Perhaps the greats do what they do because their crescendo is unfettered by illusions of grandeur, pure and not diluted by greed. In 1957, Warren Buffett purchased a five-bedroom stucco house in Omaha, where he still lives, for $31,500. He has pledged to donate up to 99% of his wealth to charity, for in the end, it all goes back in the box anyway.

Lou Gehrig was a superstar in beloved game of baseball and stricken with ALS in his prime. His farewell speech to the fans has a memorable line, “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”

Finding your crescendo is a gift. Keeping it in tact requires the humility to know that Camelot may not last forever, but with a passion doing what you do, it can last a lifetime.

Living life in crescendo still has its setbacks. Picture your BHAG as riding a bull. Sooner or later, you’re going to get thrown to the ground. As Vince Lombardi says, “It’s not whether you get knocked down–it’s whether you get up.” And the longer you stay down, the harder it will be to get back up.  Hospitals force patients recovering from major surgeries walking the following day in order to get their bodies functioning again. Running from problems doesn’t solve them either.  Certainly it’s prudent to throw in a hand once in a while—the “know when to fold ‘em strategy”, but escaping a problem hardly ever opens the door to bliss. If you live life in crescendo and get thrown down to the ground, here are 5 steps to help you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back in the action once again.

1.  Assess the damages:  Are there things that are broken that need to be addressed (physical and mental?)
2. Reflect on what happened:  Could anything have been done to prevent or minimize your mishap?
3. Dwell on the positives:  What did you learn, and how do you apply it to reboot?
4. Take baby steps:  Don’t get back on your horse and proceed to gallop. Setbacks require healing so slow down to eventually speed up.
5. Enjoy the journey: Once you are refocused and again driven toward your goal, appreciate each day for what you are doing to move you closer to your goal.

Being defeated is a temporary set-back; only by giving up do you make it permanent. As Immanuel Kant says, “Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.” Set your mind on a vision of who you want to be and passionately pursue this purpose.

One of his goals is the exploration of music as a vehicle for the migrations of ideas across a range of cultures throughout the world. In 1998, Mr. Ma established the Silk Road Project to promote the study of the cultural, artistic and intellectual traditions along the ancient Silk Road trade route that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Since the Project’s inception, more than 60 works have been commissioned specifically for the Silk Road Ensemble, which tours annually. At the invitation of the New York City Department of Education, in 2009, the Silk Road Project began a multi-year partnership with cultural and educational organizations to pilot Silk Road Connect, a multidisciplinary middle school engagement program designed to spark a lifelong passion for learning. In Silk Road Connect, visual and aural elements are used alongside the experiences of creating and collaborating, making direct connections to classroom work in subjects such as Social Studies, English Language Arts, the sciences and the arts.

Playing an instrument may have opened the door, living life in crescendo means putting that open door to good use. Mr. Ma has received numerous awards, including the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), the Glenn Gould Prize (1999), the National Medal of the Arts (2001), the Dan David Prize (2006), the Sonning Prize (2006), the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award (2008), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010). Mr. Ma serves as a UN Messenger of Peace and as a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities.

He is also the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant. Maybe this is why he happened to appear on May 4 at the University of Chicago Charter School Woodlawn Campus as a guest and sat in with inner city school kids to perform. This charter school has worked miracles with inner city students, and strives for a 100% placement rate into college. But more likely, Yo-Yo Ma was there because he believes in what he does and lives his life in crescendo.

Dr. Volkow’s work has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic effects of drugs and their addictive properties. Her studies have documented changes in the dopamine system affecting the actions of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, drive, and pleasure and the decline of brain dopamine function with age. She has also made important contributions to the neurobiology of obesity, ADHD, and the behavioral changes that occur with aging.

Dr. Volkow was born in Mexico, attended the Modern American School, and earned her medical degree from the National University of Mexico in Mexico City, where she received the Premio Robins award for best medical student of her generation. Her psychiatric residency was at New York University, where she earned the Laughlin Fellowship Award as one of the 10 Outstanding Psychiatric Residents in the USA.

Dr. Volkow spent most of her professional career at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, where she held several leadership positions including Director of Nuclear Medicine, Chairman of the Medical Department, and Associate Director for Life Sciences. In addition, Dr. Volkow was a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Associate Dean of the Medical School at the State University of New York (SUNY)-Stony Brook.

