St. Vincent de Paul Atlanta

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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

SVdP Receives $5000 Award from CITGO


On Tuesday, October 18th SVdP Atlanta accepted a donation of $5000 from CITGO and SA White Oil Company for fuel for our trucks. This was part of the Citgo Fueling Good summer program.  The Citgo award stated "For its ongoing commitment to improving and enhancing the quality of life for families in need, SVdP was recognized by CITGO and S.A. White, a Marietta-based CITGO Marketer, with $5,000 in CITGO gift cards to help extend its ripple of good and the impact of its work."

Shown above, CEO and Executive Director John Berry receives the award from Tim Peabody, Senior Territory Manager for CITGO and Marvin Aiken, Vice President of S.A. White.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Courage, Success, and The "New Normal"

Many of us were saddened this week to hear of the death of Steve Jobs, the technology genius and innovator and co-founder of Apple.  He was only 56 years old and lost and long battle with pancreatic cancer.  He and I were born in the same month in the same year, so his untimely passing was something that caused me to pause and reflect maybe more deeply than just out of respect and admiration for his incredible accomplishments.

I reflected back a number of years ago when I had an opportunity to meet and spend some time with Steve.  I was running a technology business at the time and we met in California not long after he had made the commencement address at Stanford University.    That address, especially now, has become quite famous and oft-quoted, but at the time it was still relatively unknown outside of the tech community and people who were admirers of Steve.

When we spoke I noted he similarity, in my mind, between his advice to the graduates, quoted below, and advice from Jack Welch, another of the CEOs that I admired greatly and who I had worked for at GE.  In his address Steve had said the following…

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

He made that statement in the context of his fight against cancer, and how facing death had directed his focus in a different way.  But what we talked about was a ‘rule’ that Welch talked about often with the GE management team that had a similar context; “Control your own destiny, or someone else will.”

So how does this fit in with SVdP Atlanta and our work. 

Well, I think first you have to know something else about Steve Jobs that you may or may not have heard over the last few days.  And that is that he was the adopted son of middle-class parents, that he dropped out of college after one semester because of the financial burden on his family, and that he got fired from his first CEO job at Apple; the company he had founded.  And yet, because of his intelligence, determination, focus, and drive he became one of the richest men in the world who has left a lasting influence on how we live our lives that will continue for generations to come.

How can we take that lesson and apply it to the people we serve?  How can we use that example to support those who are struggling?  The Steve Jobs story could have easily gone the other way any of number of times.  The number of ‘forks in the road’ that he faced – one leading to success, one to despair – were numerous.  Yet each time he ended up on the right one.  Why?  Maybe there was some luck, probably there was some timing, and definitely there was some determination and drive.

But ultimately the only one, the only one that mattered was determination and drive.  Steve Jobs wanted to succeed.  Steve Jobs refused to let himself fail.  And he won; big time.

When we deal with the people we serve we often can’t give them everything they need.  We can’t pay all their bills, we can’t get them a job, and we can’t fix broken relationship and bad life choices.  But what we CAN do is help them understand that they ultimately control their own destiny.  They can make the changes and commitments in their lives that will lead to success; success that is defined by their dreams and their aspirations and their abilities. 
I think that all too often we drown people’s dreams in our own definitions and aspirations of what we define as success.  And I don’t mean ‘we’ as individuals, I mean ‘we’ as society.  We define success as a college education and yet we have people with four year degrees and forty years’ worth of debt working for minimum wage at the gas station because they can’t apply their degree to the real work of the world; yet they have creative talent, craft skills, or labor skills that they would love to use and which would offer the opportunity for a good living and a shot at real success.  We have people living from paycheck to paycheck because we define success as a 3,000 square foot house in a gated community and a BMW in the driveway, We have people drowning in credit card debt at 29.99% interest because we define success as each of the kids having a car on their 16th birthday and designer label clothes to wear to pre-school.

There is nothing wrong with success.  As long as it is something that is internally defined and internally driven.  During this re-creation of the economic reality of our day we are going to have to make sure that those we help (and we ourselves) understand that there is a 'new normal'.  And the new normal is that there is no more normal.  We will have to adapt and change to meet the changing world at a pace that is even more rapid than it has ever been.  So it becomes that much more critical that we make sure that we have the courage and the heart to do what we know is right for us.   

I’ll leave you with something else Steve Jobs said in 2005 at Stanford. 

"You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

John Berry
CEO and Executive Director