Some will love you and some will teach you. But the ones who are truly important are the ones who bring out the best in you. May everyone you meet be a blessing to you and may the role they play in your life help you grow to be your very best self.

For most of my childhood, I had a weekend job that never paid a dime. But there were far greater benefits to compensate for the lack of money I earned. In the small town where I grew up, my mother was "The Avon Lady."

My brother, Winston, and I were her helpers. She would have been up for hours already when she roused us from our beds on Saturday mornings. Our favorite cheese and eggs breakfast would be waiting in the kitchen and the cardboard boxes — holding white paper sacks with her customers' names and amounts owed handwritten on the front — were sitting at the front door.

My mother ran her tiny home-based business with the precision of a Fortune 500 company. In another time and place, I believe she could have been a Marissa Mayer, a Meg Whitman or any of the other top female CEOs. Certainly, had she been someplace other than Hogansville, Ga., in the 1960s, she might have risen higher in the Avon Corporation than a door-to-door sales representative working on a small commission.

But my mother loved what she did. And she was great at it. She won just about every award there was for Avon representatives at the time. She had a cabinet full of ruby red Cape Cod glassware, commemorative crystal bowls and other top sales awards to show for it. With her 5-foot frame barely peering over the steering wheel of her 1964 red and white Ford Falcon, she would make her way through...READ MORE

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