"Give honest, sincere appreciation." - Dale Carnegie
Few things create a loving life quite like sharing appreciation of people who have been a major influence for the better to me.
I'm excluding family from this list - too much of a cop-out and too easy to leave someone out.
In no particular order other than the order in which they occurred to me. This list could be 100 people long. Here are ten.
1. Rusty Schopp. The most positive role model of my State Farm career. He is humble, funny, driven, sensitive.
2. Shari Lauer. We teamed up to provide a great experience for Leadership McLean County last year. Her ability to connect with people, remember details, get things done, smile all the way, and nurture others was an extroverted inspiration.
3. Hannah Meece. Corporate America is full of skeptics and cynics. She's not one of them. Polite beyond measure, generous, and optimistic. She was one of the pillars of happiness during my last year at State Farm.
4. Sean Stevens. Being a leader is hard; a leader of musicians can be even harder, with high risk of "creative differences" not to mention the natural stress of providing a quality sound. The band couldn't succeed without the complementary skills of both he and wife Jennifer, but I know the extra difficulty of playing guitar and singing. And he's not much older than 20!
5. Bev Buckley. My condo neighbor of 20 years, and partner on the board of directors for many of them. Into her 70's, she spends as much time as anyone at cleaning up the grounds and looking for ways to make things better. I hope I'm as alert and useful as her when I'm that age.
6. Chris Terven. Everyone loves this guy. He's talented and hard-working almost to the breaking point; not for himself, but to help those near him.
7. Ryan Short. I'm pretty sure he has at least two brains. There's no other explanation for how he gets done all that he does. He's more responsible and communicative than anyone I know. Another elite example of sensitivity for others, he also has a way of making you feel like the most important person in his life when you're with him.
8. Dan Hill. A fellow tutor at Heartland who is almost singularly passionate about math. He carries himself with Ghandi-like peacefulness and carries no ego with him.
9. Amber Gruenloh-Luecke. If I had her energy, I might be mayor. Passion gushes out of her, she reaches out to the needy, she thrives on networking. She's a self-made success to the fullest. I've spent more time on the couch this afternoon than she's probably spent in a decade.
10. Jeremy Levine. He's closer to my end of the extrovert-introvert spectrum, but way ahead of me on the kindness-toward-fellow-man scale. He has bright ideas and shares them with feeling and tact.
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