Many Builders will tell you that breaking away from the boundaries set in their own minds—despite the realities of their tortured past—was one of their most difficult, necessary, and rewarding achievements.

“De-colonizing your mind is the first step,” said Roberta Jamieson, who became chief of the Six Nations of the Grand River, where she grew up. On her way to college, Jamieson was so appalled by the treatment of indigenous people that she dumped her premed ambitions to instead become the first aboriginal woman in Canada to earn a law degree. She also became one of the first attorneys in Canada to evangelize arbitration over litigation, based on the long history of peaceful dispute resolution known so well in her tribal community. Today, she is CEO of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation in Toronto.

“You must release yourself from the repression of your mind,” she noted. “You are no longer a prisoner. You are not that person. You are a part of a long and great history. You are entitled to make decisions. You have gifts to share that belong to your people. It is your responsibility to share your talents with others. Throw off the shackles that keep you down—stop tearing at yourself and others because you don’t feel good about yourself,” Jamieson demanded.

“When you come into this world, you were given instructions—sort of a toolkit of your talents and special gifts that you are given. Your life’s task is to put those tools to use for the seventh generation. How much purpose and power would you have if you knew your choices would impact your community and country for seven generations?” When Jamieson was asked to become chief, she turned it down twice. She finally accepted the job when it became clear to her that she uniquely contributed to what her people needed. Even so, at the end of her term, she went back to her day job. “The point was to serve when the service demanded it. I’m not the kind of person who wants to be the boss for its own sake.”

Like Norma Hotaling, Jamieson was called to leadership because the cause itself had charisma. The same was true for scientist Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson. She has never quite gotten comfortable with the idea of “leading” an organization, so she simply never looks at it this way.

As a girl, Penny would sneak lizards and snakes into her bedroom, watching them for hours and days, captivated by what the little critters might be thinking. “That was all it took to just completely mesmerize me,” she said, her eyes shining. When she had the opportunity to care for a baby gorilla during graduate school at Stanford, she was thrilled.

“I couldn’t believe my luck. I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was nervous and excited about meeting what I considered the ultimate animal.” She had no idea at the time that this temporary assignment would morph into the next 30 years of her life.

What nobody had counted on was that Patterson would, like a modern day Dr. Doolittle, boldly attempt to teach the gorilla sign language. The scientific community came unglued.

“There were conferences held that were designed to demonstrate that we were frauds,” she sighed. “There were academicians and philosophers who decided that this was an impossible proposition, so something had to be wrong with it.” Teaching an animal to have a human conversation was, needless to say, “Controversial—it changed the world view in a way that is uncomfortable for a lot of people.” The attacks on her credibility were relentless.

“I think it is a blessing that I can dismiss those things so that I can focus on the positive and keep going. That’s not true for all of my colleagues, some of whom can remember all criticism chapter and verse.” But the stakes were too high, in Patterson’s mind, to be seduced into the paralysis of a victim. “It could be a constant barrage that would actually drive you to depression—you could have just given up.”

But she didn’t. For more than three decades now, her passion has put this statuesque blond in a steel cage face-to-face with Koko, a great ape that has grown up to be a 300-pound hairy scholar that does math, paints high-priced masterpieces, “and is able to reveal her thoughts and feelings through the use of 1,000 gestural words.”^[1] You might remember the now famous cover of National Geographic showing a huge gorilla cradling a tiny kitten. That was Koko. She has transformed the world’s perception of what a wild animal can be.

Having to spend 24/7 with Koko has been a lifelong pleasure for Patterson. Asking humans for support—well—that’s been another thing entirely.

“I get hives when I have to do these meetings; psychologically, I am just totally a basket case—I have to ask very wealthy, very important people to support this cause. I have to convince them about what is at stake. I have to go one-on-one and it scares me.”

