The demographic makeup of society in general has changed dramatically in the last 25 years, and it will continue to change. The demographic of many professionals, however, has not kept pace and that of professional leaders even less so.
Living and working in our world and especially in our professions will require each of us to become increasingly aware of not only the challenges, but even better, the opportunities presented to us by the cultural changes occurring both around and among us. Both our professional societies in general and all of the various sections thereof should wholeheartedly embrace the concept of our growing cultural diversity.
We need to:
Increase our awareness of the various dimensions of diversity.
Examine our own cultural identity and how that identity affects our relationships with others.
Become more aware of our own attitudes, perceptions, and feelings about various aspects of diversity.
Commit to increasing our understanding of diversity issues.
Make it important to ourselves and others to mentor and sponsor those in underrepresented groups so they can fully participate throughout all of our professional workspace.
My problem in taking the last of these steps is that from merely reading the of membership lists of the various professional organizations I have joined and seeing the same few hundred people with whom I regularly interact, I cannot see what opportunities exist to mentor and sponsor younger (I’m in my 60th year walking God’s great earth) people who might want to be so mentored and sponsored by me.
Therefore, to help me help others, please, respond off the list to me at KenBesser@LifeCycleLaw.com and tell me, if you feel underrepresented, who you are and how can I help you. Or, if you know someone else who is underrepresented, who they are and how do you think I can help them.
In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your workweek and then go have a meaningful day of rest with people you hold most dear.
By the way, using my CASE (Copy And Steal Everything) research and writing method, today I ran across a great Overview of Diversity Awareness first written by some Penn State people on 2001 and updated in 2015. It is some of the best and most easy to read discussion diversity I have ever read. There’s the link to it.
Diversity and inclusion are all the rage. A Google search for the combined terms yields 224,000,000 results. Google’s Scholarly articles for 2018 alone yield about 23,000 results. With all this attention being paid to the topic, one must wonder, “Why we have not yet solved the problems of having people feel excluded from various spheres of their lives simply because they differ from the majority of those being natured and nurtured in the world?”
The answer may reside in the truth that we may be talk too much about the problem and doing too little to actually include the entire continuity of our communities.
Glen Llopis, a Cuban-American entrepreneur, bestselling author, speaker, senior advisor to Fortune 500 companies and organizations in many workspaces, and contributor to Forbes and Entrepreneur magazines thinks there are five ways to get along farther faster toward talking less and doing more. Llopis handful of suggestions are:
Move diversity and inclusion out of human resources.
Know what opportunity diversity and inclusion solves for.
Sole for respect and not recognition.
Think mosaic not melting pot.
Move people to the center of your organization’s growth strategy.
To learn more details about how these five things might help you and your enterprise thrive better in our shrinking global world, read his article in Forbes.
In the meantime, send me an answer to this question: What are you doing to include a more diverse group of people in your personal and business spheres?
Menachem Mendel Morgensztern of Kotzk, (1787–1859), a Hasidic rabbi and leader better known as the Kotzker Rebbe who was well known for his incisive and down-to-earth philosophies, and sharp-witted sayings and his little patience for stupidity, once said, “Not all that is thought need be said, not all that is said need be written, not all that is written need be published, and not all that is published need be read.”
Nonetheless, if you are going to think it, say it, write it, publish it, and/or read it, then, please, at least do whichever of these acts you do thoughtfully and meaningfully for the purpose of entertaining, educating, and enthusing people and not for other purposes that some may have.
My wife, a family physician for 37 years now, almost always warns her patients who bring up retirement to never retire. “Retirement makes you die too fast!” she exclaims and explains. And she has plenty of scientific data to back that up. “Work slower, work less, work at something from slightly to even totally different from what you’ve been doing for your life,” she tells people. “But never let a day go by without having a reason to get up and get going doing well in the world by doing good in it.”
Back in January of this year, I had the pleasure of attending the funeral of a law colleague in Memphis named Lewis Donelson, the original founder of Donelson & Adams, which became known by many names by many mergers over half a century until it became Baker Donelson a while back, which firm grew into Baltimore by merger last year as it assimlated Ober-Kaler into its “borg.”
“Lewie” loved lawyering so much he did it actively for 70 years and less actively for many more. He was still the Senior Counsel of the firm when he turned a triple digits a quarter before he smiled his last smile at the age of 100 and almost three months.
Lewie was 72 when I started practicing in his courthouse in 1990. He treated the place not only like he owned it, but more importantly, like he was personally responsible for it.
