But America will never again be the picket-fence culture of the fifties. Business, religion, media, politics, values, morality, and even family have all changed. The debate over whether those changes have been good or bad is another book, but what’s most important now is that we realize change has happened and this culture is never going back.
BORN INTO CHANGE
My family has always been a long line of people who hated change. Born in a small mill town in rural North Carolina, I experienced firsthand how people can build an entire life without the slightest variation. For generations, my family all worked at a cotton mill, making sheets and towels. For her entire working life, my aunt worked in what they called the “sheet room,” folding and packaging bedsheets. My uncle worked in the “towel room” doing pretty much the exact same things with towels. The thought of moving to a different position never crossed their minds, and they literally held the same positions from the time they started their jobs after high school until they retired, decades later.
My family loved uniformity. They would eat at the same restaurants, order the same food, attend the same church, and go to the same place every year on vacation. Working at the cotton mill was their existence, and nothing ever changed.
At least until my father was born.
Billy Cooke was a high school football star. A great athlete with an inquisitive nature, after graduation my dad lasted about a week at the mill. On his first day at the job, they gave him a big canvas hamper on wheels and had him push it from department to department, picking up all the irregular sheets and towels.
Pushing that hamper one time around the mill was enough to tell him that life was more than sheets and towels. When the horn went off at the end of the shift, my father headed straight for the United States Marines recruiting office, where he signed up to be a soldier.
He wanted out, and he knew the only way to change his life was to get as far away from the mill as he could.
His family was shocked. World War II had just been declared, and it was certain that after his basic training, my father would be sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. But looking back, I believe the shock came more from his decision to walk away from the mill and its predictable lifestyle than from his joining the Marines. What about the regular paycheck? What about the benefits? No one walks away from life at the mill!
Talk about a jolt. My father joined the Marines, was assigned to the legendary First Marine Division, hit the beaches at Guadalcanal and other hot spots in the Pacific, and became a local hero—sending dispatches from the war back for a column in the community newspaper. Looking back, I imagine the only time he ever had second thoughts about going back to the mill was when he was frantically digging a foxhole under heavy enemy fire.
After the war, he became our first family member to graduate from college. Then he attended seminary, became a voracious reader who had a personal library of more than five thousand volumes, received his PhD in theology, and became a successful pastor who founded and led numerous churches from North Carolina to Oklahoma.
My father learned to love change.
Occasionally I could see the tug of the “mill life” pulling at my dad. For instance, he loved to stay at a tacky, turquoise-colored hotel at the beach every summer, and it took us years to break him of that habit. In his later years, he had a thing for eating at restaurants where they have pictures of the food on the menus. But those little habits were nothing compared to the major life change of breaking from his past, having a vision for a new life, and pursuing that goal to the end.
As a child, watching my father instilled in me a vision for change. My father discovered more direction and purpose for his life than any member of our family had ever done. We were also better off financially, and both my sister and I graduated from college. I followed in my father’s footsteps and earned my PhD and have been a change agent for millions of people through my work in television and the media. No one could have imagined the impact that one single decision my father made to leave the mill would have on his life and the lives of millions of others.
In the same way, you have no idea how making a positive decision to jolt your thinking will impact you, your employees, associates, friends and family, and potentially millions of people you’ve never even met. Like ripples in a pond, a single changed life reverberates in ways you could never dream of and touches lives for generations to come.
Before you continue, make the same decision my father made after his first grueling day on the job at the mill, then standing, sweating in the heat of that small-town military recruiting office. As he signed his name to the bottom of that government form, he realized turning back was not an option.
It was time for a jolt.
WHY JOLT ! ?
You may wonder why I use the term jolt to describe these changes. I use jolt because real change is big. It’s a commitment. To initiate lasting, powerful change in our lives, we need to make a decision and shake up our complacent thinking. It’s about facing the subjects we