The only thing that gets her through the queasiness is that she believes her cause has moral authority even when she feels she doesn’t. Patterson hates to ask for money—she can barely stop trembling enough to dial the telephone number. Her voice quivers. But when she gets on the line with a potential sponsor, her heart bursts with charismatic energy:

“It’s one minute before midnight, and then we lose them,” she pleaded. “When the clock strikes 12, our closest cousin to humanity—the gorilla—will be dead and gone forever.” Today, celebrities like Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Robin Williams make the job a bit easier.

The concept of the charismatic leader has been getting bad press lately. The critics may be missing the point. Whether or not you’re shy, humble, outgoing, or assertive is not really the issue. Your personality is not what determines enduring success; it’s what you do with your personality that counts. Whether you have too big or too small of an ego might create all sorts of problems, and we don’t want to let you off the hook for bad behavior. We found that the personalities of Builders come in all sizes. They have all sorts of psychological issues that are better left for description by Dr. Phil. Some are painfully shy and others seem aggressively in-your-face—it just depends on whether or not you happen to care about what they care about. If you happen to be interested, they’re interesting people. If you’re not, some seem obnoxious.

The essential difference with Builders is that they’ve found something to do that matters to them and are therefore so passionately engaged, they rise above the personality baggage that would otherwise hold them down. Whatever they are doing has so much meaning to them that the cause itself provides charisma and they plug into it as if it was electrical current.

Enduringly successful people—whether they’re shrinking violets or swashbuckling entrepreneurs—serve the cause, and it also serves them. It recruits them and they are lifted up by its power. When that happens for you, a bigger, more engaging version of “you” shows up.

Taiwanese-born engineer, Jen-sen Huang, founder and CEO of multibillion-dollar videochip maker, Nvidia, has always been ambitious, but a self-described introvert—until he steps up in front of the computer screen to show you what his team is working on. When he does that, it’s as if he were kneeling before an altar—a shrine to his life’s work. The deep reverence he has for the beauty and grace of what they build is visceral, if not a little odd, to non-techies. His awe for the cause is, in effect, the shrine. His excitement for the mission makes him seem—well—charismatic.

Although soft-spoken Huang maintains he would rather “be home playing with the kids or sitting quietly drinking a glass of wine with my wife,” he no longer shows as strong an urge to run and hide, because he’s talking about his favorite topic. When you put together deep knowledge about a subject that intensely matters to you, charisma happens. You gain courage to share your passion, and when you do that, folks follow. According to Peter Drucker, this makes you a leader.

This is exactly what happened to Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines. It’s not that he wasn’t already a fun engaging guy, but that he unexpectedly found a cause that changed an obscure lawyer’s career into one that transformed an industry. Kelleher was called in as an outside attorney on an assignment to help an entrepreneur start an airline, and the next thing he knew, he had become a co-founder.

What hit him so unexpectedly was a populist passion to cure a perceived injustice—it was simply too expensive for the majority of Americans to fly. Perhaps this might not seem like a moral obligation, but for Kelleher, it felt that way. He was willing to sacrifice a lot to do something about it. He summoned the courage to go from being a capable lawyer with a reputable practice to being an unemployed entrepreneur willing to help others join him deeply in debt, in the name of the cause.

As is often the case when Builders are gripped by the power of what matters to them, Kelleher went from being a pretty good lawyer to an extraordinary leader. He had no idea his passion would help him become one of the most admired CEOs of all time, managing with a wit and self-deprecating humor still rarely seen in a corporate board-room. Nor did he realize his airline would achieve the longest-running history of profitability in an industry known more for bankruptcy than customer service.

What is often forgotten, and you need to know, is that the good-natured Kelleher had to withstand the siege of seemingly endless litigation from competitors just to get his dream off the ground. The day after Southwest’s application was approved by the regulators, Braniff Airways^[2] sued and Southwest lost the lawsuit. Then, Southwest lost again on appeal. Kelleher pleaded with his Board to keep trying and battled his way to the Texas Supreme Court, where he finally prevailed. It took Kelleher five turbulent years to get from the now-famous business-plan-on-a-paper-napkin to Southwest’s first flight.

