I wasn’t a great student growing up. Like many other school-age boys, school really didn’t interest me much. But in high school I made some new friends who had a deeply positive impact on my life, and in turn, my grades. One of those friends, Bob Furman, remains a close friend to this day (six decades later)!
When I finally started bringing home an A or two, my wonderful mother seized the opportunity to encourage me to keep it up. Her strategy? Reward me with my very own quart of milk for every A I brought home from high school.
Now that might sound ridiculous to some of you, but for Danny boy, growing up in a family with a lot of love but very little money, a big glass of milk was a delicious but rare treat. Well believe me, each time I managed to earn that quart of milk just for me, I would sit at the little kitchen table in our shabby little house and slowly drink the entire quart—savoring every drop!
Thanks in part to those quarts of milk—and in great part to my sweet mother and father and good friends like Bob Furman—I went on to graduate from high school, then college, then grad school, and eventually became a hospital CEO and senior healthcare executive with a very successful career. Today, I could buy an entire warehouse full of milk. And yet, today and most other days, when I go to the refrigerator to pour a glass of milk, I am transported back to around 1960, in our little kitchen, pulling out my hard-earned quart of milk and sitting down at our worn kitchen table to enjoy it.
Every time I relive that beautiful memory, I thank God for the love and wisdom of my mother. And I also marvel at the power and impact of such a small but strategic reward as a quart of milk!
Gifts and rewards, in all areas of life and work, don’t need to be big; they just need to be strategic and deeply valued and appreciated by the recipient!
God bless all of the mothers, fathers, teachers, mentors, employers, and leaders who have blessed our lives by finding and creating ways to reward better, more constructive, and more positive behaviors and habits within those under their care and leadership. We are blessed and live better lives because of them!