A time or two over the next three or four decades, when I’d see him in the courthouse or socially, I’d ask Lewie if he planned to retire yet, and he’d tell me, “NO! Because I just luvvvv the law that muuuuuch.” Lewie was (and will always be in my mind) as southern as a southern gentleman can sound.
I had a free lunch today (a rarity for me) with a man, Lou Ullman, whom I believe may give Lewie a run for his money. Though Lou has decades before he catches Lewie, he appears to be in great health, sports the title “Retired Attorney” at Offit Kurman, whose email address he still uses, and now continues his passion for helping people as a partner and senior consultant at a fee-only wealth management company.
I asked Lou, whom I’m tempted to start calling “Louie,” to explain the transition and he said, “I just got rid of all the parts of practicing law I hated and got to keep all the parts I loved.”
Seeming as financially strong as he physically looks, Lou no longer worries about logging billable hours, nor billing clients for them, nor many other less pleasant parts of being a member of a major firm. Now, he just helps old people figure out the next steps in their lives, does the “big picture” estate planning and sends them to younger lawyers to get their papers drawn up.
Lou manages to practice law, without really having to manage a law practice. I hope he keeps on doing it the way he apparently loves doing it for as long as Lewie did it and then some. Just seeing his example of this idea makes me want to emulate it in its proper time.
So, here’s the question to the rest of us, “How can we help each other love what we’re doing as long as Lewie did and Lou is doing?”
In January of 2018, I enjoyed the funeral of Louis R. “Lewie” Donelson, the hundred-year-old name partner of the huge law firm, Baker Donelson. In 1990, I started practicing as a new lawyer in a large Memphis firm, Burch, Porter & Johnson, watching Lewie, then 73, still going strong in the Shelby County Courthouse. I continued to be impressed by him as he hit his 100th year of life, still practicing law, merely because he loved it.
I continue to be impressed by Lewie’s partner, my dear friend Leo Bearman, Jr., who is now 82. I was pleased to have Leo teach me third-party beneficiaries in my first year contracts class in the fall of 1987 and I was honored to sit in his private office, thirty years later, a few weeks after Lewie’s death, for 15 minutes to reminisce about how Leo and his father, whom he still calls “Daddy” joined Lewie’s firm. At age 82, Leo was still, literally, up to his armpits in the Mississippi v. Memphis Light, Gas & Water lawsuit heading to the United States Supreme Court. It is a huge case, with financial implications ranging into billions of dollars. And, Leo appeared to be relishing every day he gets to spend on it and I have been following the parties’ filings in the Special Master’s Court in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals as the case moves steadily along toward an evidentiary hearing sometime in 2018.
Mary Shainberg
In February of 2018, I shared the joyous funeral of Leo’s and my mutual friend, Mary Shainberg, along with hundreds of others who were her friends and family in Memphis’s Temple Israel, where Leo, Mary, and I have often prayed and socialized together. Besting Lewie Donelson, Mary was 101, when she passed from this world to her place in the Garden of Eden, and like almost everything else in her life, she immaculately planned and executed her dying, her death, her private funeral with her family, and her public memorial service for her friends. Mary lived a lively and purpose-driven life through her last day. She did it happily despite bits and pieces of adversity that interspersed the majority of her wellness in body, mind, and spirit.
Almost everyone wants to live as long as they can, but they still want to have as much fun as they can while they do it. As we all grow older, we begin to break down, become less lively, and enjoy life much less in our 70s that we did in our 40s. Others, however, blow and go from 70 to 100 having the time of their lives.
Seeing happy and healthy centenarians like Lewie and Mary naturally leads most people to have the question, “How can I do that?” A recent TIME magazine article (February 26,2018 edition) explains a lot about how we all can do it, most of which I saw in action through Lewie and Mary.
How a positive attitude about aging. People who carried a gene variant linked to dementia, but also had a positive attitude about aging, were 50% less likely to develop the disease.
Work hard and play hard.
Move to the big city. Big cities have strong health systems, opportunities for continued learning, widespread public transportation, and abundant arts and cultural events. Nothing like all this stuff to fight loneliness, boredom, and a sedentary life; all of which leads to a bad case of the “dwindles,” a condition in which one’s body, mind, and spirit just fritters away.
Create, build, and maintain as many strong friendships as you can.
Develop a passion for things rather than anger about other things; be engaged rather than indifferent.
