A STORY WORTH TELLING
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
— Zig Ziglar
“So,” friends ask, “how is retirement going?”
“Great,” is my go-to answer. “It lasts just long enough … between calls from people needing my help for a while.”
Careful planning of one’s career, I’ve always advocated, is a crucial step in life. For what it’s worth, having survived my attempts to chart a course from a very early age, I offer my thoughts on successes and failures.
Before junior high school, scrutinizing the “Popular Mechanics” classified pages at the barbershop revealed a world of career choices. These included rare opportunities for unique businesses such as making authentic Bowie knives and marketing assembly plans for constructing scale models of the U.S.S. Constitution in a bottle.
One really lucrative field, I was certain, was Army surplus dealers.
“Return the postagefree card for details,” the ad beckoned. “High demand, big profits.”
Exploring these and other rare opportunities kept both me and the Mount Pleasant postmaster busy covering my requests for information in outgoing mail and loads of informational literature coming in.
My concern was about which one of these moneymakers would be the best choice. The postmaster’s concern was which one of them I might harbor plans to enter.
“You’re not thinking about anything like mail-order potbellied stove kits, are you?” he quizzed me one day as I handed him another stack of postcards.
Then one Saturday afternoon while pondering empty pockets in front of the old Martin Theater downtown, I heard voices. Mystic words dictating my next career choice.
“You see, son,” Dad said, putting his arm around me. “Think about this. No work … no money.’’
He knew I was broke and had missed the sci-fi flick matinee “I Married a Monster from Outer Space.”
From that day forward, my life became a testing ground for various after-school careers and paying jobs.
Among them: Sweeping floors at the Perry Brothers store after school. Working Saturdays in the men’s department at Beall’s. Pumping gas and washing driveways at the Fina Station at night.
That move turned postage-free postcards going out to spending money coming in. Plus, it provided valuable experience, which led to seeking college advice concerning careers that didn’t involve manual labor.
“Well, Leon, looking at your grades,” I remember Mount Pleasant High School counselor Mrs. Sanders telling me, “it’s tough to tell … um, exactly what your field of expertise might be.”
“I’ve thought about truck driver or funeral director,” I offered. “But I really enjoyed Mr. Murray’s mechanical drawing class. I want to be an architect.” So, with a high school diploma plus extracurricular credits in fast cars, loud music and late nights, I was off to college to study building design. It was the beginning of five years trying to circumvent the evil conspiracy among college professors to prevent me from passing math courses and working when not in classes.
Then one day to my surprise, when the registrar’s office wasn’t looking, I slipped out the back door of East Texas State University with a degree in psychology and art.
“Tell me,” my understanding father asked after graduation, “what is it you plan to do with this varied preparation for your future?”
“It’s really very simple, Dad,” I assured him with my best collegeeducated graduate look. “Unless I change my mind before Monday, I think I’ll teach school.”
Not long after that, by pure luck, I was afforded the opportunity to get the best career advice ever from motivational speaker and author Zig Ziglar.
Full disclosure: We just happened to get on the same hotel elevator together. Still, I was the only one in the room with him — for 12 floors.
“If you can’t control the events that happen to you, you can control the way you choose to respond to them,” he offered with a smile and a handshake.
All that being said, I’m hoping to finish my long-awaited book by the end of the year. And I have decided to include in the forward how careful planning led me to a successful career in communications and journalism.
I still get Army surplus brochures, though. And I’ve got a couple of canteens and a folding field shovel — just in case anyone’s searching for a career path.
