You are now tuning in to Discover Your Potential. So listen, participate, be inspired, know that you can discover your potential. Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here, Anna. Thank you for inviting me. Well, I love talking about my work, of course, and I'm a speech teacher, so therefore I like to speak. Well, my dad was also part of this puzzle. I didn't dedicate it to my father because it was mainly my mother. She bore me when she was on the Mexican border during World War II. She was born in Nogales, Arizona, on the Mexican border, as was my grandmother, my grandfather on my mother's side, and then I was born there just because I had to be because my dad, who was from Kansas, was at war, and my mother's father was a colonel in the army. And so for three years, I didn't see my dad, so I just saw my mom for three years. And then when he came back, he took us to Kansas, and I was raised in Garden City, Kansas, a little town, that my great-grandfather on my father's side actually found it. He was the first county attorney of Finney County, Kansas, and he was an attorney, but he was also a colonel in one of the wars in the 1800s. And so I settled in Garden City, and my granddad, my dad, and my great-granddad were all attorneys in Garden City, Kansas. And so I come from lawyers. I'm coming from a white upper middle-class family in a town that was very mixed and very diverse, ended up being sugar beets, where what we raised in cattle. And so a lot of people would come in from Mexico and now from Asia, and it has been deemed one of the most diverse towns in the United States that gets along really, really well amongst all of their people. So I was never raised with prejudice at all, even though the whites lived here and the blacks lived there and the Mexicans lived there, and we just realized that that's just the way it was, but there was never any difficulty and never any problems, and I was never raised to not like anybody. My mother had the back door open, and my father, the front door opened, anybody who wanted to come in could, and of course, this was before cell phones and telephones. I mean, we had telephones, right? But anyway, it was a little town in Kansas. My mom and dad divorced after 19 years of marriage because of alcoholism. My mother was an alcoholic, and my grandmother was an alcoholic, and I became an alcoholic as well. And I have 45 years of sobriety now, but when I was 37 years old, I said, you know, I've had enough, and my mother's an alcoholic still. My grandmother died of this. I need to stop it because people are telling me that, Bob, you need to stop drinking. So anyway, I did. I went to Alcoholics Anonymous and then wanted to volunteer. So I volunteered for the National Council on Alcoholism. They gave me an award for volunteer of the year because I spent a lot of time in high schools talking to high school students about the evils of drinking. And I still do that. So I walk into my classes now, I teach college, and I say, hi, I'm Bob Hopkins. I'm a recovery and alcoholic. And so let's get started here. And I ask him to write a thousand word memo of who are you and why are you the person that you have become? Because that's what I had to do was to find out why I've become the person that I had become. And of course, I'm a different person today just because of the fact I'm recovering, but I'm talking about it and I'm helping my students understand, stop it, stop it. Don't do it anymore. You've got, there's a better way. Change playmates, change playgrounds. And now I'm telling them, read my book. I like to tell them a whole bunch more things but I don't want to shock them at the very beginning. You know what I mean? I teach communications. And so I asked them a lot of questions about why they do what they do. And of course, this thousand word thing, who are you and why are you the person that you've become? I get a lot of, you know, I think that they really want to tell somebody who they are. And some of them don't know who they are. And they say, I took me a long time to get started on this project because I'm not sure. And yesterday we did a seminar and on purpose. And so purpose is my new thing. Does everybody have a purpose? You know, I retired from a magazine that I produced. I ran nonprofit organizations for 35 years. And I didn't become a teacher only because I didn't want to be paid lower than what teachers should be paid. And so I decided to just go into business. And was I happy? I was, but you know what? When I started teaching 15 years ago, I just realized this is where I needed to be always. And you know, I had to be a teacher if I taught all these nonprofit organizations and I had to teach people how to raise money and how to be a board member and all those kinds of things. So I think I've been a teacher anyway, even though it's not been in a classroom setting, it's been in front of a boardroom or something like that. But I love teaching. And you know what I'm really looking forward to is to see who's going to be in my room tonight. They're all junior college, it's junior college class. So they're, and what's interesting is half of them are international. You know, I'm an adventure person. I am, I just love adventures. You know, I go into a little Mexican town and I want to walk down the alleys. And I want to look in the windows. And I do that. And people say, Bob, you're going to get arrested. And I go, okay, you know, I've never been in jail. And maybe that will be an experience that I need. Right, you know, I've been to five different places because of a student. And my first one was 10 years ago or so, a Chinese boy was in my class. And I said, you know what? I've always heard China is a terrible, terrible place. I was taught that. It's a communist country. It's a dirty country. They treat their people, their women terribly. I've got to go see for myself if this is true. So I asked all these people, do you want to go to China? And nobody said, no, no, no, no, no. And I met this boy in my class. And we, he and I became