The White House Financial Literacy Roundtable was held in a small ampitheater type room. It was worn and dated, but the AC worked! It wasn’t that hot outside (mid-70’s) but the humidity was killing this desert girl.
Jay Hein, Head of the Faith-based and Community Initiative called the group to order. We then had a series of highly credentialed speakers, the rock stars of the politicial world. Some were dynamic speakers and some weren’t.
Some random thoughts:
Anna Escobedo Cabral, US Treasurer, is dynamic and inspiring. She’s Latina and is tirelessly championing the understanding of money to everyone, but especially children. She is excited about everything about money. I thought about getting her autograph for my son and then realized I already had it! (Look inside your billfold, you do too)
Using the secret handshake of CPAs, I found a fellow CPA in the group and he became my new best friend. During a lull in the conversations, we pondered whether it would be against the law for her to sign a dollar bill. It is against the law to deface a bill, but her signature is already on it. So, is it against the law? Now you know the kind of things CPAs talk about.
There was a hotly debated bill going before the House and people kept running in and out. I overhead conversations (without even trying!) that I’m not sure if I was supposed to know. But then I guess it’s all public knowledge anyway, so probably it wasn’t that big a deal.
I had a chance to meet Secretary Steve Preston. He’s the brand new head of HUD. Boy, he’s taken over a boatload of trouble. He seems to have really hit the ground running though. He talked about the issues that the House is considering. Everybody knows we have to do something about the housing crisis. But what? Should the government make new types of loans available, buy up foreclosed houses to shore up the economy or give tax credits to people who buy them? They are clear that there are two different problems: a housing crisis and a mortgage crisis. They are related but are two different problems.
If you EVER have the chance to listen to John Hope Bryant somewhere, anywhere, do whatever it takes to get there and take your kids too. You can learn more about him through Operation Hope. He is the most inspirational person I’ve ever listened to. His cause is financial literacy and with hundreds of pointed sound bytes, impeccable delivery that will bring you to your feet and passion that shines through every single human encounter, this man is going places.
My favorite John Hope Bryan quote: “I redefined success as going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” I’m still pondering that. I’m careful about the questions I ask myself. But I’ve never spent time really defining what I mean by my trigger words. “Success” is one of them.
Anybody got any thoughts on that? What are your trigger words? Have you ever consciously defined what you want them to mean?
We followed the approx. 2 hour meeting with a cocktail party in the Indian Treaty room. No Indian treaties were ever signed there. But, it was the site of the first televised press conference.
And that’s when I got the real lessons for the trip. I watched the best networkers in the country, maybe the world, do what they do best – network!
I thought I was good, but I can’t hold a candle to these guys. I’m putting together networking tips for tomorrow’s post.
June 19th, 2008 at 9:32 am
I meant to ask this in the post - anyone know which President held the first ever televised press conference?
June 19th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Awesome! I can’t wait to hear about the networking tips. Your incredible experience is going to have far-reaching effects on all of us.
“I redefined success as going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” Very interesting quote. Accepting failures (which everyone has) is the key to finally achieving success; even with success there are set-backs (failures) along the way. How many people respond by giving up rather than regrouping themselves and continuing on? Those that accept their failures and learn from them ultimately will succeed.
When we started our business 21 years ago we had a great business plan - but we also had knew it wouldn’t be a slam dunk. When my husband’s partnership fell apart we had a 9 month old, a BIG new mortgage, my mother had just moved in with us and we had $10,000 in the bank, period. I had closed my business to be a stay-at-home mom, so we had no outside source of income. We talked about the possibility of failure and what could cause it. We knew it was a possibility and we didn’t hide that fact from ourselves. In retrospect I think it was one of the reasons we did succeed because we were cautious and calculated in the execution of our plan. We had already considered what could cause us to fail, e.g., more business than we could handle. We didn’t have the cash to sustain fast growth so we had to pull back sometimes.
So this quote made perfect sense to me; we lived it.
June 19th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I LOVE that quote. I just now used it with my son. Other thing we just did is buy his name as an URL. I regret never buying my name, but I do have DianeKennedyCPA . com (not live)
June 19th, 2008 at 11:41 am
DianeKennedyCPA.com ….
Hey, get that site live. Link to your websites, Squidoo page, Facebook page, etc. .
What other domains to buy to protect ones reputation? YOUR NAME + .net? What do y’all do? I often buy both the .com domain and .com w. hyphens also, especially if it might be a natural search term (a term people might be entering into a search engine, or typing directly into their browser).
June 19th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Depending on one’s goals or profession the MYNAME.com site could be a more casual site also.
-Bragging parent pictures of the family, pets, kids, links to favorite charities.
-Something that shows one as a full person, that someone might want to do business with.
-Something that shows you as someone a person would like to know, like, and trust.
June 20th, 2008 at 6:15 am
Then I’m on the right track because I have certainly had some failures. Hopefully I have learned from them. But I will never give up. Just keep learning.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I agree with Beta J, get your DianeKennedyCPA.com website up and running! The press release on your White House visit could reference that site - I would suggest a non-business site, just a bio of you, your beliefs, etc. Then from there you could link to taxloopholes.com, etc. But the first contact for people who aren’t familiar with you would be one of just information. Let people get to know you, create credibility and and then let them move on to your other sites that they are curious about. I wouldn’t even offer a freebie or anything on that site (maybe I’m wrong, but I think a very high percentage will move onto one of your other sites - I’d keep this one totally informational about you). Maybe just an RSS feed and keep it up to date with listings of what you’re doing, e.g., June 18th White House Round Table; July 18-19 Seminar in Phoenix, etc., etc.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Oh yes, update your Wikipedia entry with the link as well!
June 27th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Meant to get to this sooner.
I think John F. Kennedy was the first president to hold a televised press conference. Are you going to tell us the answer?