Meeting Joel Weldon in 1980, Scottsdale, Arizona


Something that changed my life, back when I was 22 years old, was meeting the motivational speaker Joel Weldon. I know that he's touched many lives, and I'm just one of them, but I thought that maybe you would like to hear about it. Let's time-travel back to 1980 and go to Scottsdale, Arizona.

Well, actually, we need to start at Phoenix College, which is on Thomas Road and 15th Avenue, because that's where I saw a "help wanted" ad on the job board. It was to draw some cartoons, which is what I had been looking for.

Among the many things that I had never heard of before at age 22 was a "motivational speaker". Yes, of course I know all about them now, but at the time it made no sense to me. Motivational speakers have always been around, and still are, and mostly they give the type of advice that salespeople need. But I found out that it ran much deeper.

At the time, Joel was using an overhead projector to show cartoons while he spoke. He had been using "clip art", but had decided that he would prefer to have original cartoons made up just for him. The cartoons were really just background images, which changed often throughout his speeches, so he had a need for a lot of them, which I was glad to do.

I mostly worked with his staff, but I distinctly remember meeting Joel. And I was genuinely puzzled by what he did. He had, and still has, a "larger than life" persona, and while he wasn't a particularly big man, he seemed to fill up the room. I had never met a celebrity before, but I had the sense that I was meeting one then. Over the years every time I had occasion to meet him he always impressed me, the way that I would imagine meeting Elvis in real life would be. 

Anyway, his business card, which is at the top of this post, was a can that said, "Success Comes in Cans, not in cannots". And he wasn't kidding, you could tell that he really felt it, believed it, and wanted to share it. It wasn't just for salespeople, it was for anyone who, like me, was stumbling in a complicated world, and wanted to find the strength to forge ahead.

At 22, of course, I imagined success to be financial. As I got older I discovered that success is much more than that, it's fulfillment, and happiness. When I turned 38, and got in front of a college class for the first time in my life, I imagined that I was Joel Weldon. I became successful at being a teacher not by being rich, but by seeing other people achieve their dreams.

Joel never claimed to be presenting material that he had just thought up himself. He gave credit where credit was due, and I liked that. I give a lot of credit to my success to Joel, and hopefully I've passed enough motivation along that it will continue on and on. That makes me happy, and that's success.

Thank you, Joel!

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more