Bob Stollery, '49 BSc(CivEng), '85 LLD (Honorary), who had just retired as president of PCL Construction, was the foundation's first president and also its first financial adviser. It was created three decades ago by some of Edmonton's leading philanthropic families. The foundation gathers and manages endowment funds to create capital returns to distribute to charitable organizations in the Edmonton area. Making solid contact is something I've been thinking about a lot these days in the midst of writing the ECF history. Our life plans so often are about hitting extra base hits that get us somewhere in a hurry, whereas focusing on making quality swings every time is more likely to get us where we want to go. Hitting for the cycle is that rare, and yet, even though baseball is a lot like life, I wonder if too many of us spend our lives in these self-actualized times stepping up to bat thinking we have to hit for the cycle, rather than just focusing on making solid contact. And it has happened only once since they started a formal post-season in Major League Baseball in 1903.
#Beverly trails gifted book professional#
It's so rare that it has happened only 327 times since professional baseball began late in the 19th century. One of the rarest feats in baseball is when a batter " hits for the cycle," meaning that in one game a hitter has a single, a double, a triple and a home run. A classic you'll run into frequently these days is, "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." Meaning that a person was essentially gifted his wealth but thinks he earned it through his own hard work and talent. Some of my favourite sayings have to do with baseball lingo. And you do a ridiculous amount of running in circles for no apparent reason. There's plenty of sunshine and a few rainy days. Sometimes it moves quickly and sometimes it takes forever. It's not often you get to peek inside the way something successful was made, but that has been my experience lately helping write a history of the Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF).īut first let's talk about baseball. I've recently had the good fortune to work on a project that has further reinforced the value of prizing process over outcome. There's only one way to do it, his father told him. Her younger brother had ignored a school essay about bird life in their area, and then, on the day before it was due, he panicked and frantically began asking his family how he was going to get the essay done and what method would work. In the book, she explained how she came up with the title. I remember reading a book about writing by the American novelist Anne Lamott entitled Bird by Bird. Which is probably not what my editors want to hear, given that their process involves an outcome called a deadline. So much so that I think I'm increasingly starting to view the process as the outcome. My career might be why I have become increasingly fascinated with the relationship between process and outcome. The irony is not lost on me that I ended up in a career as a freelance writer - a field in which deadlines have been known to matter. A friend of mine once handed in an essay six months late, having convinced the prof that he'd be good for it. And I don't mean the posted deadline, I mean the deadline deadline, the date on which professors had to hand in their marks. Submitting essays in university became a test in its own right to see how close to the deadline I could get before handing something in. You'll find plenty of life philosophy out there that recommends focusing on process versus outcome, but this was a foreign concept to me as I entered adulthood - unless avoidance followed by panic followed by all-nighters counts as a process.
0 kommentar(er)