Shake your body, shake your body for you! Increasing physical activity improves endurance, muscle strength, and balance; reduces falls; and lifts your spirits. You don’t have to be an octogenarian marathoner. I just walked a 91-year-old woman from the hospital (where I had recently admitted my 79-year-old mother for a week for blood clots in her legs) to her car while she explained to be still walked a mile per day. When she was 87, she walked four miles in an hour; now, as her rheumatoid arthritis is ravaging her bones, she is determined to never drop below a mile and never drop before an hour a day. And she looked great to me; not a day over the average 80-year-old great-grandmother.
Eat. Never skip breakfast and make it a meaningful meal. Enjoy any food you want anytime you want it, but only in moderation.
Drink. The healthful benefits of reasonable alcohol consumption are not a reason to start drinking if you don’t already imbibe, but they are good reasons to continue to enjoy moderation in this and most other vices, except smoking.
Be merry. Happy people outlive persistent scowlers time and time again.
Maintain a healthy sex life. My Daddy often said in his seventies, “I’m not always as good as I once way, but I’m as good once as I always was.” Frequency need not be your goal, nor should a big finish and sticking the landing every time. The real things people should care about, regardless of their age, begin with enjoying intimacy with a partner and focusing on mutually pleasing each other.
These are just a few suggestions for meaningfully optimizing your life to make it as long as possible. What suggestions do you have based on your experience so far and hopes to enjoy in the your distant future?
Have you ever started up a project and poured tons of your life’s precious resources into and then, when your project does not perform the way you thought it would, you just dropped it like a worn out pair of shoes? Yeah, me, too. Like this blog for example.
I posted my first blog here, You Can Be Great! All the Time!, November 1, 2015, soon after my wife, Susan, and I decamped from Memphis to live nearer more of our children and grandchildren in Maryland. I posted almost daily. Sometimes, two or three posts a day. I was lonely on Maryland’s eastern shore and my friend, R. Linley Richter, was nagging me to continue plugging away to compete with his blog on Memphis family law.
And then something happened after four months of posting like a wild man. I know now what i think it was, but I can’t discuss the details. Suffice it to say, I partnered with someone on a different project and then my partner petered out on that project and dealing with that falling out so sapped my desire for social media and blogging that my posting frequency went right through the floor.
It’s interesting how the failure in one relationship in our lives can so dreadfully effect another relationship. Sometimes, a relationship with a project or a job can ruin a relationship with a person. (I’ve helped plenty of clients work through divorces from spouses more married to their practices than their mates.) Sometimes, a relationship with a partner on a project can ruin your relationship with the entire project.
Regardless, I let an abandoning partner in one project hurt the project, hurt me, hurt my relationship with the project, and hurt my relationship with many other projects as well. Instead of saying, “That’s okay, friend. I can either do this alone or recruit someone to handle your part,” I essentially said, “Piffle. If my partner doesn’t want to do this anymore, then neither do I. And, while I’m at it, I’ll just let a lot of other things slide as well.”
I’ve learned many lessons over the past year and a half. Suffered through some illnesses, both attitudinal and physical. And that which has not killed me has made me stronger, so. As Isaiah said in last Shabbat’s Haftorah, “Here I am. How can I help you?”
To all whom I’ve missed while digging down into and walking out of the trough, to borrow from that song of the sixties…
Starting all over again is gonna be rough, so rough
But we’re gonna make it
Starting all over as friends is gonna be rough, on us
But we gotta face it
Have you ever professed my preferred mantra, “I’m Great! All the time!” and received the rejoiner, “How can you be great, even when you are in great pain?” Yeah, me, too. People tauntingly query me all the time, “How can you be as great as you claim when there is so much pain and suffering in the world.” To each and all of them, I explain, “It’s all a matter of your definition of “Greatness!” and specifically, when faced with pain, it’s all about how you define the pain you face and how you respond to it.
Many dispute the origin of the quote, “Pain is inevitable, suffering it optional.” Some attribute it to Buddha, others to the Dali Lama; at least one source says Haruki Murakami, a self-styled modern Japanese writer said it first. Regardless, of who said it or says it when, I believe the statement is wrong, because I believe the premise that “pain is inevitable” is wrong and I reject it — all the time.
