I was told to pick a lane too.

I started learning the hard way.

At eighteen, I joined the U.S. Navy.

I spent four years stationed in Yokosuka, Japan, serving aboard the USS Independence and USS Kitty Hawk. I worked in shipboard food service, earned my Enlisted Surface Warfare and Aviation Warfare qualifications, and deployed twice to the Middle East for Operation Southern Watch and Operation Desert Fox.

The Navy taught me a lot more than whatever was written in my job description.

It taught me systems. Standards. Reviews. Accountability. How a giant organization works when every department depends on another one doing its job. Years later, when I built employee review systems in my own company, I borrowed from what I had seen in the military.

That's a pattern that has followed me ever since. I rarely learn something and leave it where I found it.

Then I went to school, left, came back, and kept learning.

After the Navy, I earned an associate's degree in Business Administration from Broome Community College. I made the Dean's List and served as treasurer of Phi Theta Kappa.

I spent time working in my father's business, then went back to school and earned a bachelor's degree in Economics, with a minor in Business, from the University at Albany.

Economics became one of the lenses I use for almost everything. Supply and demand is not just about prices. Incentives, scarcity, tradeoffs and opportunity cost show up in businesses, people, negotiations and decisions everywhere.

I didn't know it then, but that was another piece of the same pattern. One field kept leaking into the others.

The junkyard became my real education.

After college, I went back to the family salvage yard full time.

My father had built the business. When he died in 2011, it was me and one employee.

There was no polished operating system waiting for me. A lot of the business still lived in paper, people's heads and the way things had always been done.

So I started learning.

Sales. Pricing. Purchasing. Inventory. Dismantling. Warehousing. Shipping. Freight. Accounting. Payroll. Hiring. Training. Marketing. Compliance. Software. IT.

Not because I had a master plan to become good at fifteen things. The business needed each one, so I learned each one.

Over the years, the business grew into an eighteen-person, three-building operation doing about $4 million a year across used auto parts, vehicle sales and repair.

I wrote the sales scripts. I built the training systems. I wrote an operating manual for every position in the company and kept rewriting them as the business changed.

When our warehouse needed to be better, I visited roughly a hundred other salvage yards, studied what worked, and built our own barcode warehouse system so we could locate parts across three buildings.

When pricing needed to be better, I built a multi-factor pricing system.

When hiring needed to be better, I studied personality, motivation and team design.

When technology needed to change, I learned the software well enough to help design it.

I started using Checkmate, our industry's inventory platform, in 2009. Eventually I was working directly with developers, testing alpha and beta releases, participating in industry roundtables and sending Car-Part.com more than a thousand product ideas and enhancement requests.

Other owners started calling me when they had problems their own trainers or support people couldn't solve.

That is probably the best description of how my brain works. I never cared much about knowing a piece of software for its own sake. I wanted to understand the whole system around it, because changing one setting usually changes three other things.

The business also taught me that ideas move between fields.

Some of the connections are obvious in hindsight.

The way I organized thousands of auto parts on warehouse shelves eventually influenced the way I designed my digital file systems.

A rule from the salvage yard, never dismantle more cars than the shelves can absorb, became a rule for how many learning projects I should have open at once.

Ideas from economics changed the way I thought about sales and negotiation.

Personality frameworks changed how I hired and built teams.

The employee review system borrowed from the Navy.

Years later, the same manuals, job descriptions, checks and accountability systems I used to manage employees became the model for how I manage AI agents.

That is the part of polymathy that interests me most. Not collecting hobbies. Not trying to know everything.

Transfer.

Learning something in one place and realizing it belongs somewhere else too.

Somewhere along the way, I became an industry guy.

I eventually became president of the Automotive Recyclers Association of New York after serving through the officer positions and chairing committees.

I served on the Otsego County Chamber of Commerce board and other industry and civic groups. In 2016, we were named Small Business of the Year.

I also became a speaker and trainer.

That still makes me laugh a little because I started out as an introvert who hated public speaking. I deliberately attacked it because I knew it was a weakness. Eventually I was speaking at conventions, training salespeople and managers, and even serving as an event MC.

During COVID, I started a weekly group called Recyclers Helping Recyclers so owners could compare problems, share ideas and help each other through a strange time.

That informal advising eventually became part of the foundation for Griffins Business Consulting.

Then the chapter changed again.

My run with the salvage yard ended in 2025.

Going from running a company every day to figuring out what came next was a pretty dramatic reset.

So I did what I've always done. I started learning.

I went back to school for an MBA at the University at Buffalo. I'm on the Leadership track, carrying a 4.0, and I've taken every AI-focused course I can fit into the program.

At the same time, I started teaching myself AI, IT and infrastructure by actually building with them.

I am not a programmer by background.

That did not stop me.

I built my own home server and NAS environment. Then I built a multi-agent AI operating system to run my work and personal enterprise.

Instead of treating AI like a chatbot, I treated it like an organization.

The agents have jobs. Roles. Manuals. Rules. Approval gates. Reporting lines. Work orders. Quality checks. Receipts. Different systems audit other systems.

Basically, I took what I had learned managing departments and employees for years and asked a different question:

What happens if the employees are AI?

That project now runs a large part of how I work.

And once again, the new thing turned out to be connected to the old things.

I'm not all business and technology.

I'm a dad first.

I coach T-ball, build things with my kids, and probably overthink their future more than most parents.

For years I worked as a paid DJ under the name DJ AWAHL, doing weddings, graduation parties and other events. I still DJ for friends and family.

I play drums, although the kit spends more time in the garage than I do these days.

I play poker and chess because I like games where information is incomplete, decisions compound, and one bad move does not necessarily lose the game.

I think about life the same way. Chess is the long strategy. Poker is the hand you're holding today.

I've read roughly 300 books, many of them as audiobooks while driving. Business, history, leadership, sales, psychology, philosophy, technology, whatever rabbit hole happened to catch me.

I don't really separate learning from life. If something makes me curious, I want to understand how it works.

Then I found the word.

For most of my life, I would have described all of this as being curious, restless, entrepreneurial, maybe a little obsessive.

I knew I thought differently, but I did not have a clean name for it.

Then I found polymath.

Not the old caricature of a genius who mastered every subject known to humanity.

The modern version made sense to me.

That was familiar.

It described the junkyard, the Navy, the software work, the MBA, the DJ booth, the server rack, the consulting work and the AI system.

It described why I could spend years running a company and still be genuinely interested in economics, technology, music, psychology, strategy, government and whatever came next.

And it explained something else.

I had met specialists everywhere.

I had met smart people everywhere.

But I had very rarely met people whose minds seemed to jump across fields the same way mine did.

Once I finally had a word for it, I wanted to find those people.

So I started Polymath Alliance.

Not because I think I am the perfect example of a polymath.

I'm not.

I'm still learning.

That's kind of the point.

I started it because I think there are a lot of people out there who have spent their lives being told to focus, specialize, pick one thing or stay in their lane.

Some of them probably still think their range is a weakness.

I think it can be a hell of an advantage when you learn how to use it.

If that sounds familiar, you're probably the reason I built this.