CONFIDENT THINKING NO. 8: YOU ARE A CHANGE AGENT; START THE CHANGE PROCESS WITH YOURSELF; LOOK AT PROBLEMS AS DOOR OPENERS!

CONFIDENT THINKING NO. 8

LOOK AT PROBLEMS AS DOOR OPENERS
YOU ARE A CHANGE AGENT
START THE CHANGE PROCESS WITH YOURSELF

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006

What is the one thing of which we seem most fixated? To be in control! We all like to think we are working our own agenda, living our own lives, and on our own terms, but are we? A better case could be made that we are out-of-control, indeed, that no one or anything is under control. Everything appears in a state of flux.

This is in no small way due to our programming. We are a solution driven society that expects problems to be solved when they can only be controlled. We desire stability in the vortex of change.

The world is changing. Technology is driving change. Populations are exploding. Values are changing. Developing nations are developing faster. Pollution is increasing. People are living longer.

We can pretend that this doesn’t affect us, that we can insulate ourselves from change, but that of course is impossible. Our programming is designed for a stable society not an ever-changing society.

PROGRAMMING, CONTROL AND THE FALLACY OF THE PROBLEM SOLVING

Such programming of course often fails, especially in school. The most egregious offenders find themselves marched off to the principal’s office with a pink slip and a call home to their parents. Self-control is not in the mix. Conforming behavior is praised as the controlling norm. Those not inclined to subscribe to this norm are soon labeled “trouble makers” or “disruptive influences,” and candidates for Ritalin or some other mind-altering drug.

We are programmed to behave even if it means making us walking zombies.

It doesn’t end there. A scarlet acronym can come to label us an ADD person, that is, a person with an “attention deficit disorder.” Imagine, here we are starting school, a relatively new person in the cocoon of “life,” and already we have acquired the label of a "problem child."

Psychiatrists attempt to drug this ADD malady to death. It is as if our biochemical synapses are at war against us, and the only way to countermand their advantage is to wage a similar biochemical war against them. Lost in this confusing melodrama is the individual child who simply is struggling at this early stage in life to get his insides and outsides adjusted to each other.

Later, I will share the remarkable case of William George Mosley with you. He did just that, got his insides and outsides to work together, with little help from anyone save his grandmother, whom he was exposed to for only three years.

My remarks here are directed to the child who has too much, too many, too soon, and not to the child who has too little, too few, too late. Both are handicapped, but the spoiled child has a handicapping of scale that drives out passion for the possible filling the void with insatiable need.

The abandoned child and the spoiled child are polar opposites that can come to resemble each other with indifferent stimulation of the lower (impulsive) centers of the brain. This occurs when they are fed too many sweets and other condiments that activate these brain centers and energize them to compulsive erratic and disruptive behavior.

Affluent parents often supplement this excess by providing their children with all the electronic wonders currently available. Indigent parents, on the other hand, are as likely as not to have their children sitting in front of a television set as babysitter allowing the colored pixels to dance off their eyes putting them in equal electronic daze to their affluent counterparts.

Both approaches are equally hypnotic and chaotic. It is not uncommon to find an eight-year-old child of affluence to have her own cell phone, while sharing a computer, iPod and game boy with her ten-year-old brother. And it is equally likely that a family on welfare has cable television with a hundred channels for their children to cruise with the remote at their leisure massaging their delicate psyches with bizarre fantasy images.

Parents of all socio-economic classes have a much easier time saying, “yes” to everything than “no” to anything. Saying “no” would demand explanation. Few adults have the time or inclination to communicate meaningfully with their children on their level.

Children almost from birth learn the power of tears and advantage of screams of disruption. If there is anything that fuels a child’s anxiety, it is the lack of attention and the absence of satisfaction. A child soon learns, reluctantly so, that attention is not negotiable, parents are too other-centered, and thus attention is eventually conceded, placing the emphasis on satisfaction, now!

