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Archives for Year 2000 -
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| December 25, 2000 |
It’s been said that anticipation is generally much better than the real thing. And I suppose that’s true. Mostly. It is Christmas morning for the year 2000. You’ve been anticipating this special morning for months now. And here it is. |
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| December 18, 2000 |
When Frank Capra created a character named George Bailey and cast Jimmy Stewart play the part, he knew he was tapping into something primal. Something fundamentally basic to life in America. But when his film debuted in 1946 with lots of fanfare at the Globe Theater in New York City, the response was less than he hoped. |
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| December 18, 2000 |
When Frank Capra created a character named George Bailey and cast Jimmy Stewart play the part, he knew he was tapping into something primal. Something fundamentally basic to life in America. But when his film debuted in 1946 with lots of fanfare at the Globe Theater in New York City, the response was less than he hoped. |
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| December 11, 2000 |
As I spoke into the microphone, all the pent-up anxiety hit. We’d been preparing for months. You work hard, and hope for the best. And pray that Murphy’s law won’t derail the progress. |
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| December 4, 2000 |
An ancient story becomes particularly poignant given the headlines screaming at us from all directions. It’s a parable that speaks volumes, over six hundred years later. It’s the story of an indecisive donkey. |
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| November 27, 2000 |
Polaris is not the brightest star in the night sky. It’s not the most prominent. But for us earth dwellers, it is unique in all the heavens for one simple reason. It doesn’t move. It’s the only fixed point among all the stars. |
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| November 20, 2000 |
“I’ve seen guys out there with zero body fat, fit enough to run a marathon, guys with exceptional co-ordination, athletic prowess, balance, lightening fast hand-eye skills, guys who can snow ski, water ski and snow-board… guys who learn fast…” I was getting even more depressed. Scott went on anyway. “But if they wait until they are forty… well, forget it. I haven’t seen one guy get up. Not one.” |
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| November 13, 2000 |
I went to bed on election night, that would the morning after election night, thinking, Kemp, you are a hopeless, hapless, pathetic political junky. It was nearly two in the morning. I was talking to myself. |
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| November 6, 2000 |
The TV screen said BREAKING NEWS. I thought, oh no, another 747 took off on the wrong runway in a blinding rain. How many lives this time? Or, perhaps the Middle East broke into a wider conflict… an assassination, or an explosive act of terror. The anchorman’s serious tone made me suspect that perhaps our nation was under siege. |
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| October 30, 2000 |
C.W. Perry grew the church to well over two thousand from scratch. Thirty-seven years ago, he and his wife Mary came to North Orange County California with a dream of making a mark, and building a congregation that would last. C.W. took the pulpit Sunday after Sunday, while Mary took her place at the sanctuary keyboard. Her music and his Bible talks drew them in. |
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| October 23, 2000 |
The Yphantides (pronounced “efanteedees,” accent on the third syllable) family is well known in our region. The Greek name tips you off. It’s a close fun-loving God-fearing family. The Patriarch, George, is an American Patriot. He loves the U.S. of A. and the life he’s built and the opportunity his five children have to pursue excellence. Family gatherings are marked with an abundance of wonderful food, laughter and music. Lots of music. George tunes pianos. |
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| October 16, 2000 |
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a start. A sudden awakening. No noise startles me. No alarm. No intrusion of light illuminating my room. No coyotes howling outside my window screaming in celebration of a moonlit kill. No neighborhood dogs baying in the distance. There is no apparent cause. I just wake up. To what feels like full consciousness. |
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| October 9, 2000 |
We bring two competing values to the marketplace. And I suppose, the tension between the two will always be with us. On the one hand, we emulate the qualities of the rugged individualist. Then on the other hand, we admire the whole process of co-operative effort. The two are not easily reconciled. |
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| October 2, 2000 |
As of this morning, one more marathon of Olympic coverage has come to an end. The flaming Torch that illumined the mighty stadium, the city of Sydney, and a world united in its fascination with The Games, has been extinguished. And we can now return to those other demands on our time and attention. |