Dr. Volkow has published over 500 peer-reviewed articles and more than 90 book chapters and non-peer reviewed manuscripts. She has also edited three books on the use of neuroimaging to study mental and addictive disorders. Time magazine recently named her one of the “Top 100 People Who Shape our World” and Newsweek magazine included her as one of 20 people to watch in 2007. She was listed in Washingtonian magazine’s 2009 and 2011 “100 Most Powerful Women” feature, and named “Innovator of the Year” by U.S. News & World Report in 2000.

During her professional career, Dr. Volkow has been the recipient of multiple awards, including her selection for membership in the Institute of Medicine in the National Academy of Sciences and the International Prize from the French Institute of Health and Medical Research for her pioneering work in brain imaging and addiction science.

He went on to explain that any doctor who joins his UIC ophthalmology department needs to understand that one night each week, he orders pizza for his team and they brainstorm into the wee hours on how to achieve his goal.  Dr. Azar assumed the chairmanship of the University of Chicago Circle Campus (UIC) Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences in March 2006, after a highly successful decade on the faculty at Harvard Medical School.  Shortly after arriving at the UIC, he led a surgical team to anchor a plastic cornea to a hole in a donated cornea–the clear, strong surface area that allows light into the eye. This process, called keratoprosthesis, is necessary when standard cornea transplants have failed, causing the implanted cornea to become opaque or invaded by blood vessels. The very first patient, who had lost almost all vision in his left eye after an infection two years ago, found vision restored to 20/50 shortly after the surgery.  But an artificial cornea is still a long way from a total eye plant. Dr. Azar’s burning mission still drives him daily.

In December 16, 2011 Dr. Azar was promoted to the Dean of UIC’s College of Medicine. Despite his on-going medical practice and his business responsibilities as Dean, I’m sure that he still keeps an eye on his life goal to restore vision to those who can’t see. And because he is living his life in crescendo, I’m rooting for him to succeed.

There are hundreds of people in your life who live life in crescendo. Who would you like to nominate as your favorite crescendo hero?  Let me know!

So, what have you been doing lately, John?  A life-long Red Sox fan, John recently wrote “Fanfare for Fenway,” which will be performed by the Boston Pops at park’s 100th anniversary ceremony on Friday night. Every living Red Sox player has been invited to attend the festivities and the game (against — who else? — the Yankees). ESPN recently interviewed Williams to learn about his fandom and latest composition. He mentioned that his mother was born in Boston and loved Fenway Park all of her life. She lived to be 97 and insisted that she lived that long because she wanted to see her Red Sox win the World Series again. Once they finally did it in 2004, she felt she could pass on very happily. (There is HOPE, Chicago Cubs fans.)

Williams told ESPN that Fenway Park is the  “pulsing, pounding heart of Boston. When it’s empty, being in Fenway is like being in a cathedral. You can sense all the great performances that have taken place over the decades and the millions of happy people who have sat in those seats. It’s a very inspiring place.” At eighty years old, John is still highly inspired, and he passes his inspiration on to all of us. I certainly hope that he inherited his mother’s genes. Imagine how much more he can accomplish in seventeen more years of writing great music in crescendo!

With a mother in and out of hospital, and a father who was still heavily addicted to heroin, Liz eventually ended up on the streets. In 1996, just before Christmas, Liz’s mother died. “She was alone when she passed away. We buried her in this service – they donated a pine box. Someone took a black magic marker, they misspelled her name.” Her mother’s death inspired Liz to change her life. She decided go to high school, even though she was still homeless. After many rejections, she opted for an alternative high school – Humanities Preparatory Academy in Chelsea, Manhattan. Liz was beginning high school at a time most teenagers were graduating, but she promised herself to become a straight-A student. Every morning she would rise at dawn and sneak past a room full of homeless people asleep on mattresses. Some chided her, “Why bother,” but Liz was already living her life in crescendo and never missed a day of school.

As she approached high school graduation, teachers took Liz on a school trip to Boston – her first time out of New York. “The last thing we did was go to Harvard Yard, simply because we were supposed to take a picture in front of the John Harvard statue.” Sensing her excitement, a teacher suggested she apply but, with no money, and still homeless – a secret she had kept from everyone at school – Harvard seemed out of reach.

