Anthony Helinski is a Salem, New Hampshire-based educator, engineer, and woodworking entrepreneur. He spent seven years teaching science and reading at Lawrence Public Schools in Lawrence, Massachusetts, building a program grounded in hands-on, inquiry-based learning that reached students across a range of needs and backgrounds. He later shifted into engineering and design instruction before making a full transition into gas utilities project engineering with Progressive Pipeline Management in New Jersey, where he designed remediation projects for major east coast utility companies and developed internal training curriculum. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from Suffolk University and two master’s degrees from Lesley University, including a Master of Science in General Science and a Master of Science in Education. An athlete and competitor from an early age, Helinski played varsity hockey at Central Catholic High School and later at Suffolk University. He now channels the same discipline and precision into Helinski Custom Woodworking, a Salem-based venture producing handmade cutting boards and custom pieces. His career reflects a consistent commitment to building things that work and measuring results by their impact on others.
Anthony Helinski on What Success Really Looks Like
How do you define success personally and professionally?
Success, to me, is measured by the difference you can make in others’ lives. That is the clearest definition I have found over the years, and it holds up whether you are standing in front of a class of middle schoolers or coordinating a gas main project across multiple utility teams. The metric is not the accomplishment itself. It is the residual impact on the people around it.
Was there a moment when that definition crystallized for you?
Teaching has a way of doing that. When you spend seven years working with kids who are struggling to stay engaged and you find a method that actually reaches them, you stop thinking about your own performance. You start thinking about theirs. The classroom was the best training ground I could have had for understanding what results actually matter.
How do you approach hard decisions when the right path is not obvious?
I prioritize by urgency. When everything feels important at once, I ask which problem has the most time pressure attached to it and I go there first. It is not a glamorous system, but it keeps things from sliding into crisis. After the decision is made, I evaluate: did it work, was the outcome optimal, and did it create any collateral impact on the people or processes nearby?
What role has failure played in your development?
The engineering design process is built around failure. You build, you test, you identify what did not work, and you revise. I teach that to students. I apply it to project work. I apply it to my woodworking. The moment you treat a failed outcome as information rather than a judgment on your ability, the whole thing becomes more productive.
What habits have been most important to sustaining your performance?
Everything starts with self-care and mindfulness. I know that sounds disconnected from engineering, but it is not. If you are not managing your own clarity and well-being, the judgment calls suffer. Decisions made from exhaustion or stress tend to be reactive rather than deliberate. I have found that mastering your own self-awareness tends to settle everything downstream.
How do you handle the gap between ambition and reality?
I have always tried to be the hardest working person in the room, not to prove something to others but because effort is the one variable I can control completely. The outcome is never guaranteed. But I can always control the quality of the work I put in. That is the only part of success I own entirely.
What have you had to sacrifice to get where you are?
There are trade-offs in any serious career transition, and I have made a few significant ones. Leaving teaching was a longer decision than it looked from the outside. It meant stepping away from something I was genuinely good at and valued in order to build a different kind of competence. Those transitions require you to accept a period of being a beginner again. That is not comfortable, but it is necessary.
What is the most important thing you have learned about building something that lasts?
Surround yourself with people who think differently than you do. Positive thinkers, not yes-sayers. People who bring different vantage points and are not afraid to name what is not working. I have gotten some of my best thinking from being challenged by someone who saw a problem from a completely different angle. That is true in a classroom, on a project site, and in a woodworking shop.