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| September 25, 2000 |
Steve stood in line at Costco last week. Ahead of him was a single young man – looked like a GenXer (twenty-something). Ahead of GenX (we’ll call him) was an attractive young woman writing a check and finishing up her transaction. In her shopping cart, two pre-school boys waited, fidgeting and making noise and showing their impatience with the whole process. They’d had enough of the shopping cart for one day. |
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| September 18, 2000 |
Friday nights in America still draw big crowds… live and in person entertainment for six bucks a seat… it’s a tradition that is hardly threatened, despite all the brouhaha. It’s the high school football game. We got in on some of the magic this week. |
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| September 11, 2000 |
“Dad, are you multi-tasking?” It was our oldest daughter. She is a schoolteacher. I revel in her stories… Like Ann of Green Gables or Christy (her childhood heroes who also chose education as a career), she views each day as an opportunity to prove to the world that anyone can learn and that no student is beyond hope. She’s incurably positive. |
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| September 4, 2000 |
A mile is a curious thing. Left brained purists have introduced the whole metric system to us, and for a fact, the math is a whole lot easier. It’s based on a system of tens. The meter. The centimeter. The millimeter. Much less complicated than the foot. The yard. The mile. The acre. Who came up with the concept of a mile? |
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| August 28, 2000 |
Issue #52 |
What do you do with an old town that’s dying a slow, agonizing economic death? Less than a year ago, a Main Street as American as apple pie that once drew weekend crowds shuts down Friday at five o’clock in the afternoon for one simple reason. There are no people. No shoppers. Not even a Looky-Lou strolling the displays along the walkway. “Sorry, We’re CLOSED,” reads the sign in every window. What do you do? |
| August 21, 2000 |
Tuesday, we lunched at the University Club. Albert Einstein, Dr. Albert Michelson (the Nobel Prize winning physicist who measured the speed of light), Edwin Hubble (as in the telescope), along with the principals in the annual Tournament of Roses Parade and Rose Bowl Game have found the University Club a perfect place for mid-day hobnobbing. |
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| August 14, 2000 |
I’ve been around long enough now to be getting a sense of what it is that makes a person more or less successful in their career of choice. I’ve seen it both ways. More successful and less successful. You’ve got the mediocre, the lukewarm, the colorless, the also ran. Perhaps these make up the reluctant majority. No one wants to admit that his or her life is basically plain vanilla. And then you’ve got that prized minority – the energized, the focused, the makin’-it-happen front-runner. Life in thirty-one flavors. What makes the difference? |
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| August 7, 2000 |
A brand new (buzzword) hit the airwaves just this week. A week ago, I had never heard the word. It’s not in the dictionary. But it’s rolling off the tongues of media reporters and anchorpersons and commentators and pundits in a profusion of excitement - the discovery of a single new word. It slips into the conversation like an old friend. And if you can do it, you are really hip. The word is GRAVITAS. |
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| July 31, 2000 |
It’s the season for Presidential elections. Here we go. Highly paid spin-doctors work the cameras. When cable TV puts a Republican and Democrat on the same screen, point-counterpoint, equal time, you will want to tune out. These people have all been to “media school.” Pricey consultants have worked ‘em over in practice sessions. They’ve mastered the art of the sound byte. |
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| July 24, 2000 |
There are lots of ways to give. You give gifts. You offer hospitality. You lend your tools to your neighbor. You do “pro-bono” work – you contribute your time and expertise without compensation for the good of the organization. You are generous with your grown-up toys. You give discarded clothing to Goodwill. When the new furniture arrives, the old stuff is handed down to someone with and empty room. They are delighted with your old stuff. These are all forms of giving. And each brings its own reward. |
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| July 17, 2000 |
We can make our lives as complicated as we wish. But at the end of the day, it really is not as complicated as we may like to think. Thomas Chalmers, the nineteenth century preacher, identified one of the “Grand Essentials” in finding happiness in the human life… he proposed that we simply need something to do. |
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| July 10, 2000 |
This week, I ventured into the world of California Community College. It’s been awhile since I wandered down the halls of academia. Down the hall, past the bookstore and the snack shop and the registrar’s office to Room 505. For one morning, I audited a course. No one in the room knew me. Except the professor. I took copious notes. |
