View from the Mountain

Finding Your Own Path

There is little doubt that we live in a world where jobs sometimes can disappear with little notice and even less reason.  There are times when today's workplace seems like a minefield.

Even those lucky enough to have a corporate career know that it can end if the cards get reshuffled. Often the stress of wondering if and when a long held job is going to disappear can be almost as bad as the loss of the job itself.

The chances of a career of decades at one company are slim today and maybe not even worth it.  Only a handful of people have the option of ignoring the workplace completely. Yet many of us know that there is something better than hanging onto life in a corporation.

There is actually only one solution that offers a real path to independence.  You have to create your own career.  Sometimes even multiple careers are needed to carve out the income that you need.

Trying to find your way in the business world on your own is little like standing on a dock and looking at unfamiliar waters.  You have to figure out not only where you are going but how you are going to get there.

You might take a kayak from the dock or you might need a skiff.  It is a challenge figuring out what will work if you have never been in the waters.

You also have to know if you are a good enough paddler to get there or how to learn the skills you need very quickly.

The answers to many of the questions that you want to ask before sliding away from the dock are elusive.  Much of what needs to be done relies on faith in yourself and your ability to adapt to situations that are often beyond your control.

All of this takes time and effort and enough money to survive.  You also have to be able to understand when you are headed in the right direction and when you need to turn around and start over.  You might even need to find some new skills or equipment.

Several years ago I wrote about "Dip Thinking" and knowing when to keep trying and when to try something new.

Perhaps a few years later, my thoughts are a little different. Few of us can be the greatest at what we do, but many of us can be very good at what we choose to pursue.  My thoughts on creating your own career are fairly simple.

1. Believe in yourself.
2. Turn your passion into your career.
3. Be willing to do what it takes to be very good at what you do.  If you are not the best, be certain to learn from the best.
4. Welcome criticism and suggestions on how to get better at what you are doing.
5. Promote yourself and your enterprise.  No one else is going to do it for you.
6. Be patient.  It will take time to find the path to success.  The best that you can hope is that you have enough time left to achieve your goals.
7. Add value and solve some needs without harming others.
8. Help others be successful.  The Steve Jobs model does not work for most of us.
9. The journey never ends once you get on the right road.
10. None of this ever gets easy, but eventually it might not be as hard as when you first started.

My true journey perhaps began in the fall of 2011 when I started writing what would turn out to be my second book, The Pomme Company.  It was at that time that I made the decision to completely take the rudder of my own ship.

Much of what I learned since leaving the corporate workd ended up on the pages of the first book that we published in the spring of 2012,  A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide.

However, it took me until my third book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes, before I really hit my stride.

I am currently working on a 2013 update to our "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  I have some great plans for this edition. I have listened to a lot of requests and incorporated many new ideas to make it a travel guide that fits our connected world in ways that can make the book very different from others on the market.

I am hoping this next book is a big step in my journey, but I already know that there will be many others.

A couple of other posts that I have written which relate to this same subject of finding your own way are Lessons Learned Along The Way and Some Advice To My Chidren.

 

 

It takes more than Tweets

 

Raymond's Gut, A Source of Inspiration

As a member of the generation which was born just before the middle of the last century, I worry that a few things which I cherish might be disappearing

The ability to communicate with the written word is one of those things. Closely related to that is actually putting reasoned words down on paper.

Writing about life's challenges, triumphs, and disappointments has been a wonderful blessing to me.  I have often heard it said that bottling up your feelings can destroy you.

Somehow my fingers on the keyboard have kept that from happening to me. Often, I work out any of my issues with the words that I write.  Many times I have advised team members that the best way to handle an email crafted in anger is to let it breathe overnight and then see how it tastes in the morning. If it is palatble twelve hours later once the sun has risen, then it is okay to send it.

Writing things down often works even better than those wonderful debates that we used to have around the table after dinner during college.  Sometimes you would come away feeling a little whipped after one of those encounters.  Writing usually lets you resolve things in a way that makes accepting  a tough conclusion a private event until you choose for it to be otherwise.

Unfortunately we are now in a world where reasoned writing is becoming less and less common.  Those wonderful letters so full of information and feelings that we used to write to each other are  long gone.

Pages of thought have now been replaced by clicking on the "Like" button on Facebook or a few words of quick comment. Sometimes we even feel lucky when an abbreviated sentence is tweeted.

This turn of events worries me because I believe learning how to express your opinions on paper is perhaps what made our society what it is today.  As a student of the American Revolution, I can assure you that it would not have happened without the reasoned discourses which either started in print or found their way into print after substantial debate.

While you might create a revolution with Twitter, it is far from certain that Tweets are a good basis for a decent government.  To have a society that can create a lasting government, you need a body of thought that supports the ideas of the people.  It is more than just some random thoughts about freedom and certainly it needs to be put on paper and discussed.

If you are someone who reads a lot, it is easy to put a new book or set of ideas in context.  If you want to understand a person, the best way to do so is to read what they have written.  You might gather some ideas from what they have Tweeted or posted on Facebook, but it will be far less accurate than the understanding gathered from articles or books which they have written.  If you want to challenge someone, read what they have written and find some holes in their reasoning.  Attacking someone's character because you do not agree with them is a fool's errand.

In spite of the value of the written word, many people cannot seem to grasp that writing is more than just putting words on paper or a computer screen.  Writing involves reasoning and backing up your opinions with the opinions of others.

I have actually written articles and submitted them to an editor who as editors often do picks a title that will grab attention. After the article is published I have had people, who obviously have read no further than the title, attack not just the article but me personally.  The only thing they seem to know about me is that I have an article with a title that they do not like.  It would be lost on these folks that I did not even pick the title.

