Christmas and New Year Greetings

by Kevin Cullinane, 2005 JCI President


From Cobh, County Cork, Ireland, I send warmest Christmas and New Year greetings to every Member of the JCI family and to all JCI's friends, right around the world.

Christmas is a time when we are reminded of the human capacity for goodness, kindness and gentleness. Bethlehem's message to the world two thousand years ago remains as simple, powerful and relevant today as it was then. Humanity flourishes where there is love. Chaos flourishes where love is absent.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it well when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He said, "We will never learn how to live together in peace by killing each others' children." Let us hope and pray that each day of 2005 will be used to build peace and friendship between nations, peoples and faiths and that more and more people will commit to the vocation of peacemaker whether in the home, the street, the schoolyard, the workplace or in the world of regional and global politics.

We are blessed to have so many dedicated bridge builders in our organization. Their work has laid the foundations for a future of mutual respect and partnership in place of fear and conflict. Our story brings hope to many other parts of the world still waiting for peace, still waiting for peacemakers.

We are very proud that many members of our JCI family are to be found offering help and hope in distant lands where lives are blighted by war, poverty, corruption, neglect and natural disasters, such as the devastating tsunamis in Asia. They will spend Christmas far from home and far from comfort doing what they can to change lives for the better.

Following the tragic events in Asia over the Christmas holidays, I believe we have a duty to take action on a global scale to help our trouble-stricken brothers and sisters in Asia. JCI Secretary General Edson A. Kodama has mobilized the team at the JCI World Headquarters to launch the JCI Operation Hope project today, January 1, 2005. The main objective of this project is to encourage Members worldwide to take immediate action to alleviate the suffering in Asia. I count on your support and leadership at this important juncture.

Additionally, around the global village, there are many men, women and children within our communities who want to make good, new lives among us but who will also be feeling lonely and in need of a friend this Christmas. It is a time of year when our volunteers come into their own, stretching themselves and their resources to bring a bit of comfort and joy to vulnerable families, to the elderly, the homeless, the sick, the unemployed and to all our overlooked and forgotten brothers and sisters. They are surely entitled to our gratitude and encouragement for their selfless dedication.

May each one of us both give and receive the great gift of unselfish love this Christmas and, despite the many ups and downs we face as individuals or as communities, may this be a time of deep, transcendent love in every heart.

I wish God's blessing on our JCI family and friends and a peaceful Christmas and prosperous New Year to you all.




Kevin Cullinane
2005 JCI President

Live with Passion

By Fernando Sánchez-Arias*

“Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.”
— Henri Frederic Amiel

A year has begun, a portion of time in our lives, only one part of our existence. Time, space, energy… it all comes together before us.

There are several ways we can choose to deal with what is beginning today: we can see it as just another year and repeat what we have always done. We can work and live in the same way and be swept along through inertia. We can also wait for others around us to make decisions about what we will do and how we will do it. We can see our challenges as impossible and take refuge in resignation, placidly indifferent.

Or we can chose another route: we can sit down and make a list of each achievement we hope to see by the end of this year, our priorities for success, what we hope to do and accomplish. We can place that list in our closet, wallet, computer or any other place where we can see the list on a daily basis. We can consider this year as the last of our lives and live it to the full, doing everything we can so that, along with those around us (family members, colleagues, friends and neighbors), we can achieve every one of our objectives. We can chose to be ambitious and see this year as the perfect time and opportunity for demonstrating our intelligence, generating surprising results for ourselves and for those who need our talent.

You choose the route to take; it’s your decision. Therefore, I invite you to begin a journey full of excellence towards our success in 2004. I am convinced that the latter route is the one that will make your family, your company, your JCI chapter and your community proud of you, of what you are and what you do. This latter route is the route of living with passion. It is the route of putting all our emotion and enthusiasm into each task we undertake, whether great or small.

I agree with Henri Frederic Amiel when he asserted that without passion we are mere entities waiting for something to happen that will move us along. But we are the young men and women who are creating the future today, young people who are leaders and entrepreneurs in action, world citizens who meet together, learn and grow in order to proactively bring about changes in our communities. And when we take this role we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of living without passion, of learning without passion, of acting without passion, of educating without passion, of managing without passion, of leading without passion.

This year we will confront challenges of diverse complexity, such as increasing our membership; lining up the new corporate identity worldwide; gaining prestigious corporate sponsors; successfully re-launching our JCI University; strengthening our strategic alliances with the UN, ICC, AIESEC, World Chambers Association and the European Council; generating results for our new partners, FranklinCovey and ASTD; and capitalizing on the best practices of our national chapters in the areas of technology, administration and operations, in order to multiply the excellence.

These challenges can only be dealt with successfully if we take advantage of our wealth of individual talents, diversity, experience and capacity for teamwork to achieve unified objectives within our chapters within our national chambers and within the entire JCI.

Living with passion only makes sense if we have a common purpose and if that purpose has a direct impact on the lives of our individual members, those young leaders and entrepreneurs who increasingly need our inspiration, motivation, guidance and support in order to be successful in an extremely demanding and changing world.

To act without passion is to live in inertia. To become passionate towards no purpose is primitive. To have a purpose and to lack the passion to accomplish it is one of the greatest frustrations.

Let’s make 2004 a year of successes and satisfactions for ourselves, our members and our associates. During this year, let’s live each moment with a clear view of our purpose, nourishing it with passion and giving it life through action!

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(*) Fernando Sánchez Arias is the 59th World President of JCI, a worldwide federation of young leaders and entrepreneurs founded in 1944. It currently has over 200,000 active members and more than one million graduates, in over 100 countries and 6,000 communities. Mr. Sánchez Arias has been president of his own international consulting firm for 14 years. He is a business learning facilitator, executive coach and conference speaker and can be contacted via e-mail at fsanchez@jci.cc or by visiting our web site at www.jci.cc.