– Deepak Chopra, in an interview with Oprah

Read Deepak’s full interview with Oprah here.

I remember once when I was young in my career, and meeting with a fairly older, single woman. She was a successful venture capitalist. I don’t know that I would consider her life successful. She traveled the world incessantly and was on every important board. But she seemed tired and joy was scarce. She told me to “Pack it all in.”

I didn’t. I kept my balance. I started a nonprofit and I did creative improv. I took care of my very young nephews and niece. I loved life and I loved the people in my life.

We need to be renewed. We need to feel honored as whole, functioning people with families, outside interests, balanced lives, as well as our commitment to achieving the goals and vision of the organizations we run. The beauty of this balance is that I come back energized to UniversalGiving. My mind has had “time off” and is thrilled to re-engage with our efforts to serve. I look at challenges in a new light. My energy is renewed. I bring new skills to the table; my thoughts are stronger and more helpful. It’s better for me–and for my organization.

That’s the larger picture.  For our businesses, too, we want to invest.  A recent article in The Christian Science Monitor points to increased “executive functioning,” such as continued attention and expanded memory, among children who attend preschool. The children who went to school earlier develop needed business skills more readily.  We can commit to higher teacher education, educating children of different backgrounds, and providing adequate food to ensure that our programs are holistic and successful.

Read on and invest!

Here are some projects on UniversalGiving to help children learn:

Give to send books to Africa

Volunteer teaching orphaned children in India

Give so that a girl in Ghana can learn computer skills

Support the Awesome Girls Mentoring Program in New Orleans

But poverty can be mental, emotional or spiritual poverty. I am often struck by this in my travel and volunteering in developing nations. Often, the divorce rates are low. Families not only stay together, but also spend time together. They gather food from the fields together, cook together and share meals together.

Contrast us: 15 minute family dinners if we are lucky. Fast-food and food distanced from its natural base. We eat alone; we eat in our cars. Divorces are easier to get, and in our mind it can be easier to allow those thoughts in as a possibility, rather than working through critical issues. So we lose the connection to family. We lose the connection to the local farm. We can lose the connection to long-term commitment.

We lose our greatest asset in natural wealth: relationships. Relationships with ourselves, our families, the earth. This wealth creates happy, balanced, productive, lower stress lifestyles, because we are connected in the way we are meant to be.

Further, we often pass by our heritage and where we come from. In many emerging nations, and especially in the continent of Africa, we see tribes value their connection to their heritage as primary importance even above their nationality. There is a deep-rooted connection to rituals and history which keeps people grounded in who they are, and the deeper, long-term meaning of being a part of a larger community in their lives.

Poverty is about money, at times. It has to be addressed as people should have the opportunity to live productive lives and make choices about what they would like to devote their lives to. Poverty is also about our well-being. Often when we get beyond “money poverty,” we forget “well-being poverty,” and get trapped in a go-go-go consumer culture.

I hope we can celebrate the healthy wealth that is accessible to us all in positive, committed relationships with ourselves, one another, our families, our earth, our communities and our heritage. How wonderful this is available to us all.

– J. Kermit Campbell, former CEO of Herman Miller

Campbell has it right.  A CEO is not an expert except in one area: getting the right people. Actually, let’s add another area: values. You must be a leader who gets the best people and demonstrates the highest values.

Even if you are a manager, you should still think this way. Empower your people to learn and maintain a domain of expertise. Hopefully you can hire them with it. If you can’t, make sure they have the rapid capability to do so.  Let’s learn from Campbell’s advice to us:

“I don’t believe that my job is to lead design at Herman Miller.  My job is to make sure we have great design leaders, continue to listen and try to learn from them…My job is not to be a creative guy, my job is to create a culture that allows and promotes creativity…

You’re going to have to take risks. It’s not all going to work.

You have to be able to tell people ‘great job’ on things that didn’t work.”

J. Kermit Campbell is a former CEO of Herman Miller, and the current Lead Independent Director of SPX Corporation.  He is an investor or board member for a number of companies and charitable organizations.  Herman Miller is a leading furniture company, founded by D. J. DePree, with a more than 100-year history.  They focus on innovation, and designing products to create a better world.

