My wife recently sent me a link to a TED Talk presented by a courageous woman named Sarah Trimmer. During a five-year period, Ms. Trimmer lost both parents, got divorced, had both breasts removed because of breast cancer, had the cancer return two years later which necessitated chemotherapy and radiation treatments and then had her…
The recent presidential election was extremely polarizing and many people formed strong opinions for their candidate and against the other candidate. This brings up the issue of how do you deal with people who backed the other candidate at this year’s holiday gatherings. A recent article by Claire Ansberry, which appeared in The Wall Street…
International author and speaker, actor, playwrite and former railroad executive Art Fettig recently reflected in his newsletter on his 87 year-long happy, fulfilling and rewarding life. At the end, he provided some sound advice to people starting out in life. After reflecting on what Art had to say, I strongly feel that this advice applies…
My wife told me about a piece of wisdom she got from her aunt more than 50 years ago that she still uses. When she was a girl, she was stressing about something and her aunt said to her, “With all the things in the world to worry about, is that really worry-worthy?” To this…
My friend Cheryl posted a wonderful anecdote on Facebook and I’d like to share it with you. “I attended the first Michigan State University (MSU) home hockey game last night and the arena was full of MSU students. I had so much fun with the two male students seated next to me. One was from…
A year ago I wrote about Elliot Uzelac who had coached college football for 40 years with stops at Michigan, Ohio State, Colorado and Maryland. At age 74, he set aside retirement to become head football coach at Benton Harbor High School in Michigan—a crippled program that that had endured 25 straight losing seasons and…
The company believes that employees must be incentivized to get them to perform at acceptable levels. The problem with incentives is they motivate employees to do only those things necessary to achieve company mandated performance goals and keep their jobs. In the case of Wells Fargo, it involved selling customers things they didn’t want or…
I know many of you may feel that mothers are the closest things we have to angels here on earth and you’re right; but mothers have a vested interest in their children. Nurses, on the other hand, have a job to do with no vested interest in their patients—they do what they do because they…
My son Phil passed away two years ago on September 30. Yesterday would have been his 40th birthday. He was a wonderful guy with a quick wit, big heart and a great sense of humor. He has been sorely missed by everyone who knew him. I feel very fortunate that the last words spoken between…
A friend of mine told me about this story which was posted on Facebook last March. Since then it has been shared more than 30,000 times and received more than 1,500 comments. Cesia Abigail is the 25-year-old owner of Abi’s Café, an El Salvadoran restaurant in Minneapolis. One day, a street person named Marcus walked…