The Law of Sacrifice by John C. Maxwell

Author:John C. Maxwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2010-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

STANDING ON OTHERS’ SHOULDERS

There can be no success without sacrifice. Anytime you see success, you can be sure someone made sacrifices to make it possible. And as a leader, if you sacrifice, even if you don’t witness the success, you can be sure that some-one in the future will benefit from what you’ve given.

That was certainly true for Martin Luther King Jr. He did not live to see most of the benefits of his sacrifices, but many others have. One such person was an African American girl born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in 1954. A precocious child, she followed the news of the day, including civil rights struggles. A neighbor recalls that she was “always interested in politics because as a little girl she used to call me and say things like, ‘Did you see what Bull Connor [a racist city commissioner] did today?’ She was just a little girl and she did that all the time. I would have to read the newspaper thoroughly because I wouldn’t know what she was going to talk about.”5

Though she had an interest in current events, her passion was music. Perhaps her attraction to music was inevitable. Her mother and grandmother played piano. She began taking piano lessons from her grand-mother at age three and was recognized as a prodigy. Music consumed her growing up years. Even her given name was inspired by music. Her parents named her Condoleezza, from the musical notation con dolcezza, which means “with sweetness.”

Condoleezza Rice is a product of generations of sacrifice. Her grand-father, John Wesley Rice Jr., the son of slaves, was determined to get an education and, according to Condoleezza Rice, “saved up his cotton for tuition” and attended Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. After graduating, he became a Presbyterian minister. That was no small accomplishment for a black man in the South in the 1920s. He set the course for the family, whose members were determined to become the best that they could be at whatever they did.

Granddaddy Rice passed his love for education down to his son, also named John, who in turn passed it down to Condoleezza. Her mother’s side of the family was equally industrious and focused on education. Coit Blacker, a Stanford professor and friend of Rice, commented, “I don’t know too many American families, period, who can claim that not only are their parents college-educated, but their grandparents are college-educated and all their cousins and aunts and uncles are college-educated.”6

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