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 6/18/2007 |
Becoming a high-value person
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Outside my office door, I have a daily “quote for the day.” I started putting them up a few years ago when the office was going through some turmoil, and I’ve continued the practice, mostly for myself.
Well, the other day, I posted a quote from Mark Twain, which read “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.”
When I posted it on the door, along with a number of days’ worth of quotes, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it – but when it came time for that quote to be the “quote of the day,” I stopped and thought about it.
And it reminded me of someone who fit that qualification – my dad.
When my dad died, the local undertaker – perhaps we should call him a “funeral director” – mourned over the loss. Hundreds attended dad’s funeral – he was a prominent person in our little community – and still more sent flowers and cards.
Even now, some 30 years later, I still run across people who knew and loved my dad.
He was what I refer to as a “high-value person.”
Dad cared about his community, and he cared about other people. He always seemed to have time to talk with someone who needed advice or help – even when that meant he’d wind up staying later, sometimes much later, as a result.
He worked to build people up, not tear them down. He made friends easily and almost never lost a friend. People came to care about him because they sensed he cared about them.
And that brings up this week’s Monday Motivation.
How well are you doing at becoming a “high-value person?”
To tell you the truth, I doubt I’ll ever be as good a person as my dad. When he was my age, he had already accomplished a great deal in his life – and had a great number of friends. As a person who was highly visible in our little town, and in his profession on a state basis, he was well-respected and well-liked.
As I’ve thought about him over the years, I’ve come to realize that by expressing an interest in people, he was able to gain friends, the same as Dale Carnegie famously said in this quote, which I believe is from his landmark volume, “How to Win Friends and Influence People:”
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming more interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.”
--Dale Carnegie
Carnegie proved that expressing a genuine interest in other people was what made the difference – and until you developed such a genuine interest in others, most of your efforts at influencing them would be in vain.
These days, so many people are all about formulas – they learn which buttons to push, which techniques to try, and which sales to plan. They use these formulas, techniques, and gimmicks to get an easy sale or an easy friendship – but they really don’t care about people – except for themselves.
If we consider “high-value people” to be solid gold, then the pretenders are merely gold plated base metal – or gold colored plastic. And, like the gold-colored earrings that a teenage girl might buy at the mall, eventually the plating and artificial patina will wear off, leaving the base metal below to show through, and turn that teenager’s ears green in the process.
You can tell a high value person. Consider this rather-complicated quote from Charles Dickens: “Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good and impressible for evil; and it is the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself, without in some degree improving other men.”
I’ve messed with the original punctuation of that quote, to make it a bit easier to read, but Dickens is correct is pointing out that we all affect the world around us. In other words, the good people make others become better, and when we become better ourselves, we influence those around us to become better still.
So, as we raise ourselves to higher plateaus – in other words, as we increase our own personal “worth,” we are able to lift others higher – we are able to have a greater influence on the people around us.
Of course, as they get better, they influence us, and we get better, and they get better….well, anyway, we all get better.
I was sitting in a church meeting in a new town one day. We had just moved into the town, and aside from a very few people, I didn’t know a soul. I was sitting there in my seat, when from across the room, a stranger came up, sat down beside me, and asked “are you Roy Gibson’s son?” And I was.
The stranger, who was then a stranger no more, had known my father for a couple of years, thirty years prior. And yet, he had remembered him – and picked me out of a crowd of people, as “Roy’s son.” He told me how my dad had helped him out, how my dad had made a difference in his life, at a time where he needed it, and that he had never forgotten him.
In that community, I found other people who had known my dad – and who treated me with kindness, as a result. In the years since, I have found countless others who he influenced for good – and I’ve developed a longing to be a better person myself – more of the kind of person who could be labeled “high-value.”
I know in today’s day and age, we’re not supposed to place a greater value on one person than another. I know we’re supposed to recognize that each of us has great value – it’s just more apparent in some people than in others.
I know all of that – but it just seems that some people make more of a difference in the lives of others – and in their own lives as well.
These people influence everyone they meet. They make people lives better. They keep the community’s needs in mind. They are invariably honest, uncompromisingly positive, amazingly personable.
This high-value people make a difference – and each of us should actively work to develop ourselves into high-value, high-worth individuals, so we can make a difference, too.
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