Children quickly discern parents have an obligatory rhetoric of shoulds and should nots, which they consistently fail to put into practice. While mother fastens her little darlings into their car harness, the little wonders note she forgets to fasten her own seatbelt. They are told always to tell the truth, and when asked their age at the ticket counter, their father says before they can answer, “under twelve,” when nearly thirteen. Such discrepancies feed a budding cynicism and a blossoming duplicity.

Mixed messages come to have the regularity of the Fruit Loops such children find in their cereal bowl of a morning, and so this whole obsession with control becomes a bit mystifying from the start.

Long before children find themselves in school, they have been introduced to doublespeak, which was the theme of Robert Smith’s book, “Where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nothing” (1974). It is the rare individual that can master this duplicitous language and still remain authentic. Consequently, self-estrangement starts very early and is consistently fed with dissembling, or beating around the bush.

It is because of cultural arrogance that the problems we solve are more than likely the problems we create over and over again. Former President Harry S. Truman had on his desk a plaque: “The buck stops here!” It identified his presidency, but has become an empty cliché. The buck keeps getting passed around and around until ultimately no one can be found responsible. That is the case with the ADD child. A simple thing as changing the child's diet might do more good than any mood-altering drug.

Solutions are aplenty but no one wants to tackle the real problem head on. We like to blame it all on crass materialism and the depressing spiritual void, but does that get us on top of the situation? I don't think so. To control our problems we need a moral compass with a set of reliable principles that is also adjustable to changing values and demands.

Instead, we continue to describe our problems and tack solutions on them rather than design a way forward. Studies are conducted that reduce children to provocative numbers that can be presented in statistical correlations, followed by articles and books. Obviously, this is not the intent of Jeffrey Kluger’s featured article in “Time” (July 10, 2006), “How your siblings make you who you are.” Kluger’s opens with the caption, “the new science of siblings.” That should do it. Who is going to dispute scientific findings?

According to these data, parents, teachers, preachers, mentors and other authority figures are placed in secondary roles to siblings. It is another way of taking authority figures off the hook. It is not their fault that the world is in a ness with few mature self-reliant adults on the scene.

Children have endured being essentially their own parents through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s, as both parents are likely to have full-timed jobs, who don’t expect ever to become old and so never to grow up, and who verify their eternal youth status by partying in their spare time, while expecting their children to grow up tall, and straight and true without any directional control or influence from them other than extravagant materialistic support.

It didn’t happen in the 1970s, and it isn’t happening now. It may make good copy to suggest that siblings carry the load of influence, if so, it is a matter of default not by design, while burying the problem once again.

We want so desperately to explain away the aberrancy of children, and to take society, especially parents off the hook, because the society we have created is a sick society and no one wants to tackle that can of worms.

We have created little monsters at all levels of society, some of them running the country, and the only chance we have of correcting this problem is by installing a confident thinking problem solving governor in children at an early age where they make choices that are self-creating rather than self-destructive, where they are the masters of change rather than its slaves, and where they live in harmony with their internal clock and external environment, and where they have confidence in the change process.

Children are the only hope. There is no hope of changing chronological adults suspended in terminal adolescence. There is no way to make them mature self-reliant emotionally responsive problem solvers. If you have any doubts about this, I suggest you read my “Six Silent Killers” (1998). It is not only a management problem but also a societal one. You cannot “will” people into creative problem solvers comfortable with change when they have been programmed into critical thinking conformist and passive individuals who stubbornly insist on stability in a climate of constant change.

THE PROBLEM, THE PROBLEM SOLVER, AND CODEPENDENCY

We have handicapped our culture in the problem solving. There is no shortage of television gurus and authors who have all the answers without having the slightest knowledge of the persons whose problems they are attempting to solve, other than superficially. You cannot prescribe a cure for the loveless marriage, the drug addict, or the perennially unemployed worker by a three-minute session with some television crony. It is simply a praise of folly.

If truth be known, you can’t do it with 3,000 hours if the relationship is one of passive engagement, looking for answers or justification outside of one’s own chaotic heart.

