Thanks for finding me

Hi Mark Hamilton, thanks for finding me. I am really interested in getting out of the stagnant, routine rut job I have been doing for the last 35 years with no hope of a promotion. I am a stocker at a grocery store, I’ve been a cashier and a backdoor receiver, and was a full-time employee seven years ago but have now been bumped back down to part-time. This is a union job, so the medical benefits and the wages are the only thing keeping me going.

I read in your books that anyone can move up to the top of their job by integrated thinking, but what I’ve noticed since trying it myself is they don’t like it. I have an ability to pick out-of-date product off the shelf, it just calls out to me like some kind of freak thing. I can be standing in an aisle and something tells me there is something out of date, and I will pick it up and it will be out of date.

The manager decided that since the auditors were finding out-of-date product on the shelves and he was being penalized for it, he wanted me to pull it off the shelf, but I don’t get anything for it. I’m doing him and the store a big fat favor, but it doesn’t help me. He cut my hours from 38 per week to 31 per week, and I’m working five days, driving 60 miles a day. I want to start my own business doing this, pulling expired vendor product at other stores. Is this possible?

I was having trouble with my Friday Night Essence, but after speaking with Miles on the phone last night, I know what my Friday Night Essence is. When I was just four or five, my grandfather would put a jigsaw puzzle down in front of me and I would put it together. My parents told me he could not believe how I could figure out where all the pieces would fit.

Over the years I’ve kept doing jigsaw puzzles, and even now I have a room full of them. I could spend all day working on them, and I have when I’ve been sick. I don’t yet see how jigsaw puzzles will make me wealthy and happy.

A couple more things about me: I am a piano tuner. A well-known blind piano tuner in Oil City came and tuned my mother’s piano, and after watching and listening to him, and speaking with him while he worked, he could tell I had a gift for hearing the pitch of the strings. He knew the piano factory in Seneca needed a piano tuner, so he suggested they give me a chance.

I was able to learn to tune in a week and spent 11 years working at Story & Clark Pianos, Classic Player Piano Co. as a self-employed piano tuner. They wanted to pay me $2.00 a piano, $4.00 a player piano, and do two an hour. I got so good at it that I could do almost four an hour, they were making eight pianos a day and I was tuning about 16 a day. My tunings were excellent, but after 11 years they were upset that I was making more money than they wanted me to make, so they laid me off.

Now I do volunteer work at the Debence Music Museum in Franklin, the only antique music museum in the U.S. I tune all the pianos there and have done some of the pipe organs, and I am currently learning how to restore a nickelodeon player piano. There is a lot there that people made using integrated thinking: Thomas Edison phonographs, old reed organs, music boxes, barrel pianos, player pianos, and more.

I hope something will pop into my head at the museum, since I really enjoy being down there, even though I’m not getting a paycheck. I told Scotty, the curator, it would be nice if we could make a company out of the museum. Is that possible?

I guess that is all for now.

Davy