In Harvard Business School’s current graduating class, the New York Times reported that about one in five of its members penned their signatures on “The M.B.A. Oath,” which the Times stated is “a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to ‘serve the greater good.’ ” Unfortunately, the reporter who wrote the story missed the bigger issue: Almost 80% of the graduating class did not “The M.B.A. Oath.”

I would much rather have learned why the majority did not sign it than why the minority did.

If you don’t believe in miracles, this story might convert you. It appeared in the May 10 issue of the New York Times on its obituary page.

The deceased was Marsha Mason, who died at 71 in her sleep. Nothing unusual there.

However, since she was about 11, Mason’s home was an iron cylinder as long as Wilt Chamberlain and similar in weight to a full-grown tiger: an iron lung.

Paralyzed from polio in 1948, doctors gave her no more than a year to live. But not only did she survive the first year, she lived for more than 50 years despite her immobility.

Fifty years despite not being able to move a muscle; however, she never let her disability prevent her from living to the best of her ability. She gave dinner parties and loved to socialize with the people who visited her.

What was the secret to her longevity? The Times article said Mason credited it to the fact that it was “because she was endlessly curious and there was so much to learn.”

In 1960, she graduated from Wake Forest College with a bachelor’s degree in English. She ranked #1 in her graduating class.

She also loved to write. She wrote articles for a local newspaper by  dictating them to her mother. And when a voice-activated computer became available to her, she wrote a memoir, Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung, which is listed on amazon.com.

Her life can teach us all an important lesson: Whatever your circumstances, don’t resist them. Be fully open to them. And find a passion that makes you look forward to every new day.

Next time I feel sorry for myself, I’m going to think of Marsha Mason, a truly amazing woman.

Sometimes, I read a work and wonder why it’s considered a poem. One such work is James Tate’s It Happens Like This. I invite you to read it (You can read it here.) and then vote in the poll below.

It amazes me when this in day and age any well-known publisher allows instructionally-deficient sentences to grace one of its book’s pages. Even one such sentence is too many.

While reading today the book Value Investing for Dummies, this sentence stopped me in my tracks: “Working capital is the asset base that recirculates through the business as cash, receivables, and inventory and is used to acquire raw materials and to produce and sell products” (p. 34).

So what is working capital?

It’s something that recirculates as cash, among other things. But that doesn’t reveal what it is. This is a form of mystery writing that’s not in a mystery.

A prime cause of the confusion is the verb recirculates.

Unfortunately, neither the online versions of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary nor the American Heritage Dictionary contained the word “recirculate.” However, I did find the word “circulate” in The Free Dictionary. Here are its four definitions:

1. To move in or flow through a circle or circuit: blood circulating through the body.

2. To move around, as from person to person or place to place: a guest circulating at a party.

3. To move about or flow freely, as air.

4. To spread widely among persons or places; disseminate: Gossip tends to circulate quickly.

Ignoring the fact that recirculate means to “circulate again,” none of The Free Dictionary’s four definitions match how the term was being used in Value Investing for Dummies.

If I were the person who edited that sentence, I would have asked the writer, “What are you trying to say in the sentence?”

Too much is left unsaid.

Uncovering what was unsaid and discovering what a writer really meant to say are prime responsibilities of an editor. Apparently, with regard to the sentence quoted earlier in this post, whoever edited it didn’t finish the job.