Count Your Blessings… Look For The Silver Lining
November 13th, 2009 Categories: All about me, My Stories
A note from Forth Hoyt…
This time of year, business starts to slow down, I start thinking about goals for next year, reflecting over the past year and assessing where I am as a businessman, a family man and a father… We start thinking about holidays, making plans for traveling to family events and get together and I always feel so lucky to have such great memories of holiday seasons past. I grew up in a huge family with lots of cousins, (I have over 60 first cousins just on my dad’s side!) many aunts and uncles- we had lots of get-together so there are many memories of joy, happiness and a sense of togetherness and security. It is easy for me to go back to those feelings of content and sense of belonging and it is in this spirit of happiness that I find it so easy to feel such gratitude for the many things that me and my family have been blessed with.
As I look around what’s going on in the world I know there are many challenges, fears, uncertainties and stresses in many of our lives right now, yet most of us have so much to be thankful for- My hopes are that we can all embrace the challenges we may be facing- look forward to better days ahead and realize that growth never comes easy…
“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory”. ~W. Edwards Deming
…times like these are usually catalysts for huge growth.
I believe we can learn so much from the great leaders of the past- There have been other times of turmoil… one such time was rebuilding a war savaged Japan, crippled by the atom bomb and still occupied by the allied powers. In the early 1950′s a man named W. Edwards Deming helped a broken economy rise to economic superpower status. He is regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage.
Deming was just a hard working country kid who was raised on this grandparents chicken farm, educated at the University of Wyoming and University of Colorado, before getting his Ph.D at Yale. Deming made a significant contribution to Japan’s reputation for innovative high-quality products by training hundreds of engineers, managers, and scholars in statistical process control (SPC) and concepts of quality. The improved quality and productivity combined with the lowered cost created new international demand for Japanese products.
So again; count your blessings and look for the silver lining in this storm cloud- I hope you may later look back at these times and be thankful for the lessons and growth they have brought.
