The Most Impatient, Impetuous, Discontented Soul I Ever Met....Me at 35!

OK, Dr. Mike....I want to find out, and I mean FAST, what I am supposed to do with my life....

OK, I am 25 and brilliant....

OK, I am getting a good education, have really bright professors and mentors...

OK, now, also I am really gorgeous/handsome (you pick), and I want to meet the right person, I mean RIGHT NOW PLEASE!...no delays...time is ticking and I need a serious date for the prom...

OK, so you said all these flashes would happen...so where are they?  Please Flash, hit me!!!

Well.......Dr. Mike has something to say.....

I love your spirit.

You are aware that this stuff is waiting for you..

You want it now because you like action, and you don't like boring nights...

You want it NOW!  I understand...
I want it for you too, just so you know....

But you and I have nothing to do with WHEN it will happen or come to you...

That is the nature of the Flash, White, Blue, Pink, even Green...you are aware, you can be looking...but there will be vast stretches when you hunger for it.........I was there too.

I do know it comes through others not us alone.  It comes when we maybe least expect it....

It comes in often from the side, not in front of you...

BUT, when it comes, look out, you will be blown over, you may never recover from the excitement, from the love,  from the passion....

That is just the way it is....

But don't lose the faith, it WILL happen...just be ready....

Narrow Career Tracks....and Discovering That After All You Are Not Supposed to be a Banker!

Lots of yourg people follow the career track that their peers or parents think might be "cool".  I did!  It was banking.  I spent nearly two years in international banking before I evolved on my own to follow my hunches...what I really liked more....organizational psychology...and graduate school...and then I realized that I was supposed to become an academic.  I was a young professor at the age of 29.

The business field has these huge wide expanses of career..."Marketing"...."finance"...."management"....
....it leaves one wondering..."marketing...what?"...."Finance...what?"...."Manage...what?"

Unlike art, teaching, medicine, the career tracks are wide, not narrow.

The implicit assumption of the system of formal education, parents, teachers is that students will get their education, degrees and life will help them sort it out...in the formal sense, it is all macro...there are no micro resources who can sit down with a student and help find the next step....

After my own undergraduate degree at Wharton, I did my best and chose banking...then I wandered and chose teaching, then back to banking before going to graduate school.  One of my Wharton professors played a big role in that...amazing, he did not have to do it, but he took me to lunch three times at the Penn Faculty Club to discuss career issues with me...out of his way....a true mentor...

I also sought out career counselling back at Penn during these years of wandering my career....it helped me personally to understand I was trying to please others with my choices, rather than finding what I wanted to do.

The breakthrough came when I went back to graduate school, left banking, and discovered organizational psychology and development as fields of study for myself...and I soared...it set my direction as a professional academic, professor, writer, creator....

Business is is a field in which for some it is hard to find one's way.  It is so big and wide, and global....
What helped me was some pain of feeling I was living what others wanted, not what I wanted, and being able with the help of mentors to actually decide and take action...in my mid to late twenties...I was one of the lucky ones....

Admitting what you are passionate about, and finding something you are passionate about is a big first step....

The Practical Side of Blueflash...Finding your Ultimate Career

I knew a guy in my college class...he wanted to become a heart surgeon...he did!
I knew many who wanted to become teachers...they did!
I know someone who wanted to become a celebrated artist...she has become one!

They did not take half their life to discover it.  They just did it....

Why does it seems so hard for business students to figure out their clear life vision?

Is it something about the ubiquity of the business world?  that makes it somehow less a profession and more difficult, thus, to find one's way?

Author Michael Novk wrote a famous book, "Buiness as a Calling".  He develops the idea that being in business is no less a sacred profession than is one in the arts...

My recent book, "Letters to a Young President" follows this idea...that our business students of today are the presidents of novel companies of the future...

But, I know, the business pathway is maybe more difficult than that in music, art, teaching or medicine...there are just so many possibilities for being in business...for positions in management.

Our business students (there are several hundred thousand just now studying in the US alone) today need to experiment, take chances, follow hunches...and mabe one third or one half way through their life, they will find the central project that will become the signature mission of their professional life....

