Thomas Sowell was born poor in North Carolina in 1930, but moved north at the age of 9 with his mother to live with relatives in New York City. Luckily, Eddie, a family friend of about the same age, decided to help the inexperienced southern boy.
As Sowell told Tunku Varadarajan of The Wall Street Journal, I was assigned to a junior high school in a really bad part of Harlem, and Eddie told me, You dont have to go there. You can ask to be sent to a different school. Thats what hed done. And then I followed him to Stuyvesant-a selective high school for smart kids. He led me. If you take Eddie out of my life, theres virtually no way I could have followed the path that I did.
Sowell, a Korean War marine, went on from there to earn degrees at Harvard and Columbia, as well as a doctorate from The University of Chicago. He is an award-winning economist, philosopher and author who is now regarded as an American sage. And it was Eddie who led Sowell to the major turning point of his life.
Significant turning points are events which will affect an individuals future life. They may be the result of an unexpected outside occurrence, the example of a favorite teacher, guidance from a mentor, or a persons own aha moment. Even simple things-such as a casual comment from someone at the right time-may turn out to be pivotal.
ABC News once reported that Laura Bushs ultimatum to her husband, Its either Jim Beam or me, was the turning point when George W. Bush went from the spoiled and heavy-drinking scion of a famous political family to the self-made man who would ascend to the presidency. That wasnt really the way it happened, Mrs. Bush said in her book, but Bush did stop cold turkey after drinking too much on his 40th birthday, and that was the turning point.
My own turning point occurred when I was fourteen. I came home one day from my paper route to discover a strangers car in our driveway and the stranger himself talking to my mother in our living room. He was offering, if I could pass the tests, a full-expense-paid academic scholarship to a prep school in a city five hundred miles away. My parents were undecided, so they let me make the decision. I said yes. To a kid, the opportunity sounded like a great adventure. It turned out to be a quick way, and a difficult one, to grow up, but I got a great education which also led to a college scholarship. Life for me would have been very different without that strangers visit.
While some life-changing turning points are obvious when they occur, others may not be fully understood until years later. Not all are positive, of course, but we have it within ourselves, if we choose, to de-emphasize those which might affect us negatively.
Your responsibility is to recognize those events-those positive turning points-when they arise, and then to take full advantage of them.
Jack Goodhue, management coach, may be contacted at goodhue@aol.com.