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| July 4, 2000 |
Little things make a big difference. When the creators of Sesame Street did their initial research, they were paddling upstream. Serious educators spurned the television set as a teaching tool. The prevailing wisdom in the late nineteen sixties was that television could not be used to educate children. The medium is passive. Children may experience moments of fascination. They may be entertained. They may even remain still for brief periods. But educated? No way. |
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| June 26, 2000 |
Thursday was a golf day. Our foursome now has some history. We’ve golfed some good courses in Southern California and in Mexico over the past ten years. The four of us have averaged two rounds every year. One guy runs an investment firm in Orange County. Another is a practicing attorney. The third is a real estate investor. The fourth is me. (Correction: the fourth is I.) |
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| June 19, 2000 |
There was a time when Americans wore roses on Father’s Day. In 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the third Sunday in June “Father’s Day,” he gave the Presidential order to wear a symbolic rose. Color sent a signal. A red rose indicated that Dad is living. A white rose meant Dad is not. Mine would be white. |
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| June 12, 2000 |
You’ve have heard about the prime time television faire of the fifties and early sixties. You’ve probably seen the re-runs. According to the gurus of pop culture, those old programs were blatant over-simplifications of family life. They were contrived. They were one-dimensional. They were based on the assumption that all of life’s challenges could be resolved in a thirty-minute time frame. The laugh tracks were canned. They were antiseptic and sterile and classic textbook examples about how post-WWII society emulated the fine art of denial – the avoidance of “real issues.” |
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| June 5, 2000 |
Jack Kemp made me proud of my conference nametag this week. He’s still the quarterback. When he speaks, he tends to lean forward, as though his hands should be on his knees. He barks out sentences in short phrases. Straightforward. Comprehensible. It feels like you are in the huddle with him. His voice is raspy from shouting over the noise of the stadium crowd. And when he’s done, you feel like shouting “ready, BREAK!” |
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| May 29, 2000 |
As I grew up, Patriotism was a major theme.I lived in a small mid-western town. Oak and elm trees lined the streets. These were not the scrub oaks of the West. These were sprawling shade trees, with thick limbs and rough bark. Perfect for climbing. The houses were most often red brick. The porches had swings. Two seaters. We had basements. With sump pumps. On Memorial Day, there was a parade. |
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| May 22, 2000 |
Walter Robie is an outdoorsman. He is a Renaissance man – he loves both the arts and the sciences. He is an adventurer. A mountain climber. A conservationist. Give him the backcountry. The high trails. The big vistas. A running brook. A kayak. A river raft. Or the glassy reflection of a mountain lake, framing the mirror image of fluffy clouds against a deep blue sky. And then hand him a Nikon. Some lenses. A few filters. Let him frame. Let him shoot. Let him play with f-stops and aperture settings and focal length and depth of field. And he’s a happy man. |
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| May 15, 2000 |
Jean Valjean served nineteen years in a dank French prison cell for the menial crime of stealing a loaf of bread. It happened during a long and dark period of cruel economic depression in France. Valjean was hungry. A warm brown loaf cooled on the kitchen windowsill of a cottage in the village. Fresh out of the oven. The smell drifted down the lane as an enticement to passers by. He simply could not resist. Valjean snatched the bread. |
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| May 8, 2000 |
Just this year, Rich Luttrell returned a small photograph to its rightful owner. After thirty-three years. As a reminder of the day innocence left him, Rich kept a wallet-sized picture of two people, a father and a daughter, in the billfold in his back pocket for most of his adult life. The momentary crisis that would change his life forever occurred when he was age seventeen. It happened deep in the heart of darkness - a remote Vietnamese jungle. |
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| May 1, 2000 |
Wall Street is synonymous with American finance. Though few of us have ever visited the historic downtown Manhattan building at Wall Street and Broadway where the New York Stock Exchange trades every business day, most everyone understands that “Wall Street” is where the nation finances the most robust economy in the world. |
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| April 24, 2000 |
An ancient short story survives the centuries, and carries a simple message from ages past into a new millennium. Four sons of royalty face the prospect of leaving the privilege and wonder of their palace home. Within the cleverest of inventions lie the seeds of self-destruction. |