Almost forty years ago, in my first year of my aborted medical education (I left after my second year – a decision that still at times causes me pain), my Dorland’s Pocket Medical Dictionary taught me, “Pain is a feeling of distress, suffering, or agony, caused by stimulation of specialized nerve endings.” Medicine, up that generation at least, limited pain to physical sensation. Modern medicine, however, now includes in the definition the body-mind-spirit triad of pain. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary medically defines pain as:
a: a state of physical, emotional, or mental lack of well-being or physical, emotional, or mental uneasiness that ranges from mild discomfort or dull distress to acute often unbearable agony, may be generalized or localized, and is the consequence of being injured or hurt physically or mentally or of some derangement of or lack of equilibrium in the physical or mental functions (as through disease), and that usually produces a reaction of wanting to avoid, escape, or destroy the causative factor and its effects
b: a basic bodily sensation that is induced by a noxious stimulus, is received by naked nerve endings, is characterized by physical discomfort (as pricking, throbbing, or aching), and typically leads to evasive action.
Webster’s both rightly and wrongly describes pain as “a state of … lack of well-being or … uneasiness that … is the consequence of … [a] lack of equilibrium in the physical or mental functions … that usually produces a reaction of wanting to avoid, escape, or destroy the causative factor and its effects ….” It is right in its first two-third, that pain is but a feeling, a lack of well-being or an uneasiness caused by inequalibrium; but it is wrong in embracing the idea that pain should produce a “fight or flight” response to cause of one’s pain.
You need neither fight nor flee the cause of your pain. Rather, you can, if you so desire, use the P10 Principle to embrace and affirmatively relate with and respond to the cause of your pain.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor Frankl wrote about the psychological impacts of life as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Like many of my paternal ancestors’ relatives, Frankl’s mother, father, brother, and pregnant wife were all killed in the camps. His captors took virtually everything of personal value and basic human dignity from him. The sole thing the Nazis could not strip from him, however, was his choice as to how to respond to the deprivation, degradation, and trauma to which he was subjected. Frankl meaningfully chose to focus his energies on “owning” that small but vital space between the noxious stimulus received by his naked nerve endings and his response to it. Frankl’s ability to retain his energetic, emotional, and intellectual autonomy in the most horrific circumstances imaginable provides a near-perfect example of the value of having intrapersonal strength and grace under extreme duress to use one’s power of personal choice to use one’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to embrace one’s pain and decide to make something inherently positive out of something inherently negative instead of fleeing or fighting that which in the present circumstances can neither be fought nor fled.
For, as Frankl is often quoted, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
[reminder]Do you have the Greatness! to embrace and relate with your pain?[/reminder]
My new friends, Stacey and her father Doug, an inspiring daughter and father team
Have you ever experienced something significant you did not desire and, when you’ve enjoyed about as much of it that you can stand with, you screamed, “My God, why have you done this to me?” Yeah, me, too. But, I’ve thought about this a lot, especially after having suffered many setbacks over the years. So, let me tel you what I’ve found out.
Life gives us our challenges, to which we are liable to respond, and how we respond to them makes us who and what we are. For example, meet a pair of my new Planet Fitness friends, Stacey and her father, Doug. I will not use their last name or home Planet Fitness facility to protect their privacy. Before I tell you what little I know about them, however, let me tell you more about another father and daughter-in-extremis couple I know.
A few years ago, I handled a post-divorce child support case for a mother of a lovely child who was badly injured during her birth. The child, now in her late teens, continues to live despite severe brain damage that causes her to have very little muscular control, thinking power, or verbal ability. Her mother loves her and has made it her life’s mission to manage and use the child’s large legal settlement trust to give her as good a life as possible. Her father, however, divorced her mother shortly after her birth and essentially checked out of the child’s life, leaving the mother to pursue the lawsuit, the settlement of which has now provided both daughter and mother a better life than they would have had. The mother is employed by her child’s trust to take care of her child. It is a win-win situation. The father married another woman, had more kids, and is much less involved in his challenged daughter’s life.
Let me say here and now, as I have often said before, no one knows what it’s like to be in a particular marriage, challenged family, or other situation until one has actually been there. So, any disparagement of this first father is only based on my objective perception of the facts presented to or discovered by me as part of my work as that mother’s lawyer in that case. So I do not judge the father as a person, though I can imagine some better ways to handle a situation where a couple is challenged in life by having a challenged child.
For example, Doug and his recent Sunday morning workout accompanied by his daughter, Stacey. I was just starting an elliptical step workout when I saw someone near my age pushing his daughter in a large, custom-built wheelchair to a cable-driven weight lifting machine in front of me. The daddy was much buffer than I think I’ll ever be, but he was not the object of my attention. Stacey was.