If you don’t have your ducks in a row, don’t have a clear identity in terms of your “real self” and “ideal self,” or have come to accept the difference between self-demands and role demands, any therapeutic exercise is one of futility because you will never come to define your situation as it actually is, and therefore to design an action plan forward.

The more dependent on the authority of someone else the deeper into self-delusion and ultimate self-destruction you are likely to drift. The attraction for such dependency is a closet desire for change without pain. Indeed, you want the option of blaming someone else should your life not turn up roses. It will not happen. No one can save you from yourself but yourself.

Melody Beattie has written a series of books such as “Codependent No More” (1987) and “Beyond Codependency” (1989), which have all the right words and ideas about getting beyond making the situation worse for the person you’re trying to help, but does it work?

Perhaps everyone reading this, including this writer, has had a needy family member or friend crippled by continual “help.” What invariably develops is that the needy person comes to expect to be “bailed out” no matter how serious the fix he or she manages to get in. It is never the person’s fault. The needy person knows your vulnerability, knows how to exploit all your weaknesses with the precision of a surgeon with little risk, and even less sense of regret should it destroy your own security in the process. The needy have only sensitivity to their need.

Once the pattern is established, it never changes. Gradually, the high crimes and misdemeanors of the needy person escalate until you are emotionally and economically strapped. The phone can ring at any time of night or day and you are expected to be there for them. Were the positions reversed, do you think the needy person would be there for you? If pigs could fly!

If a family member will have none of this, that family member is exempt from being contacted. The needy person knows he will not be moved by tears, guilt, blackmail, or threats (including the threat of suicide). Now why is that?

The needy person recognizes the limits of his or her manipulative skills, and therefore employs them only where success is guaranteed. It is the same with the child. The child knows when and with whom to engineer a crying jag and when it would be a waste of energy.

Is such unresponsive behavior cruel? Heartless? These are not even relevant questions. It puts the focus on the responder and not on the needy, not on the person who is on a self-destructive tear. A long time ago, if that person had been alone in the rag bone cellar of the human heart, and had no one else to pick her up, she would have picked herself up and gone forward. She would have developed the rudiments of problem solving. That is the nature of the life instinct and the survival mechanism placed in the human heart. That has been denied the needy person. Therein lies the tragedy.

A psychologist with an unpronounceable name, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, has made a reputation advocating, “going with the flow” (“Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” 1990). The author’s idea is flow is the way a painter gets so absorbed in his canvas that he loses track of time; the musician disappears into the piece she’s playing. It happens to athletes, surgeons and chess players. They are all in an apparent state of ecstasy where everything comes together. The common expression is “they’re in the zone” with good neurotransmitters flooding their synapses. Notice these people first are self-reliant and emotionally mature which is an index of disciplined control where such flow is possible. They have paid their dues, and the price tag has had more than a modicum of failure punched into its ticket.

That is the problem with such books: they give false hope; they put the preliminary need for struggle and pain aside and avoid the process, focusing instead on the product, the ecstasy of the optimal experience as if life were an unrealized utopian dream available to all; that it is a matter of osmosis. It is not. Too many don’t have the gumption to pick themselves off the deck and take the risks to do something meaningful. They would rather envy others that do.

Is this because people don't want to embrace the hard work of confident thinking? Only you can answer that question for yourself. In any case, it is true we look to books and television gurus to short-circuit us to the good life without sacrifice, pain, failure, or inconvenience. Yet, it is sacrifice, pain, failure, inconvenience, as well as discipline that allow these good neurotransmitters to flood our synapses and to put us in the zone.

Unfortunately, when you are at wits end and trying to grab something, anything, to make sense of a problematical life, there is always another book to ease your conscience if not resolve your concern.

Judith Rich Harris wrote a controversial book that gained some attention, “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do” (1998) with the subtitle, “Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More.” Dr. Harris was taking on the debate between nature vs. nurture, and siding with the latter. As with the “Time” article weighing in on the influence of siblings, "the nurture assumption,” again, takes parents off the hook.

