Doug’s 50th
Today is the 50th birthday of my good friend Doug Hackney.
I met Doug at the Inc. magazine conference in 2001. October of 2001. We were among the few who were “brave” enough to travel to a conference that soon after September 11th. Over a drink at the end of the conference we talked for an hour and a half not about business, but about life and the state of the world — and five years later we’re still having that conversation.
In thinking about what to get Doug, it occurred to me that Doug doesn’t need a damn thing. (Most of us don’t.) Visit his website at hackneys.com and you’ll see that he and his wife Stephanie are world travelers who actually want fewer things, not more. So I figured for his 50th I would just let him know how much I’ve enjoyed that conversation, and how much I admire his dedication to living his own life the way he wants, and helping people wherever and whenever he can. They call it “exploring the world and meeting its people.”
At the top, you see a photo of Doug from last year in the seat of a Kubota tractor clearing debris from the wreckage of people’s homes in Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Below are Doug, Steph, and a friend, after clearing wreckage for a grandmother and her two granddaughters.
Doug is good people. Happy 50th.
January 16th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
[…] It’s always fascinating to see how you turn up in someone else’s writing. And by “fascinating,” I mean distressing. As a dramatist, I’m entitled to the truth as I create it, and other people’s views (particularly of me) just get in the way of that. Here’s a case in point. Remember my good friend Doug, of “Doug’s Reading List“? Yesterday, a year and a half after the creation of The Reading List, and six weeks after my posting it here, he sent a broadcast email with his version of how the list came to be created: Back when we were planning to go out via sailboat, I asked a well read friend of ours, Lee Wochner, to give me a list of his “take to the desert island” books. I expected him to spend a few minutes banging out his top-of-the-head top ten list and leave it at that. But to Lee, books are the essential currency of our humanness, the primary record of our civilization and any personal list of favorites to be the ultimate opening of the kimono – the baring of the ultimate soul – the absolute and total revelation of who you are as a person. […]