For decades, Jay Thiessens hid a painful secret as he built his machine and tool company from a mom-and-pop operation into a $5 million-a-year enterprise. During the day he hid behind the role of a harried businessman, too busy to review contracts or shuffle through mail. At night, his wife, Bonnie, would help him sort through the paperwork at the kitchen table, in the living room, or sometimes sitting up in bed.
Other tasks he delegated to a core group of managers at B&J Machine Tool Co. who had no idea their boss couldn't read.
"I worked for him for seven years and I had no clue," said Jack Sala, now the engineering manager for Truckee Precision, a B&J competitor. "I was his general manager. He would bring legal stuff to me and say, 'You're better at legalese than me.' I never knew I was the only one reading them."
Few people knew of his shame and most burning desire: To be able to read a simple bedtime story to his grandchildren. But he couldn't keep his illiteracy secret forever. "It became too hard to continue to hide it," said Thiessens, who has begun to read at the age of 56. "Since I made the decision to let everybody know, it's a big relief."
On Wednesday, Thiessens will be honored in Washington, D.C., as one of six national winners of the 1999 National Blue Chip Enterprise Initiative Award. Sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and MassMutual, the award recognizes small businesses that have triumphed over adversity.
Thiessens' torment took root when he was in the first or second grade in McGill, a small mining town in central Nevada. "A teacher called me stupid because I had trouble reading," he said. All through school, he was the quiet little boy in the back of the room.
"I think the teachers just got tired of looking at me so they passed me on," he said. He graduated from White Pine High School in Ely 1963, getting mostly C's, D's and F's. He made the honor roll once, in his senior
year when he landed A's in auto mechanics and machine shop.
The day after graduation, Thiessens moved to Reno, where 10 years later he started a small machine shop with his last $200. Today, B&J specializes in welding, machine parts and precision sheet metal work. With 50 employees, the company conducts $5 million a year in business and just broke ground on
a new 54,000 square-foot expansion.
Despite his success, the stigma of being labeled a dummy haunted him through adulthood. He compensated by being a good listener. He rarely forgets details and has a solid grasp of math and figures, a trait essential to the industry, others say.
"The majority of everything we do is technical," said Randy Arnett of A&B Precision, B&J's longest competitor. "It has more to do with math, geometrical shapes, than verbiage."
"He's always been a decent competitor," Arnett said of Thiessens.
Two years ago, Thiessens was invited to join a local chapter of The Executive Committee, a kind of CEO-support group where non-competing chief executives discuss business trials and tribulations in confidence.
Thiessens was reluctant. "He was concerned he wouldn't measure up to the rest of the group," said Randy Yost, committee chairman and former CEO of Placer Bank of Commerce in California. "About 6 months after we met, he told me he had a reading problem," Yost said. "At that time, he was very tight-vested about it."
Thiessens confessed to the rest of the group last year.
"He was a little teary. His voice was shaking," recalled Doug Damon, a group member and CEO of Damon Industries, a beverage concentrate manufacturer. "It was clearly a difficult thing for him to do." Damon was surprised by Thiessens confession. "I knew he was a high school graduate, and so I guess I automatically assumed he knew how to read. He'd been very successful in his business. Who would have thought?"
Thiessens feared titters and jeers from his college-educated CEO peers. Instead, he was overwhelmed by support. "As much as I respected him for what he accomplished, it enhanced my respect for him," Yost said.
Last October, Thiessens found a tutor to instruct him for an hour a day, five days a week. That's also when he told his plant managers. The rest of his employees found out last month.
Thiessens recently read "Gung Ho," a book on employee relations, as a management team project. It was slow going as he underlined all the words he didn't know and later sought help with. But he finished it. He wants someday to be able to rifle through mail as quickly as his wife and "round file" the piles of junk mail that comes across his desk.
More importantly, he hopes his story will encourage others to learn to read.
"There is no shame in not knowing how to read," said Mrs. Thiessens, his wife of 37 years. "The shame is not doing anything about it."
how I can practice these values.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Truth
kneeled, staring, not daring yet to touch. It was a simple gold-plated bracelet, nothing fancy or expensive, a gift from an old boyfriend on my seventeenth birthday. The intense Hawaiian sun, already hanging well above the surrounding cliffs of volcanic rock, caused the sea water coating the jewelry to sparkle like diamonds. But the huge basalt rock beneath the bracelet glistened just as brightly and just as meaninglessly. Nothing unusual. Certainly nothing to be frightened of.
Except the bracelet shouldn't be there.