kind of friends and talking in at least because I do want to talk to people about who they are and why they are the person that they've become. And he has had a sister who's in business in China. So he said, oh, my sister will meet you at the airport. And so then I got online to see if there were any professors at the University of Texas in Arlington who were from China. So I did, they were like 19. So I sent them all an email. And I said, I'm going to Shanghai. Is there anybody here that would like to help me? One professor responded. And he had just happened to be on the same floor I have my office was at the University of Texas in Arlington. So I went around and he and I became friends. And he said, I'm going to be in Shanghai when you're in Shanghai. So I'll just meet you too. And so one thing led to another. And yes, and I went to meet him there and the sister picked me up at the airport and she took me to my hotel and made, got it cheaper than what it was supposed to be because I didn't know any of the language, of course. And then that happened to me with Uganda. That happened to me with Nepal. That happened to me with Mexico. That happened to me with Guatemala. And it's all students in my classes who are from these places. And when I talk to them and say, where are you from? They tell me and I go, I want to go there. Hey, DYP listeners. 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View important disclosures at acorns.com slash dyp. When I was in high school, we had the foreign exchange student in our high school from Argentina. And so he would stay at my family for a year and then ended up being the ambassador to Ireland and then died unfortunately in the early 60s. I mean, when he was early 60 years old, but I've become friends with his wife and his three children. And I haven't been to Argentina yet because they don't live, none of them live there anymore. They all live in the United States, but I'd love to go to Argentina. And there's so many places I haven't been yet that I'm waiting to see who I'm gonna meet tonight. Okay, well in the middle 80s when I started in philanthropy and I started nonprofit organizations, there was a man named Dr. Douglas Lawson. Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago, but I was at his knee in the middle 80s listening to him and everybody was. When he would walk into a room, he would be filled with people on the floor, even trying to get in the room to listen to Dr. Douglas. He wrote a book called Give to Live. And go online everybody and put in Give to Live and then put in more Give to Live because he did a second edition, that's it. Did I send that to you? Yeah, I did. You did. Okay, so anyway, Give to Live is, there's more Give to Live too and that's the one you probably want because he re-gidded and after it was done and it was translated to 50 different languages, et cetera, et cetera. When he died, he left me all the copies of Give to Live because I was his biggest fan of Give to Live and he knows that. Everybody has to read it and it will tell you why you have to be a giver because we are all waiting to be asked to do something for people, but if nobody asks, we're embarrassed to go up to somebody and say, can I help you? And so I tell my students to do a circle of influence. Who are your people in your life? And unfortunately, some of them have seven. They know seven people in their lives. Is there grandma, their grandfather, a couple of aunts and uncles and their parents. I mean, they don't know anybody else's name to put down, but I ask them to write 250 names. And of course, some of them can because they've been raised in families where mom and dad took them everywhere and got them involved in every kind of sports and programs and school things. And you know, people don't really pay any attention to who people are around them anymore. And I always tell people, I say, what's your name? And they say, George. And I go, George who? George who? McKinney. And I say, you need to tell them your name, your full name because people need to know who you are. If they ever want to talk to you again, they're not going to be able to find George. They're going to be able to find George McKinney, maybe from Austin, Texas. And maybe that happens to be such and such and such and such. And I get on Google and I find people and I want to hear all about what Google's got to say about people. And I, you know what, Anna, I think that this purpose has got to have to do with other people. And you know, some people just like horses and just like dogs. And they said, I've got my dog and that's all I need. Well, it isn't all you need. Your dog isn't going to find you a job. Your dog isn't going to take you to the airport. Your dog isn't going to take you to the hospital. The dog's not going to pick up your trash. You know, you need people and people who, Barbara Streisand said, people, people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. And I've seen this to my students, of course, they've never heard of Barbara Streisand. But anyway, I sing the song and I tell them and I start up, it's not what you know, it's who you know. You've got to connect with these people that are connected with you. And your parents should have introduced you to that kind of a world. Because I think that's what parents are supposed to do is to make you socialize and get involved with people because it is people who make things happen for you. So those of you listening here, you want this book, Give to Live, get online and read it or call me and I'll give you a pep talk about how to become, how to become recognized when you walk into a room so that you don't end up being a wallflower and nobody recognizes that you're even in the room. Write my telephone number down and cell me the number. $60 and I'll mail it to you, signed copy and you can trust that I'm gonna do that. At Zell 214-502-0306. This is Cindy Gilman and you're listening to Discover Your Potentials. So until next time, do something nice for yourself but do something nice for someone else.
