I’d like to tell you a story. You may have heard it before. It’s about an entrepreneur.

His passion was technology. He spent years struggling and even starving in the early going. The people around him thought him mad for the work he pursued. But he proved them all wrong and in the end achieved unimaginable wealth.

Do you know who it is?

It’s not Bill Gates. He had a garage to work in. He was lucky.

Not Steve Jobs. He had friends’ couches to sleep on. Luxury.

This is the story of William Kamkwamba, a young man from Malawi. His father was a farmer, and thus, William helped in the fields throughout his youth. One year the crops failed and famine struck his country. His family gradually had to reduce their food intake to one meal per day, just a few mouthfuls. They sold off possessions, all money going to feed the family. William had to drop out of school because they lacked the funds – about $80 US – to pay the school fees.

He began hanging out at the library – 3 shelves of random books donated by the US. Among the books he found Using Energy and saw a picture of a windmill. He decided to build one of his own. He used this book for guidance despite the fact that the book wasn’t even in his language.

Using scraps he found in a garbage yard he began to build. The people in his town, the other children, even his family thought he was crazy. He had no local Home Depot. He had to create his own screwdriver and wrenches. He had to build his own generator and circuit breaker and light switches. And he had to build a tower atop which he would place his windmill. And he did. He did all of that.

And he did it all by the age of 14.

The full story is told in his inspiring, tremendous book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. In the meantime you can get a flavor for his wonderful personality from his Daily Show appearance. We should all appreciate that heroes like William exist in this world.

Love is a powerful force. It will drive you to soar and to crash, to elation and to despair, to push forward and to pull back.

It drove Joannie Rochette, the Canadian figure skater whose mother suddenly and unexpectedly died days before the Olympics, to compete to honor her mother and walk away with a bronze medal. It drove Edwin van Calker, the driver of the Dutch 4-man bobsled team, to withdraw from the Olympics, enraging his coach and dashing the Olympic hopes of his teammates.

Joannie is being hailed as a hero, a triumphant athlete who stood tall under tremendous adversity. Edwin is being branded a goat, a coward who has disappointed a nation.

This is unfair. Edwin watched the Georgian luger perish and saw 30 other competitors crash on that same track. He listened to commentators repeatedly expressing the view that this particular track was dangerous. He thought about himself, his wife, his kids, and he decided the competition wasn’t worth the risk.

Have you ever been in a near death experience? Have you ever witnessed a fatal accident?

Many winter sports have inherent dangers. The athletes who compete exhibit bravery every time they take to the snow or ice. Van Calker’s decision took a different kind of bravery.

So who is the real hero?

In their own ways, they are each heroic, for different reasons and for different people. Rochette is a hero to her family and her nation for her performance and achievement under adversity. Van Calker is a hero to his family for coming home to them safe and sound.

Canadians will honor Rochette everywhere she goes. That’s easy for them. How will the Dutch respond to van Calker? Will they lift him up? Will they honor him? Those who do are also heroes.

BTW, regarding yesterday’s post, the Leopard can stand tall, having beaten skiers from such snow producing countries as Sweden, Canada, USA, Switzerland, Russia, Norway, Italy, Finland, and Austria. Congratulations!

My wife didn’t like the closing line of my initial post about the Olympics. So today and tomorrow I will try to make up for my transgression.

Yesterday I read a short article about the “Snow Leopard.” Reminiscent of the Jamaican bobsled team, Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, AKA the Snow Leopard, is Ghana’s only Olympic athlete in Vancouver. Asked what he is trying to achieve he said, “My goal is to try and beat some other countries who have snow.”

His event, the men’s slalom, is scheduled for today at 10 AM Vancouver time. That is TV worth watching. I for one will be routing for the Leopard.

The last two posts have been about everyday heroes – people who saw big problems in areas of safety and child support and worked to overcome them.

The essence of heroism is that you take action. You relentlessly believe you can influence a situation and you take actions based on that belief. But what happens when the influence you want is to tear someone down? What happens if what you really want is revenge?

Companies beware. This can happen too.

This is a cautionary tale for corporations and an inspiration for disgruntled customers. This video has received over 7 million views. United offered compensation once the video went viral, compensation that the musician refused and recommended that they give to charity. He is staying true to his promise to produce three videos about his experience of haggling unsuccessfully with the airline.

True, this experience hasn’t exactly hurt him financially. But before you view this as a quick cash grab, understand that he spent over 9 months trying to resolve this more amicably.

