Who Would You Be?

Woody Allen once said, “My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.”

I thought of that line in the midst of a funeral service for a friend whose life had been particularly difficult. Personal relationships had soured, business pursuits always ended unsatisfactorily. The guy just never seemed to catch a break. And as I sat there, listening to a eulogy that was long on rhetoric but short on substance, I wondered if the deceased had ever wondered why his life had gone the way it did, and if he had sometimes wished he were someone else.

And then I thought, if I were someone else, who would I want to be? Would I want to be Bob Bruininks or Dennis Dease—a president of a fine university where I could improve the world by teaching, guiding, and inspiring young people to use their talent to accelerate the accomplishment of our common goals?

There are too many people with too many many wonderful attributes, whose special qualities are so varied that there is no first-place winner.

Would I want to be Peter Brosius, the artistic director of the Children’s Theatre Company, whose special gift enables him to open the minds and the hearts of children of all ages, changing their lives by getting them to think out of the box?

Would I want to be Chuck Denny or Jim Campbell or Dick McFarland, all of whom are unselfishly devoting their retirement years to giving back to the community, volunteering to take on the most challenging civic and social issues in order to build a stronger, more enlightened community for the benefit of future generations?

Would I want to be Dick Schulze, who started with nothing and built one of America’s great retail empires through a combination of innate business brilliance, an absence of arrogance, a willingness to listen to his customers, and the gutsiness and foresight to change with the times?

Would I want to be Arthur Rouner, widely admired and loved builder and minister of one of our community’s important congregations, who, midcareer, answered the call within him and committed the rest of his life to serving God in not-so-comfortable Africa? “Selflessness” is his middle name.

Would I want to be Ralph Strangis or Mike Ciresi or Marianne Short or Tom Crosby or another of the brilliant attorneys in our community, whose adroit intelligence and deep respect for the law has been a major, but frequently unacknowledged, reason for the remarkable success of Minnesota businesses?