuing a wide range of sports: diving, skiing, SUP, and more. The slash life has brought him a wealth of lived experience, and the equilibrium between work and play means he can work hard and play harder. He is not only a precise and dependable engineer — he is a man born for the ocean and for freedom. The slash life begins with the art of managing time with ease, and from there sets out toward a richer, more complete existence. We'll be bringing you more stories of people creating their own value through slash lives — stories to inspire you to shape more of your own future. Seize every moment, and get ready to Slash with us!
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