My Story
“How did I end up spending my life
helping people design meaningful lives?”
A Curious Beginning
I was born in the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1944. My father was part of a small team solving one of the greatest engineering challenges of the Second World War: producing enough plutonium for the atomic bomb.
I grew up outside Philadelphia, where my real classroom was the woods behind our house. While other children were playing organized games, I was exploring forests, observing nature, and asking endless questions. In fourth grade my classmates wrote stories for our class yearbook. Most wrote about sports or their vacation. I wrote - and illustrated - an article on the mating habits of crocodilians.
Looking back, I suppose the signs were already there.
Greenwich Village
Boarding school introduced me to a guitar player named John Sebastian. We became roommates and close friends. Before long we were sharing apartments in Greenwich Village, just as the folk music revolution was beginning.
Bob Dylan had recently arrived. John would later found The Lovin’ Spoonful. My first close adult friend was the great Texas blues master Lightnin’ Hopkins.
The Village taught me something I never forgot: there are many ways to live a life.
The Boy Detective
One day I befriended the manager of Globe International Detective System in New York.
Soon I found myself licensed as a private investigator in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut - even though I was underage.
For a while I became, quite literally, the boy detective.
It was less about crime than curiosity. I loved wandering into unfamiliar worlds and figuring out how they worked.
Choosing My Own Path
When the Vietnam War came, I refused to go.
College wasn’t much better. I quickly realized I learned far more from reading, exploring, and experimenting than I did sitting in classrooms.
I studied literature, humanistic psychology, Buddhist philosophy, and the lives of extraordinary people. Along the way I sang lead in a rock band in Fairbanks, Alaska, where many members of the audience carried sidearms.
It was an unconventional education, but it suited me.
A Farm That Changed Everything
My first wife and I bought a fifty-acre farm in Appleton, Maine.
There I immersed myself in the emerging organic farming movement, eventually becoming Vice President of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA).
Looking for a way to support the young organization financially, I proposed creating an old-fashioned country fair celebrating organic agriculture and simple living.
That idea became the Common Ground Country Fair, which continues today as one of the country’s premier celebrations of organic farming.
Living on that farm taught me something profound:
A well-designed life grows much like a healthy garden. If you spend your time and attention feeding and caring for your plants, rather than worrying about the harvest, they’ll turn out fine.
Buckminster Fuller
While living in Maine I became friends with the great architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller.
Bucky became both mentor and inspiration.
He encouraged me to ask questions that were big enough to devote a lifetime to answering.
One question captured me completely.
How do people build lives that are both deeply fulfilling and genuinely successful?
Creating Career Design
The more I looked, the more I realized that traditional career counseling had almost no answer to that question.
People were choosing careers based on interests, prestige, salaries, or personality tests.
Very few were getting to know all the clues that would lead to a brilliant choice.
I founded Rockport Institute to change that.
Over the next thirty-five years I developed what became known as Career Design, created the field of Career Coaching, wrote The Pathfinder, and worked with thousands of people searching for work that truly fit who they were.
One of my favorite metaphors compares people to musical groups.
A bluegrass band and a string quartet can both make wonderful music - but not if they’re playing each other’s songs.
Much of life consists of discovering which music you were designed to play.
Today
Eventually I sold Rockport Institute and expanded my focus beyond careers.
After all, work is only one part of a meaningful life.
Today I continue writing, consulting, and exploring the larger question that has fascinated me for decades:
How do people consciously design lives of purpose, vitality, freedom, and fulfillment?
That search continues every day.
I have been married to an extraordinary woman for many years, Mitra Lore, a sculptor (Mitralore.com) and live in Potomac, Maryland.
A Life Still Under Construction
I’m a sailor.
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A guitarist.
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A landscape designer.
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A husband to the extraordinary sculptor Mitra Lore.
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A father and stepfather.
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Above all, I’m still a student.