"The new science of siblings” and “the nurture assumption” are admittedly eye-catching declarations, but do they provide greater insight into the nature of self?

What makes problem solving so critical to confident thinking is that the person must first be aware that he or she has been programmed to think, believe, value and behave in a certain way. That type of programming was reasonably effective up to and through World War II, or the first half of the twentieth century. Change was then moving at a tortoise pace, but no longer. Now change is a speeding rabbit and each of us must govern the change process within ourselves if we are to be effective change agents in our problem solving.

This programming is in trouble because it has created a passive society with a reactive disposition. We are in a time when people need to anticipate and plan actions designed to unravel complexities not be consumed by them, or to strike out on tangents. Unfortunately, we are all graduates of the “Blitzkrieg School of Problem Solving.”

This is the school that believes throwing money at education will solve illiteracy; finding a cure for AIDS will stem this epidemic; conducting massive layoffs and redundancy exercises will bring back corporate health; searching for miraculous cures to obesity, diabetes, and other lifestyle diseases will ultimately succeed in a climate of self-indulgence.

Consequently, causes and effects are treated interchangeably, as if they are the same, which of course they are not. AIDS is an effect which is caused by ignorance and lifestyle promiscuity. It has resulted in a search for the definitive virus antidote while the epidemic spreads.

When causes are addressed, the results are dramatic. While modern medicine receives the accolades for improved mortality rates, lower birth defects, longevity and societal health, the credit more deservedly should go to public health practices, public health education and public sanitation. Safe drinking water, efficient control of waste removal, and educational lifestyle communiqués have been powerful change agents.

Meanwhile, we remain in awe of medical science with its sophisticated tools that have been put into play because of lifestyle excesses such as “CAT” scanners, x-ray therapy, renal dialysis machines, cardiac pacemakers, and other electronic devices that can identify and measure nearly every body function instantaneously. It is clear “Nuclear Man” has gambled almost everything on a mechanistic quantitative approach to his physical and psychological well being. The “heart of God” now resides in science. Translated: man can ravage his mind and body, and by extension his environment in wanton glee, and science ultimately as superman will come to the rescue.

What is paradoxical about science is that the cleaner the technology the more abstruse the ramifications. Take nuclear power. Nuclear energy has become the consensus source of cheap and clean fuel to rescue the planet from global pollution. Nuclear waste cannot be destroyed. Meanwhile, barges roam the seas and byways of the world in the dead of night like vessels without a country looking for a safe haven to dump their dubious product.

We think so well “big,” but so poorly “small.” Little things are killing the planet and us with them. Lifestyle excesses start with feeding sugar to babies giving them what they want rather than need, which continues through adulthood. What is a cigarette but a candy substitute? This has become metaphor to our times, codependency from cradle to grave.

Creativity is apparently on holiday. Education focuses on grades rather than creative thinking. Creative thinking encourages students to embrace the unknown. Critical thinking reifies what is already known. The word “education” means to “to lead forth.” Simply regurgitating information is not learning.

What exactly is the function of SAT and GRE cram review courses? If they are necessary for students wanting to qualify for the best colleges or graduate schools, what are these examinations actually measuring? Certainly they are not measuring conceptual skills. Better yet, what did these test takers learn in their degree programs in preparation for these opportunities?

Since course work is largely regurgitation, I suspect little. Chances are once a course is completed it is soon forgotten. This backdoor cram-exam preparation for qualification personifies a reactive society that never gets on top of its problems because its focus is always on effects. In my day, students bragged about never taking a book home in all of high school. Today nearly every child has homework from preschool on, but I wonder if it is more ritual than self-motivated conceptual learning. I sense that it is reprogramming with the same old critical thinking criteria. This spills over into life.

LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Learned helplessness is educated into our society. It cripples the student when study demands initiative, or in the case of a worker a quick response to a problem when it is not necessarily in his job description, but something he can handle. A response of helplessness is the polar coordinate of codependency.

