​Howard Henderson is a former educator and entrepreneur, a teacher and principal who went on to start two successful companies. He is also the first person I’ve interviewed who is retired and at the end of his career path. In looking back over his 50+ year career, the same lessons emerge that we’ve been talking about throughout this series: stay flexible and open to new opportunities, carve out your own space that fits with your strengths and interests, and don’t worry about knowing the end point right from the beginning. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I grew up in a small town about 40 miles east of Cincinnati, a town of about maybe 1,200 people. It was a perfect place. That was in the 40s and 50s. It was a great place for kids to grow up in. You could ride your bike anywhere you wanted to. Everybody in town knew you. It was very comfortable. We went swimming in the creek. We played tag. I worked at the Kroger grocery store. It was pretty much a traditional Midwestern town in the 1940s and 50s with parades and all those kinds of things.
 
I had a high school basketball coach who was also an American history teacher. He had come to the school when I was a freshman in high school. He was young and easy to talk to. Our first year, our record was 3 and 13 - terrible. We didn't know which end to shoot at. But we came along. By the time we graduated, we were much more successful, and it was fun. So I thought I wanted to do that. I really like American history, I really like sports, so I thought I’d be a teacher.
 
My dad was not particularly excited about me being an educator. He had his own business, a savings and loan bank that he had inherited from his father. It had been in the family for a couple generations. I tried to be fair and say maybe I could do that, but I had no interest in it really. I'm sure my parents were a little disappointed, but it all worked out.
 
How did you decide to attend Ohio University?
 
There was no doubt that I was going to go to college. My parents were both college grads, so I never thought about it much. My parents told me I was going to go to Ohio University, so I never looked at any place else. My uncle had a PhD and had been involved with the government in DC. His son, who was the same age as me, had gone to private schools on the East Coast, so they had eastern influence. My uncle knew the president of Ohio University and said that I should go there. That's the crazy, true story.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I went in as an education major. It was comprehensive social studies, so I got a lot of history, geography, and economics. Because of my dad's wishes for me, I decided maybe I should go into business administration. In my sophomore year, I took some business administration courses, and I hated it. My dad was very happy that I was going to try it, but I tried it and I hated it. So I switched back to education.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
I graduated with my teaching credentials, but I went into the Army as soon as I got out of college. I graduated young, I was always the youngest one in my class, and I just decided that I wasn't ready to settle down. Kids take gap years nowadays. Well, gap years weren't around then, so I signed up for the voluntary. I was in for about 18 months. There was no war going on at that time - I was very fortunate. I was mostly at Fort Hood, Texas, Camp Carson, Colorado, and Camp Polk, Louisiana. We were learning how to drive the tanks, the gunners, and all those kinds of things, playing soldier.
 
When I was in Fort Hood, I was in a truck wreck and I screwed up my knee. After that, I was assigned to a nurse, Major Lad. She was the head of the pharmaceutical places at Fort Hood. She was really tough; she knew more bad words than I could even think of, and she kept me in line. The reason I got the job working for her was because I could type. Not very well, but it was good enough for Major Lad.
 
I spent almost a year with her. It was an easy job. I didn't have to wear khakis. I didn't have to show up for morning drill, or anything. I just went to her office and worked in the pharmacy. It wasn't bad at all. Then I came out and started teaching.
 
I went back to Ohio, to Hamilton which is just north of Cincinnati. I took a job coaching and also teaching what they called adjustment classes, or special education now. That's what I was hired to do, but I didn’t have a clue. They didn't even have certification for it yet. I said, "I don't have any training," and they sent me to a two-day workshop in Columbus. I went and I was the youngest person in the room by probably 40 years. I got some training then, but I had no skills. I was worn out every day. We did okay, but I don't think anybody had a clue what to do with special kids.
 
I was there three years, and then I went to another school in Hamilton. I was coaching and I taught physical education for two more years. By this time, I was starting to get the message that I needed to get my master's. I started on my master's at Miami University in Ohio, which was an excellent school.
 
After I got my master's at Miami, I went to Bowling Green and picked up a specialist degree, which was two more years. Then, I was going to get my doctorate, but at that point, you had to give up your present job and income, and be a graduate assistant. I couldn't afford to do that because I had two kids. But I did get a two-year National Science Foundation grant to go to Stanford where I met great people.
 
