August 25, 2025
Good morning! Coming to you this morning from Without A Vision Consultancy’s summer headquarters in Starboard Cove, Maine. We marvel at the stunningly spectacular sunrise just as California is getting tucked into bed the night before. Hasten to marvel at the spectacular display of Venus and Jupiter in the morning sky… nothing short of spellbinding! The recipient of communication is, de facto, the best evaluator of its quality. Question: Which sport, on average, permits the closest physical proximity between spectators and athletes?
- Surveyed executives expressed muted optimism for their companies’ prospects in the next six months.
- They see geopolitical instability as the top obstacle to their organizations’ growth. (Smit, Etc., et al., 2025)
- For the first time since March 2022, surveyed executives foresee geopolitical instability as the top risk to companies’ growth over the next 12 months.
- Weak demand was the most-cited risk in the previous three quarters and is now the second-most-cited disruption,
- followed closely by changes in the trade environment and trade relationship.
- … those expecting increasing profits and demand are the smallest in years.
- At the same time, responses suggest both workforce sizes and prices are stabilizing… (Ibid.)
- Prevailing upon your patience and generosity, the following is from the working draft of a book-in-progress with the working title, How Do You Know?
- I don’t know if it will ever get finished, but parts of it are getting close.
- Here are a few paragraphs from one of the chapters:
- HAVE MENTORS: It’s a mystery as to why some people form a positive bond with each other and others don’t. I’m often reminded, everyone has a fan club. Each of us has mentors — and we’re mentors to others, perhaps unaware — and because of them we’re inspired, motivated, educated, trained in ways unlikely if not for them. At a young age we idolize or hero-worship an athlete, a movie star, an explorer, a neighbor, a relative, or someone from history. As we grow older we purposefully seek out those who we perceive can help us along the way, sometimes unconsciously. The term mentor is over-used nowadays; I don’t recall hearing the word the first 40 years of my life; now it is everywhere. But, just because it’s an over-used word doesn’t make it any less important.
- Speaking of mentors, I don’t know if you remember your 6th grade teacher; mine was Mrs. Searles, Alice Searles. She lived on a farm a mile outside our little rural village and she was always frantically moving about in several different directions at once; two or three of them unfocused and misdirected, the others compensating unceasingly and completely for the misdirection, if messily so. I can only assume that she was regularly in trouble with her principal, though her students would have scarcely known about it and would have never suspected. She was hardly ever on time to class and personal inhibitions were not part of her personality.
- Class often started with what for most teachers would have been a final crescendo, but for her was simply a random place from which to begin – and then she naturally reached new crescendos theretofore unimagined. On Halloween her entire room was redecorated, floor to ceiling, with pumpkin guts.
- She was just there – day after day – and she filled the room with her presence; far from perfect, but a fabulous, memorable teacher. She taught us about birds, one of her great passions. To this day I love the birds; their plumage, their flight, their songs, their eating and nesting habits. There is no reason in the world I would love – or even know about – the birds if it weren’t for Mrs. Searles. In 6th grade she simply and unceremoniously enrolled all of us as ornithologists.
- We didn’t vote to do this, it wasn’t an outside club or an interest group, she simply proclaimed it by her frantic sense of urgency. Anyone observing would have concluded that bird watching was a state of emergency. We received bird identification books, personal record keeping documents, audio recordings to memorize sounds, lumber and tools to build bird houses, and daily quizzes to motivate our research and memorization. Many of us soon knew every single bird indigenous to southeastern Minnesota. Around the perimeter of the room, above the blackboard, where most teachers featured the Palmer handwriting samples, she would introduce a new bird daily… by the end of the year, though I don’t recall precisely, there must have been more than 170 of them… and we could identify every single one by its seasonal plumage, its shadow profile, flight, and song.
- Though my memory is somewhat blurred, I think there were days during peak autumn and spring migration seasons when she took the whole class out to the woods for the entire length of the school day – and then those of us who wanted to stay longer, to possibly catch a glimpse of one more bird for our growing lifetime list, we’d stay out until dusk, somehow eventually finding our way back home (it was the 1960s and parents didn’t have time to worry).
