Being the insatiably curious person that I am, when someone grabs my attention, I stop them and introduce myself. And that’s exactly what I did when I first noticed Paul Roemer in my circles on Google Plus.
Paul Roemer has lived in Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania but he grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and he received an MBA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee. He is a Christian, husband and father, and he calls being a dad his greatest success to date.
As someone who has many interests and talents, Paul paints and writes, goes scuba diving and running, and he has been a business consultant for almost 30 years. In between all of those activities, he also somehow managed to teach both horseback riding and rappelling.
From having read Paul’s blog (http://themonkeyward.blogspot.com) I gathered that he is an expressive person with strong opinions. When I told him so and asked if voicing his opinions has ever gotten him into hot water, he said, “Fia, you made a reasoned and accurate assessment; I prefer to engage and given the freedom to do so would rather do it over something meaty. I have been in hot water once over a post, but it had as much to do about who it featured as it did with what I wrote. Even so, the piece was meant in jest, and meant to give the readers a smile.”Paul also has a “work blog”(http://healthcareitstrategy.com/) that he uses as a networking tool. This blog has an impressive fifty thousand readers. It focuses on an area Paul had zero expertise in when he started writing. So when he began blogging, he set up writing guidelines, which he shared with me:· Write something very different from what everyone else was writing to give writers a reason to read mine over someone else’s blog.· Challenge the convention wisdom. I do not do this for the sole purpose of being obstreperous, but to learn. I take a stance on something which I know will get a reaction, and then fine-tune my perspective on the issue based on what readers with more expertise than me have shared.· Be entertaining. Tell a story, use analogies and allegories, and make myself the butt of the joke.· Leave them with a very simple talking point, one they can recall easily.Paul admits he can’t help himself from exploring the limitations of what he is capable of doing. If he learns he isn’t good at something he enjoys, he works at it. He simply can’t stop being creative and he told me, “If at some point I am blessed enough to earn a living from it, I would be more enamored by being able to do it without burdening my family than by the money. I would do the same thing if I lived on an island, but I notice a need of mine is to have someone who can really write, or who can really assess writers, read my writing and share their opinion. I did a degree in math in part because I did not want to write any papers in college. Maybe the desire to create also comes from feeling comfortable in my own skin. I have always been a runner and favored that over team sports.”Something I always like to ask people is what they would change if they were granted the power to change anything. When I asked Paul this question, he replied, “I would not ask for any do-overs even though like for most people, some of the challenges in my life have been rather extreme. For example, I have had cancer and a heart attack, but I would not do away with them. I tell my young children that if someone gave me the chance to be president or any celebrity, I would not do it because that path would have meant I would not have been their father. But to answer your question, if I could change anything, I would never have smoked a first cigarette.” Another trademark question of mine is, if you could meet anyone, living or dead, real or fictional, who would like to sit down with for a discussion? Paul says he is as far from being a People Magazine fan of celebrities as there is. He probably would not recognize Britney Spears if he sat next to her on a bus but if he did, he might change seats. However, he wouldn’t mind having a chat with Mel Brooks because he makes Paul laugh with his wide range of clean humor. The other person Paul wouldn’t object to having a conversation with is the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In ten years from now, Paul’s youngest child will be twenty. He thinks he will be at the top of his game then if he is still involved daily in his children’s lives. And he can see that happening. With regards to his writing, in ten years time, he would like to be doing it full time. He is convinced he can write in a fashion people find interesting. Paul also feels he can conjure up a darn good story so he would be writing merely for the thrill of finding out what happens next in his stories. “I think it will come down to adding luck to the talent,” he says about the idea of writing full-time. “It seems to be about whom you know; who will mentor and champion me? It is difficult to know where to look for luck.”
I know from personal experience that figuring out where to look for luck is a tricky endeavor. So I wish Paul all the luck in the world on his quest for luck.