After I got my degree, I started applying for principalships. I was not impressed with what I was doing as a teacher, and I thought I could do a better job as a principal. I became an assistant high school principal, then a junior high school principal over a five or six year period. After I'd been a principal, I applied for supervisory jobs and I moved up to a director of instruction position, then a supervisor, then an assistant superintendent of schools.
 
When I got to assistant superintendent for curriculum instruction, I stayed in that job for 18 years. I was in a district that had about 700 teachers, which was a pretty good-sized district. This was the Lyndon Johnson era, and Johnson got a lot of money for schools. It was called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Some of it was for teachers' salaries, and a lot of it was used to get updated audio-visual equipment: slide projectors, tape recorders, the kind of stuff we laugh at now.
 
I stayed in that role for 18 years because it was great. I got a number of National Science Foundation grants to go places to learn about what was going on. I went to Stanford, University of New Hampshire, Michigan State, and met some of the leaders in the field. Then I used some of the money in our district to get those leaders to come to Mansfield, Ohio to work with our teachers.
 
We got a lot of recognition from that, and we were written up in a lot of journals. We were working on how we could reorganize classrooms, so they worked better for kids; making things interdisciplinary, putting different courses together that complement one another like social studies and literature, or science and math. Our staff was so excited. These consultants would work with us all day, and then they would hang out. It was really relaxed atmosphere. To be involved and see teachers get better was a real thrill.
 
I retired from that position in 1985, and then I started my own company. There were small, mostly Catholic schools throughout the Midwest that were going bankrupt because they had no money. The reason they had no money is that they had no graduate programs. Graduate programs make money. A friend of mine and I, we decided that we could help those schools. We would go in and write their curriculum, and get it approved by their state Department of Education and the North Central Association of Secondary Schools and Colleges. Then we would hire people to teach the courses.
 
We brought graduate education to where the people were, rather than having to take the graduate students to the home campus. For example, in Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin's a great school, but you have to go to Madison. There are people throughout the rest of the state that didn't have higher ed at that time. So we set up programs all over the state, and then did the same thing in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. We did that from '85 until I bought out my partner in '94 and then I sold the company in 2003.
 
I also started a company with a woman I knew from Ohio State. She and I wrote a learning style inventory that students could take, and we could identify their learning strengths. The teachers could then adjust their teaching to the strengths of the student, and they could learn more. Simple concept, but hard to do.
 
There had been a few done before, but there had never been any that were normed. I was doing the practical part and she was doing the database stuff, tabulating numbers and looking for trends. We did a lot of work with schools that had foreign students who came to the US for higher ed. And we did a lot with industry too, like General Motors and Bell and Howell.
 
I bought my partner out in 2000, and I kept that company and ran it until 2013. I was done traveling, flying someplace every week. So I sold it and retired. I miss my jobs. I had to retire, but I miss it, the connection with people, the enthusiasm. I've never been one to say, "I can't wait to retire."
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
Professionally, I think I was blessed. I was at the right place at the right time. I got breaks that I don't know how I got, and I was really excited about it. I wouldn't change anything in my professional career. I really wouldn't. Eventually, I got tired of traveling, but I felt so full. I had something to help people with.
 
One of the advantages I had was that I was the first person to hold that particular position in most of the places I worked. So I got to organize what I was going to do. They basically said, "Here's what we want to have done," and then I would figure out how to do it. I never had to follow anybody. My advice is to find something you have enough confidence in that you think you can make it work, and then go for it. 

A few months ago, I shared a post on the Strong Interest Inventory (you can refresh yourself here), introducing the six occupational themes: artistic, conventional, enterprising, investigative, realistic, and social. But identifying the main theme or themes that align with your professional interests is just the start.
 
The next step I like to take with students is to introduce them to O*NET Online. Now, prepare yourself. O*NET Online is affiliated with the US Department of Labor, which means they have an absolute treasure trove of information about prospective careers. But, like many government websites, it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing. I often talk to my students about not ruling out a particular college because their website is hard to navigate – a difficult website does not correlate to a poorly run college. And the same thing applies here; just because O*NET Online isn’t straight out of a Squarespace advertisement doesn’t make it any less useful.
 
The first place I bring students is to the Advanced Search tab, which allows you to look for jobs based on occupational themes or, as they call them, interests. Clicking on “Realistic” will take you to 100 sample professions that fall in that category, organized by “job zone.” This is one of my favorite elements of O*NET Online.
 
