Month: January 2019

Who are you?  Who is the person reading this right now?  I could guess that you might be a fellow blogger in the personal finance and early, or not so early, retirement space.  Or maybe you enjoy reading blogs for entertainment and information?  Either way that makes you and me not so different at all.  So, let me take you back in time ten years ago to when I posed a question to my wife .  “It is your birthday tomorrow, Honey, what do you want to do?”  I asked that question ten years ago and her answer changed our lives.  “I want to go see some waterfalls!”, she said.

I broke out into a Cheshire Cat smile because again I knew I had won the relationship lottery when she agreed to be my life partner!  That might seem over the top? But there was more to this waterfall hunt than you know, so let me explain.  First, the weather report for the next day was 32 degrees F and rain, all day.  Added to that, Arkansas waterfalls are in remote areas of our state, several hours drive away and involve much strenuous hiking to find.  So, my wife was suggesting that middle aged her and middle aged me hike hard all day in the freezing rain.  I don’t know what your idea of fun is but most people do not suggest driving hours to take a walk in the woods while getting pelted with freezing drizzle as the perfect birthday date. But who wants to be most people anyway?

And that is exactly what we did and it was one of the best days of our married lives!  Because of the rain the falls were swollen with cascading water and because we are outdoorsy people we had sufficient cold weather rain gear to stay moderately comfortable in spite of the inhospitable conditions.  It was fun because it was our idea, it was fun because nobody sane would have done it and it was fun because each of us was with our best friend, our best crazy friend!

We knew where to find the falls because of a book on Arkansas waterfalls by Tim Ernst, a noted Arkansas outdoor writer and photographer.  This book, titled simply Arkansas Waterfalls,   detailed 120 Arkansas Waterfalls including photographs, rough maps, historical information and GPS coordinates for each of them.  After this first waterfall adventure we decided it was so much fun that we would embark on a quest to visit every one of the 120 Arkansas waterfalls in the book. 

A word of caution if you happen to be an Arkansas resident or someone who travels here for recreation.  Getting to all of these falls is not easy and getting to some of them is quite dangerous.  Some of them are simple where you can literally drive up and see them without getting out of your car.  Many of them are on well marked and well travelled trails.  But some of them are dangerous bushwhacks across extreme terrain with only your gps to guide you, in areas where there is no cell phone coverage and very little chance of anyone finding you if you are injured. Some of these are very long treks of up to ten miles on terrain that easily limits your pace to one or two miles per hour with a lot of climbing and scrambling on your hands and knees.

On these bushwhacks you will encounter cliffs, boulder fields, difficult water crossings and horrendous saw briar thickets. There are bears, cotton mouth snakes, copper heads and rattle snakes to add to the adventure.   We carried an emergency transponder beacon like the ones used to locate crashed airplanes by satellite because there was no way either of us could have gotten the other out if we had broken a leg or ankle or worse.  Bushwhacking is inherently dangerous and extremely demanding physically so I would not recommend it unless you are in very good physical condition.  All of that caution aside we never suffered anything more than scratches and bruises though we fell dozens of times on our bushwhacking hikes and we never had to trigger the transponder to call in a helicopter.  Fortunately the book describes the difficulty level of each of the falls treks and is pretty accurate about which ones are inherently hazardous.  Take note that when the author says the hike is dangerous or life threatening, he is not kidding!

That first cold and rainy waterfall adventure was ten years ago on my wife’s birthday and we hiked to the 120^th and final waterfall ten years later, again on my wife’s birthday, earlier this month.   So much of our lives have been lived over those ten years bracketed by our waterfall quest.  Our kids went from from, well, kids, to young adults with six university degrees between the three of them, and the seventh in progress.  We have had a few medical scares that haven’t impacted either of us permanently but have reminded us of the frailty of life.  My wife came within three minutes of qualifying for the Boston Marathon and would have if her inept coach (me) had realized it during the race.  My career went from lobbyist, to corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company, to slightly early retired and very part time consultant.  My wife’s parents and mine passed away. One constant that held us closely together during that decade was the shared dream of completing the journeys to all of the falls. 

 For fun my wife listed how many waterfalls we reached each year of the ten-year period.  And there, plain to see, were the patterns of our lives played out in waterfalls.  The only year we did not hike to a single falls was 2011, the year my employer sold the company and the year my new overlords elevated me from government affairs to running the company.  That was a whirlwind year when I did not  know if I’d keep my old job or be terminated, much less be promoted.  I was not ready to retire and with all the work turmoil there was precious little time for recreation.  Two years later I was very sick, and also had knee surgery, and wasn’t fit for hard hiking.  We only made it to three falls that year, 2013.  In 2015 and 2016, when I realized I was done with work and made my exit  we saw 39 waterfalls.  My focus on my career was over and we were focusing on life! And in this very new year of 2019, which is only a month old, we have already crossed off the last six falls in a furious onslaught, much like the last two hundred yard sprint in each of the marathons we ran together. A last little push when there isn’t any reason to save any of your reserves because the finish line is…right…there in front of you. 