Imagine yourself bailing out of your nice, safe, well-respected professional job to become the subject of ridicule and litigation by the industry you want to reinvent, and then bleeding red ink for years to accomplish the goal. It happens all the time to pioneers. Kelleher was sustained by his passion for justice—the very reason he had become a lawyer in the first place—as he argued tirelessly not to achieve success, as traditionally defined as power, fame, and riches, but rather to serve a cause that mattered. It was his belief that the cause had charisma, he insists, that made his zealous, “unprecedented, irrational behavior possible.” Braniff Airways has long since been out of business. On the other hand, Southwest is flying high, and the value segment of air travel has been forever redefined in ways that are catching on all over the world.

Popularity was never high on the list for Nadine Strossen. “I’m a lawyer, and I think that the law is a wonderful profession,” said Dr. Strossen, a law professor at New York University. “But if you look at surveys of attitudes of lawyers, especially young lawyers, you see enormous unhappiness, malaise, and lack of excitement at best; real alienation and frustration at worst—whether you’re talking about powerful partners at established Wall Street firms or solo practitioners,” she said.

“The one exception I see is any lawyer in the profession who is somehow involved in using the law degree to advance his or her own conception of justice.” Strossen’s team has “this passionate commitment toward justice. We may have different conceptions of what that is, but we believe in it and therefore derive great joy from using our professional skills to advance it. It’s fun as well as being good work in both senses of the word,” she said.

“Isn’t that why we’re here?” shrugged Strossen, who graduated from Harvard Law School, brimming with hope that her own brand of populist justice could make a difference. “If it’s worth doing, then for heaven’s sake, treat it as if it’s worth doing!” Leadership begins with you as an individual and your ability to improve your performance—to develop your expertise and excellence.^[3]

If there was an attorney you might expect to be angry or unhappy, it would be Strossen. She volunteers to work for free as president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). It’s hard to imagine an organization more under fire from all sides of the political spectrum.

“Clearly, I had to develop a tolerance for unfair criticism, and I found that amazingly easy,” she claimed, “Perhaps because it is an organization that is being attacked rather than me as an individual.” But she admits she is also assailed as an individual, too.

Strossen says she doesn’t have “a thick skin in the sense that I am not insensitive and not open to see if there is at least a kernel of truth in criticism—something constructive that I can learn from it, as an individual or as the leader of my organization. But I do not let it incapacitate me in any way. I see the contrast, for example, with some of the younger employees in the ACLU or some of the less experienced ones who are shocked and really find it personally debilitating, and I have to give them pep talks to bring them along.”

Strossen, who says she would “be willing to pay [the ACLU] to do this job,” confidently reassured her troops. “Don’t take it personally. And you can even see it as a compliment. People wouldn’t see you as such a lightning rod, such a target, unless they saw that you were making headway on your agenda and their agenda is a very different one,” she insisted.

“In some ways, I can say what Ronald Reagan once famously said about a criticism the ACLU had made of one of his policies.” Strossen quoted the president: “He said, ‘I hear the ACLU has criticized me. I [Reagan] wear that criticism like a badge of honor.’ And I would say, well, when his [Reagan’s] attorney general denounced us [the ACLU] as the criminal’s lobby, I wore that as a badge of honor. You have to be an optimist in my line of work—or an idealist—or you could never carry forward. But the wonderful and exciting thing is the empowerment that one feels. The harder you work, the more energized you are by the justice of the cause and the opportunity to really make a difference in the lives of real people,” Strossen said.

“My concept of leadership is not necessarily having a title, but exercising a certain kind of behavior. I use the term [leadership] more to describe what you do, rather than what position you happen to occupy. In other words, there are people who have prestigious titles—including a lot of elected officials—that to me are quintessential followers rather than leaders. They follow the shifting tides of public opinion and adjust their positions on the issue accordingly.