- Louis L’Amour

Louis L’Amour was an American author. He is best known for his Western fiction novels, though he also wrote historical fiction, science fiction, nonfiction, poetry and short-story collections.  He was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore on March 22, 1908, the last of seven children.  He grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, a medium-sized farming community.  As he grew older, he traveled throughout the United States and abroad, in various positions including as a mine assessment worker, a professional boxer and a merchant seaman.  In the 1930s, Louis and his family settled in Oklahoma, and Louis turned his focus to writing.  He began to have success with short stories in the late ‘30s and ‘40s, beginning to sell novels in the 1950s.  Louis also served in the United States Army during World War II.  Louis ultimately wrote 89 novels and more than 250 short stories.

– Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, Section: The Simplification of Life

What is absolutely vital in your life today?  Are you truly called to be doing what you’re doing…or is it simply your agenda?  Align your purpose with a divine motive…

Thomas R. Kelly (1893-1941) was a Quaker educator and writer, with a focus on mysticism.  He graduated from Wilmington College, and studied at Hartford Theological Seminary with an interest in being a missionary.  During World War I, he joined the YMCA to work with the troops, and worked with German prisoners of war.  His pacifist position eventually lost him this position.  He returned to Hartford to complete his training, and married Lael Macy.  In the 1920s, Kelly and his wife went to Germany, where they were significant in founding a Quaker community.  He returned to Germany in 1938 to encourage Quakers living under Hitler.  Kelly taught at a number of universities throughout the 1930s.  His collection of writing, A Testament of Devotion, was published posthumously by a colleague.

There is so much to enjoy… and so important that we focus on it.  It can be easy to be distracted into something that isn’t working, when we really should enjoy and relish what is before us.  It need not be a big event. It can be a small gratitude.

Then, too, there are times to patiently persevere.  Not all is easy, peaceful; at times we must stay the course, step by step, like a diligent marathon runner, committed to her course, unrelenting until the final finish line.  It might not be a quick race, but more a matter of a marathon.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, and natural philosopher, best known for his two-part poetic drama Faust, which he started around the age of twenty-three and didn’t finish till shortly before his death sixty years later. He is considered one of the greatest contributors of the German Romantic period. At the age of sixteen, in 1765, Goethe went to Leipzig University to study law as his father wished, though he also gained much recognition from the Rococo poems and lyric he wrote during this period. In 1766 he fell in love with Anne Catharina Schoenkopf (1746-1810) and wrote his joyfully exuberant collection of poems Annette.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe now rests in the Fürstengruft or “Royal Tomb” in the “Historic Cemetery” in Wiemar where his dear friend Schiller is also laid to rest. In honour of these two famous German men of letters, a statue of Goethe and Schiller now stands at the German National Theatre in Munich. UNESCO’S “Memory of the World” list includes the handwritten works of Goethe preserved by the Goethe-Schiller-Archive.

Bio Source: The Literature Network

“We are losing our listening. We spend roughly 60% of our communication time listening, but we’re not very good at it. We retain just 25% of what we hear. Now, not you, not this talk, but that is generally true. Let’s define listening as ‘making meaning from sound.’ It’s a mental process, and it’s a process of extraction.“

Julian Treasure

“Five Ways to Listen Better“

TED talk

What a powerful opportunity we have to really listen to someone. It gives them our full attention and our devotion. In a way, it’s a potent way to love someone.  That person can be your husband, your friend, the doctor, the postmaster, the intern or the CEO at work.

I agree we should be mentally alert and strive to extract as much information as we can. At the same time, a compassionate, sincere listening will do wonders for your speaker’s soul, and your own.  It’s about honoring one another, which includes their heart, their ideas.

Julian Treasure studies sound, and advises businesses on how best to use it.  He is the chair of the Sound Agency. He asks us to pay attention to the sounds that surround us. How do they make us feel: productive, stressed, energized, acquisitive?  Treasure is the author of the book Sound Business and keeps a blog by the same name that ruminates on aural matters. In the early 1980s, Treasure was the drummer for the Fall-influenced band Transmitters.

Bio Source: TED.com

I spoke this from memory at her service, and I still love it to this day. Oma, I know you are “just around the corner.” I love you, Oma.

Eternally Yours,
Pamela

Death Is Nothing At All
Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.

All is well.

Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918) was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, one of Oxford’s oldest and most prestigious seats.  He was also canon at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the founder of the Christian Social Union, and a strong advocate for social justice.  “Death Is Nothing At All” is his best-known writing.