It is bittersweet in a way, like any life accomplishment that matters, it has a bit of an anticlimactic feel to it. You’ve been there too, it could be your child getting married, landing that big promotion, going on that bucket list dream vacation or hitting your financial independence number.  You realize soon after the fact that it was the journey that mattered, much more than the prize.  The trip to the goal was everything, and now that you are there, what next?  Well, of course the answer for us is another quest, another goal, another journey to begin together.

We have been married 40 years and counting and sometimes people remark that it is quite a feat to stay together and to stay friends that long.  Not really, you just have to do things together you enjoy.  In our case they are active sports, hiking, distance running, skiing, fishing, tennis, pickle ball and off roading in our ATV.  But we also cook together, watch movies, go to church together and travel.  We do as much with others and separately as we do together, but we put a premium on the activities we share. 

The waterfalls quest spanned the transition in our lives of going from a high stress corporate executive who was always on call and a stay at home wife to a retired couple with some side gigs and volunteer work.  I think that was the perfect time in our lives to pursue it because it gave us a constant shared vision in the midst of great personal change.  In fact I will go so far as to encourage any of you who are within a few years of retiring or switching from a 9 to 5 to a entrepreneurial lifestyle to start a quest now with your partner.  And one that will take years to complete, hopefully long enough to bridge the transition to your next life.  I cannot explain the magic it brought into our lives, and the peace and the joy of stumbling out of the woods, exhausted, in the late afternoon having visited a breathtaking waterfall few people have ever seen.  Being able to share that with your partner and no one else, all the emotions of having been crazy tired, totally lost, and then delighted with the visual treasure of falling water cascading down to an emerald pool.  How do you stay together for 40 years?  You have to add magic.

What quests have you taken on or considered?

What do my wife and I need to do next, we need another quest!

To leave a comment just click on the title at the top of this post.

Sounds click bait-ish doesn’t it? But it absolutely is the truth. I’ve written about my career many times. I’m a chemical engineer and spent much it running a large chemical complex in a rural southern state. It was my only 9 to 5 job after graduating college and when I finally stopped enjoying it I was already in the financial position to never have to work again. Blogging is one of my non-monetized hobbies and I also consult a little for entertainment. So how and why did a billionaire personally save me from making a big mistake?

To make sense of that I need to start at the beginning. When I got out of college with my engineering degree I already knew where I wanted to work, at the place I had interned between my junior and senior years. I explained why I picked that place in my last post, but in short it was because it was a growing company run by chemical engineers, like me, and one in which they were poised to do a lot of hiring. I was going to get in the door first and have a competitive advantage over all the ones hired after me. I also liked the guy who would be my boss. He was a fast mover and I felt the chances of following him up the corporate ladder were excellent. All that worked flawlessly and I was able to develop a tremendous skill set by designing multi-million dollar improvements to the complex almost from the day I walked in the door. It was a Fortune 500 publicly traded corporation but still had a family feel to it. I could not believe I had my dream job when most of my classmates seemed lukewarm at best about their jobs at other companies.

I was promoted twice and given large raises and when the corporation sold us my boss was promoted, just as I had expected. And I got his old job which was arguably the number two position in the company. The new owners were much different than our previous ones. They were a private company, owned by a single individual. In fact he owned some 60 companies, although ours was the newest and largest in the stable. He was in his sixties and had some of his grown kids in the business too, but none of them were engineers. That was important to me because that meant that there would not be a problem with nepotism being a barrier, at least not prior to hitting a C-suite level job. They did not pay quite as well as publicly traded companies but I was still treated to very good raises. And I enjoyed my first few years working for them just as much as I loved working for the original owners.

After awhile though I began to tire of turning down recruiters on the phone who were offering me higher paying jobs and jobs equivalent to my bosses position. I also worried about the market segment we were in. While it looked to be around for a few more years the writing seemed to be on the wall as far as the glory days being in the past. My skill set fit extremely well with a similar industry that was poised to greatly expand in the future and so for the very first, and only time in my career, I decided that maybe I should change industries. I interviewed with an exciting company in Dallas and they loved me! I went as far as tentatively accepting the job, but had not told my employer yet. If any one reading this remembers the television series, Dallas, that had the infamous J.R. Ewing as the main character, the golden tinted windowed building in the opening credits for the show was where my office was going to be. Only I was going to work for the real company that lived there and not for the evil J.R.

I apologetically told my boss about my plans to leave, I felt I owed my employer quite a lot. They had been very good to me but just did not have a job open imediately at the level I was ready to fill. He did not say much but the next day I got a call from the owner. THE OWNER! I knew him because in spite of the 60 companies he owned he always spent most of his time at his newest prize, which was us. But he rarely called me, I was several levels below him on the organization chart.

