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How Jimmy Carter Changed Everything

The Outsider’s Guide to Winning: Lessons from Jimmy Carter

Joseph Serwach
Leadership Culture
8 min readJan 2, 2025

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How did Jimmy Carter change everything? It’s not in the conventional way cable news and social media focus on. He showed all his successors how an unknown could challenge Washington and wake up angry voters looking for a real change but those same arguments were used to remove him so he wound up spending just eight percent of his 100 years as chief executive. But we all can learn from his story including his campaign theme: My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President. Image by Wikimedi
How did Jimmy Carter change everything? It’s not in the conventional way cable news and social media focus on. He showed all his successors how an unknown from an unknown place could challenge Washington and wake up angry voters looking for a real change. The same arguments were used to remove him so he wound up spending just eight percent of his 100 years as chief executive. But we all can learn from his story incouding his campaign theme: My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Describe America in one word? Jimmy Carter smiled and said “Searching.”

Searching for something new and better? Or the one? A leader with some celebrity spark?

Searching to understand the secret of Jimmy Carter? His December 29 death makes us reassess the ways he changed America.

We remember him as a loser — yet he showed far more (including all his successors) how they, too, could win the world’s biggest jobs.

The title of his first book made him sound a little like Donald Trump: The first of his 32 bestselling books was titled Why Not the Best? In the book, Carter declared:

I am a Southerner and an American, I am a farmer, an engineer, a father and husband, a Christian, a politician and former governor, a planner, a businessman, a nuclear physicist, a naval officer, a canoeist, and among other things a lover of Bob Dylan’s songs and Dylan Thomas’s poetry.”

One picture — and one map — reveal even more about Jimmy Carter

A map and a photo (below) offer some essential clues of exactly how much Jimmy Carter changed everything.

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Joseph Serwach
Joseph Serwach

Written by Joseph Serwach

Story + Identity = Mission. Leadership Culture, Journalism, Branding Education. Inspiration: Catholic, Polish. https://medium.com/@serwachjoe

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