It finds children blaming parents, parents blaming children, teachers blaming both with everyone attempting to dump the problem on to someone else. It is the same in the work environment. In this landscape, solutions have many authors with nearly everyone blind to the obvious problem. This might explain why so many books are written on the subject of society’s ills without a consensus definition of the problem situation. We are crippled with our dependence on analysis rather than designing our way out of the mess. Designing suggests radical change or action, not reaction to calamity once it occurs.

There isn’t an author who pens a book, this author included, who is not guilty of many of the behaviors mentioned selectively here. The reader must read-between-the-lines to see how the information and conceptual detail fit his situation, and then go on from there with an action oriented design. Stated otherwise, the reader needs to rally support to a strategy that fits his problem situation. The person who experiences the problem, first hand, whatever the problem may be, has the solutions within his grasp. It will not be found in a remote generalized description of the problem nor in watered down logic provided by others. The reader must come out of his cups and rally himself into action. This is not easy.

When we are programmed to be suspended in terminal helplessness, parent-dependent, then teacher-dependent, and later in the workplace manager-dependent, we are likely to be always looking for solutions to our difficulties outside ourselves when they are always within our reach, within us.

True, there are supportive and abusive parents, supportive and abusive peers, and so on, but somehow we must get past these impediments, and find our way to self-dependence and confident thinking. This includes enduring pressures from family and friends who are certain they know what is best for us. They may use guilt or intimidation, or hit us with, “how could you think of doing this when all the things we have done for you?”

When other people make us feel miserable about ourselves, no matter who they are, they do not have our best interest at heart, even though they are confident that they do, but only their own. Nor can we pine away about what our parents did or didn’t do for us, using this as the justification for our miserable lot in life. Grow up! Accept the fact that once we are on our own, we are alone, and being “al-one” is the beauty of being al-together, whole, ready to face the world and contribute to it.

Likewise, I have heard so many people tell me they never had good teachers. This is horse hockey! It is meant to convince ourselves that it is someone else’s fault that we never developed a passion for learning. Grow up! It doesn’t work that way.

There is a saying the teacher will arrive when the student is ready. This places the burden where it belongs on the student. There is not a more difficult or more thankless job than that of a teacher. It is very hard work with a lot of time and attention that must be committed outside of the classroom for little appreciation or remuneration. Yet, a teacher’s role is the most important in society. Why is it, then, that education is made so important in lip service but teachers are not esteemed equally to that of other professions? The answer is obvious. Society places a higher premium on material wealth than intellectual acumen; on the product (wealth) rather than the process (learning). It is that simple. Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees baseball team makes more in one year than 400 teachers at $50,000 per annum make teaching school with master’s or doctorate degrees in Florida’s public school and university system. Something is wrong with this picture.

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What has happened in the workplace illustrates dependency to the point of sorrow. Millions on the assembly line and in manufacturing jobs have found those jobs disappearing at an alarming rate and being relocated to other countries about the globe. This is not cruel and inhuman treatment. This is the reality of a global economy. It is a process that has been underway for the past fifty or sixty years. It did not just happen.

I saw it first hand when I was a youth. Factory workers in Detroit were making more than most professional men with college degrees and graduate educations. I saw the sons and daughters of assembly workers going into the factories right out of high school without a thought to improving their intellectual skills or preparing for a future when “paradise lost” would not be a Milton poem, but a fact of American industrial life. No one wanted to talk about it, taking comfort in, “as Detroit goes so goes America!” In other words, have no fear!

So, Detroit continued to make automobiles that were designed primarily for American roads because Americans loved big gas guzzling machines, and gasoline was cheap. Detroit believed in that incredibly absurd model, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Detroit, the hub of American industry, wore blinders as if American utopia was a lasting state. No attempt was made to educate the buying public to think differently. It was the codependent parent giving the American baby what it wanted. So Detroit, the car industry, the assembly worker, and the car buyer have all been complicit in the downturn.

