Born in New York in 1820, Thomas Heally set out at age 14 to find work with the East India Trading Compay in London. Soon enough through a lot of salesmanship, he'd sail to Boston with his own ship and became a roaring success in the United States as an exemplar of success and business. Gilbert Stuart—who painted that famous unfinished portrate of George Washington—would paint Heally's portrait, too.

Then the British seized his ship in the War of 1812 and imprisoned him in Antigua. He suffered significant financial hardships after that, but eventually married Mary Hicks in 1813 and gave birth to their first son. And after all that he wrote, "The only true happiness is a good marriage."

I'm celebrating six years of marriage this week. I've never been imprisoned by the British. And no one has come to paint my portrait. But I suspect Heally was on to something.

Heally would later travel to Paris determined to become a master painter. Until he went Full Texas, according to one report:

What has Justin been doing?

• Earlier this month this piece was published on Kathy Goffer, a lovely insurance professional near Fort Wayne. I merely wrote this story and Kathy did the hard work of being an interesting person to interview.
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  ​“I loved the industry. And I loved the people I worked with,” she says of her time at Parkview. For about seven years, she and a small team of professionals drove countless miles showing agents, consultants, and employees how to use their benefits. “But,” she adds with a slight sigh, “I had this epiphany that I’m not having fun, not digging this, and I needed to do something different.”
• I've been working with Indiana University and recently published some new material for students coming back to school.
• Late last month I published a members-only piece on my site as part of Confessions series:
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  ​By my late twenties, I realized running a business rarely produces control. Autonomy, yes, insofar as I could decline some projects or just decide not to work on this or that.
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  And I realized this business was all I had to leave as a legacy. I had to make the business successful because someday I would be dead, which could be very soon.
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  I wanted a body of work that people looked back on fondly and a business that could carry on some bit of institutional memory of me. That meant hiring people, creating processes, and pursuing money. The company had to win to survive, and from that point on, it and I were inextricably tied together.

And a preview on my side-side-project

Work continues on my 1925 Tri-State Tornado book. I had a few days this month where the mornings or afternoons were wonderfully productive. But I also began work on a magazine piece two months that I hope to get published about Herman Lamm, the father of modern bank robbery.

You may recall Lamm was my original idea for a book, but I abandoned that endeavor for lack of material. There just isn't a lot of accurate reporting on them, and, as I learned: bank robbers lie a lot. Their names, ages, professions, and other details are always changing. That makes newspapers and police records almost useless to count on. But, with the help of some court records and a whole lot of index cards scattered over my floor to piece it together, the first draft is done and revisions are underway.

Here's a preview exclusively for you:

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