" . . . If You Waste That Miracle . . ."

Frank Cross: I get it, you're here to show me my past and I'm supposed to get all dully eyed and mushy. Well forget it pal, you got the wrong guy.

Ghost of Christmas Past: That's exactly what Attila the Hun said. But when he saw his mother, Niagara Falls."

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Ghost of Christmas Past: You left Claire for Frisbee the dog? Frank, let me sum this up for you: you don't know who you are, you don't know what you want, and you don't know what the hell is going on.

Frank: I've made a few mistakes. I gotta live with that. But I do know who I am, I know what I want, and I know what's going on.

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Frank Cross: Same old Claire, still trying to save the world.

Claire Phillips: You still trying to run it?

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Frank: "It's Christmas Eve . . . it's the one night of the year we all act a little nicer. We smile a little easier. We cheer a little more. For a couple hours out of the whole year . . . we are the people that we always hoped we would be. It's a miracle! It's really a sort of a miracle. Because it happens every Christmas Eve. And if you waste that miracle, you're gonna burn for it! I know what I'm talking about . . ."


- Stills and dialogue from the offbeat movie classic Scrooged, 1988.
Based on the book A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (commonly known as A Christmas Carol) by Charles Dickens. The "ghost of a tale" was first published on December 19, 1843.

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"God still wanders among myriads of human hearts, looking for a place to enter, for a place where he can share life and love. But often, he finds no room, for people are unaware that he is really present in the world.

"Christmas is an invitation to find God in the daily love that people show to us, in the small acts of kindness and love that they offer to us without pretension.

"If we become conscious of the wealth of simple, ordinary love in our lives, we become conscious of the gift of God."

- Focus Your Day by Kenneth Grabner
(This book available on Amazon.com)

"Make Fear Fly in Formation" - Bounce

Test pilot Chuck Yeager did it. So did First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. (Or more recently, pop music diva Britany Spears.) "You must do the thing you think you cannot," said Roosevelt, who overcame obstacles with determination. (Yeager broke the sound barrier flying the X-1 with busted-up ribs after a fall from a horse.)

Barry Moltz knows about facing the ups and downs. He is "crazy about business." He's founded and run businesses with a "great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years" - appears regularly on national talk shows, sharing his wealth of experiences in a lively style. Now he's captured the pithy experiences in his book Bounce: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.

Topics shed light on the cyclical nature of work and life - there are highs, there are lows. A bottoming-out is but an opportunity to "make fear fly in formation." Bounce reads like a conversation with a good coach - and it is.

And Moltz knows his stuff. He's been fired. Had to fire people himself. Succeeded. Failed. Founded an angel investor group, an angel fund, and is a former advisor to the Board of the Angel Capital Education Foundation. He now is a business consultant, author, acclaimed speaker. (He's even appeared as a speaker avatar on virtual reality site Second Life.

As Moltz says, "of all the wild places I have been in the world, from New York to New Zealand, there is never a ride that can compare to the one business can provide."

CNBC Talk show host Donny Deutsch and Barry Moltz.


Yeager photo from the Academy of Achievement, which also features an interview about the day he flew through the sound barrier.