“So, my model always goes back to John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage—people who had the courage of their convictions through thick and thin. I think just about every character or historical figure in that book, at some point or another, was, in fact, voted out of office or denied office precisely because of that quality, which in my view made that person a leader whether or not he continued to be president or in the Senate.”

Builders cling to a personal commitment that’s so compelling to them—something so important to them that they would actually do it for free—that they must do it despite popularity, not because of it, the way Nadine Strossen does.

Condoleezza Rice, like Strossen, lives her life in the crosshairs of public opinion and long ago found herself attracted to issues that moved her so much that she could not avoid them. When you meet both women, it’s clear that their secret to survival and success has always been to go deep—to learn everything they possibly could about anything they deeply cared about.

Life takes “passion, determination, and skill,” Rice cautioned. You can’t skip any of those three and expect to enjoy success built to last.

Neither Rice nor Strossen picked career paths that would make them piles of money, but instead chose another kind of wealth and power: knowledge. If you should be greedy about anything, it should be about acquiring “intellectual capital” for your dream.

When you have “earned” knowledge, as Professor Rice told students during her time at Stanford, you have an ethical responsibility to “invest” that capital—those skills—on making a difference in business or public service.

You could argue that Strossen and Rice have always been bordering on the obsessive—both are over-the-top overachievers who have worshipped their cause as it has drawn them to have extraordinary impact on the world.

Rice never thought it could be done any other way. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, when the Klu Klux Klan was still in business. When she was eight, a fellow schoolmate, Denise McNair, died in an explosion when white supremacists attacked a neighborhood Baptist church. Rice’s parents, her father a minister at Westminster Presbyterian Church and her mother a music teacher, had the resources to insulate her from some of the discrimination she would have faced with lesser means. But Rice says she always assumed that she had to be better prepared as a woman and a minority—to go “twice as deep” to get ahead. Being superficial or taking her passions lightly were never options.

As a child, she was a competitive figure skater and played the flute, violin, and the piano (her favorite). Her mother decided to name her daughter based on an affectionate Italian expression in music composition, Con Dolce or Con Dolcezza, which means to play “with sweetness.” Today, her adversaries in international politics would think that ironic for one of the toughest, most powerful women in the world.

At 15, when her classmates back in Birmingham were finishing up their summer vacations after their freshman year in high school, ambitious Condi was already starting college as a music major at the University of Denver. She soon discovered that she was “good, but not good enough to be great at it,” she said. Rice had wanted to be a virtuoso, not end up as a music teacher helping “13-year-olds murder Beethoven,” she told ABC News. So at 16, the college sophomore went in search of a new major, and the world would never be the same.

It was a time when the Cold War with the Soviet Union cut planet Earth precariously in two. Here comes this brilliant black teenage girl from the Deep South who knew something about a divided world. Whether it was the gulf between her precocious genius and intellects of her peers, the extraordinary poise she exhibited at a relatively tender age compared with older college students, or the issues of color or class back home, Rice knew how wide the chasms were to cross in this nation and this world. She found that an irresistible challenge. She wasn’t welcome in a hat shop in Birmingham, but she could become president of the United States. It was no surprise she decided to train for politics.

Rice happened upon one of the most central inspiring figures in her life when she attended the class of former Czech diplomat, Josef Korbel, who was talking about Stalinist Russia. (Korbel was father to another rising star in government, Madeleine Albright, who became President Clinton’s Secretary of State.) Rice was captivated and dove headfirst into political science and international diplomacy. After getting her master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and her Ph.D. from the University of Denver, she became an assistant professor at Stanford when she was in her twenties.