Our role as their teachers and mentors is to help that process...it demands enormous patience for us all...but great anticipation of the possibilities that await....

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were once struggling to figure this all out....

The young guys who founded Google, Facebook, etc.,  stumbled brilliantly upon their thing at a quite young age...they found their art and music in business....

Passion is the central theme...it is ageless...

The Tough Love Side of Love....

....Small child lost at sea......
....Just a number....no one really cares....
....When someone we love leaves us suddenly....
........like, when they die, and we ...
.........cannot touch their face again...

These are the very tough moments of love.
But our love does not stop....

Love is a pure light that shines on out from our soul to the far corners of the universe...
...at the speed of light....yet it takes forever to travel...
...because it has life....through the dark night...

Love is also being apart....
It briges the farthest distances...
It brings everything back to start....

It is fear of abandonment that cripples us...

Small child lost at sea....
Lost love that seems it can never be...

There is a force, some say, that arises in the oceans, in the skies...
...where nothing is impossible....and where our spirits are free...

....where the child is saved....
....where the lost love burns again bright...
....where however great we fear being lost....
....we are saved by the light....
....and we never again fear the night....

48 Lives On.....

No sooner than I posted the final essay about my friend Ricky last night, than "click" into my email dropped an email from him.  It was a great note with pictures of Pandas....another amazing serendipity in my life in the last year...

BUT, wait a minute, I emailed Ricky back...."did you email me because you just saw what I wrote about our friendship...?"

No!  It was just an email he sent, normally in the course of the day, loving Pandas, thinking of my loving Pandas also....no connection...

I quickly told him of the blog essay I just posted....he came back quite amazed, yet unfazed....nothing is an accident any more....48 lives on...the number never changes for either of us...now the internet is alive with the sound of music.....!

It's Just a Number.....Whiteflash is with Us Forever....

We often hear students from big universities say..."I am just a number"...
That has happened to many of us in life...we are just a number in somebody's big system....we feel like we are just a number...lost in the sea of masses...no identity...sometimes, it is even a safe place to hide!

When I met Ricky (I disguise the true identity of my friends and the details to protect us all...), I had no idea what was to come...

It was Beijing, 1997.  Our initial meeting was a luncheon where one of our students brought us together, just thinking that we had some things in common...was he ever right....Umberto....thanks for that forever!  Your intuition was so correct.


The luncheon was fine, but hurried.  I suggested to Ricky that we meet on my next visit to Beijing, which I knew would be in about one month.  On that next visit, I called him.  He was shaken, on his way to the airport to fly back to Japan...you see, his son had just been murdered....how could I express my sympathy, I had hardly just met Ricky....

One month later, on my third visit into Beijing, I finally had the chance to have that dinner with my new friend.  He told me the very sad story of how his son had become a victim of a crime...he was lost to Ricky at the age of 25....

Ricky during dinner was still shaken...but was beginning to deal with the grief.  I knew my job with this friend was to listen and give comfort where I could....if I could...

......I had no idea what was about to happen at that next moment....
Ricky told me he had not accepted that his son had really died because he kept getting signals from him...strange but worldly messages...things too real to be untrue....

I could see his seriousness and determination.  All I could do was to ask him about that.....

He shared that they had a favorite movie they had just seen the weekend before the son died.....in that movie, which was their favorite, the number 48 was a significant number....Ricky went on to tell me that that number was also his number,  his own lucky number, most of his life, and was also his son's number.  Ricky said that since his son died, that number kept coming up in different places and in different ways....

Numbers are strange things.  I suppose many people have a lucky number they use all their life, by choice, if they can...it brings them luck.  I suppose,  that number for some has huge importance, it brings them wealth, good luck, power....they guard it....it can even be their secret number.

Now, in the strange crosscurrents of life, we are thrown together with people we call friends in the most amazing of circumstances  well beyond our call, beyond our immagination...these are potentially the sacred moments....

