I’ve never been particularly interested in following one straight road through life.
I’ve worked in radio and newspapers. I’ve built businesses, owned restaurants, taught music, worked in creative roles and spent thousands of hours driving around cities talking to people I probably never would have met otherwise. I’ve had ideas that worked, ideas that didn’t, businesses that grew and things I cared about that eventually disappeared.
And I wouldn’t trade the variety for a more impressive-looking résumé.
I’ve always been driven more by experience than accumulation. I wanted to know what it was like to do something. To build something. To walk into a room where I didn’t quite belong yet and figure it out. To meet people whose lives looked nothing like mine and hear their stories.
Some experiences lasted years. Others were brief chapters. Almost all of them left something behind.
There’s another part of my experience that I don’t talk about for sympathy, but I don’t particularly want to hide either. I live with ankylosing spondylitis. It’s part of the deal. It affects some days more than others, and over the years I’ve learned how to work around it, work through it and occasionally accept that it gets a vote too.
It’s not a crutch. It’s not an excuse. And it’s certainly not the most interesting thing about me.
It’s simply one of the realities that has travelled with me through a lot of these stories.
That’s what this section is about. The stories.
It might be something from my radio days, something that happened in one of my restaurants, a person I met while driving, an old friend I suddenly remembered, a business lesson I learned considerably later than I should have, or one of those moments when life takes a turn you couldn’t possibly have planned.
There have been successes, failures, absurd situations, wonderful people, difficult people and more than a few occasions when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
Those may have taught me the most.
I don’t look at the different things I’ve done as separate careers anymore. They’re experiences. Collectively, they’ve shaped how I write, how I see people, how I understand business and even how I approach public life.
You pick things up along the way.
Eventually, you realize you’ve got some stories to tell.