Success and Significance

Donna and Kate and I had dinner last night with our daughter Eileen and her husband Andrew at their apartment in Baltimore’s Brewer’s Hill neighborhood. Andrew’s parents, John and Diane, were there, as were Andrew’s aunt and uncle, Elaine and Dean.

After much bourbon, followed by a spectacular lasagna dinner and much wine, Dean and I were talking about his work as an independent video producer. He was talking about work he recently did for a client, interviewing owners of car dealerships. Many car dealerships are family owned businesses and are passed from generation to generation.

One of the things that struck Dean was the amount of community outreach many of these families do. It makes sense from a business standpoint: As you contribute to the community, you build your network of potential customers. But it’s much more than that. Many of these family businesses contribute to the community for the purpose of, well, contributing to the community.

After taping an interview with one car dealer in a rural community out west, the two were talking as Dean was putting away his video equipment. The owner mentioned how his family had made lots of money over the years, and that they were working to turn success into significance.

That phrase resonated with Dean. He quickly put his gear back together and asked the businessman to repeat the comment on tape. He recounted how a family member had contracted leukemia and the community hospital didn’t have the expertise or equipment to effectively treat the disease, and his relative had died without care that could have been beneficial. Subsequently the dealership owner started a drive to fund the building of a new cancer wing for the hospital. “We used our success to do something of significance,” he said.

Not all of us have the resources to make the kind of impact on a community like the businessman Dean had interviewed. But we all have the resources to make some contribution to our community. Whether it’s working in a soup kitchen once in a while or committing a random act of kindness or participating in a fundraising event.  A community is simply the shared resources of its collective members. The more we give, the more we all prosper.

That’s turning success into significance.

Copyright © by Dave Douglass.