HOW DO YOU SPELL “FORTUITOUS”? G-A-R-F-I-N-K-E-L
Sometimes, really neat things just fall into your lap. This happy circumstance can happen to writers of books when their material strikes a ready nerve with a reader. That’s pretty much the story line for what I’m about to recount. A San Francisco-based marketing consultant, writing coach and former bureau chief for McGraw-Hill Magazines read my piece on thinking like a dolphin here. That led him to download an ebook copy of LEAP! Soon he was sending me an e-mail that read, “My name is David Garfinkel. When I got your book yesterday as a Kindle, my mind got so energized . . . I keep reading it in exciting sprints! (Leaps?)” The next day I received a second email from David. This one noted, “I love the way you write!” Anyone who tells me that is going to get a request to do me a book view. Within a few days, David had supplied one on Amazon.com that was laudatory and exceptionally creative. I asked his permission to make it the focus of one of our promotional emails for LEAP! You can see what our graphic designer produced above. To read David’s review, go here. (You’ll need to scroll down to “Customer Reviews.”) If the Great Fortuity God is listening, my thanks for sending David Garfinkel our way! And a really grateful “thank you” to David for investing the time, energy and creativity to produce that truly insightful and understanding review.

‘THE MAN FROM LARAMIE’ RODE INTO TOWN THE OTHER DAY
That would be Dr. Frank Galey, dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. That’s him at right with his beloved dog, Hoover (now deceased), and his horse in a photo taken on the Galey family ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming. The dean came to Gainesville last week for a day’s training in the use of our BrainMap® assessment tool. For more than a decade, The BrainMap has been a mainstay in teambuilding and personal skills enhancement activities offered to participants in a remarkable program called Leadership Wyoming. Since graduating its first class in 2001, Leadership Wyoming has annually selected about 40 of Wyoming’s most promising citizens from a variety of professions for a year-long educational program in leadership qualities, skills and techniques. So far, there have been 531 graduates, including Governor Matt Mead, Former First Lady and Federal Judge Nancy Freudenthal, U.S. Senator John Barrasso, Adjutant General Luke Reiner and 15 legislators. BTC is proud of the fact that virtually all of Leadership Wyoming’s participants have taken and spent considerable time discussing The BrainMap to expand their insights into how people think, assign value and forge beliefs. Up to now, these sessions have been mostly led by the highly capable Margaret Benson, BTC’s longtime associate from Casper, Wyoming. And now the torch is about to be passed—to Dean Galey. The dean’s academic specialty is veterinary forensic toxicology, but he is a man of great curiosity and many interests and talents. Among them is developing leadership skills in current and future generations of Wyoming’s best and brightest. The BrainMap and Leadership Wyoming, among many others, are lucky to have him!

IRELAND’S RESILIENT SEAN BROPHY AND HIS LATEST TURNING POINT
My friend and long-time colleague in Ireland, Dr. Sean Brophy (photo below), has a dolphinthinker’s love of life, and that’s remarkable in view of the life he’s been given to love. I’ve referred to Sean’s arduous personal journey before, and to establish a story setting for where I’m going with this, will briefly do so again. He was born with spinal scoliosis—curvature of the spinal. Physically, it has touched almost every moment of his existence. In his school days, his devout Catholic family made frequent pilgrimages to Lourdes, seeking a miracle cure for their boy. In between, there were numerous hospital stays as young Sean fought pneumonia and other grave conditions. But irrepressible Sean, small and bent of stature but huge of heart, always bounced back. His plaster corset was a cause célèbre among classmates, and his joie de vivre was contagious. In spite of his problematic physique, he played football as a high schooler (and, at age 15, lost a kidney because of sports injuries). In adulthood, the frequent hospitalizations continued. In the past 15 years, they’ve sometimes come three or four a year. I soon realized that each e-mail I received from him could be the last, so it was a thrill to get his latest a few days ago. He wrote, in part, “I’ve been quite successful at interrupting the incessant cycle of respiratory infections by eliminating dairy and wheat products and all narcotics from my diet. Now I’m concentrating on detoxing my regulatory organs to provoke an organic process through systematic and controlled fasting where my body consumes its own nonviable scar tissue thereby opening up my airways and giving me more wind power with a reduced dependence on supplementary oxygen. So far I have lost 12Kg in weight, a lot for a little guy, but the upside is that I feel great, with lots of vitality and my brain is sharp as a razor. I’ve concluded that ensuring a good supply of clean blood to my brain is the key.” Sean has just turned 70. He is resuming his executive and personal coaching practice from his home. And he’s just published his eighth book of poetry. It’s called Turning Points (that’s the photo of Sean and his brother and sister from the book cover at left) and on the surface, his poems offer a retrospective of his life in Dublin since 1943. But they are really about life in general and Sean’s love for it. “I’ve realised that unhappy people keep looking inside themselves for a problem to be fixed,” he said in that e-mail the other day. “Happy people keep looking out into the world for something to create. Scientists and theologians will have a different take on this ‘source’ of creation. Frankly I don’t care. Every day is a gift. Carpe Diem-create-be happy!” You can order Sean’s latest work (at €19.50 each, shipping included) here (or order any of his other books, too!). He says the average book of poems in Ireland sells about 180 copies. His Rainsford Press has already sold about 120 copies of Turning Points. A laudatory biographical sketch about Sean, written by a friend, appears here. Understandably, it’s in prose. The life being described supplies its own poetry.