I sat there looking at Ricky in the comfortable restaurant chair after he had just told me about the number 48 as the message he gets from his son, that brings comfort these days... how could anyone on the planet know this scheme and orchestrate it?  It was unique to them....it was their family number, their family system...Ricky shared with me that night in Beijing.  The night was cold...the moon had been drawn over by clouds...it was a quiet cold night in late fall in Beijing.

Except for one now small detail, one statistically improbable fact...a shining light in the darkness....I cleared my throat and said to Ricky..."Rick, sit down,,,I don't know what this means, but that number 48 is also my number, all my life....its where I lived,  it was my age at the time, it is the number I played all my life as my lucky number...48!
Ricky, fell off his chair...and I had to help him to hs feet, crying...there was silence for a long time......

.........do you know what that kind of experience had on us as friends, the friendship?  It sealed it.  It gave us a new language...we spent hours discusing our lifetime of how 48 was a factor in what seemed were the most important  happenings in our lives...

Years later, this has not stopped....the number 48 still shakes me when I see it as a sign...and Ricky is the same...when my Mother was dying I was in and out of Beijing several times that year,,,Rick would always take me to the airport, the airport coffee shop to be with me as a friend...long flights home...we would sit down, order coffee, maybe when it was rough, a scotch,...and always the gate number Beijing to SFO was Gate 48....48, the number just kept appearing....

Years later, there are periods when that happens in streaks...if there is some reason,we cannot discern it....
...but there is graceful comfort in accepting it......

Ricky and I are still close friends.  I have come to see him as not an ordinary friend, but someone I had destiny to meet in this huge populated world......we had a purpose to meet, share,and connect on some magical, serendipitous stuff that will last in our memory the rest of our lives.

A number....48 was it...just a number, thats all!  It made all the difference that what happened was mystical and special....and it was.....  It gave us the gist of believin' in some stuff bigger than us....powerful...like who is in charge, who is boss.....certainly not us...

Ricky has led a rough and miraculous life since then....surviving cancer, retiring to another country, starting over....new life....yet once in a while 48 knocks on his door, and mine...we are reminded...at those moments...we are humbled...Whiteflash knows that number and what it means....we are still and always left wondering....Whiteflash knows the power of believing in being connected to the recently departed., the importance of bringing others to that same place to be with the ones who need help...it is all part of a plan....like it is a natural phenomenon........

Number 48 was not a whim, temporary number for me...it was long hoaned in my life...it had deep personal history...like 25 years of my using it....Ricky had the same....

Whiteflash was always there in the background, like a friend, just appeared to give us an extraordinary gift.  Whiteflash sort of said to us, "hey, guys, I want you each to meet a most special friend, and here is how I am going to prove it to you both....I am going to show you that you both have this not accidental bond, but something very worldly, like a number....but it will reveal you are not alone.....it will show you that in your very worst moments, I am with you...."

.....It was just in time that we met, for Ricky, and for me too.... it was the right time.  We are still deeper friends all these years later.  The number has not changed for either of us...we laugh now...we laugh knowing we came close to one of the secrets of the universe....we still have that gift....number 48....it will last forever....

This is "Real Earth" Day!

Well, It's here....the "real" Earth Day!  Plant a tree.  But make sure to plant your feet, right down solid on Mother Earth, our planet, our home, where volcanos, rising waters, fires, winds, all remind us who is really boss.  We are just passengers for a while.  Respect the Mother Ship!  She does take care of us, but demands respect.

Enjoy her.  Go find a Greenflash this evening, if the horizon is clear and you can see the sun go down over the water.  Find a waterfall, feel the mist on your face...find a fresh snowfall and taste a snowflake!  See the tiger in the bush, burning bright, ever in the night.

Find that face you love to see and kiss it.  Touch it.  Pinkflash is a gift here on Mother Earth.

Look to your sides today.  See if some surprise is there waiting.  Something good, I hope.  Something you hoped for, asked for...Whiteflash is out there...

Stay on your pathway toward your life purpose.  If you are not sure, look down, see your feet planted on this Earth and see them moving toward something you love...Blueflash spirit is alive today!

Sun is up in California, coffee tastes good this morning...not another average day....