Illumination Editor Introduction

A Self-Introduction from Timothy Key

From fighting fires to wrangling metaphors, an illuminating journey

At the suggestion and encouragement of Dr. Yildiz I am offering up this article as an introduction.

Background

I live in the Puget Sound area and I am just a few steps away from the view in the picture above.

In January of 2019 I retired from the fire service. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I had pictured working for that fire department for at least a few years more. However, fate and politics had other ideas. It didn’t take me long to realize though, that this was one of the best things to happen to me. I write a little about that here:

I was about midway through an MBA program at Eastern Oregon University, so stepping away from full time employment was a blessing of time that allowed me to focus more intently on my education. Truthfully, the timing was spot-on as that winter quarter turned out to be a brutal one in terms of workload.

While I spent plenty of time on the street as a firefighter/paramedic, I also spent several years in management in my fire department. Being in an organizational leadership role inspired me to get a bachelor’s degree in my particular niche of emergency medicine management, which then just spiraled into the master’s in business.

I am fascinated by organizational culture and leadership concepts. I am also captivated by the ideas of social and emotional intelligence and the roles they play in everyday as well as corporate life.

I also believe (in spite of how automated our lives are becoming) that all business is people-centric, and as such the things that make business (and people) successful is the ability to connect on a human level. I touch a little on that here in my first-ever article on Medium:

Writing Goals

You will see in my Medium bio that I have been a paying member since 2018. I spent a long time reading stories on the platform before it ever occurred to me to write one.

With that being the case, I feel a particular attraction to Medium as an information source as much as a place where I can share my ideas.

In the beginning I believed that my article focus would be more leadership and finance oriented, but over time I feel that my most impactful writing has been around self-awareness and self-improvement. I have had articles published in The Ascent, The Startup, Publishous, and The Data Driven Investor.

While it is gratifying to get a back-pat from a larger publication in the form of publishing my work, I find myself gravitating towards publications like ILLUMINATION when I read, so I am focusing on producing pieces that resonate here.

I admit to being quite excited by the invite and call-out to write for ILLUMINATION, and I am very pleased and humbled by the community within the publication. I have seen some great writing and ideas here so far and expect much more to come.

My principal writing goal is simply to write; something easier said and offered as advice than it is to actually do sometimes. I want to continue to write in the self/self-improvement area as well as finance and investment, leadership, organizational culture, and I would like to try my hand at some travel and socio-cultural examination.

Skills

I think one of my principal skills to offer in a virtual community such as this is positive inter-personal interaction. I think kindness and the ability to have a positive virtual relationship is profoundly undervalued, so I offer that as my main skill.

Second to that is a relatively keen eye to grammar and punctuation. But sometimes that is as much a hindrance as a help as I overestimate my self-editorial abilities and miss things. I suppose that is why writing is more of a practice than a skill, right?

Life Purpose

My wife and I have a goal to travel and to experience different places and people on a portion of the spectrum that is much closer to ‘local’ than ‘tourist’. Before we pull up roots and become nomadic, she wants to reach a particular year milestone at her current vocation and also to complete her communications degree. That has us packing up and heading out late in 2021.

In the meantime, I have an omnipresent urge to learn. I want to dabble in design, marketing, social media interaction and programming in order to build at least a novice standing in all those areas. With that base education, I feel that we can earn enough remote income to make a more-than-comfortable stab at traveling around the globe at our own pace. Although, I suppose that even if we didn’t have the wandering urge, I would still want to learn all those things.

Writing on Medium is a good start. I am working on my website (have an Adobe Portfolio placeholder now) and learning to navigate in and around WordPress. I also just today decided on taking (and enrolled in) a Python introductory course.

Inspired (of course) by a great story I read on Medium, I enrolled in the free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from the University of Michigan; Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python).

While those are personal undertakings, I also have a more outward goal to support a community around me that embraces gratitude and kindness. That isn’t always easy, as I am an introvert and don’t have a drive to seek out interactions constantly.

However, I believe that social proof is a powerful motivator and that we can create the community we want by modeling the behavior we want reflected back in our direction.

For a little deeper look at my personal dogma, and how I use the power of symbolism to help me model my behavior there is this article:

Conclusion and Invitation to Get Involved

I hope that you not only enjoyed my introduction, but will look at it as the beginning of a dialogue that we can undertake over time as we interact through ILLUMINATION and Medium.

I would also like to invite some of the writers that I follow and find to be engaging to take a look at ILLUMINATION and follow the publication. I have really enjoyed reading work from the following authors:

Darrin Atkins, Jyssica Schwartz, James M. Harmon, Jo Ann Harris, Bianca Bass, Colleen Murphy, Lynda Dietz, Kathy W. 🤗, Jill Ebstein, Johanny Ortega, Anna Klawitter and Vincent Novak.

Thanks for reading through my introduction; I can’t wait to get to know the rest of the crowd.

Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.