From my medical education and experience, I assumed Stacey has experienced either a massive neuro-muscular genetic mutation or a hypoxic brain injury. The etiology of her disease is not important, nor the specifics of her physical and mental impairments. What is important, however, was her ability to engage me with some facial expressions and hand movements while her dad did his set on that machine.
Stacey grinned and me and I could not help but grin back. I am, after all, a tremendous flirt with attractive women. And Stacey, challenged as she may have been, attracted me with her attention to me. We flirted for a good, long time as her father finished a set on one machine in the row in front of me and moved her and himself to the next, again and again. Each time, Stacey adjusted her head to look at me and smile and, each time, I could not help but smile back and imitate her hand motions as she thumbed her own jaw line and grinned.
After I finished my time on the elliptical, I went over and introduced myself to Stacey and her father and told them both how much I admired and respected the way the two of them came to work out together. Doug informed me he came to work out with his daughter and she came to ogle the hunky guys. I felt even more flattered by her attraction.
Doug was the opposite of the other father in this story. Her saw the challenges shared by him and his daughter to be life affirming instead of life imposing. Such is the essence of the definition of Greatness! I teach in my writing and speeches, “Doing what is best in the present circumstances for the optimal balance of the highest priority and greatest number of those for whom our values make us responsible.”
Most religions teach, we should be thankful for both the good and bad things in our lives, for we do not know with certainty which is which as they happen but they all make us who and what we are.
Doug and Stacey (and their wife and mother, Mary, I am sure) are the essence of such Greatness! They are inspiring and have added to my life. I hope this post has added to yours.
Turn not away from uncomfortable things for coming to know them better will usually teach you something better about them and, hopefully, your self.
Have you ever been focused on getting something in particular done or going somewhere in particular as soon as you expected to get done doing whatever it was you were doing at a particular time, only to have something pop up here, there, or somewhere else that requires you to either stop what you were doing or postpone what you wanted to do next when it does? (Was that convoluted enough for you?Well, sometimes, life is that messy. But, I digress.) Yeah, me, too. Because, sometimes, we are liable to respond to what life makes go on around us.
This whole idea of responding to whatever life throws into the present circumstances is a major part of the definition of Greatness! So, let’s start with a review of that whole definition.
Greatness! — is a peaceful and satisfied state of mind resulting from using proaction, perception, planning, preparation, practice, and persistence to promote your values, vision, and mission into a practically perfect performance of a balanced creation, highest and best use, and recreation of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to do what most enhances life in the present circumstances for the optimal balance of the highest priority and the most of those people, places, things, and ideas with whom and which you have relationships and to whom and which and for whom and which your values make you responsible.
Focusing on the underlined last half of this definition, we see that our purpose in life is to “do what most enhances life,” but what most enhances life, like beauty, art, ugliness, and pornography, almost always lays (or lies, depending on your perspective) in the eyes of the beholder. And then we have to consider how what most enhances life changes in response to what life throws at us in the present circumstances, because change in the moment brings with it the anxiety of having to constantly assess and then reassess what’s the “optimal balance of the highest priority and the most of the people, places, things, and ideas with whom and which you have relationships and to whom and which and for whom and which your values make you responsible.”
Seeing all this stuff in action may make it a bit clearer for you, so let’s enjoy tonight’s “true life adventure.”
My dear friend, Linley, spent the afternoon watching his son fish (see “Proud Papa’s” photo above) and pooped out on doing my second workout of the day tonight, so I was forced to enjoy the evening in Cordova’s Planet Fitness alone, after which, I planned to watch Madam Secretary long distance with my wife. It was the best alternative enhancement of life we could think of instead of watching it with her in person, because I am working in Memphis this week while she is working in Maryland. Fools plan and God laughs, however, and life was about to hang a Louie on us.
As I returned from my post-workout shower to my locker, at 8:10 p.m., ready to head home and FaceTime my dear wife back in Maryland to recap our respective days, I noticed a large, muscular man sitting on a bench in front of a bank of lockers, pensively and intently closely staring at a nice sturdy lock on the locker directly in front of him.
“You look like you’re trying to think open that lock, man,” I jested.
“Nope,” he replied. “I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to get my keys out of that locked locker and get to work on time by nine.”
I advised wisely, “So, go to the front desk, get their bolt cutters, snap the lock off and get on to work.”
He sighed and answered, “They can’t find them,” just as one of the two young night time front desk employees came up with a pair of channel locks and a hammer.
The attendant explained, “We still can’t find the bolt cutters, so we’ll just have to beat your lock open.”
