A Different Kind Of Ordinary

http://www.finnwcontini.com

Sometimes ordinary people do extraordinary things. Gandhi challenged us to peaceful resistance and freedom; John F. Kennedy challenged us to land on the Moon; Cleveland Amory challenged us to promote animal rights. At some point, an ordinary person emerges as an extraordinary leader, to move us forward, to better our species, to challenge humanity to accomplish something.

I am a beneficiary of such a challenge from an executive at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle.

While I was working there on a dead-end temporary assignment in late 1997, Jed Selter walked up to me at a copy machine and said, "You can do better."

I thought he was talking about the copying task. I was wrong; he had just issued me a challenge.

He could tell from the way I carried myself that I was extremely depressed and dissatisfied with the direction of my life.

Jed invited me to a seminar he and his friend Gil Tumey created for other Boeing personnel, called IPPE: The Institute of Personal and Professional Effectiveness.

Along with roughly 300 Boeing employees, we talked about where we were, where we wanted to be, and more importantly, how to get there. Jed wrote a book called The Journey that conveys his personal story, explains why he helps others, and concludes with a poem I wrote for him.

Jed took me under his wing and asked me about my career aspirations. I told him I have always had a natural talent for writing and wished to become an author.

I was working on my first book at the time, a parody of John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. My book was called Women May Be from Venus, But Men are Really from Uranus, and written under the pen name Katherine Black.

Jed read the first draft and said, "You can do better."

He was right. Instead of listening to everyone's opinions about how the book should be written, I wrote what comes natural to me: parody and satire that offers a different perspective.

I have since written many other books, which I am publishing as eBooks to reach a wider audience. While relationship parody is fun, I prefer political satire, and my latest book, Taking Conservatives Behind the Woodshed: The Right Has Never Been So Wrong, exemplifies my writing style at its best, though I have also written nonfiction about Microsoft's corporate duplicity and internal secrets.

But that's not where this story ends. Jed's random act of kindness that changed my life should be paid forward.

In order to leave this world a better place than I found it, I must positively change the lives of others. Using Jed's IPPE template, I seek young adults who were just like me in 1997: Going nowhere fast and dissatisfied with life, but believing each has something special to offer this world.

I befriend those people, teach them what Jed taught me, and after just a few months my new friends have gone from hopeless and pessimistic, to hopeful and optimistic.

"You can do better" was not a criticism, but rather a challenge.

My style is a little different from Jed's, but the outcome is the same: Just as Gandhi, JFK and Cleveland Amory inspired us to change, I strive to be a different kind of ordinary.