The Importance of Knowing Your Story

After 50 years of work, mostly in the newspaper world, I retired as a newspaper executive for The Washington Post Company at the age of 66.

The primary reason for my retirement was that my life had changed to that of a caregiver for a spouse that was in declining health with Alzheimer’s Disease.

As is the case with most changes in life, there were other underlying reasons.

Newspapers were under assault by the Internet. Online newspaper web sites were no match for competitors like Google, Facebook, and Apple that swallowed up proprietary news and offered it in bits and pieces and increasingly carved out chunks of newspaper advertising revenue with robust search engines and targeted algorithms.

I took some measure of pride in my career at solving business problems and turning around organizations with creativity and resolve. But, I could see no quick fix to this Internet disruption; truthfully, neither could I see any long-term answers. This was a new era.

My work life, as rewarding and challenging as it was, was accompanied with some back-and-forth travel from East coast to West coast, and had otherwise taken its toll from that corporate cocktail of long hours, little sleep, and eating on the run; plus there was the hard-to-admit factor of aging.

Retirement brought with it an awareness of exhaustion — that deep-in-your-bones fatigue that you don’t know is there until you step off the treadmill.