So yes, even vindictiveness can be heroic, especially when it is authentic and tongue in cheek.

Yesterday I wrote about someone I called a hero. I labeled him a hero because he took action to change something important. Armed with an idea he was welcomed by an organization he hadn’t previously known and created something beautiful that appears to be making a real difference.

Yet he also had experience as a director, know-how in movie making. What can you do if all you have is grit and determination?

Karen Silliter had just that. Her two kids were in college and her husband owed her years of unpaid child support, money she desperately needed. Meanwhile, he was living in a wealthy community in another state and had claimed to have no money.

So what did she do? I’ll give you the short story. Her efforts brought her to the DMV, real estate offices, voter registration, the tax office, the county registry of deeds, the Department of Revenue, newspapers, the DA’s office, banks, the courts, her Senator’s office, and more. There were warrants, letters, and faxes. There were dumb blonde routines (her words) and unexpected helpers. There were liens, subpoenas, and flight risks.

In the end she discovered that he had covered his own wealth by starting and running his business under his new wife’s name so he could maintain his unemployed status.

So what did she do then?

She changed the law. With a heroic effort she worked with attorneys and legislators to change the law so that anyone who conspires to help a delinquent parent hide their assets will be liable for the same fines and jail time as the delinquent parent.

They even had a signing ceremony with her, the Senator, and the Governor.

None of us needs any special talents to be heroic. We don’t need superpowers. Just find your grit and determination and that can be enough to take on the world.

If you haven’t seen this, it’s well worth watching. Posted less than a month ago it has well over 1 million views.

The writer/director has no affiliation with the organization that sponsored this video. He doesn’t work for any traffic safety organization.

Daniel Cox simply had an idea and wanted to help. His concept turned out to be a good fit for what this organization wanted to do. This video is the result.

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (for whom my alma mater was named) said, “Most of the things worth doing in this world had been declared impossible before they were done.”

Maybe no one told Daniel that this video was impossible, but he could easily have told himself that he was powerless to do anything about an issue as big as seatbelt use.

Instead, he chose the heroic path.

On Thursday I spoke at the annual planning meeting for the Miami Children’s Hospital (MCH). It was unbelievably moving. Yesterday I wrote about what I learned from from their mascot. Here’s my second day of lessons from MCH.

Lynnette was one of the employees honored at the event. While this is the first time she has been formally recognized by the hospital it is not her first time being recognized. Patient families regularly thank her and write letters to the hospital expressing their appreciation for how Lynnette has helped them through a difficult time. So what is her job?

Nurse? Doctor? Chaplain? Does she run the family care center? Is she the masseuse on staff?

No. Lynnette runs the checkout in the cafeteria. Her job description says her role is to ring up customers’ food and take their money. Provide change. That’s it.

But Lynnette doesn’t see herself as a checkout person. She sees herself as a member of a patient and family care system. Her job is to help families through the most difficult time of their lives. So she does something simple yet extraordinary.

Lynnette smiles and talks to people. When they show up in the cafeteria more than once she asks their names and the name of their child who is a patient at MCH. Then she remembers. The next time she sees them she greets them by name and asks about their child by name.

Lynnette’s cash register isn’t a location for food purchase transactions. It is a transformational space where welled-up emotions are released, where comfort and compassion are delivered, where what could be taken as a small part is turned into a powerful role.

I’ve never felt that I learned as much or took as much away from an event where I was a speaker as I did yesterday. I was in Miami speaking at the annual strategic planning event for the senior executives of the Miami Children’s Hospital, and over the next couple of days I’ll share some of the more poignant lessons.

Let’s start with their mascot, Lance.

Lance is a dachshund. His back legs became paralyzed during a spinal operation he had to have 2 years ago. His owner, Caio, told me that he just decided he had to make something good happen out of this painful situation. So he got what he refers to as Lance’s bicycle. (This Lance’s namesake was also known for riding a bicycle and achieving greatness after suffering a medical crisis.) Then he enrolled in the therapy dog program at MCH. He wanted to show the kids that even if your health issue leaves you less than 100%, you can still do amazing things.

The kids loved him. He became the hit of the therapy dog program. He even became a cartoon complete with his own comic book that Caio hands out to the kids.

Caio told me that some said he should put the dog down instead of have the surgery, that Lance would have a lousy life and it wasn’t worth it to put him through that. They said Lance would be miserable that he couldn’t run around the way he used to.

Then Caio said this:
Dogs don’t think about what they can’t do. They just see what they can do, and they go and do it.

We should all take that lesson from Super Lance.