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

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

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

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

Somewhere in between, she took a few months to travel to over 25 countries. She 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 Leighann works from home, she not only talks to her animals, she talks to herself.