Inspiration

Member

Aire's Dilbert thread on the other page got me thinking. Do you know that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, used to work at a bank, and apparently wrote down 30 times every day "I will be a syndicated cartoonist?"

The Franklin Covey system of time management encourages users to write down a goal and think about what it takes to get there and then write down in the monthly calendars they give you the things you need to do to complete those steps. I know from personal experience that can be very successful.

Can you tell us of someone you know who started out doing one thing and wound up somewhere completely different to achieve something important? I could deal with some inspiration--perhaps some of you could, too.

Member

I don't have any ideas, but did you read The Dilbert Future by Scott Adams? It's pretty interesting/humorous but for the last chapter he talks for a bit about affirmations. Well worth the read.

Member

Well, I always looked to MIL for inspiration. She began her working life as a librarian when Kramer was little. Then she went to college, worked for an orthopedic firm, and in the end was running her own corporation (small, but immensely profitable) doing independent clinical research. She did the college thing with help only from her mother while raising the kids, so she inspires me today that I can someday live like she was living -- very well -- if I just work very hard. So I do work very hard.

My other inspiration, who reminds me so much of MIL that it hurts my heart, is my professor/advisor/confidant. She began her working life as a legal assistant. So she is in the same field, but yes, doing something completely different with it. She is an educator, but so much more. She is very active in the Paralegal Education community. She has articles published very frequently in the various magazines, from NALA to AAfPE. She runs the Advisory Board, of which I am a member, and stays in close contact with the lawyers, judges, and other important people in our field. She is, quite simply, an amazing woman, and the example I am trying to follow.

I'm very lucky to have had such strong, independent, and kind women in my life to inspire me to be strong and independent, and show me that anything is possible if I just want it badly enough and work hard enough for it.

Oompa Loofah

Well, my husband's uncle was a missionary to Peru and his father (BC's grandpa) told him that every man should make a career change at 40. No matter what.

Well, he did and he became the 3rd largest funeral director/mortuary in the state of New Mexico. And he's done it using honesty, fair prices, and compassion.

Pretty impressive careers either way....

Master of Prissface

I've met three people at my practicum so far that all left the shark-infested, albeit high paying, waters of corporate America to do something far more meaningful with their lives, which is what I hope to do when I get out of school. Another of my classmates was CEO of a company and left, as he put it: the Mercedes, the country club membership and the social climbing wife, to be who I really am." He just graduated last May and is doing family therapy and loving it.

to all these great people whose footsteps I can't wait to follow in. Great thread topic, Go.....and very timely with the conversation I had with my boss today too. Thanks for starting this!!! (I hope what everyone posted so far helped you a bit?)

Member

ok. I had to think hard about this, because so many people inspire me in so many different ways. However, there is one story in particular that sticks out in my mind, and that is about my cousin Louisa. Lousia is that 4 daughter of my mother's sister, my Aunt Jean. Louisa grew up in a very well to do household where my uncle was a sucessful lawyer and my aunt was a senior officer at the University of Michigan. All of Louisa's siblings went to U of M and did very well. Unfortunately by the time it was Louisa's turn, my uncle's drinking had gotten out of hand and he had divorced my aunt and married the local bar maid. So Louisa ended up going to Jackson Community College and worked as a teller in a local bank. She continued to work her way up and ended up working in Detroit at National Bank of Detroit while getting her MBA an night at U of Detroit. After many, many years of very hard work, she is now on of the senior vice president's of a very large bank in Chicago. She has a beautiful 2 bedroom sprawling condo right on the golden mile in downtown Chicago. The best thing about it is that she is still one of the nicest, down to earth people that I know. She is very humble and always the first to ask how you are doing.

Truely an inspiration for me.

Hipster Doofus

Someone I know personally who's done that and inspires me? I guess it would be my wife. For five years or so, she did the same thing I did here - we met in our training class. She left here when our son was born. After some work in a local day-care, she got a part-time job as a page at the library she works at. She went from part- to full-time, went from a page to a children's libarian, and got herself a Master's degree in library science. She is doing something she loves, and I do envy her for that.

Someone I don't know personally who did the career change and is an inspiration would be Peter Garrett. Hanging around as Midnight Oil's front man for 25 years is a feat enough. But after some fifteen years or so with a true political bent to the band's music, he put his money where his mouth was. He's now in the Australian House of Rperesentatives, fighting the good fight.

Member

Somebody who has really inspired me is a missionary that our church has helped to financially support over the years named Rosemary. Rosemary travelled to the Phillipines (I guess it was early-mid 1980s - Marcos was still in power) and while she was there she spent her time visiting many of the smaller, extremely rural islands. Apparently there are hundreds of different dialects spoken that vary from island to island and linguistics was Rosemary's field of study. When she was visiting one particular village she struck up a relationship with a couple of families and felt God calling her to build on these relationships. Over the next couple of years she maintained a letter writing relationship with the families she had met and in so doing was starting to become more and more familiar with their language. The families began to ask Rosemary a lot of questions about this "Bible" she often spoke about and Rosemary would send them excepts translated into their language.

After a couple of years of doing this Rosemary started to realize that there was nothing she cared about more than the letters she was writing to these families in the Phillipines. She felt that her life could best be spent translating the Bible and other literature to give these people access to information from which they would have otherwise been isolated. That day she started the process of moving to the Phillipines. She has been living there ever since, working and living among the people of this village and doing her best to try to open up more of the world to them in the small way that she is able.

What inspires me most is Rosemary's quiet, humble and unassuming demeanor. Everything she does goes completely unnoticed by most of the world but the legacy she will leave for this village of people living half a world away will endure long past her lifetime. I know there are a lot of people like Rosemary out there, but I can't help but think there needs to be more.

Inspiration

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