Happy New Year! In just a few weeks we will begin our SIXTH year of this blog. While it has been great fun posting about the gear trade with you, we have never been able to enjoy the healthy back and forth with readers we first envisioned. Every time we enabled comments, an immediate stream of spam and irrelevant nonsense arrived. One of the truly great things about our industry is the interesting people you encounter, each with a unique connection to our shared passion. At a time when there is much concern over where the next generation of gear guys and gear gals is going to come from, we need to hear your “origin stories”, to borrow the “term of art” that empowers a tsunami of superhero movies. Too many human resource departments, in my opinion, are looking for candidates in the boring, conventional places and ignoring the successful careers of people who came in the side door. Other than the “legacies”, second and third generations of established “gear dynasties”, I have never met someone who had a childhood goal of becoming a gear industry “lifer.” So here is my proposal: Tell us how you got into this wonderful vocation and how you persevered to enjoy it. We’ll help you make it something you want posted as a guest blog and added to our archives. To jump start the process, I will use next week to summarize my own experience. We’ll also be encouraging our volunteer technical editors and other people we know to have interesting backgrounds to participate. Do not be put off by your lack of “pedigree.” True, most of Gear Technology's content is peer reviewed technical papers from some of the world’s leading experts. But most of our readers graduated from the gear division of the “school of hard knocks.” Your knowledge and experience make the components that move the world - and the man-made objects that leave this world. There are youngsters out there who need to know they can make a great “gear life” without a fancy diploma on their cubical partition.