I put my second stockinged foot in my pants and proposed, “You got too much lock and not enough tool there, sir.”
“Why?” he asked, hitting the lock ineffectively another time or two.
As I called Linley, who ignored me again and didn’t answer his cell phone, and then called my sister to send her scouring her nearby garage for some bolt cutters, I explained, “You’ve got three-sixteenths of an inch of high-carbon cold-rolled steel hook tucked in a solid brass lock casing and you’re going to break your locker hasp long before you break that lock.”
I turned to my new, forlorned friend and asked, “What kind of work do you have to get to in forty-five minutes?”
“MPD. Night shift.”
I finished tucking and buckling, gathered up my bag and told the front desk attendant, “Stop beating that thing. You don’t have the right power, the right tools, nor the right angle of attack to defeat that lock.” I looked at my cell phone clock and said, “Well, the wife will have to wait and we’ll watch Madam Secretary in the morning. Did you go to church this morning?”
He looked at me a little puzzled and embarrassed and said, “Nope, I didn’t get off until nine this morning and went home and went to sleep.”
“That’s okay,” I assured him as I put my big, black religious beanie on my head, “because the Lord has sent another Jew to save you again.” He chuckled as I finished. “Get your shoes back on and let’s go work the problem here.”
I told him we were going to take my car, drive south, turn in to the first store we thought might sell bolt cutters, buy some, and come back here and snip the lock off. He protested that his wallet was locked in his locker, along with his keys.
“Figures,” I chortled, leading the way away.
AutoZone was first on the left. I left the cop, whose name I still haven’t asked, in the running car. Josh, a nighttime AutoZoner, was reluctant to let me borrow the store’s bolt cutters without giving him some security, until I jammed my iPhone 7 into his hand. “I got an MPD cop in my car who needs to get his uniform out of his locker at Planet Fitness up the street there and get to work in thirty minutes. I don’t have much time. Here’s your collateral. I’ll be right back.”
Five minutes later, the musclebound member of Memphis’ finest, snapped the lock and handed me back my emergency cell phone pawn ticket.
“I don’t know who you are, man, but you are totally awesome.”
“Ken Besser’s the name and Greatness! in the moment’s the game. Just do the same for the next person you see who needs your help.” I split quick, because AutoZone was closing sooner rather than later and I’d already missed the first 20 minutes of Madam Secretary.
Why did I go through all that trouble for a stranger I’d never met and will likely never see again? Because, in those present circumstances, with me having only a less-than-perfect virtual TV date with my wife and with a cop needing to get to work protecting me and the rest of Memphis from bad folks, my values made me responsible to do what is best for the optimal balance of the highest priority (me, first; Susan, second; this cop and the rest of Memphis being normally lower priority) and largest number (the community at large needing this cop’s protection) of the people, places, things, and ideas with whom and which we have relationships (we are all related to some degree) and to whom and which and for whom and which our values make us responsible (we all have the duty to serve and protect our respective parts of the world).
All that being said, in the circumstances that presented themselves, I had to interrupt my planned evening for the exigent circumstances presented. I let me schedule slip a bit and stuffed in a little bit of knight work for a city night watchman. It cost me little of my life’s precious resources of time, effort, and energy; but it paid me a larger amount of the resources of emotion in that I was doing good in my little part of the world.
And it all gave me a timely and practically perfect example of Greatness! in action.
All this being written, the next post I promised you in the last post, will have to be the next post I’m now promising you in this post. See you then.
[reminder]What would you have done tonight in these same circumstances? Turned toward the need and fed it or away from it and fled it? Hopefully, the former. Certainly, next time ….[/reminder]
Are you steaming along on your path to Greatness! or just treading in hot water? Yeah, me, too’ but only sometimes.
And when I find myself just treading in hot water, I pop open a book my young friends at the Granville T. Woods Academy gave me last spring titled, 212 The Extra Degree, by Sam Parker and Mac Anderson, and it really keeps me motivated just when I need it.
The difference between water at 211 degrees and 212 degrees is that the former is only hot water and the later can power a locomotive straight down the railway to Greatness! and the difference is just one degree, less than 1% of the difference between ice and steam (we’re talking Fahrenheit here, friends; this is America).
So, when you find yourself lacking some gumption, be 2-1-2 and make the extra effort needed to get out of the hot water and steaming on down the rails.
I’ll be sharing more of this book and its philosophy with you over the rest of the year.
[reminder]What have you done to move from 211 to 212 degrees?[/reminder]