Word of young, wiry Condi Rice’s extraordinary talent for American and Russian politics got around. Rice’s expertise—her passion for going deep—gave her more authority. President George H. W. Bush selected Rice to advise him on Soviet affairs in 1989, and soon she became his chief advisor for the summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet Union neared its collapse. According to journalist Steve Kettmann, Bush proudly introduced her to Gorbachev, “This is Condoleezza Rice. She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union.”^[4]

Is Condi Rice an admirable public servant and/or a conservative hawk? Is Nadine Strossen an admirable public servant and/or a radical liberal? There are armies of people on either side of those positions. There are some who are uncomfortable seeing both women in the same book, let alone the same sentence. Loved or hated, Rice and Strossen draw enormous power and energy from their respective causes—demanding deep knowledge and commitment from themselves and their teams. That personal connection to meaning has substantially contributed to their ability to have high impact in their careers for a very long time.

One of the best ways to unleash the charisma that Builders feel for a cause, calling, career, or other major objective, is to see whether or not they’re really willing to immerse themselves in it. Opportunity comes from expertise, not just luck, talent, and passion. If you find it impossibly tedious to become an expert about what you think matters to you, then you’re not chasing a dream, you’re just daydreaming. You can’t claim the buried treasure if you aren’t willing to dig for it.

That is not to say that it’s easy, or that you won’t suffer frequently. But if you find you can’t or won’t persist in learning more and more about it, then it’s going to be very tough to hang on when inevitable obstacles get thrown in your way. This isn’t earth-shattering news. We heard this from everyone—being your best at what you do is essential to success built to last.

Former biotechnology entrepreneur, Ed Penhoet, now head of one of the world’s largest foundations, thinks that your willingness to become great at what you do—for its own sake—is a key to success. After all, if you find it’s impossible to go deep, then you’ve found out something valuable, too—you shouldn’t be doing it, he said.

“I’m a big believer in fortune cookies,” Penhoet grinned. “When I was a professor at Berkeley, I once got one that said, ‘Whatever you are, be a good one.’ And to me that’s the only business advice I can give anybody. When you are good at one thing, doors open up in front of you. People want to work with you, so people provide opportunities to you. You don’t have to go looking for them. Usually, they come to find you,” he said.

“Success is always built on doing well the job that’s in front of you today, not being resentful that you don’t have a CEO job yet,” Penhoet said. “In fact, it’s an amazing phenomenon. I see it in MBAs in particular. They all think because they have an MBA, they ought to be at least a senior vice president (by) the next week. But what they need to do is prove that they can actually do something well,” Penhoet insisted.

“In my own life, I found that people who are always worried about the next move in the chess game of their life never quite get at that move. Don’t think that way because, if you’re always worrying about the next step, it will compromise your ability to do your current job well,” Penhoet said.

People get to know you as the person who does a good job or the one who does a bad job, Penhoet said. You won’t “be remembered as having done that job badly—you’ll be remembered as a person who does a bad job,” he said.

When Builders found that striving for excellence is unreachable, joyless, or the kind of misery you find in a Stephen King horror movie, they saw it as a message to move onto something else. For the cause to have charisma, it must reach into your heart in a personal way to unlock all you have to give.

In fact, after you’re focused on what you believe needs to be done, you will have more energy to persist despite inevitable resistance from other people. School teacher Marva Collins runs into a wall almost every time she introduces her new program to educators. “I still have a great challenge today when I go into schools to put in my methodology or to work with a school; many of the teachers will not speak to me, or have a very negative attitude. But the attitude isn’t about me; it’s that they do not believe in their excellence as much as I see that they’re excellent,” she said.

“So I have learned to look at that in a different perspective—because I think if you somehow concentrate on the wrongs that have been done to you (the criticism), you will never evolve. And if you do not evolve, you’re not growing,” she insisted. She says that the pushback that she gets often isn’t as much about her as it is about how those people feel about themselves. The problem is that their cause doesn’t have charisma for them.

“I was ridiculed by the other teachers,” Collins lamented her early days as a school teacher. “Even the principal said to me, ‘Your problem is you cannot forget that these are not your children. They come from fettered homes, antecedent homes; you cannot have the same expectations for them.’”

