Dog's Unmarked Trail

The Dog started out to become a newspaper reporter and ended up as a human resources person.   That makes me think a whole lot of people never end up where they intended to be, so arguably the best strategy for life is not to have a strategy.  Just take the days as they come, pay attention when opportunities come by, and take a chance every now and then.   Keep learning growing, exploring, and living.   Easy to say, hard to do.
The Marines made me a photo-journalist, for some reason.  The only journalism training I had was a class in high school, where my major accomplishment was setting up a water pistol fight in the classroom and then writing a feature story about it.   If that happened now, I'd be in jail.
Anyway, whatever the case, when my first Marine Corps story came out in print in Stars and Stripes, I was hooked.  
I reached my first dream job in the early '70s when I had a newspaper in Lafayette, Colorado.  I had landed in Colorado after the Marines, and wanted to continue my career in journalism but I couldn't even get an interview with a paper.   So, being the naive, uneducated bloke that I was, I ran an ad in the Colorado Press Assn. newsletter that said, "with 15 minutes training, I can do anything". 
A couple of weeks later the phone rang and, shortly thereafter, a deal was struck for two other guys to put up the money and me to put up the work to start a weekly paper in Lafayette.   I didn't even know where Lafayette was, and we didn't form any committees/task forces or even look at financial projections.  
I went up to Lafayette (20 miles NW of Denver) and wandered around.  I visited stores, restaurants, banks, hardware store, and asked them what they thought about a newspaper in town.  Little did I know that today that would be called "conducting a market study" and I should pay a consultant several thousand dollars to do it.  WTF?
Anyway, the first paper came off the press on Feb. 28, 1974, and has been hanging on my various walls ever since.   The Lafayette Times was the only weekly newspaper to have made a profit in its first year, and continue to increase circulation and advertising revenue, in a community that had access to three large daily papers.   It is my "real-life MBA", and one of life's biggest accomplishments.  Totally unplanned.  How'd that happen?
The dream ended a couple of years later, when after paying back the partners initial investment and starting to pay a monthly return (ROI today), the partnership dissolved and I was summarily dismissed over "philosophy".   Not writing philosophy, but financial philosophy.  I wanted to roll a bigger piece of our bottom line into building the paper and they wanted to roll more into "our" pockets.  Another great learning experience. 
So, there I was, 24 years old and my life's "vision" reached -- and finished.  
Still with no real life plan in hand, unemployed, uneducated, married, and with a new house, I decided to go to college and look at possibly becoming a lawyer (another great story there).  
In order to go to school and help pay our bills, I needed a job.  A friend of mine introduced me to the CEO of St. Anthony Hospital in Denver, and I stumbled into a management training program.   That exercise started in housekeeping and somehow along the way, when the Personnel Director resigned, ended me up there.   No formal training in personnel, and my college degrees in Economics. 
Go figure.