To give you some perspective of this man, this billionaire, he had started with virtually nothing as a young adult. But he was a tremendous entrepreneur and risk taker. Over the next forty years he went from flat broke to billionaire status. How wealthy was impossible to pin down because all his companies were privately owned, by him. But Forbes magazine listed him on their top 200 Richest in America list. He had a jet. He had an impressive vacation compound on a private island at the beach. He had his own yacht and a large private hunting preserve. Yet he would show up at our facility at 5 AM, when he was in town, and hand deliver dozens of donuts to our hourly workers. He would ride a bicycle around our plant and stop and talk to every employee he met about their family, their job or sometimes just the weather. He really cared about his employees to the point that he even kept one of his unprofitable companies in operation until the very last elderly employee retired, because he had never laid off a single employee in his life. He would also write personal checks to individual employees that had suffered a medical or family crisis above and beyond what company insurance covered. He was an amazing individual but also a shrewd businessman and expected hard work in return for your paycheck. He demanded the best from everyone but also helped inspire us to deliver it. He had no patience for laziness or dishonesty but he never fired anyone for a lack of talent, as long as they tried to perform.

The next day when my phone rang and it was him, I wasn’t sure if I was going to hear harsh words or kind ones. He simply said he understood what my plans were and asked if it would be OK for him to hop on his jet and come to my office the next day. He said he thought he had information I would be interested in. It felt like Jeff Bezos was calling and telling me he had heard I had some problems with my last order on Amazon and was there anything he could do to help. This man was a legend and I was still just an engineering department manager, nobody that should ever pop up on his busy radar. Of course I said yes and immediately began to wonder what in the world he was going to say to me in person.

He came into my office the next morning with a bulging file folder and got right to business. He said I needed to know something about the company I had agreed to work for and began to lay out some profit/loss charts. Then he showed me the debt history of the company. I have no idea where he got all of the information but it painted a very different picture of the other company than I had been given on my interview trip. They were bleeding out financially, had enormous debt and were making no money at all. In fact, based on the numbers, they would be bankrupt in a matter of months. Then he switched to talking about me. He told me that I figured into their plans for the future greatly. They wanted me to move up rapidly and already had plans for my next promotion. He told me he hoped I would stay with them and help them build the company but that either way, thanks for what I had already contributed. Then he got up, shook my hand and drove back to his jet.

I decided to stay, I reasoned where else in the world would I ever find a company whose billionaire CEO/owner would personally try to prevent me from making a bad career decision? Ironically an industry friend ended up taking the job I had originally accepted but then turned down at the debt ridden corporation. And just as my owner had predicted they went bankrupt a few months later. Instead of becoming unemployed I was given a large raise and it was not long until I received the first of several promotions. These eventualy led me to becoming a corporate officer and in charge of that division of the company. I felt fortunate that someone so important and so busy took the time to help keep a young man from making a career mistake. Over the years I saw him take that same kind of interest in many others. His life was not about making money, he had made more than any human could ever spend. He passion was in building things and in building people to run them for him.

He was a great leader, one who genuinely did not think he was better than you because he had more money. He remembered not having any money at all. He honestly felt that by building successful businesses he was serving others and serving his employees in particular. And while we were never close friends, he taught me more about leadership than anyone else I ever worked with.

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Have you ever worked for an inspirational leader, or for someone who changed the course of your life?

Are there even still people like this around in the business world?

Part one of this post was partly a defense of the good old 9 to 5, so I won’t go there today.  Today I’m going to assume that if you are reading this you are either excited or resigned about the need to get a J.O.B.  as opposed to becoming an entrepreneur, at least for now.  It also dealt with getting the right training or education to set yourself up in a high paid career.  But today I’m going to talk about picking a dream job as your first job, or your next one. 

You have already gotten the training you need to qualify for a career that you can excel in, because as I said in part one, you don’t try to fulfill your passion with a job.  You find a job you can excel in and as you become world class you grow a passion for that job, in the classic virtuous cycle manner.  Michael Jordan wasn’t the greatest basketball player of his day because he loved basketball, his love for basketball grew as he mastered it and only because he could master it.  Your work is going to be like that too.  No matter how much you want to be something, if you pick something you can’t gain mastery in you will not find fulfillment in it.  The world is full of untalented and unhappy actors and singers who just don’t have the skills and talents to succeed at their “passion”.  Leave any passion that doesn’t fit your talents in the hobby closet. 

