From Chapter 4
An Autobiographical Detour

The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more that child will tend to feel and see his earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. — Carl Jung

Before I get back to the Melwood journey, I'll take another and more personal detour. I promise it will be fairly short.

People sometimes ask how I came to do the work I've done. I guess it has to do with the person I am. A sense of social caring and entrepreneurial drive was forged within me early in life, maybe as early as 1946.

I remember a cool, windy, early morning that year. I was eight years old and furiously peddling my bike down a beach road in Savannah Beach, Georgia, determined to arrive at the blackberry patch before my buddy. The motivation was easy: the first one there got the best berries. It seems like yesterday instead of 60 years ago — bouncing on the handlebars, filling the gallon bucket full of berries, selling the produce to neighbors at 25 cents a coffee can. I remember well the special feeling that comes from earning your own money. It felt good to successfully compete with my best friend, both in the harvesting, marketing and selling. Probably that's the day my entrepreneurial spirit was born, a spirit that remains with me.

Another incident from that year has stayed with me for my whole life. In my third-grade classroom at our three-room Savannah Beach schoolhouse, a fellow student had a moment of great embarrassment. She had to get to the bathroom but she couldn't get the teacher's attention. You can imagine what happened next: she lost control and made a puddle beneath her chair. Naturally, the other students laughed. The moment made me want to hug her and say: "It's all right; we all have experienced such unfortunate moments. Don't worry about the laughter. The other kids mean no harm; it's just what kids do."

From that moment forth, that girl and I were the best of friends. Later in life when I looked back, that story helped me understand my internal makeup. A sensitivity toward people, or what I refer to as social caring, was as much a part of me as entrepreneurship was. It explains why just making money, by itself, never resulted in complete personal satisfaction for me . . . .