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It was an accident. In 1979, a ventriloquist visited my kindergarten class and shared the secret of his profession—talk to the animals and they'll talk back. And so I did. Night after night, week after week, I lined up my stuffed animals and spoke to them, hoping that some day they would talk back. When that didn't work, I wrote them letters until I finally realized that just like writing to my toys, I wanted to write to people—to make them talk, contemplate, listen and buy stuff.

A few decades and a Journalism degree later, I was writing, but this time to stockholders. As a reporter, I greeted the financial world before most of my twenty-something friends would roll out of bed. I wrote five daily columns about things like market capitalization and net loss and spouted terms like FY99.

But it was 1999 and the stocks that most of the world followed were in Silicon Valley. So shortly before the feared Y2K, I accepted a job with yet another hierarchical officious oracle—Yahoo! Inc. For two years, I used terms like web traffic and click-through rates and attended company meetings complete with ice sculptures and live bands.

But as a marathon runner and collegiate athlete, I needed to get back to my roots of sweat and competition. Nike was the perfect fit. I could write about Lance Armstrong in the morning and spend the afternoon on the bark dust track getting lapped by pro athletes. I spent four years at the shoe giant. I learned the mechanics of the perfect golf swing and acquired a closet full of brightly-colored swooshes.

Somewhere in between J-school and self-employment, I took a few months to travel to over 25 countries. I taught yoga in New Zealand, learned how to spearfish in Fiji and ride a motorcycle in Vietnam.

It's been 29 years since that fateful day in kindergarten class. And now that I work from home, I not only talk to my animals, I talk to myself.