NWA Success! magazine began
as a lawnmower idea -- literally.
The concept came to me while pushing the
mower along the back yard. You see, I had spent the better part of the
afternoon pondering the present post-college job market, or the lack
thereof. Were I only twenty-one years of age I wouldn't have been so
concerned, but as a thirty-something with a family, an understandable sense of
urgency presented itself.
If I was to
discover a way to use my unceremonious Health Science college education, such
ideas would need to come from successful people in the Northwest Arkansas
region. This area is blessed with an abundance of successful
individuals, so within seven days of my mid-afternoon revelation I was
interviewing my fellow Arkansans from all walks of life. All I
really wanted was a handful of mentors, but the more I invested in the
lives and interests of other people the more I began to learn my first four
lessons about success:
1. Success is
elusive. It is something to be nurtured but not
possessed.
2. Success appears often
in the most uncommon, unlikely places.
3.
Success is not a respector of age, race, education or
gender.
4. Success demands that you think
about others for a
change.
I
wept when I heard that Mr. J.B. Hunt passed on, because for years I had told
myself, "There is a man who understands business. Someday I'll go meet him
and ask him for some advice." Friends, don't wait for
someday to come. It rarely comes, if ever at all, and
the price for delay is far too much to bear. This led me to another
success principle:
5. Success flees from the hand of the
procrastinator; take action NOW.
So
it is, hopefully for the better, that I have become a student of success:
a person with no great biography of his own, committed to celebrating
and learning from others the timeless lessons of
success.
It has been said that when the student
is ready, the teacher will appear. Northwest Arkansas, you've
been here all along.
Until our next
meeting I shall remain yours in success,
