The importance of people who inspire you
This weekend I was catching up with a beloved former client and friend who’s had an incredible career. He started in Wall Street finance, then used his MBA to pivot to impact investing. After working on the ground to build businesses in Africa and then managing a portfolio of impact investments, he’s now helping fund space exploration.
He embodies the kind of leader that inspires me most:
Someone who is holding himself to an ever-higher standard of personal impact. Listening to him explain his rationale behind the choice to dedicate the next era of his career to space exploration made my hair stand on end. As did his description of the next era of human propulsion. After rockets, we will be traveling to Mars on a beam of light.
“The answer is simple: significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions.”
The above quotation is from a letter he sent me after our call. The letter was written by Ernest Stuhlinger, the Associate Director for Science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun from Zambia, in response to her own letter in which she asked, how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on space exploration at a time when so many children were starving on Earth.
If you want to see that letter too, here it is: a dialog between Sister Mary Jucunda and Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger. It is really worth a read. He argues, in 1970, that the space program will fuel innovations that will benefit humanity in unimaginable ways, including helping solve the problem of starving children. And indeed, we can say, nearly 50 years later, he was right. Here is a partial list of innovations that impact our daily lives that resulted from NASA’s work trying to get humans into space.
My friend added, when he sent the link: “I find striking similarities with MLK’s Letter from Birmingham jail.”
I listen to or watch Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” every year on this day. For a while, I had it on high rotation in my iPod: I would listen to it on my daily walks by the lake in Chicago. But I had never read his Letter from Birmingham Jail.
So I read it. And I also discovered a dramatization of the letter that is part of The MBA Art of Leadership course taught by James Fredrickson at Texas McCombs Business School.
I will let you decide if you agree with my friend’s assessment about the similarities.
But let me tell you what inspired me and what inspired me to share these missives with you.
I am inspired that there will always be people in this world committed to a bigger, more beautiful future than the one that can be seen from here.
I am inspired that it is possible to have fierce commitment to a cause but the compassion and empathy to speak kindly and respectfully to people who disagree with you.
I am inspired that there are leaders like my friend, like Sister Mary Jucunda, like Ernest Stuhlinger, and like MLK, who hold themselves to ever higher standards of personal positive impact on our shared humanity.
And I am inspired that you might be someone like them: someone who is “chasing a goal of high challenge” that will motivate you to innovate and help make the world a better place for all of us. Not because there is anything wrong with the present, but because, to quote MLK in that famous letter, “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
Whatever you do to honor Martin Luther King Jr. today, connect with someone who inspires you. The people who inspire you are the laser beams propelling you to reach not just your dreams, but also the dreams of all the inspiring leaders like MLK who’ve come before us whose visions have not yet been realized.
P.S. If you like a cappella music, check out this wonderful composition called “For Martin,” by Judah Adashi, recorded by the Yale Whiffenpoofs at First & Franklin Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, MD on MLK day last year. Give it a listen. It’s beautiful.
