10 Greatest Self-Made Men in Philippine History (Part 2 of 2)">

Yester­day, we had num­bers 10–7 of the our list of The 10 Great­est Self-Made Men in Philip­pine His­tory.

They are:
10) Pres­i­dent Ramon Magsaysay
9) Sen­a­tor Ninoy Aquino
8) Pres­i­dent Fer­di­nand Mar­cos
7) Sen­a­tor Manny Villar

While #s 10–7 are lumi­nar­ies of the polit­i­cal world, the rest of the list come from another sphere. We con­tinue with the rest of the Top 10…

10 Greatest Self-Made Men in Philippine History (Part 1 of 2)">

This piece was inspired by The Art of Man­li­ness arti­cle on The Great­est Self Made Men in Amer­i­can His­tory.

While I have attempted some sem­blance of order in list­ing down the 10 men; I have found the list grow. There are other nota­bles and men wor­thy of men­tion, but in the inter­est of whit­tling down the list to just ten men, I have decided to let go of some other really good can­di­dates and focus on these instead. This is a “live” list and by men­tion­ing these ten, I do not endorse them in any way (the ones alive and still in pol­i­tics any­way). May this be the begin­ning of a dis­cus­sion on who ought to be there and who should not be part of the list. Give me your com­ments below. I’m sure you have your own strong opin­ions about them.

This is from a Time Mag­a­zine arti­cle cel­e­brat­ing Nel­son Mandela’s 90^th birth­day. I have high­lighted and sum­ma­rized the arti­cle for quick read­ing. To read the orig­i­nal, click here:

http://​www​.time​.com/​t​i​m​e​/​w​o​r​l​d​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​0​,​8​5​9​9​,​1​8​2​1​4​6​7​,​0​0​.​h​t​m​l​?​i​m​w=Y

Nel­son Mandela’s real first name is Rolih­lahla, whose mean­ing is “trou­ble­maker”.
As he cel­e­brates his 90^th birth­day next week, Nel­son Man­dela has made enough trou­ble for sev­eral life­times. He lib­er­ated a coun­try from a sys­tem of vio­lent prej­u­dice and helped unite white and black, oppres­sor and oppressed, in a way that had never been done before.

I’ve always thought of what you are about to read as Madiba’s Rules (Madiba, his clan name, is what every­one close to him calls him). They are mostly prac­ti­cal. Many of them stem directly from his per­sonal expe­ri­ence. All of them are cal­i­brated to cause the best kind of trou­ble: the trou­ble that forces us to ask how we can make the world a bet­ter place.

I didn’t want to leave the high of the US Elec­tions with­out even dis­cussing the lessons we can learn from it. I read sev­eral arti­cles on the just con­cluded US Elec­tions and one of the com­mon threads is that President-elect Bar­rack Obama ran one of the best elec­tion cam­paigns in history.

When I saw this speech for the first time, a thought came to me: this is his­tory being made right before my eyes.

This is one part of Bar­rack Obama’s accep­tance speech at the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion for Pres­i­dent. This is clas­sic Obama: clear, strong, hope­ful, aspi­ra­tional. It builds in crescendo and tugs at your guts. Yes, it is more sym­phony than speech as David Ger­gen said on CNN.