I learned:

• from John Stuart Mill, thinker — to revel in the achievement of even the smallest part of ultimate goals, to work cheerfully within a larger whole for invisible ends, to recognize and help the forgotten among us, and to strive for the inner freedom and courage to admit mistakes and change one's mind;
• from Frances Lussier, Deborah Levin, Bertrand Barrois, Robert Weller, Martha Riherd Weller, James Graves, and Melissa Charron, colleagues and friends — pleasure in work and conversation, and how to combine them productively;
• from John Ferguson, Andrew Shepard, and Carl Miller, bosses and brothers-in-bureaucracy — cooperation, delegation, bi-directional loyalty, and how to see things from larger organizational perspectives;
• from Kenneth Tasky, Robert Sorensen, and Kathryn Rucker Hitchcock, co-authors and comrades — effective collaboration, compromise, creativity, selflessness, and sharing of success;
• from William Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, and Johann Sebastian Bach — to witness, and rejoice in, and stand in awe of the brilliance that individuals can reveal through genius, perseverance, and good fortune.

I also thank (and beg the forgiveness of) the many splendid teachers whose names have been inadvertently omitted. And from those who are still teaching me, whose stories are yet to be finished, I ask patience; to you I give special thanks.

Sunday, August 01, 1999 at 19:33:37 (EDT) = 1999-08-01

TopicPersonalHistory - TopicProfiles - TopicLife

(correlates: ImproveMentation, ThinkingToolsDefined, PickwickPapersWidthAndWisdom, ...)