Pioneer or settler?

Pioneer or settler? We tend to be one or the other. Most of the previous posts have been more about me than the jobs I've done down the years. I've been looking back on what I did and why I did it, about the choices I made, about my expectations from life.

Most of us look for meaning and identity in our lives. It's a sad fact that many people are indistinguishable from the job they do. If they lose their job, they lose their identity and purpose. If we can't find our identity through our work, then we look for it in other places. How many people do we know who lead double lives? They have their work identity, and a totally different one for the weekends, for their holidays, for their leisure or for their hobby.


I found my identity when working in pioneer mode. Learning new skills, new ventures, breaking new ground, opening new territories. After that, boredom sets in.
I doubt if many people are totally pioneer orientated. We have a little of the settler in us all. We may strike out on our own in search of pastures new, but then we settle down to develop what we've claimed for ourselves.
Looking back, I've always been at my happiest when in pioneer mode. Opening new shops, starting up new factories, developing new concepts, writing staff manuals, training new staff.
I don't know how many new shops I opened during my retail career. At least five as manager, plus others as part of the opening team. I loved the challenge of moving into an empty space and over a week or two seeing the fittings and shelving installed, the staff interviewed and a team put together, the deliveries of stock, the unpacking, checking and stocking the shelves; the training of the staff in the various tasks; the late nights leading up to opening day. The exhilaration of opening day and the sheer hard work needed to overcome the obstacles of getting a new retail outlet bedded in. The variety of the seasons culminating in the frantic pressure of the first Christmas. Sales records set. Then the almost standstill post-christmas when it seems nobody's buying. The re-organisation of the shop layout to improve sales, looking for ways to do things better, quicker, more efficiently. Training your successor and moving on to the next store opening.
I left retail management in 1994 when I was made redundant following a takeover. I'd been with the firm for about five years, eight if you included working for firms that had been absorbed along the way. The industry was changing and I didn't like the way it was going, so I left and never looked back.
Many of today's giant retailers have their roots as market traders. Both Marks & Spencer and Tesco's founders began as barrow boys. Jack Cohen's motto as a barrow boy was "pile it high and sell it cheap", and when he moved from a market stall into his first shop in the 1920s he took his philosophy with him.
The Uk's first supermarket was opened by J Lyons & Co in 1950. When I worked in the sales order office at Henry Telfer's, our offices were just upstairs from the supermarket, just along from Kensington Olympia. Tesco soon followed, opening their first self service shop in St Albans in 1951, and their first supermarket in 1956. Tesco rapidly expanded through a mix of new openings and acquisitions, including a small chain of supermarkets in South London run by Ralph Goldstein. Together with his sons he started up a new venture, a self service drugstore, the first in the UK.  They called it Superdrug and they did everything themselves, buying the goods, stocking the shelves and operating the tills. They were pioneers and I worked for them on two of their pioneering ventures, Superdrug and Volume One Bookshops.