{"id":573,"date":"2012-02-26T14:01:48","date_gmt":"2012-02-26T18:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/cld\/?p=573"},"modified":"2012-02-29T22:47:07","modified_gmt":"2012-03-01T02:47:07","slug":"three-minute-leadership-you-bring-meaning-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/2012\/02\/three-minute-leadership-you-bring-meaning-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Minute Leadership- You Bring Meaning to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

To: The Great Leaders Who Have a Passion for Continuous Learning<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In his 1980 commencement address, \u201cThe Wilderness of Your Intuition\u201d, at Connecticut College Alan Alda, American actor, director and screen writer, spoke of his college days and the existential philosophy that was popular at the time. He summarized it in these words: \u201cLife is absurd and meaningless and full of nothingness.\u201d Admitting that this may not seem positive, he said that \u201cit’s one of the most helpful and cheerful ideas I’ve ever heard\u201d and shared a story of his experience.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI had a teacher in those days who saw me with a book by Jean Paul Sartre under my arm and he said to me, \u2018Be careful, if you read too much of that you’ll start walking around dressed in black, looking wan, doing nothing for the rest of your life.\u2019 Well, I read the book anyway and as it turned out, I’m tanned and lovely, I’m rich and productive and I’m happy like nobody’s business.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe it was my natural optimism at work, but what I saw and warmed to in the existentialist writings was that life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; that it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What powerful words that push us to action: \u201cLife is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it.\u201d You are in control of your existence. You give it shape and meaning in your choices, in the discovery of the gifts within you, in your daily stretching and challenging the limitations of assumed realities, convinced that you will achieve whatever you commit yourself to accomplish. Robert Byrne, poet, wrote: \u201cThe purpose of life is a life of purpose.\u201d Fill your life and the lives of those whom you touch with passion and purpose. Find meaning in the great and the small, in everything however innocent that comes your way. There are gifts to be found in them. Remember the words of Alfred North Whitehead, British mathematician and philosopher: \u201cOur minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. \u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Have a beautiful day and a magnificent week!!!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mike<\/p>\n


\n<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To: The Great Leaders Who Have a Passion for Continuous Learning   In his 1980 commencement address, \u201cThe Wilderness of Your Intuition\u201d, at Connecticut College Alan Alda, American actor, director… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[121,123,122,120],"class_list":["post-573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-three-minute-leadership","tag-alan-alda","tag-alfred-north-whitehead","tag-meaning","tag-robert-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":592,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573\/revisions\/592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/StillmanLeaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}