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| Our backyard in North Carolina's Piedmont as the leaves fall |
Every fall when the leaves start falling, I am always reminded how those leaves enrich the soils in our yards. There are people who do not want a leaf around, but I am of another persuasion. I am happy for all the leaves that come from neighbors' trees. The lawn crew grinds them up with the mowers and each year a little more organic matter is added to the soil. This summer presented me with a great example of how this works.
A cousin have been dumping leaves on his red dirt garden for over sixty years. As the drought got worse this summer, I remember him saying that he did not have a way to water his garden and it would just have to make it with what Mother Nature delivered. While nearby corn (See picture at end of post) wilted, my cousin's garden looked unfazed by the dry weather.
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| My cousin's garden filled with leaf mulch, dying corn in background |
The metaphor of dumping rotting leaves on your garden does not work perfectly for your life, but what does work is building your life by incorporating what you have learned in the past.
Growth does not happen on its own. I am old enough to remember the early days of the Internet. I was a manager at Apple and it did not take me long to figure out the web could be very helpful for a remote sales force. I can remember making some early web pages. Eventually I had an internal (inside our firewall) homepage for our team. I found the web a much more effective way to keep our goals and even our commitments and presentations on the web.
When you are sales person, you get more focused on doing what you said you would do if you know that in six months someone is going to be flipping through your old slides on the web while you are delivering your update.
After Apple defenestrated me in the summer of 2004, I started blogging on Typepad where my ~[View from the Mountain Blog](https://www.blogger.com/#)~ has over 1,500 posts. Not long after that I started posting here. Because of my expertise in communicating on the web, I got hired as a vice president of sales and marketing in 2006. That took me in Google ad words. I put together web-based sales training and support for the inside sales people at our company.
After I left there, I eventually got involved in another company but not before I had learned how to do effective email marketing with MailChimp. By then I had also learned how to harvest people's addresses and do mailings to backup the email and Internet efforts.
Promotional work I did at the Crystal Coast of North Carolina, led me deeper into web skills. The more that I learned, the more that I noticed that I was building on skills that I had learned early in career.
I have been at my most recent job for over a decade, but I still make time to learn new things and build on what I have previously learned. The very first post on the View from the Mountain blog was about my introduction to Windows after twenty years at Apple.
I want to be able to work with GPS files. The key reason I actually bought the system was so I could upload GPS maps under Windows.
Now I can buy my GPS and we will have a Pentium based Linux box as a bonus. GPS was just a start which I embraced with my boat, watch, and Smartphone.
Now I am working and creating GIS maps which still has to be done on Windows. I hope that I am never to old to learn and embrace new things.
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| Sad, dry corn |
