Donald Van de Mark

I'm a newsman.Like all news people, I have a beat -- a territory I cover. Mine is the mega-successful. I've investigated and reported on those who have reached 'the top of the top' in the fields of politics, business, and culture. People like Warren Buffet, Martha Stewart and Bill Bradley. Everybody knows these people's accomplishments. There's no news there. What I do is observe them at length and interview them about how they think and make choices, so I can decipher how their minds and hearts work. From doing hundreds of interviews, I've found many of these newsmakers to be ruthless...

Andrew Weil’s Location Revelation The good among the great, the men and women such as Doctor Andrew Weil, the pioneer of holistic medicine are always open to new experiences because they are alert to their own wants and they embrace opportunities to satisfy those wants.  In the early 1980’s, Weil moved to a majestic Arizona ranch 2500 miles from where he grew up because he listened to his heart and was open to a new experience.  The opportunity to live in this sun-splashed corner of America only presented itself after his car broke down on his way home from doing research...

ABC's Christiane Amanpour spent an hour with five of the best human beings in America talking about tackling some of our most vexing global problems.  There were many things that were striking about this show, how upbeat it was in the face of all our current gloom and doom, how practical and non-combative these accomplished souls are, how Amanpour seemed perplexed again and again by the generosity and responsibility these five feel for others and perhaps most of all -- was the contrast in quality of thought and intention between these leaders and so many of our elected officials. The...

"Gratitude is the heart's memory." --French Proverb "There's always something to be grateful for", so says Rachel Walton, a hospice nurse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  It's a remarkable statement coming from a woman who is around death and grieving all the time.  "Sometimes I think about the fact that I can see. It opens me up. It opens up my vision. I realize all the beauty around me. And when you have that kind of awareness, you start tapping into the heart."  Being appreciative or "tapping into the heart" is another way that exceptional human beings steer and enrich their own...

The best people you'll meet have what Abraham Maslow called, a "democratic character structure."  They appreciate and see the humanity in every human being. Maslow wrote, "Most profound, but also most vague is the hard-to-get-at tendency to give a certain quantum of respect to any human being just because he or she is a human individual."  This is because the best people see into our hearts, they sense with their own hearts who we each are.  And thus they look past or through our superficial differences such as age, sex, race. Abraham Lincoln, the democrat As aware as he was of the...

"Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?"   William Blake In 2005, a newly minted graduate of Dickinson College headed to the ghetto of New Haven, Connecticut. While many of his friends were backpacking through Europe or netting impressive entry salaries on Wall Street, Andrew Ferguson went to teach sixty-eight underprivileged boys in a broken-down trailer. The roof leaked, the walls had holes punched in them, and the building was condemned at the end of Andrew?s first year. ?It should have been condemned my first day.?...

David Brooks nails it with his new book, The Social Animal.  After looking at all the great research going on these days into human behavior, one of his core conclusions is that the emotional connections we make throughout life determine who we are, and who we can become.  Brooks cites several research studies about the importance of student-teacher connection when it comes to student achievement. One comment from a great interview on San Francisco's KQED radio show, "Forum" with Michael Krasny: "I came across one researcher who said that if you want to know who is going to drop out...

The best people I’ve ever interviewed such as Andy Grove, Bill Bradley and Steve Case, all believe in three fundamental truths about everyone’s life:   1. Everything is changing, always (which is why you must look at every day with fresh eyes) 2. Reality always intrudes 3. Every person can have a profound effect on his/her own destiny.    It’s a belief in what poets call the symmetry of our actions, that the chickens do come home to roost, that what goes around does come around, that Karma is real, that there is always a day of reckoning.  Or as the great...

"I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates. Love liberates. It doesn't just hold - that's ego. Love liberates. It doesn't bind. Love says..."I love you. I love you if you're in China. I love you if you're across town. I love you if you're in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I'd like to have your arms around me. I'd like to hear your voice in my ear. But that's not possible now, so I love you. Go." - Maya Angelou...

In the January, 2010 Vanity Fair cover story, Leslie Bennetts describes Meryl Streep as a woman who is vital, expressive and spontaneous – a personality trait that the late great psychologist Abraham Maslow would have recognized as one that the healthiest psyches share.  Bennetts, however, is more interested at first in Streep’s box office clout and the fact that she is rewriting Hollywood’s playbook on how to produce a blockbuster. But the more interesting story isn’t about ticket receipts or even clout.  It’s about personality -- Meryl’s.  This is a 60-year old human being who’s profoundly healthy psychologically. To start, the...