The more I read about Wilberforce the more I love and appreciate his work. The book Amazing Grace is loaded with inspiration. This one goes to the top of BTL reading list.
Read it.
Here’s my favorite quote from the book so far…I’ve still got 67 pages to go. This one’s from Romilly, the solicitor-general. This speech, delivered in the House of Commons, brought nearly all who were in the Chamber at the time to tears. The date was February 23, 1807. In the speech Romily contrasts Wilberforce with the French Monarch. As you read the text you might want to substitute your dreams for money, power, and prestige with your big dreams for your family, your neighbor, your community. As you read listen for how Wilberforce kept score and ask yourself how you keep score.
“When I look to the man at the head of the French monarchy, surrounded as he is with the pomp of power and all the price of victory, distributing kingdoms to his family and principalities to his followers, seeming when he sits upon his throne to have reached the summit of human ambition and the pinnacle of earthly happiness – and when I follow that man into his closet or to his bed, and consider the pangs with which his solituted must be tortured and his repose banished, by the recollection of the blood he spilled and the oppressions he commited – and when I compare with these pangs of remorse the feelings which must accompany my honourable friend from this house to his home, after the vote of this night shall have confirmed the object of his humane and unceasing labours; when he retires to the bosom of his happy and delighted family, when he lays himself down on his bed, reflecting on the innumerable voices that will be raised in every quarter of the world to bless him, how much more pure and perfect felicity must he enjoy, in the consciousness of having perserved so many millions of his fellow creatures.”
Every year for 20 straigth Wilberforce had taken a bill that year after year was defeated. In 1807, after twenty unsuccessful attempts, he would finally SCORE.
How do you keep SCORE?
Does your scorecard reflect anything that is NOT a NUMBER?
Why is it so much easier to keep score at the corporation in the company of many than at home in the company of a couple?
Why?
Why?
Why?
BUILT TO LEAD 