Lesson from a feature story...

Yet again, a simple feature story generated a big lesson this week.

By the end of our conversation Thursday, Chester "Chet" Salit wasn't sure he

had such a good story for me - his was kind of a boring story, he suggested.

But I begged to differ.

First, I told him that the Ladder of Success isn't necessarily meant to be about celebrities, but rather they are about people who don't necessarily get the headlines. This feature, which you can read every Saturday on the business page, is more about everyday people, who get up and go to make their business or industry better every day.

As the manager of a local architecture firm, he was just that.

But his story was refreshing beyond the criteria of our business page.

In a time when it can be easy to get lost in "positive" spin, I realized I was talking to a

guy who was refreshingly honest about where he'd been and where he ended up in his career.

He readily acknowledge that early in his career, he wasn't in the elite echelon of designers in the architectural field. Designing buildings didn't come easy for him, he said.

But he persevered, eventually moving to the business side of architecture.

We're not all rock stars in what we do. But sometimes we just have to plug away at it, and eventually we'll find a niche.

Thanks to some honesty from people like Salit - boring or not - there's hope.