Sometimes people ask me what I do, and I don’t know quite how to answer them.
I am a broadcaster. Yes, but that doesn’t sound right. I am a radio announcer. I am a news reader. I am a commercial producer. I am an interviewer. I am a public speaker. I am a writer. I am ... a businesswoman ... and mankind is my business.
Remember that wonderful moment in Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, “A Christmas Carol,” when Ebenezer Scrooge’s now dead business partner, Jacob Marley, is explaining to Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts? As he lays out the events of the night, Scrooge sees the cumbersome chain Marley is laboring under. Marley explains that the chain was forged from all the many ways he failed humanity. Scrooge tries to defend his old partner by saying, “You were always a good man of business.”
Marley rattles the mammoth chain and bellows, “Mankind was my business!”
Mankind is our business.
If you talk on the radio, mankind is your business. If you are a nurse, mankind is your business. If you are a teacher, a janitor, a manager, a CEO, a police officer, a stock trader or any other profession I can imagine, mankind is your business. The day you forget this is the day your business starts to fail and the day your heart starts to break.
If you are a teacher, a janitor, a manager, a CEO, a police officer, a stock trader or any other profession I can imagine, mankind is your business.
I met a man who taught me this lesson, again, this week while I was at a remote broadcast with my radio partner, Tim Hughes. The man was carrying two boxes of candy. He stood apart from us for a moment while another man, who happened to be a veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, finished what he had to say. After the veteran said his goodbyes, he stepped up shyly, placed a box of candy in front of Tim and one in front of me, then looked at me with eyes that were starting to moisten and said, “Before my wife passed away, listening to the two of you was her favorite thing in the world. She just loved you. Sometimes she’d wake up in so much pain, but somehow hearing you took her mind off of it.” He tried to hide his tears before he finished, “I’ve been trying to find a way to see you and thank you for a long time, and then I heard that you were here, so here I am. Thank you so much for all that you meant to her.”
Somehow we were blessed, in the midst of the breaking news and the traffic-and-weather-together-every-10-minutes-on-the-nines, to express love for that woman. And even more miraculously, somehow she felt it. Love is truly what I feel when I come to work every morning, love and curiosity. I know many people are afraid of the word love. They limit it to its least interesting meaning of romantic love. When I think of love, the love I bring to my job each day, I think of my love for mankind. I think of my love for the people I can’t see who were in the traffic accident we just reported on and their family members. I think of my love for the people in the stories we report on. I think of my love for everyone within the sound of my voice who needs to feel the love of their fellow man (or woman). There is no limit to the love I, or anyone else, can feel. I don’t believe we were born with a finite amount we are allowed to feel or express each day or in a lifetime.
I just know that when I think of what I do for a living, I do not think of myself as a radio announcer, although clearly that is what I do. I get up each morning around 2:30 a.m. to get to the station before 4 a.m. I read and talk with my coworkers as we prepare to start the morning at 5 a.m., but in my heart, the most important thing I do does not depend on the precision with which I share content. It’s that I care about you, whether I ever meet you or not, whether you like me or not, whether you listen or not. That’s just how I see my job, and maybe that’s why I still love it after 30 years. My job is to care about mankind, because mankind is my business.
Amanda Dickson co-hosts Utah’s No. 1 rated morning show, Utah’s Morning News on KSL NewsRadio.