Although this boy had received numerous offers for housing from friends, he did not want to be separated from his mother, so for nearly six years he woke up every morning in the back seat of a car. He walked across the parking lot to a nearby Wal-Mart and washed up in their restrooms. Then he took two city buses to arrive at school before the first bell rang. He ended up graduating with a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Scholarship, a full ride to a four-year college of his choice.

The story took two minutes to tell. But by the end, I was ready to quit my job and go to work for that school district!

Here’s the deal. No one goes into education for the big paycheck. That two-minute story worked in a powerful way to reconnect those overworked and underpaid educators to the core reason they went into this line of work in the first place. You could see it all over the room: tender smiles, nodding heads, people clearly reenergized and ready to return to the issues of diversity, budget, and test scores with a renewed sense of purpose and hope. The story was a creative and compelling way to remind people of the vision.

Two minutes.

Some of my most memorable intersections with powerful vision have come in educational contexts. Perhaps it’s because there is no question that something more than money motivates educators.

Another time we were working with a large school district in the Los Angeles area. Once again we were working on exercises around the topic of vision, but this time, we had divided the group into teams: administrators, principals, psychologists, teachers, etc. One team in particular worried me: the facilities and maintenance employees. I wasn’t at all sure that these guys in their jeans and T-shirts would be able to deeply engage in discussions about vision. After all, their primary responsibilities included cutting the grass and cleaning the bathrooms.

I can be an idiot sometimes, but that’s for another chapter.

After I explained what I wanted the teams to do, I walked over to “help” this table. I kneeled down and said in my best consulting voice, “So, what have you got for me?”

The head of the department said, “Well I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot over the past twenty-five years,” and the rest of the guys around the table chuckled. I assumed he was having hard time trying to figure out this vision thing, so I continued, “Well, tell me what you have been thinking.”

To this day, I still carry a scrap of paper in my wallet on which I’ve written what that man said next:

“We work to create and maintain an environment that inspires greatness.”

“Excuse me?”

As he repeated that sentence (that glorious sentence) the laughter around the table returned, and stories started spilling out.

“Yeah, yeah, we don’t just plant flowers, we create gardens that inspire greatness,” one of them said playfully.