I am certain that you have your own favorite place to celebrate a warm spring day. When the trees are blossoming it can be a truly awesome sight. We’ve had a few flowers bloom here already and the taste of spring is in the air.
Tough Winter
I always think of spring as the time for a new beginning. It is a good time to wash out the garage and take an inventory on how your life is going. We have had a tough winter here in America with some real financial challenges and although they are far from solved, perhaps we are heading in the right direction. I’m endeavoring to freshen up my outlook and my attitude. Let us give thanks for being here in America and let us pray that God will keep our troops from harm and bring them home soon to a healthier America.
Well, I suppose that you have all now heard by now that Guiding Light the CBS soap opera that’s been in existence for 72 years — since 1937 on the radio and 1952 on the television — will air its final episode post-Summer. The Associated Press cites declining daytime ratings and budget as the reason for the show’s demise. If you think you feel bad about what is happening think about the poor ladies and probably gentlemen too who have been following this show for the past 72 years.
I guess our lives will never be the same. First it was losing all that money in the stock market and so many people’s retirement plans going up in smoke. Then people’s jobs started falling off like dead flies and now this. It is interesting how different things have a different importance to different people. That difference can be summed up as it depends on whose ox is getting gored.
What will it be next? Perhaps Sixty Minutes will be canceled and replaced by a weekly fireside chat from our President. He seems to be saying something to somebody on TV every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Life just isn’t the same these days, but then it never was, was it?
I think I have the real reason for the canceling of the soap Guiding Light. People used to watch soap operas because the problems the characters faced on the soaps were always much more severe than their own little problems. It used to bring people some joy to see that some other poor soul had it worse then they had it. In comparison our own lives seemed better. Well now, with all of the bad stuff that is floating around that is not so often the case. We now have it worse than those soap characters and so who needs them? So turn down the guiding light, we’ll somehow make it on our own.
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I have never played basketball…
Playback I was watching the Sweet Eight games this weekend and occasionally when a player scored a field goal they would play back the others outstanding plays that player had made in the game. Swish! Swish! Swish! and the thought came to me, “Enjoy it to its fullest because, young man, that may be as good as life ever gets for you.” I have never played basketball, never made field goal but I thought about the rare times in my life when I really knocked the ball out of the park or scored the winning run. These precious moments came to me in my speaking career. That time at the International Toastmasters Conference in Toronto in 1978 where I had the honor, as a professional speaker to be one of the two keynoters. The Executive Director told me later that I set a new standard for keynotes that day. And those heart warming three days at the National Safety Congress in Chicago in 1979 when I had attendance setting records at the early morning sessions and scored with three different presentations. Another was at the Grand Hotel on Mackinaw Island where I was hired to substitute for then President Gerald Ford for the Michigan Petroleum Association and my parents were in the audience. We all score our field goals in our own way in our lifetime. Maybe that moment came for you as a mother or a father when you really stepped up the plate and truly measured up or perhaps you had the challenge and the opportunity to step up and prevent a disaster.
I guess our challenge is to give whatever we are doing our best all out effort every day of our lives. That is really living.
Say Something Good Associations. Never underestimate the potential for growth available from attending a state or national association meeting. One catch through. You must not just attend. You must find a way to participate. Here in America we have many thousands of different associations all with their own missions. In today’s challenging times both the government and our corporations are taking a long hard look at meetings and their justification. May I encourage you to fight hard to attend such meetings but go there to work and to participate and set yourself a goal to bring home with you the spirit and knowledge to make this world a better place because of what you have learned. May God Bless America, give comfort to our people’s suffering and keep our troops from harm.
Visit Our Website I’ve been thriving since 1972 using my creativity and my speaking skills. I learned to use my creative imagination and then to implement my unique ideas creating my own corporation. My book new E-book titled Beyond Duh-Creativity in Action is now available at our website www.artfettig.com It might be just what you need to get started in a new era of your working life.
Check out our website at www.artfettig.com Learn about our sensational new 101 Kit that allows you to save thousands on speaker and travel fees and implement our fantastic employee positive interaction 101 program yourself. It is an instant behavior modification commitment program that gets everyone in your organization involved in safety. Remember, you have a ten day money back guarantee too. Act now. Go directly to www.artfettig.com And get your safety program cranked up to a whole new level of performance. If you have questions just call me at 800 441 7676 or e-mail me at artfettig@aol.com.
Points To Ponder As you consider ways to deal more effectively with other human beings, remember that the center for communications is not in the head, it’s in the ‘gut.’ Moshe Davidowitz
A Little Humor One safety speaker I know explained to me, “Art, I have discontinued giving long speeches because of my throat. Several members of the audience have threatened to cut it.”
Quote of the Week We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion. – Georg Hegel
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Jack Welch knows how to win. During his forty-year career at General Electric, he led the company to year-after-year success around the globe, in multiple markets, against brutal competition. His honest, be-the-best style of management became the gold standard in business, with his relentless focus on people, teamwork, and profits.
