justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

Wonder where our paths diverged?

Have you ever thought about someone who is the same age as you, who has gone on to do something awesome? Something that could be seen as far greater than you have done?

That happened to me in the first job I took after leaving public education, when I joined Bank of America. At the time, it was the country’s largest bank and its CEO was Sam Armacost. I was surprised to find out that we were the same age. My position had a great title (and a long one, at that) - Senior Systems Development Analyst - and it was a job that I really liked. But for a fleeting moment, I wondered where the career path for Sam and the career path for me diverged, and led to our roles in the company.

More recently, I’ve followed closely the fortunes of Governor Jerry Brown, also about my age. He served his first two terms as the 34^th governor of the great state of California beginning in 1973 and returned as its 39^th governor in 2011. He was recently re-elected for his second term of his “second term” as governor!

I do know that our paths in life…career and otherwise…are influenced by many factors. Some are inherited, some are chosen from alternatives, and some could be called purely accidental, like a chance meeting, a change in environment, or just a bunch of other indefinable factors.

Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, comes to mind, with his closing stanza holding a clue to the choices, and resulting outcomes, that have led me to where I am today:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Or is it possible it’s as simple as the great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said?

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”