Michael's Gratitude Project

I have never cared very much about what people call me, but for years most people have called me Michael.  I get asked all of the time whether I prefer to be called Mike or Michael and I have a canned response.  I tell everybody that when I was in high school one of my best friends was named Mike and that I was Michael and that was just how we were distinguished.  I probably go through this routine every couple of weeks and have for years.  Each time it reminds me of that Mike who used to be a huge part of my life and who, for many reasons, I am very grateful for. I don’t remember how I met Mike, I think he was a friend of a friend and I am sure that we started to hang out because we were friends with, and probably both trying to woo, the same girl. I remember that by the beginning of our junior year in high school that we were pretty close and that we got much closer through that year.  I could write countless stories of adventures that Mike and I had tha...

Since today is the election I can’t help but think back to some of my favorite memories of election night in the past.  Thinking back 20 years I remember the first election night where I stayed up late watching the returns.  I was nine years old and the race was between incumbent President George H.W. Bush and a young governor named Bill Clinton.  A wealthy Ross Perot was also in the race as an independent. I was in fourth grade and my teacher, Mrs. Holt, decided to teach us about the election process.  Leading up to the election she divided the class into two “parties” and had us pick candidates to campaign for class president.  Each party could choose a name, a theme, a candidate and most importantly a mascot.  If I remember correctly my team selected the monkey as the mascot, because monkeys are the best.  The other team selected the owl. I was selected to represent my party in the election and it was incredibly exciting.  I was deter...

Sometimes one act of kindness in a moment of dire need can have a long and lasting impact.  This is a story about one of those acts. Not long after starting my job at the Utah Hotel & Lodging Association I started a blog of sorts doing reviews of hotels around the state.  It was a way for me to highlight and bring attention to hotels that supported the association.  It also gave me a chance to get around the state and to visit a lot of hotels.  I would usually try to connect these reviews with meetings that I needed to attend in order to get more bang for my buck. On one such occasion my plan did not work very well.  I had planned a meeting in Cedar City to help the hotels there organize a local lodging association.  It was a lunch meeting that would only last a few hours.  However, since it was a three hour drive each way I figured I would use it as a chance to visit a local property. I had been talking with Patrice Arent who was doi...

It seems like many of my posts so far have been about political influences, or people that have impacted my career.  Perhaps I will try to focus on a few other influences in my next post.  But not this one. After writing about Mike Leavitt the other day I started thinking about one of the major players in that post.  If you read it you would have come across the name of Darrell White who was the superintendent of Davis School District while I was a student there.  Derrell was the one that helped to orchestrate my first meeting with Governor Leavitt while I was a sophomore at Viewmont.  Of that incident I could write a long post about how grateful I am to him.  However, since the history of that event and the subsequent effects of it are already in my other post on Mike Leavitt I want to focus here on some of the other great things that Dr. White did for me, for which I will ever be grateful. At the end of my Jr. year I was selected as the Student ...

Many of the people that have influenced me are your average Joe’s and Jane’s.  They have been neighbors and friends, classmates and coworkers but occasionally they have been more public citizens or high profile individuals.  Some of the high profile folks on the list have come across as kind of “high and mighty.”  They know that they are a big deal in town and they let everybody know it.  This is a story about a man that was a big deal in town, but that was as down to earth as any neighbor and friend that you could hope for. Jim Wall was the president and publisher of the Deseret Morning news when I first met him.  He had been in that position for many years when we first crossed paths.  As the publisher of a major newspaper he had enormous influence in Salt Lake City and throughout Utah.  We met while we were both serving on the board of directors for the Salt Lake Convention and Visitors Bureau, later called Visit Salt Lake. The board is a ...

Part of the reasoning behind this project is that it is requiring me to think about important turning points in my life, recognize vital influences at that time and try to understand how that influence has impacted me.  It is a way to understand how grateful I should be as much as an opportunity to express how grateful that I am.  Some of the people on my ‘list of folks to write about’ are people who have impacted me, but I am not yet sure how.  I need to evaluate their influence and then hopefully come to a deeper understanding of their impact on me. On the other hand there are people on my list like Mike Leavitt who inspired the gratitude project and whose influence I have evaluated over and over in my mind through the years.  I could detail at length the direct impact that has come from my interactions with Mike Leavitt and his influence upon me.  The challenge here is to try and keep that line of thought to only a few pages. My first significant in...