I have often wondered what people in the future might deduce from my Facebook postings or the things that I might have tweeted over the years.  I sometimes tweet opinions that I find interesting but which are ones that I do not personally embrace. It would be hard to really understand who I am by studing my tweets.

Many people today believe they are well educated.  Yet they refuse to read words with which they cannot agree.  I amazed that someone who believes they are a well versed person could possible hold as true ideas which they have not allowed to be challenged by the thoughts of others.  Truth is always born in the crucible of debate with other ideas and with other people hopefully even more knowledgeable than one's self.

I have written three books and thousands of other pages since I started writing in earnest a little over thirteen years ago.  One book, A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide, is about where I live and how much I enjoy living there.  Our second book, The Pomme Company, is about the twenty year journey that was my career at Apple.

Perhaps as one of my good friends said the most significant thing about my Apple book is "the control and measured perspective" that I brought to the book while preserving my passion for the subject.  To be able to step back from the situation you lived and provide perspective is what you strive for when you write a book.

Our third book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes, really describes much of how I got to be the person that I am.  Not all is in the book as there is another book a little earlier and maybe a few chapters on those ten years of farming.

That my three books are electronic books has also worried me so I have already formatted our book, "The Pomme Company," for print.  In celebration of being married 40 years this summer, I might spend the fifty dollars or so that is needed for that one print copy.  I am sure once I see it in print, the other two books will follow.

Those printed copies will join the many treasured papers and some other books that I believe are so necessary for a worthwhile life.

My good friend, RJ Berrier, who died after many years as a newspaper editor in 2000, used to say that most people only get their names in the newspaper a few times in their life and sometimes only twice, once when they are born and once when they die. RJ believed they deserved to have their names spelled correctly.

I would go much further today.

First if you want your obituary done correctly perhaps it is best to write it yourself but understand it will not be easy. 

Second if you really want your story to be told correctly, there is no other way than to either put pen to paper or fingers to your keyboard.

Trust me it is worth the effort.

 

 

 

Looking Back is Worth the Effort

My college years were spent studying history.  One of my favorite quotations happens to be one from Edmund Burke. “Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.” There are a number of modern variations of that quote but I think there is another more important way of respecting history for those us who are not statesmen.

We need to take  the time to record our own history or  one day we will regret our inaction. At the very least not making some notes about important events in your life will eventually cause some frustration among those who come after you.  We have become a society that does not like to write or read. Those precious letters that we wrote in our twenties and thirties might be the last letters of a generation.  I am afraid to imagine the next generation trying to piece together family histories from whatever Facebook ends up doing with our time-lines and those tidbits of information that a few people Tweet.  Certainly examining Pinterest collections is not going to reveal a lot about our lives. Thinking about how to make a history out of emails will only bring on a headache.

For several years, I have been trying to create a few treasure troves of information for later generations.  I say “later” generations because it seems to be hard for the next generation to get very excited about what their parents or grandparents have done.  They are too busy creating their own memories.  I just hope they are doing more than cellphone videos on YouTube

I managed a few years ago to grab some wonderful video memories from the many hours of home video that I took starting sometime around 1985 or 1986.  I collected and edited the video until I got a DVD worth of home video snippets.  One Christmas eight or nine years ago I gave each of our children one of the DVDs and kept a spare one or two for myself.  Some family member in the future will be very happy to find my DVD.

I was also very fortunate to collect a few videos of my mother and her sister Molly.  My mother died in 2004 at the age of 93 years and six months.  I am tremendously pleased that I have my mother and her sister on a DVD.  At some point our granddaughter will be able to watch her great grandmother. I actually think that is pretty neat.   I cannot imagine how excited I would be to just hear the voices of any of my grandparents.  They were all long gone by the time that I was born.  There are barely a handful of pictures of three of the four of them.

While I have also been collecting photos over the years, I think it is very important to put photos into context.  Last year I wrote a book, “The Pomme Company,” about my career at Apple.  This year I wrote a book which is much more important to me personally.  The book, “A Taste for the Wild, Canada’s Maritimes,” chronicles how I got from Harvard College to building a cattle operation in northern New Brunswick.

I have heard that certain parts of your life are more important in forming your character and even memories.  I know that those sixteen years that I lived in Canada turned out to be very important in establishing my values and priorities.  Certainly the book, “A Taste for the Wild, Canada’s Maritimes,” clearly provides some insight into my early, post-college life.

I have two more books to write that might be of use to future family members, one is almost one third done.  The working title is “From Mayberry to Nova Scotia and Back.”  The other one which will deal with our years on the farm does not have a title yet and might be very hard to write given that even I did not take great notes during those ten years.  I was just too busy farming at the time and Glenda, my wife, was busy with our three children when she was not driving a tractor or truck for me.

History is a long term project so I am content to move forward with some other books for a while now that I have my recent book about Canada published. Sometimes you need a break from the past so I am starting to work on a 2013 update to our book, “ A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle, NC, Travel Guide.”Travel guides are a spring thing. Once that is finished I am planning a book of some of my favorite photographs of the Crystal Coast area with just enough commentary to provide some area information.  I am hoping some special photos in an e-book will please those folks who keep asking me to publish some of my photos.

My mind will eventually get focused back on history.  I am planning to take the new video camera that I got earlier this year and visit some older relatives.  It is surprising how much five minutes of video is worth a few years down the road.  It is very easy to record and edit video these days.  Sometimes an amazing bit of information will slip out among the tales we have heard over and over.  I sometimes wonder if what passes for communication in 2013 can ever be considered in the same breath as some of the wonderful oral stories that I have heard my elders recount over and over.

Hopefully my efforts with my family’s history will  inspire some others to write down  a few important things while those memories are still accessible. Once you start doing it, you quickly realize how important it is.