The Best Advice I Ever Got

I was reading an article today in the May 12, 2008 issue of Fortune Magazine.  It was titled, The Best Advice I Ever Got.  The tagline says this, “From tech (Larry Page) to Wall Street (Peter G. Peterson) to the military (David Petraeus) to entertainment (Tina Fey), 19 accomplished people tell Fortune about ‘The Best Advice I Ever Got.’” 

The article was somewhat interesting to me, but what really struck me was that 8 of the 19 people credited their Dad with the best advice they had received.  In this small sampling of highly motivated and highly successful people, nearly half of them received life changing (or life shaping) advice from their Dads.  That was really what caught my attention.  That just shows the value of Dads.

I am always talking about how important Dads are, and I even spend considerable time compiling statistics to put on the main Dadsworld.com webpage.  All in an effort to get the public to recognize how valuable our Dads are, and how valuable we are AS Dads.  This article in Fortune magazine confirms what I’ve been saying.  Dads matter. 

The people they interviewed for this piece were: 1- Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City and Founder of Bloomberg LP.  2- Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Google.  3- Mark Hurd, Chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard.  4- Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of Pepsico.  5- Sam Palmisano, Chairman and CEO of IBM.  6- Eddie Lampert, Chairman and CEO of ESL Investments, Chairman of Sears Holdings.  7-  General David Petraeus, Commanding General of The Multinational Force.  8- Thomas S. Murphy, Former CEO of Capital Cities/ ABC.  9- Bob Iger, President and CEO of Walt Disney.  10- Nelson Peltz, CEO of Trian Fund Management.  11- Zhang Xin, Co-Founder and CEO of SOHO China.  12- Charlene Begley, President and CEO of GE Enterprise Solutions.  13- Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist.  14- Peter G. Peterson, Co-founder and Senior Chairman of Blackstone Group.  15- Joanna Shields, President of BEBO.com.  16- Elon Musk, Founder and CEO of Spacex, and Paychex.  17- Tina Fey, Actress, Creator of 30 Rock.  18- U. Mark Schneider, CEO of Fresenius.  19- Tony Robbins, Persformance Coach.

2 of the 5 Women on the list credited their Fathers with the best advice they ever got.

Help us spread the word about involved Dads!  And keep up the great work in guiding and teaching your own kids.  Hopefully someday if they are ever asked about the best advice they have ever received, they will say it came from you.  That’s inspiring.