Revolutions start not when conditions are at their worst, but only after they have begun to improve, changes have been instituted, leadership has developed, and the people have come to have a new vision of what might be. Real revolutions are not begun in the streets or with guns and bombs. People who have changed the universe have never accomplished it that way.
Think about it… Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandella, a guy called Jesus, and others...they’ve done it by inspiring the people.
And once that inspiration is there, once people have seen what "can" be, there is no going back. It is only when peaceful revolution is made impossible, that violent revolution becomes inevitable. John F. Kennedy said that. Syria is living it right now.
Revolutions are begun – and won - in the minds and hearts of people – and they are not always violent. Revolutions are as simple as changing minds and looking at life in new ways.
Revolutionaries realize that they can’t change their world at once – they can only change the way they look at it and deal with it. They can only change the ways they deal with the people around them and the world they live in. They realize that the big change comes that way. One person at a time…beginning with ourselves. And that, my friends, is the hardest change to make.
One of Martin Luther King's lesser known quotes is one of my favorites, because speaks to the need for change to come from within, not from outside or above:
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
Whatever you choose to do with the rest of your life, remember one thing. It is all up to you. You are where you are because you choose to be there. Don’t let someone tell you “you can’t do that”. The biggest thing I have learned in my 60 years of life, is that there is will never be enough money, time, available resources or helpful people to do anything we want to do. Success is in finding ways to do it anyway.
Go be successful peaceful revolutionaries.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Monday, June 24, 2013
Law Dog Not
The previous ramble alluded to the fact that the Dog, at one time, aspired to be a lawyer. The back story on that exercise may be interesting, if not too perceived as whining, because it truly isn't.
As previously noted, I lost my newspaper dream and was continuing on my learning journey to find out what I didn't know. One of my best friends was a lawyer and had this wild idea that I would be a good one and, perhaps, we could practice together into the great unknown future. That vision only had one obstacle, I had to get into law school.
So, after completing my BA in Economics at the University of Colorado, I dutifully took the LSAT and applied to law school. The only school that I really could attend at the time would have been the University of Denver, since it was the only one in driving distance offering night classes - and I had a full-time job.that couldn't be put on hold. On a lark, I also applied to Notre Dame.
I got accepted at Notre Dame. I got put on a waiting list for Denver.
While I was commiserating with my friend, the attorney, about this travesty, we were interrrupted when his paralegal came bounding into the office announcing that she just got accepted at Denver.
Hmm. Not being able to pass this inquiry opportunity up, and knowing that she wasn't aware that I had also I applied, I innocently asked what it took to get into that school.
"What was your LSAT score?", I asked. Her score was lower than mine.
I followed with, "How about your GPA?". Her GPA was also lower than mine.
I asked her if she was famiiar with the Bakke case. (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978)
She was not.
The final outcome was that she dropped out after two semesters.
I learned a lot more than law during those years. Wouldn't trade it for any law degree.
As previously noted, I lost my newspaper dream and was continuing on my learning journey to find out what I didn't know. One of my best friends was a lawyer and had this wild idea that I would be a good one and, perhaps, we could practice together into the great unknown future. That vision only had one obstacle, I had to get into law school.
So, after completing my BA in Economics at the University of Colorado, I dutifully took the LSAT and applied to law school. The only school that I really could attend at the time would have been the University of Denver, since it was the only one in driving distance offering night classes - and I had a full-time job.that couldn't be put on hold. On a lark, I also applied to Notre Dame.
I got accepted at Notre Dame. I got put on a waiting list for Denver.
While I was commiserating with my friend, the attorney, about this travesty, we were interrrupted when his paralegal came bounding into the office announcing that she just got accepted at Denver.
Hmm. Not being able to pass this inquiry opportunity up, and knowing that she wasn't aware that I had also I applied, I innocently asked what it took to get into that school.
"What was your LSAT score?", I asked. Her score was lower than mine.
I followed with, "How about your GPA?". Her GPA was also lower than mine.
I asked her if she was famiiar with the Bakke case. (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978)
She was not.
The final outcome was that she dropped out after two semesters.
I learned a lot more than law during those years. Wouldn't trade it for any law degree.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Dog's Unmarked Trail
The Dog started out to become a newspaper reporter and ended up as a human resources person. That makes me think a whole lot of people never end up where they intended to be, so arguably the best strategy for life is not to have a strategy. Just take the days as they come, pay attention when opportunities come by, and take a chance every now and then. Keep learning growing, exploring, and living. Easy to say, hard to do.
The Marines made me a photo-journalist, for some reason. The only journalism training I had was a class in high school, where my major accomplishment was setting up a water pistol fight in the classroom and then writing a feature story about it. If that happened now, I'd be in jail.