Collins grew up in poverty in Alabama with the hope that she would get an education. She ended up influencing public education in Chicago. Collins has been so admired for the results she achieved with “hopeless” students that Presidents Reagan and Bush, Sr., asked her to serve as Secretary of Education (but she chose instead to stick with her passion in the classroom). Today, her methods are a model in dozens of communities across America.

“When you’re swimming upstream in a nation where the average conversation is ‘what’s wrong with the children,’ and I am telling them what’s right with the children—well, that’s not a conversation that wants to be heard.” So after 14 years of battling, of “seeing such lowered expectations for our children,” Marva Collins started her own school, funding it out of her own pocketbook.

Collins believes she can change the world by helping children believe that the world would be a darker place without each of them. “There’s a line in Moby Dick that says, ‘in the slippery world, we all need something to hold on to,’ and we aren’t giving our children something to hold on to. You can’t hold on to computers and computer games, and designer clothing, and how lovely you are, how handsome you are. You have to hold on to that one person, that wherever you go, there you are. And that’s the self that we each are.” That is the self that hears the whisper about what matters to you and tells you which cause or calling will have the charisma to light up your life.

When you can come to the point where you accept yourself for who you are—“warts and all”—and you can embrace what you love, for better or for worse, you have a better chance of finding lasting success.

“The first question I ask teachers that I train is, ‘What’s wrong with the children?’ I get a litany of answers,” she noted. “My next question is, ‘What’s wrong with the parents?’ The answers are infinite. The third question is, ‘What’s wrong with you as a teacher?’ And, of course, I get complete silence. We have to begin with what’s wrong with us that (puts us in a position where we feel) we can’t help this child? If you begin with these children, those parents, that principal; they don’t know this, they don’t know that. If we begin with all those negatives, we will never get to where children can go.” Collins believes that you must ask “not just what your cause can do for you,” but what you can do for your cause. When you can “feed the cause and it also feeds you,” then you will make a difference and develop your confidence.

Maybe you thought you would wait to tackle your persistent passion when you had more self-confidence. Well, do the work and accomplish something and, voila, you’ll gain that confidence. Self-esteem is highly overrated.^[5] There are criminals who rate highly on confidence tests and saints who score pretty low. Marva Collins wants parents, kids, and teachers to know that they are capable of excellence. She does not advise them to wait for self-confidence, nor does she want them to believe success is an entitlement. It’s not about whether you have high or low self-esteem; it’s about the quality of your effort.

When a student turns in a paper far below the mark, Collins doesn’t judge it as bad or give him or her a failing grade and move on. Instead, she asks, “Do you want this to be a paper worth 50 cents, $50, or $5 million?” She points out how they are capable of all three outcomes and could go about achieving any of them.

“We teach children that someone lived happily ever after,” she said, and that they can take shortcuts or take the easy way out. That just cheats them from the opportunity to build the kind of skills that will give them more confidence. “We don’t teach them how to get through bad times—that’s why these kids are killing each other and blowing up schools. We must teach children that there are bad times and how to get through the bad times and that life is not a happily-ever-after endeavor.”

You’ve got to fail on the path to success, Collins said. This can be a tired cliché, of course, but it is also a fact. As you will see in the next chapter, Builders believe adversity provides the opportunity to get better at what you do—to go from average to extraordinary—and to test what you really care about. “You’re going to make mistakes” if you try anything that is worth doing, Collins said. What is important is to “remove labels” that hold you back from realizing you “can be a champion.”

Don’t wait for a day when you feel good about yourself to get started. Builders insist that self-esteem comes from trying and failing, trying and failing, then succeeding with small wins and doing the work a little better each time. That tenacity comes when a cause has the charisma to pull you through hard times and unleash your passion for going deep in ways that drive you to do more than you might have ever imagined you could do.