George B. Leonard

                           Look Magazine

Last week my Defying Gravity, Too co-author Larry Portzline and I spent several days editing 15 inspiring stories of men who are pursuing encore careers.  (I can't wait to get this book in the marketplace so people can read them.)

One midlife-change artist whose whose story won't appear in the book, but whose influence is felt throughout, is George Leonard (see above), who died two weeks ago at the age of 86.  Transitioning in his 40’s from being an editor at Look magazine to what has been called the Esalen’s Institute’s “third founder,” Leonard became a voice of Sixties counterculture, helping to coin the term “human potential movement” and emerging as one of its early promoters.

Leonard believed, as I do, that our human abilities are expandable and that our potential is inextricably bound to social justice.  Today, of course, is Martin Luther King Day, and I write this with the hope that all of us who long to fulfill our own potential do whatever we can to foster a world in which people everywhere have the freedom and opportunity to fulfill theirs.