The same syndrome of learned helplessness of course has plagued other American industries. Steel mills, shoe factories, linen producers, appliance makers, and airlines have been economically disrupted if not forced to close. Industrial workers once received generous employee benefits that were not a function of productivity but guarantees for surrendering control of work. This made workers counter dependent on the company for their security and financial well being. The more workers made they more they spent, keeping the economy healthy, but not saving for a rainy day. What is worse, companies operated on the margin even borrowing from pension programs to finance optimistic expansion, as if the dog days of summer would never end. Now we see the fall out of this excess in bankruptcies and empty pension fund coffers. In too many cases, workers have been left high and dry. Whose fault was this?

It is easy to blame companies. Many played quick and dirty with pension funds making them complicit in these developments. But more basic is that management and unions were in collusion allowing wage and benefit demands to spiral out of control to the point that many such companies are no longer competitive. Every General Motors vehicle off the assembly line has $1,500 added to pay for entitlement programs for current and retired workers. It would seem as if no one expected the rest of the world to catch up. This has proven worse than naïve; it hs proven insane.

It points to a fatal flaw in the American character when it comes to problem solving. American workers treated management as surrogate parents, suspending themselves in permanent adolescence in learned helplessness, totally reactive to demands, staying out of trouble by being polite, obedient, submissive, and conforming. Management not only encouraged this behavior, but also systematically programmed it into workers. So, now, when workers need to take the initiative, demonstrate creative verve, be confrontational, and self-motivated problem solvers, the adaptive skills are missing in their gene pool.

Instead, what we see are American workers moaning on television about their plight with no sense of being complicit in the strategy. How they see it is that they did what they were told, and management made promises, promises few companies could reasonably expect to discharge, especially when the generosity was not tied to productivity.

Still, companies encouraged this prevailing attitude by creating the impression that the company “was a family.” Companies have paid dearly for this erroneous metaphor. The only guarantee a worker should truly expect is a full day’s pay for a full day’s work. It is up to him to make his value-added status one that ensures his security, and by extension, his company’s stability. Somehow this got lost in post World War II euphoria, and now everyone is suffering for it.

It has been my observation that for every hard worker, there are four that are dogging it. What is sad to report is that everyone knows this, but no one does anything about it. Mired in learned helplessness, hard workers don’t want to be labeled snitches, while loafers know how to play the system to their advantage. Since loafers are paid the same, they busy themselves looking for ways to redirect attention by constant complaining or flattering their bosses. Like the disruptive child that used tears to get its way, they know the squeaky wheel gets oiled. So, while hard workers are focusing on work they are nitpicking or focusing on making an impression. Loafers have killed the golden goose, and now, with matters as they are, with a global economy in full spring, the blame game has no fire or audience.

WILLIAM GEORGE MOSLEY’S PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE

Michelle Bearden is a journalist with “The Tampa Tribune.” She has written a moving article (July 9, 2006) on an African American man that while inspiring is indicative of the resilience of the human spirit under the most trying of circumstances. Mr. Mosley’s journey epitomizes the beauty and breadth of confident thinking problem solving, and for that reason, it is included here.

Mr. William George Mosley is 87. When he stubbed his toe and infection set in two years ago, doctors had to take his left leg. For a time he got down and let his health go, but now he works out religiously at the Interbay-Glover YMCA in Tampa, and attends church in his best dress every Sunday.

The simple rules provided by his grandmother have guided this man throughout his life. She told him to keep his head up and face his problems. “I just may be the luckiest man around,” he declares. “And I ain’t got but one leg, no teeth, and no money, but I know God is blessin’ me, as sure as I know anything.”

He believes to understand where a man is, you have to understand where he came from. Mr. Mosley came from Macon, Georgia, where he was born September 21, 1918. His daddy, a Pullman porter, died of a heart attack that very day. Three months later, his mama passed away. His maternal grandmother in Tampa took him in and poured on the love.

She taught him pretty much all he would ever really need to know: “don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t drink no liquor, and don’t do no drugs, don’t hang out with no crowd, don’t do nothin’ that will land you in jail, and surely don’t do nothin’ that will land you in an early grave.”

