Several months ago, I was in Starbucks, and I was talking to a gentleman who had started a medical transportation service. This was a company he started well over 30 years ago, and well before the big HMOs came into play, or when the federal government had increased Medicare services reimbursements, and started to fund the healthcare industry to the degree they are today. As I began to talk to this gentleman I realized that he had no peers, and that is to say sitting in the Starbucks he had no one who had accomplished as much as he had in his life, in that industry.
Specifically, no one in this valley had ever created a company from scratch out of nothing and built it up to that plateau. Although, he is not retired yet, I soon realized that he really had no one to talk with. Sure, I live in a well-to-do area, and a major tourist destination for golfers, and there are retirees from the Fortune 500 here, but this gentleman really had no one to discuss things with, there is certainly no one who would understand what he knows, how his business works, or how he's developed his point of view through his observations while growing his business.
So I ask; what the heck to someone like that do, when he has no peers? No one to talk to, no one that understands, and yet he is within the top one percentile of his industry. He's done quite well for himself, and he's worked very hard. As we talked more and more I realized that our lives were somewhat parallel, albeit in different industries, so at least I can understand where he was coming from, and why he developed the views that he has.
He is a local at the Starbucks here, and he frequents a couple of different locations, and yet when I see him engaged in conversations with other coffee patrons he never talks about his business, rather he dummies down his conversation, cracks a lot of jokes, and you'd never know by talking to him the little empire he's built, or the vast knowledge he has attained in doing so. So, I guess that is his escape; he talks and shoots the breeze about irrelevant events, and happenings in the media with folks who'd never understand.
Indeed, I must say there are millions of Americans in his shoes, perhaps tens of millions, successful folks who don't use social networks, and are out of place, and out of time as our society changes and morphs into something totally different. Indeed I hope you will please consider this philosophical thought and think on it.
Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,300 articles will be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..
