During the summer of 1972, I was honorably discharged from the US Navy after serving 21 months on active duty in communications... I served on a salvage/rescue ship and was stationed at Little Creek at the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia... During the last 6 months of my enlistment our ship was deployed on a Med Cruise and when we left port, I decided I was not going to shave until I was discharged. So, the beard you see in the photo is the result of a little over 6 months of growth and never trimmed. Once home in NC, I kept the beard for a couple of days then shaved it off. I wore a mustache for a few years, then a goatee for a couple of more and have been clean shaven ever since.
I was 25 years old and had completed 3 years of college before enlisting in the military because I was not sure if I wanted to be a college student or not... It did not take me long to realize that college was the only way for me to have a successful future. In 1974, I was awarded a BA in English and in 1981, I was awarded an MBA... And, while I could have used my MBA to earn massive amounts of money, I would have had to relocate much farther NORTH than Virginia and I just did not want to do that. So, the trade off was a high salary for a slow pace life.
And, while my life was of a slow pace, all the jobs that I accepted in NC, TN, KY were anything but slow paced with the realization that the only thing I had escaped was being in a lot of traffic at rush hour. As a result, I suffered a massive heart attack at the age of 60 that should have killed me but because I was so damn healthy due to constant exercising, I survived because my body had created its own bypass which at the time I thought was amazing and still do.
I have had about 10 employers during my 45 year career all of whom were pains-in-the-ass and did not want "free thinkers" but someone they could control to do their bidding, using numbers to measure and control their future employment.
Not only was I in a constant state of change, I taught change and continuous improvement of processes in a variety of industries: Education, Manufacturing, Retail, Government, Military, Healthcare, Publishing, Printing, Automotive, Service, and Non-Profits. Small scale, incremental, day-to-day changes in the way the work gets down... including continuous improvement in how I delivered my material.
Change in the only constant in life besides the passing of time and the fact that we all grow older and what's done is done and can never really be redone since the past can never be revisited... as it is always the present and whatever was done is now NEW. That is to say... a company can NEVER have any STANDARD OPERATION PROCEDURES if they are making continuous improvement by DEFAULT...
Some people find that UNSETTLING... to say the least...