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| April 17, 2000 |
One of the most basic, fundamental necessities of life is water. It’s no wonder then, that we arrange our lives to be close to a plentiful source of cool, clean water. We need it. Lots of it. |
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| April 10, 2000 |
It’s something primal. Something powerful. Something real. Something uniquely human shared across the boundaries of ethnicity and nations and religion and philosophy and generations and time itself. It’s that longing to hear the voice of those who have left us. Those who have gone before. |
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| April 3, 2000 |
There was a time and place when a backyard baptism got people in trouble with the law. True, it was another time. Another place. But as recently as turn-of-the-last century, that would be a hundred years ago, an open baptism would be an act of defiance against the State Church. Let’s just say some considered it treason of the most damnable sort. |
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| March 27, 2000 |
For many years, Carolyn’s parents lived in a small farming town with a descriptive name – Black Earth. Tucked away in the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin along Highway 14, that black earth of Black Earth produces grains and corn and wide grassland pastures in abundance. |
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| March 20, 2000 |
Renée Lancouague fell out of bed. The night before, she and her then fiancé Mike danced the night away at a Los Angeles hotel ballroom. All the way home, they laughed and talked about their wedding – just two months away. The invitations. The wedding party. The tuxes. The dresses. The rehearsal dinner. The reception. The music. The dancing. Oh… the dancing. Footloose. Everybody cut footloose. It’s gunna be the best, they agreed. |
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| March 13, 2000 |
It’s a measure of common sense. It’s not rocket science. Most everyone agrees with this one – if you want to make money, you buy low and sell high. The opposite is a recipe for financial ruin. |
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| March 6, 2000 |
Dr. Laura is no stranger to controversy. To some Laura Schlessinger is a fraud. A female shock jock. A smug moralist. The Nurse Ratched of a radio Cuckoo’s Nest. To others she is a champion. A model mother. A friend. A master of common sense. |
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| February 28, 2000 |
Dan Dill is the only guy I know who considers round-the-world flights routine. On any ordinary workday, Dan occupies the left seat in the cockpit of a jumbo Boeing MD-11. It’s hardly glamorous, he says. He calls it “the office.” |
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| February 21, 2000 | Janessa |
Craig Holiday is a successful businessman. He likes to say, “success happens at the intersection of opportunity and preparedness.” You can be prepared, but until opportunity comes along, you’ve got nothing. You can have opportunity all around you, but if you are not prepared, the opportunity is worthless. Useless. |
| February 14, 2000 |
Tom and Dave Gardner advise the world on how to invest. They say you don’t need an advisor. You don’t need a high priced mutual fund. You don’t need a money manager. All you need is the S&P 500. Follow that index and you’ll beat the street. They call themselves The Motley Fool. |
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| February 7, 2000 |
This
week we put down ten yards of concrete. Ten yards. We’ve got
sidewalks. And sore lower backs. This
is serious manual labor.
Getting things done is not as complicated as you think. |
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| JANUARY 31, 2000 |
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They
are traveling companions. Hope and Despair. They travel through
time together. And they travel alongside us.
While they appear to be inseparable fraternal twins, they only show up one at a time. If they were born on the same day, they have long since split up. Irreconcilable differences. They are not friends. |
| JANUARY 24, 2000 | “I never heard a man on his deathbed say that he wished he’d spent more time at the office. Or called on a few more customers. Or cut just one more deal. Or complain over missed financial opportunities – or express regrets over the failure to invest in one of those dot.com stocks.” | |
| JANUARY 17, 2000 |
Hoppy O’Halloran, Headmaster of the Leamy’s National School in Limerick, is Frankie’s seventh grade teacher. He is a small man – with a big heart. He’s got a short leg. That’s why he sits. Most of the time. |
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| JANUARY 10, 2000 | I strolled into the office after five days away. The mail was stacked high – mostly junk and bills. The voice-mail box overflowed. It was the start of the Third Millennium, and I just wanted to go back to vacation mode. | |
| JANUARY 3, 2000 | Contingencies | For us, January 1, 2000 at 12:02 AM EST, the lights went out. The darkness was startling. And complete. Everything attached to an electric cord went out. Dead as a Dickensonian door nail. |
LeaderFOCUS. Let’s make things happen – together.
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