Instinctively, I turned and scanned the trees and rocks surrounding me. The cove was small, not much larger than an Olympic-size swimming pool. There were no more than ten or twelve widely-spaced palm trees to my right, bracketed by a small copse of dense evergreens, the local lehua with their fiery red flowers not yet blossoming. No where for someone to hide. Directly in front of me, separated by a short expanse of ebony sand, the cliff face towered nearly thirty feet into the sky. I could see the path I always used to descend that monolith, really little more than a series of toe-holds. My skinned knees and lacerated hands were constant reminders of the precariousness of that route. But I had never minded the hardship or even the potential danger. I came here every day not because it was easy or convenient, but because it was secluded and secret. This place was mine. At least until now.
Assured I was alone, I sat Indian-fashion on the hard rock, a natural pier that jutted so conveniently into the Pacific Ocean, and tentatively picked up the bracelet. It had been placed near the edge, just inches from the sweet-smelling waters. I briefly considered the possibility it had been washed ashore by some benevolent wave. I would have liked to believe that, would have liked to believe the sanctity of my secret place hadn't been desecrated by another human being. But I couldn't fool myself. The bracelet had been lost since yesterday, its broken clasp evidence of what happened. I was swimming in these very waters, naked except for this single piece of jewelry, as free as any other creature of the sea. I felt the bracelet come loose some fifty yards from shore, but was too slow to react, and it sank into the murky depths below. Forever beyond my reach, I thought.
I felt the tears building behind my eyes. Violently, with all the strength I could find, I threw the offending bracelet far into the cold blue waters. I hadn't really cared when I thought it gone, and now it could only be a memento of what I had lost this day. I felt violated somehow. Is this what rape was like? Or was I over-reacting, as everyone always said I did? Nobody would understand. The girls at the dorm would call me silly if I tried to explain. They couldn't comprehend my loss any more than they could comprehend what this place had meant to me for the past year. Most had grown up with their own rooms, all in their own homes, with their own families. They would never know what it was like in a place like Saint Vincent's. They would never know what it meant to grow up with two hundred brothers and sisters, to live and sleep in rooms designed for dozens of children, to never have any thing or any place to call your very own. No one would ever understand that moving directly from the orphanage into a dormitory at college had felt like having my prison term extended for another four years.
This cove had been my salvation. I could be alone here, but more importantly I could feel like this place belonged to me and to no other. It was the one thing in all of my nineteen years that I never had to share with someone else. I would schedule my classes around my late morning trips to this secluded beach, laying in the black sands while I studied, or swimming in the cold Pacific waters. My sand. My water. My secret place.
But that was over. Ended. Whether I liked it or not, I realized I now shared my secret with another, with someone else who knew the beauty and aloneness of this small, hidden cove. Maybe they had silently watched me swimming yesterday, either from the heights of the cliff or from some far-away boat. Or maybe they came here all the time, just as I did, and we'd somehow missed each other for the past year. It didn't matter. I turned and laid on my stomach, leaning over the edge of the rock and running my hand through the cold waters for what would my last time. Tears ran freely down my checks, dripping into the ocean waves. They became my offering, my contribution to the saltwater tears of the Mother Earth.
Through blurred vision, I saw the bracelet again, slowly rising to the surface. A mirage, I thought, a silent taunt of life's endless cruelties. But then I felt it, the unyielding metal being gently nudged into my outstretched palm. Startled, I jerked my hand back and the bracelet once more disappeared beneath the water's surface. Was I losing my mind? Had my grief destroyed the small vestige of sanity I still maintained? I stared hard into the waters, afraid I would again see the metal trinket floating just beneath the waves and almost equally afraid that I wouldn't. I nearly felt a sense of relief when I saw the bracelet slowly rising to the surface. At least if I was crazy, I thought, it was going to be a consistent kind of crazy.
The bracelet broke the surface and I found myself staring into a pair of eyes, very round and very soft blue. It was a tiny bottle-nosed dolphin, weighing no more than fifty or sixty pounds. A baby. The bracelet was perched at the end of his snout, slowly rising above the waves as he carefully edged forward to set it on the brink of the rock.
"Excuse me," I could almost hear him say in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. "But did you happen to lose this again?" I think I giggled then, a giggle that quickly erupted into a throaty laugh. The dolphin slipped beneath the waves, only to instantly reappear again, standing atop the surface, holding himself aloft with the marvelous power of his flippered tail. He squealed at me, a combination of his own laughter and an obvious invitation to play. Hurriedly slipping from my clothes, I gently slid down the side of the rock and into the cold ocean waters. I felt soft skin brush my leg below the water, then he rose to within inches of my face and squealed at me again. I nodded, knowingly, assuring him he was absolutely right.
I hadn't lost a secret place today. Rather, I had found a secret friend.
Except the bracelet shouldn't be there.