Job zones correspond to the level of training required for a particular profession from 1 (little training) to 5 (extensive training). What I love so much about this is that it distills each occupational theme down to its fundamental quality. For example, a realistic occupation with a job zone of 1 would be a fast food cook. It’s a concrete task that involves things rather than concepts and follows a set procedure that gets executed repeatedly. A realistic occupation with a job zone of 5 would be a surgeon. Again, a concrete task that involves things more than concepts and follows a set procedure; but repairing human bodies is more complicated than making hamburgers and thus requires much more training.
 
You can also combine themes in the advanced search, looking for jobs that are both realistic and social (like a sheriff or an athletic trainer). And the advanced search results indicate green occupations that are going to be in greater demand as we move toward a green economy, like bus drivers for example, who will be more and more necessary as larger numbers of people start taking public transportation. There is also a designation for jobs that have a bright outlook, or are likely to grow faster than average, increasing 10% or more over the next 10 years.
 
While O*NET Online might not be the shiniest website you’ve ever seen, it is a wildly helpful place to start getting ideas for prospective jobs that fit your occupational themes. I encourage you all to start playing around with it and to find the the careers that are right for you.

​I’ve been in Mexico City for the past month, and yesterday, I finally had the opportunity to visit Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s home and now a museum dedicated to her life and her art. Because I am a nerd, I opted to get the audio guide so I could learn as much as possible. In the very first room of the house, we were directed to a portrait of Kahlo’s father, Guillermo. The audio guide pointed out the curious background of the painting, regularly space orbs that resembled cells as seen through a microscope. The guide explained that, as a child, Kahlo had been enamored with science and hoped to become a doctor.
 
I was shocked by this new perspective on a woman who seemed born to be an artist; the idea that she almost went in a completely different direction felt at odds with the aesthetically complete version of Frida I’d come to know. But as I’ve talked about many times, we’re all far more complex and contradictory than we initially present ourselves. And so I’m enjoying the idea of Frida Kahlo, the artist, alongside Frida Kahlo, the doctor. 
 
Kahlo’s evolution inspired me to look for other iconic people who almost didn’t end up in the profession with which we so fully identify them. Like John Grisham, who leveraged his 10-year career as a lawyer into his current profession as a celebrated author of legal thrillers. Or Vera Wang, who spent 15 years working as a fashion editor at Vogue before designing her own wedding dress and launching a wildly successful bridal line. Or Harrison Ford, who was working as a carpenter for none other than George Lucas who thought he would be perfect for a role in his new project – Star Wars.
 
My favorite story was about Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed and co-founder of The Huffington Post (and brother of comedian Chelsea Peretti – what a family). Peretti attended University of California, Santa Cruz where he majored in environmental studies. He then moved to New Orleans and taught computer science at a private high school before going to grad school at MIT. While procrastinating on writing his master’s thesis, he started exploring Nike’s new service for customizing your own sneakers. After submitting a few unsavory words that got rejected, he tried the word “sweatshop,” which launched an email back-and-forth with Nike that he forwarded to a few friends. The email thread eventually reached millions of people and Peretti ended up on The Today Show discussing labor practices with Nike’s head of PR, launching his career in media.
 
Like Jonah Peretti, Frida Kahlo ultimately found her way to her vocation by leaving room for chance. As a child, Kahlo suffered from polio and, while recuperating, she took to drawing pictures in the fog on her window to entertain herself. Years later, when she had to spend months in bed after a horrific bus accident, her parents gave her an easel and a set of paints she could use while lying down all day. There was even a mirror installed directly over her bed so she could see herself and paint the self-portraits she is best known for today.
 
As these stories and many of my interviews illustrate, we can only plan so much before something upends our intentions. Sometimes those disruptions are fortunate, like Peretti’s email thread, and sometimes they’re devastating, like Kahlo’s accident. But, fortunately, there’s no expiration date on choosing a different path. We can always learn something new, try something new, or reinvent ourselves. And in the end, we might find a version of ourselves that fits even better. 

Bekah Rife is a vegan chef and cooking instructor in Venice, CA. And if she looks familiar, that’s because her twin sister, Rachel, was a previous interviewee on “When I Was 17.” In addition to hearing Bekah’s story, I’ve also had the pleasure of eating her food, and I can tell you firsthand that she knows her way around the kitchen. If you want to experience it for yourself, check out her recipes on Rife.Style, or sign up for a class the next time you’re in LA! Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I was so sports driven that I just thought I would keep playing sports into my 20s. My dad was big into football. He got a scholarship to college and he almost went pro, so he always pushed us kids to be athletes. I was doing water polo, synchronized swimming, and speed swimming. I didn't really consider life outside of sports.
 