So you know what you are good at and you’ve gotten equipped to start doing it.  What’s left to do?  Just selecting the place to work and the entry job that will let you start on the path to excellence.  First, and this is huge, do not go to work anywhere where the top guys, the guys in the C-suite, aren’t older versions of you.  I was a chemical engineer so I looked exclusively at oil and chemical companies because their top leadership included a lot of chemical engineers.  I could have worked at an insurance company or a firm that built integrated circuits and computers but those companies were managed by finance majors, accountants or electrical engineers.  There is a simple reason for limiting your consideration to companies run by people with your credentials.  Prejudice!  Not in the sense of the evil racial , gender or ethnic kind.  This is the simple business preference that everyone considers their own qualifications to be the best ones, all the way up to the CEO.  And they will always promote people with the same qualifications as their own over people who are, in their subconscious opinions, misfits or less qualified.  That probably isn’t fair and it might even be an evil kind of prejudice but it is reality and you can make it work for you or against you. 

Next, realize that you may have some strong preferences about lifestyle yourself and do not pick a job that will compromise them unless you do it as a great adventure.  In my case I was engaged when I graduated from college and my wife was from a rural farm literally  in the middle of nowhere.  She had less than twenty people in her high school class.  Neither of us liked big cities and our hobbies of tennis, fishing, hunting and hiking and our dislike of crowded conditions meant that I chose a job in Arkansas over Chicago, Houston, Tulsa or Dallas.  I also chose a job where I could probably stay put without hurting my career advancement or transfer to Colorado if I wanted to (we both love to ski!).  I had interned at this company while in college and noticed that many of the top leadership had stayed in the same rural location for most or all of their careers, so that was a plus for me.  Had I not been about to marry I might have taken the Chicago job because it was a very elite offer and after a couple of years stint there I would have been on the international team working all over the world.  That might have been fun for a single guy but not for my wife and keeping her happy is a top priority.  In the same way think hard about how much travel you would have to do in a job and if that works for you.  The job I took had me on the corporate jet from my very first year of work and that’s an amazing and fun way to travel!

Make sure that the pay and benefits are not the only things you consider.  In my case the pay for Arkansas was exactly equal to what Chicago offered me so that was not an issue.  In fact it was a plus because the cost of living in Arkansas is very low, and big city wages in tiny town really let you ramp up your savings rate without extreme frugality.  Besides pay and benefits find out about the biggest benefit of all, how fast can you grow your skills in that job?  As an intern I was already getting a chance to do senior engineer work and I had not even gotten my degree.  It was obvious that I could advance as fast as I was capable, and there were mentors galore in that location that just loved to teach newbies.  Plus it seemed like everyone there was constantly being sent off to industry leading training seminars all over the country.  Week long, very expensive training was provided to everyone every year, sometimes several times a year.  Being a fairly small company in an industry dominated by  giants, our management realized they had to train hard to compete.  The company spent over $200,000 training me across my career, adjusted for inflation the number is probably closer to $500,000 in today’s currency.

Pick your boss.  When you consider a job consider your supervisor.  Again as an intern I got to know the players and it was easy to see that the person who would be my boss if I took the job was on his way up the corporate ladder.  He was a genuine genius full of money making ideas for the company and it stood to reason that if I worked for him and became his right hand guy, then as he rose, I’d rise.  That is exactly what happened.  If you take a job working for someone who isn’t progressing then don’t expect to either.  He will likely have realized his career is stuck in the mud and will not be very productive.  And his reputation will rub off on you despite your best efforts.  Don’t take a job unless you are going to be managed by a thoroughbred, if you are hitched to a mule you better get used to going slow. 

Finally, pick your competition.  That was a big reason I ended up at a smaller company.  I had offers from huge corporations but they had something I preferred to avoid if at all possible, strong competition.  The small company I chose was beginning to flourish but they had seen some hard times for the previous decade so they had not hired any new engineers during that period.  That meant there was a ten year gap between me and the next youngest worker.  They had plans to hire a lot of people and I was going to be the first of several.  Being the first guy in and being someone who had modern skills they lacked when it came to computerization and coding let me establish my reputation (in their minds) as a rocket scientist, so that when the next dozen engineers were hired they just had no chance of competing with me.  It is unlikely you can find a field quite that fertile but the principle is still valid.  Given a choice, pick a place where you do not have strong competition.  If you are the fourth one hired into a team and the others are brilliant and have a year or two experience advantage on you you’ll spend your entire career working for them and will have to change companies to get ahead.  I saw that happen to most of the people hired in after me. Whenever that next great promotion came up it always came to me first. 

So that’s what I learned during my 9 to 5 days, which blessedly are almost three years to the day behind me now.  Now I work a day a week consulting for entertainment and money I don’t need, I volunteer a couple of days because it helps people in need and I blog and pursue a bunch of outdoor activities for fun.  I credit having had an exciting career that was one of my favorite hobbies for three decades, to my selecting the right career and the right company. And I credit that to my using the thinking I put in this post and the previous one (part one).  At least I can say it worked for me. 

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What about you?  Do you agree with these tips ?

What has worked for you in landing a dream job?