Genesis

It is generally my nature to consume and not to create.  This is my attempt to try to change that, even if only slightly.

My favorite thing in the world is to talk to smart people and learn from them.  If I've had any success as a banker it's been because I'm so curious about learning from smart people.  And small business owners tend to be pretty smart.  So I've seen structuring deals as the necessary evil to get into the room in the first place.

My first goal with this blog is to get shit out of my head.  I've consumed too much info without having processed any of it.  I used to just read and read.  At some point I started reading and highlighting or taking a few lines of notes per book.  Now I want to have it all in one place.  There may be betters ways to accomplish this goal.  But starting here is better than not starting.

My secondary goal is to eventually use this as a way to share with the internet what I'm thinking about so that smarter people will tell me when I'm wrong.  I don't know when or if I'll go public, but that will be the eventual goal.

It's common advice for bloggers to pick a niche and stick to it.  I have never blogged before, so I don't know what my style is or what will work for me.  But extrapolating from other endeavors, I will likely not do that.  Topics will likely be all over the place.  But I'm writing this for me and no one else, so I'm not really worried about it.

I've been very interested in finance for a long time.  So finance will be a major theme, hence the Banker part of "The Shoeless Banker".  Working at community banks has exposed me to a fair amount of real estate investors, so there is a fair bit of real estate involved.  My interest in real estate lead to an interest in urban planning and community development.  And tangential to all of that is an interest in building and growing effective organizations.

Not directly related to any of those things, I'm interested in prison reform, recovery from substance use disorder, and decreasing stigma and increase access to mental health care.

I also really don't like shoes.  I think the common assumption is that shoes are innocuous, but there are real problems that come from constantly wearing shoes all day.  And we'd be better served to wear shoes less often.