Instinctively, I turned and scanned the trees and rocks surrounding me. The cove was small, not much larger than an Olympic-size swimming pool. There were no more than ten or twelve widely-spaced palm trees to my right, bracketed by a small copse of dense evergreens, the local lehua with their fiery red flowers not yet blossoming. No where for someone to hide. Directly in front of me, separated by a short expanse of ebony sand, the cliff face towered nearly thirty feet into the sky. I could see the path I always used to descend that monolith, really little more than a series of toe-holds. My skinned knees and lacerated hands were constant reminders of the precariousness of that route. But I had never minded the hardship or even the potential danger. I came here every day not because it was easy or convenient, but because it was secluded and secret. This place was mine. At least until now.
Assured I was alone, I sat Indian-fashion on the hard rock, a natural pier that jutted so conveniently into the Pacific Ocean, and tentatively picked up the bracelet. It had been placed near the edge, just inches from the sweet-smelling waters. I briefly considered the possibility it had been washed ashore by some benevolent wave. I would have liked to believe that, would have liked to believe the sanctity of my secret place hadn't been desecrated by another human being. But I couldn't fool myself. The bracelet had been lost since yesterday, its broken clasp evidence of what happened. I was swimming in these very waters, naked except for this single piece of jewelry, as free as any other creature of the sea. I felt the bracelet come loose some fifty yards from shore, but was too slow to react, and it sank into the murky depths below. Forever beyond my reach, I thought.
I felt the tears building behind my eyes. Violently, with all the strength I could find, I threw the offending bracelet far into the cold blue waters. I hadn't really cared when I thought it gone, and now it could only be a memento of what I had lost this day. I felt violated somehow. Is this what rape was like? Or was I over-reacting, as everyone always said I did? Nobody would understand. The girls at the dorm would call me silly if I tried to explain. They couldn't comprehend my loss any more than they could comprehend what this place had meant to me for the past year. Most had grown up with their own rooms, all in their own homes, with their own families. They would never know what it was like in a place like Saint Vincent's. They would never know what it meant to grow up with two hundred brothers and sisters, to live and sleep in rooms designed for dozens of children, to never have any thing or any place to call your very own. No one would ever understand that moving directly from the orphanage into a dormitory at college had felt like having my prison term extended for another four years.
This cove had been my salvation. I could be alone here, but more importantly I could feel like this place belonged to me and to no other. It was the one thing in all of my nineteen years that I never had to share with someone else. I would schedule my classes around my late morning trips to this secluded beach, laying in the black sands while I studied, or swimming in the cold Pacific waters. My sand. My water. My secret place.
But that was over. Ended. Whether I liked it or not, I realized I now shared my secret with another, with someone else who knew the beauty and aloneness of this small, hidden cove. Maybe they had silently watched me swimming yesterday, either from the heights of the cliff or from some far-away boat. Or maybe they came here all the time, just as I did, and we'd somehow missed each other for the past year. It didn't matter. I turned and laid on my stomach, leaning over the edge of the rock and running my hand through the cold waters for what would my last time. Tears ran freely down my checks, dripping into the ocean waves. They became my offering, my contribution to the saltwater tears of the Mother Earth.
Through blurred vision, I saw the bracelet again, slowly rising to the surface. A mirage, I thought, a silent taunt of life's endless cruelties. But then I felt it, the unyielding metal being gently nudged into my outstretched palm. Startled, I jerked my hand back and the bracelet once more disappeared beneath the water's surface. Was I losing my mind? Had my grief destroyed the small vestige of sanity I still maintained? I stared hard into the waters, afraid I would again see the metal trinket floating just beneath the waves and almost equally afraid that I wouldn't. I nearly felt a sense of relief when I saw the bracelet slowly rising to the surface. At least if I was crazy, I thought, it was going to be a consistent kind of crazy.
The bracelet broke the surface and I found myself staring into a pair of eyes, very round and very soft blue. It was a tiny bottle-nosed dolphin, weighing no more than fifty or sixty pounds. A baby. The bracelet was perched at the end of his snout, slowly rising above the waves as he carefully edged forward to set it on the brink of the rock.
"Excuse me," I could almost hear him say in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. "But did you happen to lose this again?" I think I giggled then, a giggle that quickly erupted into a throaty laugh. The dolphin slipped beneath the waves, only to instantly reappear again, standing atop the surface, holding himself aloft with the marvelous power of his flippered tail. He squealed at me, a combination of his own laughter and an obvious invitation to play. Hurriedly slipping from my clothes, I gently slid down the side of the rock and into the cold ocean waters. I felt soft skin brush my leg below the water, then he rose to within inches of my face and squealed at me again. I nodded, knowingly, assuring him he was absolutely right.
I hadn't lost a secret place today. Rather, I had found a secret friend.
Cherry Tree, The by: M.L.Weems, Good Stories for Great Holidays
When George Washington was about six years old, he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet of which, like most little boys, he was extremely fond. He went about chopping everything that came his way.
One day, as he wandered about the garden amusing himself by hacking his mother's pea- sticks, he found a beautiful, young English cherry tree, of which his father was most proud. He tried the edge of his hatchet on the trunk of the tree and barked it so that it died.
