Twinsight 51: Dream Big and Work Your Dream

 

The Twin Cities lost a great health care leader this summer, and we lost a dear friend: Carl Platou. After recently being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he died at age 88. Carl was a bigger-than-life kind of person who is sorely missed by many.

Steve and I had the privilege of getting to know him and his wife, Sue, in the early 80s—initially when Steve was a health care administration intern in the corporate offices of the Fairview Health System after college. (Carl was the CEO.) Then later Carl and Steve worked together at the University of St. Thomas in the graduate health care management programs.

When we met them, we were a young, newly-married couple living in a one-bedroom garden apartment trying to make our way in the world. I made the big money in the family ($11,000 a year) while Steve was interning and preparing for graduate school. Even though they had literally thousands of friends and many of them in high places, Carl and Sue were so kind and generous to us. Carl took Steve under his wing professionally, as he did for so many, and Carl and Sue included us in their elegant parties, hosted us at their Sanibel  Island, FL, home, showed up at our casual parties, and loved on our girls. We have been unlikely friends.

Carl’s visitation brought back a flood of memories for both Steve and me. Carl was a truly inspiring man. He faced his share of obstacles including parachuting into France on D-day as a demolition expert, and pursuing an ill-fated career in medicine. (He loved to tell of his first pre-med semester during which he earned 3 Ds, an F and an incomplete.) But he dreamed big and worked those dreams to make them come to fruition—particularly at Fairview and the University of Minnesota. Here are some of the qualities that we and others observed in him that made him a high-impact person:

• Positive...always looking for the best in people and circumstances.
• Equanimous...having uncanny emotional stability and calmness under challenging circumstances (a word used in his obituary that I had to look up, and once I did, I agree it's spot on).
• Visionary...continually focused on the future and what could be.
• Warm...making everyone who had the opportunity to get to know him feel that he knew them up close and personal. Because he did.
• Classy...always doing life with a flair, which involved paying attention to the little details in the midst of always having big jobs to do.
• Organized...being a faithful member of the clean desk club and joking that it was the sign of a empty brain.
• Light-hearted...having an endless supply of humorous stories which he told at just the right moment with a twinkle in his eye.
• Determined...removing or circumventing interpersonal roadblocks getting in the way of progress with grace and finesse. 
• Legendary...making a mark by living out his dreams in the face of real life.

We are grateful for his influence in our lives.