There is no question that we are off to an excellent start! The
ebullient mood of last Monday continued through this meeting,
buoyantly held by Dave Stewart’s unique style of chairing, and
Jill McCormick’s ability to set up the Table Topic speakers for
success. We do ‘walk’ our motto’s ‘talk’: Learning through fun
and friendship.
The Highlights for me were the quality of performances by
everyone this night, the mix of interesting information, and the
Induction of a new member who filled in her Application Form at
her very first meeting!
Dave and Omar Hung ran some interesting statistics by us:
In the ‘trivia column’, Dave’s interesting opening remarks about
“The Best of September” theme quoted a random poll that he had
read, which had researched which month people loved the best.
The least popular month was February, and the most popular one
was October. (September, by the way, came in third.)
For the second night in a row, our Inspiration was visual and
memorable. Omar told us about an experiment conducted by
Stanford University to predict a person’s future. Thirty
4-year-old children had a marshmallow put on the table in front
of each of them. They were told that if they could wait for 15
minutes before eating that marshmallow then they would be given
another one. 67% of them couldn’t wait the full 15 minutes! The
study tracked all of the children for the next 10 years and
found that the children who had chosen to wait for a second
marshmallow (looking at the long term gains rather than
immediate gratification) were the most successful in school, in
life, in their thinking skills, and even in their interpersonal
relationships. Of course this study would have to continue for
many more years to effectively determine their longer-term
futures, but the concept is interesting. Maybe those of us who
are “marshmallow resisters”, choosing to improve our lives by
coming to Toastmasters meetings, rather than relaxing at home in
front of the TV on Monday nights, will be more successful in the
future than those who chose the latter?
The other interesting information we heard was in an
enlightening speech by Jim Sinclair, who described the three
basic steps that lead to successful Production Management:
Understand the needs of the business with which you are dealing;
Plan to succeed; and then the bottom line – Get it done (which
basically means that “it degenerates into hard work”). Jim was
applying these steps directly to his work as a Production
Manager, but it could apply just as easily to many of us, so the
audience was with him all the way.
We saw high quality performances by all of the Evaluators and
Table Topic Speakers at this meeting. Congratulations go to The
Ribbon Winners: Kate Elliott for Best Table Topic speech, and
the General Evaluator, Ruth Sol, for the Best Evaluator..
Club 1085