There was a neighborhood pool around the corner from the house that we grew up in. We started summer recreation swimming there at age five. Then my dad would go on these long bike rides and he saw this pool where girls were doing synchronized swimming. He told my mom that he thought Rachel and I should start synchronized swimming. Twins are pretty coveted in the sport because they're perfectly matched.
 
I definitely didn't like it at first. I wanted to quit. But we were taught not to quit things. There's so much technique you have to learn, so many different skills and elements, to even be able to do something that looks like you're a synchronized swimmer. But then I really started to excel and it's fun to be good at things, you know? So I stuck with it.
 
Then I started playing water polo in high school and I really fell in love with it. So I thought, “Hey, it's not like I have to be the best in the nation, but there are these teams that travel around the world and play water polo,” and that sounded cool to me.
 
How did you decide to attend San Diego State University?
 
I visited San Diego frequently growing up because of swim competitions, so it was always ingrained in my mind as this warm paradise with palm trees. And being from Northern California, it's a very different landscape. It was definitely the goal to get a scholarship and play sports in San Diego, so it was neat when that happened.
 
I did both swimming and water polo in college. It was really intense. I liked the teammates and the camaraderie, but I was really glad when it was over. It's just very, very demanding. Sports is what I knew, but I think realizing that there was this big world out there besides sports was really exciting.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I didn't really have much guidance from my parents as to what my interests were beyond sports, and I hadn’t done much self-exploration. Both of my parents were business management majors, so they both advised me to major in business because it's broad. So I did.
 
But I think I would do it a little differently if I had it to do over. I would definitely have sat with myself a little more and thought about my interests beyond sports. I think now I would get into something involving nutrition or health.
 
I did enjoy some of it. I had a lot of athletes in my classes, so we all bonded together and had a lot of fun. And I really enjoyed my electives like Spanish and women's studies and studying abroad in Valencia, Spain.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
I graduated from SDSU and that was really when my soul searching started to take place. I was just thinking, “What am I doing? What do I want to do?” I worked in restaurants for a bit, just to figure it out, because I had no idea. I also worked in VIP guest services at a hotel. And I did some traveling for a couple of years to sort it out. I did a trip to South East Asia, a few places in Central America, I lived in Australia for a summer, I did a couple of Burning Man's. I just really explored.
 
Then I did a competitive synchronized swimming competition in the South Pacific,
which was super fun. So I picked up synchronized swimming again professionally. We started our own little group in San Diego and then LA and did music videos and movies and private events. We even had a full underwater gig inside the Dubai Aquarium - a mermaid show.
 
Then I started working for an events company, which I liked, but it didn't really feel like my true passion. When that company was downsizing, they told me, "You can take as much time as you need to find your next job," which was super cool of them. So then that's when I got into food.
 
I interviewed with a gentleman who had a rare autoimmune disease, and he was looking for a chef. I grew up cooking - part of my allowance was cooking the family dinner growing up - and I would watch my mom and my grandma who is a fantastic cook. I feel like the food thing was kind of in my blood because of my grandma, and that's where my base of cooking started. 
 
So he hired me to cook for him. I was nervous, but I knew I could cook and the food I made always tasted decent, so I just went with that. Maybe it was one of those young and dumb moves, I don't know. But it worked and it went really well. And then he got a bit more sick, so he had a nurse there full-time. She was from Africa and she was a fantastic cook. Her food was full of all these cool herbs and spices and every time I walked in the house it smelled amazing. So that was good and bad. I had less work, but it also pushed me to figure out what was next.
 
Then I started cooking full-time for a couple. Their diets were a bit specific, so that took up a lot of my time. One of the women in this couple was a kind of serial entrepreneur and she had a tech start-up. Over time, she started to bring me into the company, kind of like her right-hand gal. And I still do that now.
 
Then I found this culinary program called Rouxbe. It's actually the largest online culinary school in the world, and about five years ago they launched a plant-based program. I was super stoked to find it because I wanted to go to culinary school but I also had to work full-time.
 
At first I didn't quite get it because the chefs couldn’t taste my food, but when we cooked, we had to take pictures of the stages of cooking. And then we had to be very, very descriptive about how things tasted and smelled and the techniques we used. I got so much out of it even though there wasn't a chef tasting my food in person. And I definitely got enough feedback from feeding the people that were in and out of my house.
 