“I knew I needed scholarships,” she says. “Finally, there was one from the New York Times. $12,000 per year–every year of school.” In her application, Liz had to detail what obstacles she had faced in order to achieve academic success. For many of her friends and teachers, it was the first they had heard about her past struggles. “I remember coming in [to school] and the lobby was filled with people. They didn’t know each other. They were people who read the article, got in their cars, drove to the school… ‘Can we help Liz?’”

With a scholarship in hand, Liz started her studies at Harvard. While she was there, she began public speaking – helping people who, like herself, had an almost impossible mountain to climb to succeed in life. As she was finishing her studies, Aids was taking the life of her father. Travelling back to take care of him, Liz says she took some comfort in knowing that her father had died a sober man. “When someone gets sober, it’s almost like meeting them for the first time. Just before he passed away, he wrote me this card. ‘Lizzy, I left my dreams behind a long time ago. But I know now they’re safe with you. Now we’re a family again.’”

Murray’s inspirational story was captured on Lifetime Television’s original film in 2003, Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story, which was nominated for three Emmys. Now she makes her living as a motivational speaker and founder of Manifest Living, a company which offers workshops for people wanting to change their circumstances. She has been featured on ABC News 20/20, Good Morning America, the Today Show, CNN, and featured in The New York Times, as well as numerous other media outlets. She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling Breaking Night, her memoir, which was released in September 2010. She has been awarded the White House Project’s Role Model Award, a Christopher Award as well as being among the first to receive from Oprah Winfrey, the “Chutzpah Award.”

The next time someone tries to dissuade you from your goals of living life in crescendo, do yourself a favor and think of Liz.

In 1960 her mother was appointed Burma’s ambassador to Delhi and took Aung San Suu Kyi with her. Four years later she moved to England to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. There she met her future husband, academic Michael Aris. After stints of living and working in Japan and Bhutan, she settled in the UK to raise their two children, Alexander and Kim. But Burma was never far from her thoughts.

When she travelled back in Rangoon in 1988 to care for her critically ill mother, Burma was in the midst of major political upheaval. Thousands of people were protesting, demanding democratic reform. “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that is going on,” she said in a speech on August 26,1988. Burmese people asked her to lead a revolt against the then-dictator, General Ne Win. Inspired by the non-violent campaigns of U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King and India’s Mahatma Gandhi, she organized rallies and travelled around the country, calling for peaceful democratic reform and free elections. But the demonstrations were brutally suppressed by the army, who seized power in a coup on September 18, 1988. Threat of assassination did not stop her from sending her message to anti-governmental dissidents. A few months later, without charge and without trial, Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest.

The military government held national elections in May 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) Party convincingly won the polls, despite the fact that she herself was under house arrest and disqualified from standing. But the junta refused to hand over control. UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar, as well as human rights activists from around the world, called for her release, but the military refused to acknowledge them, and continued holding imprisonment for more than two years when the Nobel Prize Committee announced that she had received the 1991 Nobel Prize for Peace. The committee chairman, Francis Sejested, called her “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless”.

With $1.3 million-dollar prize money, Aung San Suu Kyi set up a trust fund for Burmese healthcare and education. Economic sanctions and political pressure from the outside world grew too great, and the military released her on July 10, 1995, six years after her arrest. Still, the military would continue to place her for extended periods of time back under house arrest. In a 1997 letter smuggled out from the country, as reported by the Free Burma Coalition, she said:

“The cause of liberty and justice finds sympathetic responses in far reaches of the globe. Thinking and feeling people everywhere, regardless of color or creed, understand the deeply-rooted human need for a meaningful existence…Those fortunate enough to live in societies where they are entitled to full political rights can reach out to help the less fortunate in other parts of our troubled planet. Young women and young men setting forth to leave their mark on the world might wish to cast their eyes beyond their own frontiers to the shadow lands of lost rights… Please use your liberty to promote ours.”

At times she could briefly meet NLD officials and selected diplomats. But mostly, her detention was solitary confinement. In March 1999 the military gave her permission to travel to the UK to see her dying husband but she refused, fearing they would never allow her back into Burma.

What did she do to live life in crescendo while under repeated house arrest? She studied, meditated, worked on her French and Japanese language skills, and relaxed by playing Bach on the piano, all the while patiently focusing on her dream to restore democracy to her country.

