Monday: June 22-- Your Better Future Begins Now

(posted early because I'm travelling this week-end)

General Motors has been in the news quite a bit lately. A friend of mine told me over lunch that for some reason he couldn’t stop thinking about all the GM cars he’d owned. Then he proceeded to tell me a bit about each of them—going back to his first Chevy—a 1956 “honey” as he called it.

Naturally, this got me to thinking about my almost 40 years of GM cars, first the Chevy Impala my wife and I had when we got married in 1969, then the many Pontiacs, Pick-ups and Cadillac vehicles that we've driven since.

But this talk about GM also surfaced things I had learned about a remarkable man who, as head of research for GM for 27 years was the driving force behind GM’s dominance in the market. His name was Charles F. Kettering, who was the inventor of many things relating to automobiles and also founded the DELCO Corporation. Always the forward looking optimist, regardless of the situation, Kettering once told a reporter, ““My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there”

I like that thought because as much as we’d like to, we can’t go back in time, except in memory, but we can always be interested in the future, which isn’t a bad idea considering, as Kettering observed, we are gong to spend the rest of our lives there. Of course, right now for many people thoughts about the future holds nothing but uncertainty and apprehension because we are interpreting the future through the lens of the present.

One of the things that made America the land of opportunity is that people weren’t afraid to dream dreams and believe that they had a future, even in the worst of situations. Take for example, J.C. Penney.

Most of us have shopped at Penney’s. And many of you know his story. J.C. Penney started out as a clerk in a store, became a manager, then a partner, then opened his own chain of stores.
But Penney's rise to fame and fortune was not an unmarred success story. A major financial disaster struck in the 1929 stock market crash. He lost $40 million when several banks from which he had borrowed foreclosed on his personal holdings of stock. At age 56, all but broke, he grew wings and facing a $7 million debt started over and built what became the J.C. Penney’s we all know today.
In his later years he reflected: "I believe in adherence to the Golden Rule, faith in God and the country. If I were a young man again, those would be my cardinal principles."

You say, that’s fine for someone like J.C. Penney, he had connections and he was able to use them to start over, even late in life. Let me tell you about Toni Clark.

Toni Clark at age 50 recently (June 2009) graduated from Essex County Community College in New Jersey. After many years of gainful employment as a certified nursing assistant, she found herself unemployed, and finally living on the street.

After graduation, she told a reporter, “I lost my apartment and my job, and I didn't want to stay with family, so I went on the street, but God put me right in school," Then she continued, "It's been hard. I was staying in (Newark) Penn Station, the airport," Clark said. "But you know, I was taking care of business and everything, but I just didn't have a home."

Clark said it was during a moment of spiritual connection that she realized she couldn't waste time. She said she became determined to plan for the future and added, "God wanted me to go to school," In other words, her faith empowered her to look at the future as the place she would spend the rest of her life, dared to dream what most would have called an impossible dream and created a whole new future.
Have a Great and Profitable Week (and future)!
Robert Hidde