by Joelle Steele

I love my life and I love my work. I am one person with many careers. On several occasions I’ve been asked how it’s possible to simultaneously pursue multiple careers and be fully competent in all of them. Well, it’s not as difficult as it may seem, partly because I have a very high IQ (186). But the main reason is that while most people spend their spare time watching TV or browsing the Internet, I’ve spent almost my entire life’s spare time reading, learning, and pursuing my hobbies and interests. Yes, I do keep up with my social media. I look at all my accounts every morning. And, I do watch TV, but I’m very picky about what I watch, and I rarely view more than about 10 hours per week.

I got a head start on all my careers because I began reading at age 3, and my parents had thousands of books on many and diverse subjects, especially history and the arts, in addition to all the great works of fiction. From the age of 16 to this day, I generally read at least two books per week, fiction and non-fiction. My current list of books read contains 4,458 books – a tremendous amount of information (and I confess I didn’t absorb it all). And I never discount the knowledge that comes from reading fiction, especially the works of authors writing during their own times. Those novels provide amazing insights into how people lived and thought over the centuries – something of which most people today are profoundly ignorant. 

So I’ve assimilated a lot of knowledge, and they say “knowledge is power.” But for me,  knowledge is all about freedom! With the exception of a few full- or part-time jobs along the way, it has kept me out of the corporate world where I always felt unfulfilled and, quite frankly, bored stiff. Knowledge has expanded my creativity into every aspect of my life. You or your business have a problem? I can probably troubleshoot it for you and give you a variety of workable solutions, because knowledge opens your mind and allows you to see the big picture, the tiny details of which it is composed, and the way everything fits and works together. With that knowledge, if it’s not working, you can always fix it.

Knowledge has also given me the flexibility to study and pursue my many careers that I always find both interesting and challenging. Of course, simultaneously pursuing multiple careers brings with it the additional challenge of juggling them all and keeping track of various projects and a large client base. But, if nothing else, that has taught me to be uber-organized! Computers were the answer to keeping track of everything. I first laid my fingers on a computer keyboard in 1975, and just a few years later I jumped on the computer bandwagon with my first of 14  PCs and Macs – a Kaypro II with no hard drive. At first, I learned to build them myself, but later I had them built for me to my specifications. And I learned to code and started my first website in 1992.

All of my careers sprang from my hobbies and interests. I’ve studied lots of things, including ancient Egyptology, archaeology, history (mostly European), philately (stamp collecting), deltiology (postcard collecting), fashion (history and design), and geology (rocks and fossils) – all things I am still interested in but never pursued as careers. But my earliest interest that resulted in a career was astrology.

My father was interested in astrology and he owned several books on the subject. When I was about 13 years old, I read his books and started studying astrology in depth. By the time I was about 16, I could erect a chart manually, but a company in San Diego was selling charts of all kinds that were computer-generated and much more accurate. I became much more proficient as a result of their charts. When I was 24, I began a consulting practice, emphasizing career and life purpose (midheaven astrology). I chose this specialty because I quickly discovered that when a client had problems in almost any area of life, many times the problem and the solutions were found in their chart’s midheaven. I’ve read 217 books on astrology, and a few on astronomy. It’s a very complex subject. There are more than 350 items that can be analyzed in a single birth chart (horoscope chart). Most people do not know this and usually just dismiss astrology entirely. I’ve taught astrology, and I’ve written about 53 articles and four books on the subject, with one book still in print.

I also studied graphology starting around age 14, and I became a forgery expert at age 34, becoming court-certified four years later. Since then, I’ve analyzed more than a thousand documents including letters, wills, bank drafts, invoices, employment applications, diaries, anonymous/threatening letters, etc. Not as many books necessary to learn graphology, but I managed to read 56. While I wrote about 60 articles on the subject, I only wrote one book, now long out of print.

When I was 24, I became interested in anthropometry, the measurements of the human body. I was only interested in the use of anthropometry for the analysis and comparison of human faces and ears in order to authenticate the identities of people in photographs. At the time, I had become interested in genealogy and I had about 500 loose family photos and a friend’s four family albums, all filled with faces in need of identification. I began practicing professionally when I was 30 years old. My first client was a Nazi hunter with 200 photos of purported Nazi war criminals, two of which turned out to be exact matches. Anthropometry is a very complex subject because there are more than 100 measuring points on the human face and more than 35 measuring points on the human ear. I read 110 books and articles dating from today all the way back to the Renaissance era, some in other languages I can read, and others that I had to have translated. I also traveled widely to consult with several experts in related fields to fully understand whatever was unclear or missing from these books and articles. I’ve analyzed and compared more than 25,000 unidentified faces in photos, and I’ve written five books on this subject, four of which are still in print.

But there’s more. I always loved gardening and working in the yard, usually with my mother (who knew a lot about horticulture because she grew up on a farm). I read about 20 gardening books before I got a vocational certificate in ornamental horticulture. I then got a part-time (later full-time) job in the landscape industry where I worked for five years, after which I had a partner in a landscape business for 12 years, and then was a landscape designer for another 10 years. During all those years, I also attended and spoke at conferences, taught in the classroom and on lecture circuits, provided consulting services to the industry, published two periodicals for the trade, became a court-certified expert in the usual and customary practices of the landscape industry, and had more than 150 articles published in almost every trade magazine in the green industry, and had 13 books published, one of which is still in print. And through it all, I still love gardening, although my own yard is huge and my back is unwilling at times!

And then there’s art and writing. These two careers go hand-in-hand and tie everything else together – hobbies, interests, and careers. I think I must come by these talents genetically, since I have so many ancestors and relatives who were/are artists and writers. My mother was creative in art and writing, and she had several friends and cousins who were artists. My father wrote fiction as a teenager, and both he and my mother had cameras and loved photography. In addition, my father’s stepfather was a classically trained artist from Italy, and he made a huge impact on my art, as did the art instructor who taught me for nine years from the age of 9. I also collect art. I started at the age of 15 with my first of 70 or so antique European decorative landscape etchings. I started collecting vintage pottery vases and antique silver bracelets a few years later. And I still have collections of stamps and postcards, although I no longer collect them. So I’ve learned a lot about all of those different kinds of collectibles as well.

As an artist, illustrator, designer, and photographer, I’ve created numerous works since I was about 5 years old. Many of my illustrations and photos accompanied articles I wrote about horticulture, forgery, astrology, face and ear anthropometry, and a host of other subjects. I did 20 or so commissioned paintings for interior designers; do meticulous digital photo restoration; and have had my drawings (ink) and paintings (watercolors, oils, and acrylics) exhibited in a variety of art venues. And, in addition to designing my own book covers, I have designed upwards of 50 book, CD, and magazine covers for others.

As a writer, editor, proof reader, creative director, and publisher, I have worked on far more projects than I can even begin to count. My first book was a chapbook of poetry published when I was 24, and my first short story and my first article were published a year later. I’ve had more than 700 articles published and 45 books. Then there are short stories, poems, and songs. And literally thousands of works for hire: catalogue descriptions; annual publications; directories of hotels, restaurants, parks, and membership organizations; web copy; and a wide variety of marketing letters, ad copy, and official reports of one kind or another. I also read a variety of law books and took several law classes before I began writing and selling more than 100 contract templates for small businesses in 1983. And from 1983 to 2016, I taught more than 500 adult education classes on the various aspects of writing and publishing.

Knowledge really is freedom for me. It’s why I do the things I do. It’s why I love the things I do. And it’s why, at 69 years, I’m still doing all those things, and still reading and learning more and more every day!