Musings on a Monday Morning from Mike Mullin…

The weekly Newsletter of Without A Vision Consultancy LLC

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February 24, 2020 – Leap Day Coming

Good morning!

It’s been sunshine and >forty degrees for the last two days here in Central Minnesota; I wore tennis shoes on the hike instead of winter boots for the first time in four months. It’s been a too-long winter; maybe someone could write a poem — or a song, probably in the genre of The Blues. I heard the first Cardinal of late winter claiming his territory high in the tree tops; Cardinals are smart and bold that way — and they get started early.

• Only one more day until Mardi Gras… and then three weeks to wait until the Feast of St. Patrick.
  • I recommend hoisting your flag early and getting on with it.
• I don’t know how to do crowd flash mobs or ragers, but maybe one of my readers does:  25th Avenue DQ opens on Friday… be there 4:30 PM for this annual rite of spring.
  • It has been too too long absent a hot fudge salted pecans sundae, too long, my friends; more than four months.
• Is there a force on earth stronger and more certain than gravity?  Try the status quo.
• Collectively, termites outweigh humans here on planet Earth by more than ten to one. (Margonelli)
• Looking for a fabulous investment of two hours of your time?
  • Watch the PBS documentary on Maya Angelou, And Still I Rise, 2017; the two hours pack an erudite punch.
• The New Yorker had a cartoon depicting Sisyphus saying, “Woo hoo!  Four day work week!”  (Hilarious!)
• “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.  As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save ourselves.”  (A. Lincoln)  
• “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” (Heijer)
• Credit card debt in the United States has skyrocketed to more than $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) with defaults increasing daily.
  • Which doesn’t include the college debt rapidly approaching $2 trillion with no relief in sight.
    • Got an idea?  A solution is needed soon.
• “It wasn’t until 2018 that the New York Times (regarded by many as a liberal-leaning newspaper) finally hired a woman of color as an op-ed writer, though the paper was founded in 1851.  That means it took the Times 167 years to come to the realization that lacking the perspective of a woman of color among its roster of op-ed writers was a grave omission… Also, while an African American woman’s perspective certainly improves the Times’ op-ed pages, surely more than one in the sea of countless white men would be better still.”  (Cottom)
• Are you operating without a vision?  Be careful.
  • Are you leading an organization without a vision?  Would you drive a school bus without brakes?

• What do you get when you work with Without a Vision Consultancy LLC?
  • We listen, we learn, and then we customize our response to deliver:
  1. Confidence
  2. Clarity
  3. Coaching
  4. Companionship on your journey… sometimes it gets lonely and it’s good to have a friend.

A Nickel for your Thoughts

By Michael A. Mullin

Is finding a battered nickel on the street
equivalent to discovering five lucky pennies?
Os it it worthless because it’s not
even made of nickel?
Of course neither is a penny clad with copper anymore.
Is it the copper that’s lucky or the penny itself?
Once I found thirty pennies in a parking lot,
scattered like seeds among the gravel and stones and debris.
Someone had flung them as if they were worthless.
No one else had thought to pick them up.
I picked up every single one, but I might have missed one.
If I did miss one, what if it was the lucky one?

©2017 Michael A. Mullin

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