Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
The goal was ambitious. Public interest was high. Experts were eager to contribute. Money was readily available. Armed with every ingredient for success Samuel Pierpont Langley set out in the early 1900 to be the first man to pilot an airplane. Highly regarded, he was a senior officer at the Smithsonian Institution, a mathematics professor who also had worked at Harvard, his friends included some of the most powerful men in government and business including Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell. Langley was given 50k $ from the War department and 20k $ from the Smithsonian to fund his project, a tremendous amount of money for the time. He pulled together the best minds of that day, a veritable dream team of talent and know-how. Langley and his team used the finest materials and the press followed them everywhere. People all over the country were riveted to the story, waiting to read that he had achieved his goal. With the team he had gathered and ample resources, his success was guaranteed. Or was it?
A few hundred miles away, Wilbur and Orville Wright were working on their own flying machine. Their passion to fly was so intense that it inspired the enthusiasm and commitment of a dedicated group in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. There was no funding for their venture. No government grants. No high-level connections. Not a single person on the team had an advanced degree or even a college education, not even Wilbur or Orville. But the team banded together in a humble bicycle shop and made their vision real. On December 17, 1903, a small group witnessed a man take flight for the first time in history.
How did the Wright brothers succeed where a better-equipped, better funded and better educated team could not? It wasn’t luck. Both the Wright brothers and Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen scientific minds. They were pursuing exactly the same goal, but only the Wright brothers were able to inspire those around them and truly lead their team to develop a technology that would change the world.
Find Your Why
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