Since Welch retired in 2001 as chairman and chief executive officer of GE, he has traveled the world, speaking to more than 250,000 people and answering their questions on dozens of wide-ranging topics.
Inspired by his audiences and their hunger for straightforward guidance, Welch has written both a philosophical and pragmatic book, which is destined to become the bible of business for generations to come. It clearly lays out the answers to the most difficult questions people face both on and off the job.
Welch’s objective is to speak to people at every level of an organization, in companies large and small. His audience is everyone from line workers to MBAs, from project managers to senior executives. His goal is to help everyone who has a passion for success.
Welch begins Winning with an introductory section called “Underneath It All,” which describes his business philosophy. He explores the importance of values, candor, differentiation, and voice and dignity for all.
The core of Winning is devoted to the real “stuff” of work. This main part of the book is split into three sections. The first looks inside the company, from leadership to picking winners to making change happen. The second section looks outside, at the competition, with chapters on strategy, mergers, and Six Sigma, to name just three. The next section of the book is about managing your career—from finding the right job to achieving work-life balance.
Welch’s optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set is riveting. Packed with personal anecdotes and written in Jack’s distinctive no b.s. voice, Winning offers deep insights, original thinking, and solutions to nuts-and-bolts problems that will change the way people think about work.
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Don’t Wait Too Long
I wrote a song with the above title and as I was listening to it I had the thought today, “Just what is too long?” Is there a certain time in your life when you should give up on a dream and let it go? What if that dream comes back again and again throughout your lifetime? Should you pay any attention to it? What I am learning as I get older is that the real joys in life come in the journey. Reaching your destination is always a sort of a letdown. When you get somewhere in your life you have to start going somewhere else right away or else you get bogged down. My wife Jean was talking with a friend who was about to celebrate his ninetieth birthday and she suggested that they have a party. He just sort of shrugged it off and said, “Let’s wait. The ninety-fifth will be the big one.” I keep working on new stuff all the time…A new book on Hillsborough. A novel I hope that I am about to complete. I started on a new song today. I’m working on a new speech…Also talking with a guy about singing some of my songs. Somebody said, “Happiness is having something pending.” I just hope I can keep a lot of coals in the fire for a long, long time to come.
Say Something Good
The competitive spirit. Watching all of this basketball I have had my heart jump up into my throat a number of times and it happens when I watch the absolutely fantastic competitive spirit of some of these teams and of some of these individual players. Knock them down and bloody their noses and most of them get up smiling and all the more determined to win. This powerful competitive spirit is what made America great and we need more and more of it today in this tremendously competitive world. It is time for every American to get in there and find a way as an individual to contribute to the greatness of America. May God bless this nation and keep our troops from harm.
Is there a certain time in your life when you should give up on a dream and let it go?
Visit Our Website
Check out our website at www.artfettig.com Learn about our sensational new 101 Kit that allows you to save thousands on speaker and travel fees and implement our fantastic employee positive interaction 101 program yourself. It is an instant behavior modification commitment program that gets everyone in your organization involved in safety. Remember, you have a ten day money back guarantee too. Act now. Go directly to www.artfettig.com And get your safety program cranked up to a whole new level of performance. If you have questions just call me at 800 441 7676 or e-mail me at artfettig@aol.com.
Points To Ponder
Admonish your friends privately, but praise them openly. Publilius Syrus
A Little Humor
You know you are in trouble when you go to the airline baggage office to complain about a lost bag and the attendant is wearing your clothing.
Quote of the Week
The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. Albert Einstein
Yes, it is that week end again when all the talk around here is the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament. I’m sure that wherever you live there is some such critter. At the NCAA Selection Show tomorrow some 65 teams will be picked from around the nation for the NCCA battles. What is so amazing is how many of these games can come down to the last five or ten or fifteen seconds and SWISH…the lead changes and a team comes out victorious.
In other words, some team might snatch defeat from the jaws of victory or some such thing in the flash of an eye. In the Virginia Tech-Carolina game Friday we watched it get down to the final seconds and I could feel it in my bones that Carolina might lose. Carolina was leading by one point but Virginia Tech had the ball and was threatening. Then somehow #50 Tyler Hansbrough tied up the ball, it was Carolina’s possession in the rotation, and they managed to run out the clock for the few seconds remaining to win by ONE POINT. Neither my wife nor I could understand that play it happened so fast, and we had to wait for a game summary later to find out what happened.
The Virginia Tech coach was so upset by the call that he ranted and he raved, he waved his arms and then he took off his coat and threw it on the bench and it was a beautiful sight to behold in this wonderful town of Hillsborough, North Carolina just a few miles from Chapel Hill, the home of the UNC Tar Heels. May God bless America and keep the fans, together with our troops from harm.
Tyler Hansbrough