Anyway, whatever the case, when my first Marine Corps story came out in print in Stars and Stripes, I was hooked.
I reached my first dream job in the early '70s when I had a newspaper in Lafayette, Colorado. I had landed in Colorado after the Marines, and wanted to continue my career in journalism but I couldn't even get an interview with a paper. So, being the naive, uneducated bloke that I was, I ran an ad in the Colorado Press Assn. newsletter that said, "with 15 minutes training, I can do anything".
A couple of weeks later the phone rang and, shortly thereafter, a deal was struck for two other guys to put up the money and me to put up the work to start a weekly paper in Lafayette. I didn't even know where Lafayette was, and we didn't form any committees/task forces or even look at financial projections.
I went up to Lafayette (20 miles NW of Denver) and wandered around. I visited stores, restaurants, banks, hardware store, and asked them what they thought about a newspaper in town. Little did I know that today that would be called "conducting a market study" and I should pay a consultant several thousand dollars to do it. WTF?
Anyway, the first paper came off the press on Feb. 28, 1974, and has been hanging on my various walls ever since. The Lafayette Times was the only weekly newspaper to have made a profit in its first year, and continue to increase circulation and advertising revenue, in a community that had access to three large daily papers. It is my "real-life MBA", and one of life's biggest accomplishments. Totally unplanned. How'd that happen?
The dream ended a couple of years later, when after paying back the partners initial investment and starting to pay a monthly return (ROI today), the partnership dissolved and I was summarily dismissed over "philosophy". Not writing philosophy, but financial philosophy. I wanted to roll a bigger piece of our bottom line into building the paper and they wanted to roll more into "our" pockets. Another great learning experience.
So, there I was, 24 years old and my life's "vision" reached -- and finished.
Still with no real life plan in hand, unemployed, uneducated, married, and with a new house, I decided to go to college and look at possibly becoming a lawyer (another great story there).
In order to go to school and help pay our bills, I needed a job. A friend of mine introduced me to the CEO of St. Anthony Hospital in Denver, and I stumbled into a management training program. That exercise started in housekeeping and somehow along the way, when the Personnel Director resigned, ended me up there. No formal training in personnel, and my college degrees in Economics.
Go figure.
The Marines made me a photo-journalist, for some reason. The only journalism training I had was a class in high school, where my major accomplishment was setting up a water pistol fight in the classroom and then writing a feature story about it. If that happened now, I'd be in jail.
Anyway, whatever the case, when my first Marine Corps story came out in print in Stars and Stripes, I was hooked.
I reached my first dream job in the early '70s when I had a newspaper in Lafayette, Colorado. I had landed in Colorado after the Marines, and wanted to continue my career in journalism but I couldn't even get an interview with a paper. So, being the naive, uneducated bloke that I was, I ran an ad in the Colorado Press Assn. newsletter that said, "with 15 minutes training, I can do anything".
A couple of weeks later the phone rang and, shortly thereafter, a deal was struck for two other guys to put up the money and me to put up the work to start a weekly paper in Lafayette. I didn't even know where Lafayette was, and we didn't form any committees/task forces or even look at financial projections.
I went up to Lafayette (20 miles NW of Denver) and wandered around. I visited stores, restaurants, banks, hardware store, and asked them what they thought about a newspaper in town. Little did I know that today that would be called "conducting a market study" and I should pay a consultant several thousand dollars to do it. WTF?
Anyway, the first paper came off the press on Feb. 28, 1974, and has been hanging on my various walls ever since. The Lafayette Times was the only weekly newspaper to have made a profit in its first year, and continue to increase circulation and advertising revenue, in a community that had access to three large daily papers. It is my "real-life MBA", and one of life's biggest accomplishments. Totally unplanned. How'd that happen?
The dream ended a couple of years later, when after paying back the partners initial investment and starting to pay a monthly return (ROI today), the partnership dissolved and I was summarily dismissed over "philosophy". Not writing philosophy, but financial philosophy. I wanted to roll a bigger piece of our bottom line into building the paper and they wanted to roll more into "our" pockets. Another great learning experience.
So, there I was, 24 years old and my life's "vision" reached -- and finished.
Still with no real life plan in hand, unemployed, uneducated, married, and with a new house, I decided to go to college and look at possibly becoming a lawyer (another great story there).
In order to go to school and help pay our bills, I needed a job. A friend of mine introduced me to the CEO of St. Anthony Hospital in Denver, and I stumbled into a management training program. That exercise started in housekeeping and somehow along the way, when the Personnel Director resigned, ended me up there. No formal training in personnel, and my college degrees in Economics.
Go figure.
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