When he was four going on five, his grandma passed away. An aunt took him in, but he doesn’t remember much love in that house. “She beat on me bad, like a dog,” he says. “So, I grabbed me a knapsack, and I ran away.” He was five going on six.

He spent days foraging for food in Ybor City (Cuban suburb of Tampa), and running errands for Cuban shopkeepers to earn a few coins, always mindful of his grandmother’s rules. When darkness came, he bundled up in a potato sack and slept under front porches and produce trucks and in outhouses. When the stink got to be too much, he’d open the door a crack and stick his nose out to breathe in the fresh air.

He tried once to go to school. He got in line with the other children in the schoolyard, but a teacher noticed how filthy he was and delivered him to the principal’s office. “They told me to go home to my mother and father and take a bath,” he says. “I walked right out of there and never looked back.”

Instead, he taught himself to read and write. He would study a word in a newspaper or comic book, and when he saw a friendly face, he’d ask what it meant. His Cuban friends taught him Spanish, too. He learned to count money and take care of his own finances. Never bothered with a bank account; a money belt did just fine.

Grandmother had always told him to watch his back; don’t rely on no one but your own good sense. “Nothin’ more than puttin’ your mind to it,” he says.

From time to time, a kind family took him in and treated him like one of their own. “There’s good folks out there, wherever you go,” he says.

As a young man, he ventured down to Opa-locka (Florida) where he worked for $15 a week for Mr. Cook, a white man from Tennessee who owned a car lot. He washed cars for a while, before admitting to his boss he would rather be selling them.

One day, he got that chance. “A black man was in the lot from 9 in the morning ‘til quarter to 2,” he recalls. “And Mr. Cook, he told me to see what was up. The man bought two Coup de Villes, one for himself, and one for his wife. Then he told me he’d pay me $150 to drive one of the cars to Fort Lauderdale (Florida)."

When Mr. Mosley returned, his employer gave him $400 cash commission for each car. He had never seen so much money in his life. “Bill, you got yourself a job selling cars. And I’m making you my assistant manager,” Mr. Cook proclaimed. Two of the other three salesmen promptly quit. They would have no part of working for a black man. The next day, the remaining salesman fetched Mr. Mosley a cup of coffee.

Serendipity continued to follow him. One time he was on his way to Tuskegee, Alabama to pick up some cars, when he got caught up in Martin Luther King’s Selma-to-Montgomery march for civil rights. He remembers it as a beautiful thing with hundreds of people, black folks and white, marching side by side. He also remembers the police using fire hoses and fierce dogs against the marchers. He could hear his grandmother’s warning about staying out of crowds and away from trouble. Still, he felt it was important to be there, make his stand for equality. “But it was real scary,” he says.

He didn’t want trouble on his travels, so he took to dressing like a chauffeur, “white shirt, black pants, black cap,” when he drove one of his beloved Cadillacs. He didn’t want anyone thinking he was uppity. When he gassed up, he would always tell the gas station attendant that he was driving for Dr. Mosley. Only when self-service stations opened along the interstate did he let his guard down. “Best thing that happened for us,” he says, “didn’t have to rely on the eyes in the back of our heads.”

Eventually, with the entrepreneur spirit, he had a fleet of limousines, driving for such celebrities as crooner Nat King Cole and Muhammad Ali. “You call him Cassius Clay and he’d knock you out,” he says.

And so now, Mr. Mosley in his eighty-eighth year is still smiling, still living by the code of his grandmother, and still always finding something happening to brighten his day.

Is Mr. William George Mosley unique? I don’t think so. He was blessed very early in his life with programming from his beloved grandmother. It sustained his spirit under the most trying circumstances. He has been a confident thinking problem solver engaged in a passion for the possible. Resilience has blessed his life, and all those he has touched. His moral compass was set firmly in place in his heart by a grandmother he lived with for only three years. Imagine that! What lessons his life teaches us.

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