Go out and do good

The big news in Salt Lake City tonight was the death of Larry H. Miller. He is a very well known businessman in the area as he owned car dealerships, the Utah Jazz basketball team (and some other sports teams), several movie theaters, restaurants, and stores, and a motor sports raceway. As the news stations were all memorializing him, they talked a lot about his philanthropic work. They kept showing him with one of his frequent quotes in which he said, "Go out and do good until there is too much good in the world." How cool would that be if we all did that?

In other interviews he said a couple of other cool things. In one he said, "I’ve learned that net worth, good health, and happiness are not necessarily connected to one another. " I have no doubt that having lots of money makes life more comfortable, but I've sure heard a lot of rich people talk about what it doesn't provide. And it certainly didn't keep him from dying at a young age. It makes me think about priorities, for sure.

In one other one, he was asked what advice he would give to other businessmen or to his children. I thought his response was interesting. "It took me until I was 50 to realize that my family needed me to be more than a breadwinner. My wife needed me as a companion to help with things with the kids or the house. Once I figured that out and started doing it, I found it was easy, and I wondered why I hadn’t been doing it all along."

I'm pretty sure he wasn't a perfect man. But overall, people's views of him seem to be pretty positive. Perfect or not, I thought he said some pretty good things that we could all take to heart.

Likewise, I am nowhere near perfect, but I can only hope that someday when I die, there will be at least a few people who will speak of me as someone who went about trying to do good in the world. Until then, I'll just keep trying.