Who or what influenced you to travel down the career path where you reside today? I’m curious and invite you to share your influences with me and the readers of ENX/The Week in Imaging. I’ve written about the long circuitous route I traveled to get where I am before, but never gave credit to the people and events that influenced me along the way.
Over the course of our lives, we’ve all been influenced by someone, something, some event, or a combination of things. Most of those influences were positive while some might have been perceived as negative at the time, but when you reflects back on things, you might see that it was still influential in its own way.
A positive influence was a college English/journalism teacher who helped me realize I had the talent to string a bunch of words and paragraphs together to tell a story in a coherent fashion. I had an inkling I could do that, but until then didn’t have the confidence until I heard it from her in the cafeteria one day when she mentioned the article I had submitted for a class assignment wasn’t all that good, but the article I contributed to the school newspaper was good and that she was going to grade me on that instead. That vote of confidence meant more than any letter grade. (And yes, I did realize at the time that article I submitted as my class assignment was not my best work.)
I’ve had a few other influences along the way, bad bosses (see last week’s column), other writers, editors who I worked with or for, and friends as well as some challenging family issues I experienced growing up. Those are stories for another time and maybe another place.
In the meantime, I encourage you to send me an e-mail with a sentence or two, or more describing who or what influenced you and how. The intent is to publish those in September. We hope that reflecting on your influences and those of others in the industry will be illuminating and influential, and make for a good read.
Thanks for reading.