The last house arrest ended in November 2010; her son Kim Aris was allowed to visit her for the first time in a decade. The first general election in 20 years was held in 2010, and the NLD won overwhelmingly. Since then, the NLD won by-elections in April 2012. David Cameron became the first UK Prime Minister to visit Burma since 1948.  He met President Thein Sein and said his government had to demonstrate that recent moves to democracy were “irreversible” for the world to remove its sanctions.

Aung San Suu Kyi has peacefully pursued her dream to restore democracy to her country for nearly twenty-four years. Now that her dreams are finally being realized, you can bet that she is living her life in crescendo more than ever.

He left his true mark in golf on the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, where he became the first wheelchair golfer to complete a round at the birthplace of golf. “I am surrounded by the history, not only of the game but of the players that have all walked through this fairway and over the bridge, and the ghosts are close,” he said while recalling the thoughts he had while crossing the bridge. His goal was to break 80: he shot a 79.

About nine months after his round, Reeder realized another dream.  After ESPN interviewed Jack Nicklaus for Reeder’s story, Scott Tolley, vice president of corporate communications for Nicklaus Corporation, arranged for Jack to meet Reeder in a charity golf tournament which was being held near Reeder’s home in the greater Nashville area. After a few moments and cordial introductions, Nicklaus grabbed Reeder’s short clubs.

“Those are my short wedges I hit from my knees,” he told Nicklaus. Then Nicklaus noticed that Reeder was left-handed, and Reeder couldn’t resist a quip: “God didn’t think I had enough handicaps.” The crowd burst into laughter.

Nicklaus’ admiration for Reeder is just a part of his appreciation for all veterans.

“I think anybody who can overcome a handicap is inspirational to me. There are a lot of things that are very special that we have in this country, and a lot of people are very inspirational. I think you look back and say, ‘Hey, that guy really wanted that.’”

No doubt, Mike Reeder wanted to leave his mark. “You can do anything you can set your mind to, and I think that is one example that I will claim. I have shown what a person can do if he puts his mind to it, whether disabled or not. If you have a goal and you strive toward that goal, just the fact of doing it, striving toward it, makes you a better person.”

Challenged Athletes Foundation (CAF) is an organization that supports people with permanent physical disabilities who lead active lifestyles. Nico Marcolongo, a former Marine, is the program manager of Operation Rebound, a division of CAF. “It was the opportunity of a lifetime for him, and I realized that through the sport that he loved he was able to really heal and really have an experience that went beyond just the golf,” Marcolongo said. “It was something that he always dreamed of doing. Our motto is ‘front line to finish line’; it was his finish line.”

Mike has recently written a book about his life experience titled “From Where I Sit”. Mike and his wife Debby currently live in Tennessee and have three children who are very supportive of their dad’s efforts, which include driving awareness for CAF through charity work.  I think Mike Reeder is still living life in crescendo. Do you?

Oscar is one definition of global inspiration. But how did he get his inspiration? Pistorius was born on 22 November 1986 without the fibula, the long, slender bone running along the outside of the leg from below the knee joint and down to the ankle, in each of his legs.

His parents consulted with some of the leading doctors in the world before making the heart-wrenching decision to have his legs amputated below the knee, the thought being that having the amputation done before he had learned to walk would be less traumatic for him and therefore would greatly improve his chances of mobility in later life. Six months later he received his first pair of prosthetic legs and within days he had mastered them.

Supported and encouraged by his family, Oscar lived an active life including water polo and rugby in secondary school. He also played cricket, tennis, took part in triathlons and Olympic club wrestling and was an enthusiastic boxer. In June 2003, he shattered his knee playing rugby for Pretoria Boys High School and feared that his sporting career was over at the age of 16. He took up track running to aid his rehabilitation after a few months in the gym, he entered a school 100 meter race on the prompting of one of his teachers and won in a time of 11.72 seconds–faster than the existing Paralympic world record of 12.20s.

The rest, they say, is history, as Oscar became one of the great paralympians of the world.  He faced opposition by the IAFF (International Association of Athletics Federation) to compete with able-bodied athletes, but ultimately won this battle too, and will hopefully be representing South Africa in the 2012 Olympics.  TIME Magazine recently named Oscar Pistorius to the 2012 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Oscar is living life in crescendo because he believes in what he does, and does what he believes