I gained a real understanding of how to build flavor in that course. And I learned some of the science behind food, which has helped my cooking. And I'm just a curious person by nature, so learning the reason behind why we do things in the kitchen was fascinating to me. I also recommitted to the diet that I believe is the healthiest, which is whole food, plant-based.
 
The one area that I didn't get to deep dive into was nutrition, which is understandable because it was culinary school, it wasn't nutrition school. So I took the online Cornell Plant Based Nutrition Course, which was fantastic. I had a pretty good idea of how to cook for people with heart disease and diabetes and things like that, but it furthered my knowledge in that realm. I just wanted one more thing under my belt to solidify my education in the plant-based world, and there were so many good takeaways from that program.
 
This summer, I started teaching cooking lessons, which have been super fun.
Sometimes with personal chefing, there is not a lot of interaction with clients or people; you just go into a client’s house, cook, and leave. So the food journey that I've been on has been making that connection with people and just chit-chatting about food. I felt like the lessons were the perfect way to do that.
 
I’ve got my menus live on Cozymeal, which is this app where you can have a chef come over and cook a private dinner for you. And then I also pitched my cooking lessons to Airbnb Experiences – it’s called Vegan In Venice Gourmet Cooking Class.
 
Sometimes I do the lessons at my house, but I also travel. Like last weekend, I did an 11-person birthday party and we rented out a big chef kitchen in Marina Del Ray. Or I had a couple celebrating their anniversary dinner at a nice Airbnb in Venice, so I met them at their Airbnb for their lesson.
 
It took me a moment to find my calling, which is in food and nutrition. It's where I feel the most excited and I totally see a future with it. I would love to reach a bigger audience and support more people in transitioning to being plant-based. I would love to host a vegan food show that blends traveling with cooking. I would love to be a resource to a greater group of people and support their journey to going plant-based.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I wish I’d had more guidance from my parents or an adult role model who had said, "There will be life after sports, so consider what you want." It was such a stark life change to go from being a competitive athlete to stopping and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. It was just so much to deal with at 22 years old.
 
Some real mentorship and asking kids, “What do you actually want?” would have given me a greater understanding of what life could be like. And then you can go from there and decide if you should go to college or trade school. Maybe I would've gone to culinary school right out of high school. And don't be married to the one job you get out of college. Use your time to travel and see the world because that's definitely part of your education and it will continue to form what you actually want to do.
 
I don't want to put down my journey and I'm so grateful for it, but I think supporting people to pause a little more and sit with themselves and apply that to the choices we make when we're 16 or 17 years old would be good. 

A few months ago, I was watching Bob’s Burgers on Hulu (highly recommend, btw), and I saw an ad that was a bit different from the usual cars and movies and fast food. It was this ad for Google’s new veterans search tool. Developed in part by Matthew Hudson, a former civil engineer for the US Air Force, this tool allows veterans to enter in their specific military codes when searching for jobs to help them identify civilian jobs that match the skills they developed in the military. And companies themselves can integrate this tool into their own search engines.
 
Hudson explains that he was motivated to tackle this project because of his own experience trying to find a job after leaving the military. He talks about the clearly delineated roles and hierarchy of the military, and how that made things even more confusing and tricky when he began to transition to civilian life. So when he got hired to work as a program manager for Google, he wanted to find a way to support other veterans going through the same experience.
 
Hudson explains the importance of this tool that acts as a translator between what service members know how to do and what non-military jobs require, “There isn’t a common language that helps recruiters match a veteran’s experience with the need for their skills and leadership in civilian jobs. As a result, 1 in 3 veterans—of the roughly 250,000 service members who transition out of the military each year—end up taking jobs well below their skill level.”
 
The reason this made such an impression on me is that this provides yet another way for young people to think about their career paths. Similar to what I wrote about last week, supporting veterans in finding good jobs when they leave the military makes the choice to join in the first place a much more positive and empowering decision. Rather than creating one path to a good job – a four-year college – our students would be much better served by having a range of options to consider. That way, they can opt for the post-high school path that’s right for them, knowing that there is a variety of supportive and satisfying jobs available to them.
 
I know Google doesn’t always get it right, but I’m impressed with the steps they’re taking to support and empower veterans. Good jobs should be available to everyone who puts in the time and effort to learn important skills, and that goes even more for the people who have risked their lives to protect our country and our citizens.