Episode #9: Two CEOs Reconnect

It's not a, it's not a policy book.

I really appreciate your saying this, and it's a great conversation to have about how this is applicable to other fields.

I tell the story in the book that one day after church I was chatting with a friend and she asked me to tell her about it.

And like most of people I know, I don't know about you, they're not in my field.

My personal friend groups are not necessarily doing what I do, uh, even though I've got an extended family of friends that do.

And her field was health, um, actually rare diseases.

And she said, "You know, it's always a parent.

It's always a parent who starts something and pushes it farther and faster than anyone else." And then we talked about why that sticks a lot more in health and, and injury and safety related areas than it does in education, and that was really what it, why, why I put it in the book is because it really is at the heart of why I did the book.

There are people every day trying to make fundamental change, and yet we don't talk to them or talk about them as if they're solving the world's problems.

We isolate, our society tends to isolate in a box education.

And we would be running for, you know, and you name the disease.

We're riding bikes for pancreatic cancer.

We're challenging with mothers against drunk driving.

We've create, create incredible laws that have saved millions of lives because of her and the work of people who came after her.

And yet when it comes to education, we're like, "Oh, yes, schools, and we're done, and it seems just easy and someone else is gonna handle it." Well, guess what? Education's about more than what your kids are learning in classroom.

That's important in and of itself.

They have to read, write, spell, learn something about history and civics, something we're missing a lot today.

But more than that, it's the building of community.

It's replaced, in a way, what you and I had, many of us had growing up.

It is our civic life, the world that you could be around where you could walk down the street and everyone knew your name.

If schools don't create communities, children do not thrive, and at the end of the day, education should be the key to helping people flourish.

And how you get from A to Z, no matter what circumstances you're born into, is really at the heart of what our Avengers have done.

These folks, it overcame some really incredible circumstances, and a lot of people would've just given up.

Um, whether it's, you know, again, education Avengers or people like Candy Lightner who started MADD.

Like, what, did, are these people like born with this? Like, what, what sets these people apart? Um, each one of your stories is so unique and different, but there's that, that you, you weave it together that, that these people just did not give up.