Some time after this, his father discovered what had happened to his favorite tree. He came into the house in great anger, and demanded to know who the mischievous person was who had cut away the bark. Nobody could tell him anything about it.
Just then George, with his little hatchet, came into the room.
"George," said his father, "do you know who has killed my beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden? I would not have taken five guineas for it!"
This was a hard question to answer, and for a moment George was staggered by it, but quickly recovering himself he cried: --
"I cannot tell a lie, father, you know I cannot tell a lie! I did cut it with my little hatchet."
The anger died out of his father's face, and taking the boy tenderly in his arms, he said: --
"My son, that you should not be afraid to tell the truth is more to me than a thousand trees! yes, though they were blossomed with silver and had leaves of the purest gold!"
What I learnt from the value!
the value teaches us how to be honest. Integrity always has its reward!
Ways I can practice the value
be honest.
When George Washington was about six years old, he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet of which, like most little boys, he was extremely fond. He went about chopping everything that came his way.
One day, as he wandered about the garden amusing himself by hacking his mother's pea- sticks, he found a beautiful, young English cherry tree, of which his father was most proud. He tried the edge of his hatchet on the trunk of the tree and barked it so that it died.
Some time after this, his father discovered what had happened to his favorite tree. He came into the house in great anger, and demanded to know who the mischievous person was who had cut away the bark. Nobody could tell him anything about it.
Just then George, with his little hatchet, came into the room.
"George," said his father, "do you know who has killed my beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden? I would not have taken five guineas for it!"
This was a hard question to answer, and for a moment George was staggered by it, but quickly recovering himself he cried: --
"I cannot tell a lie, father, you know I cannot tell a lie! I did cut it with my little hatchet."
The anger died out of his father's face, and taking the boy tenderly in his arms, he said: --
"My son, that you should not be afraid to tell the truth is more to me than a thousand trees! yes, though they were blossomed with silver and had leaves of the purest gold!"
What I learnt from the value!
the value teaches us how to be honest. Integrity always has its reward!
Ways I can practice the value
be honest.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Love
Everyone is born with the ability to love.
Love is everlasting and comforting. Love is not about being jelous nor behaving arrogantly.
Love is about tolerance and principle. Love is not about betrayal and selfishness.
Love is like a dream, floating clouds, an illusion.....
Love is everlasting and comforting. Love is not about being jelous nor behaving arrogantly.
Love is about tolerance and principle. Love is not about betrayal and selfishness.
Love is like a dream, floating clouds, an illusion.....
- I will love myself and the others around me
- I will understand and tolerate my love ones.
- I will look after my pet with patience and not flare up suddenlt at it.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Gracious and healthy lifestyle
Presentation of value
Everyone of us is born with graciousness.It depends on us to contiune to be like that or not .Everyone is born with their own internal beauty.therefore we do not need to do intentionally to become better looking on the outside. We need not skip meals in order to lose weight instead, we should maintain a healthy diet and train ourself physically to keep fit.
what each value means
Everyone of us is born with graciousness.It depends on us to contiune to be like that or not .Everyone is born with their own internal beauty.therefore we do not need to do intentionally to become better looking on the outside. We need not skip meals in order to lose weight instead, we should maintain a healthy diet and train ourself physically to keep fit.
what each value means
- I should talk in a gracious manner.
- I should think positively towards life.
- Ishould maintain a healthy diet.
- I should train myself physically to keep fit.
Practicing the value
- I will be more confident in myself while facing challanges.
- I will talk in a gracious manner towards peers,seniorsand elderly.
Maximising potential
Presatation of value
Everybody has their own hidden potentials, awaiting to be discovered.While awaititng,each of us should try our best in what ever we do and maximise the quality of our work and develope our strengths.
Meaning of value
Everybody has their own hidden potentials, awaiting to be discovered.While awaititng,each of us should try our best in what ever we do and maximise the quality of our work and develope our strengths.
Meaning of value
- I will strive hard on my known talents.
- I will set goals both academically and physically and achieve them.
- I will participate in many other programmes to unleash and discover my hidden talents.
Usage of value in daily life
- I will try my very best in my work regardless of the subjects
God-fearing
Presatation of the value
To be a god fearing person,one must be honest,upright.In the state whereby when one see a ghost,he/she is not afraid as he/she knows that they are not guilty of any thing .Similarly,when they happen to see a immortal,you know that you have done nothing wrong,hence nothing will happen to you.
Meaning of value
- I will respect other religions and God even if I am not a Christan or Catholic.
- I will not use His name in vain.
- I believe that God help those who help themselves.
- A leader is one who lead and influence others positively towards success.I will not lead others astray.
Usage of value in daily life
- I will respect other religions and God even if I am not a Christan or Catholic.I believe that everyone is equaland should be treated equally.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)