Writing in the WSJ, Peggy Noonan recounts a story: In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce had a conversation in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy.
“She told him, she said, that “a great man is one sentence.” His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don’t have to hear his name to know who’s being talked about. “He preserved the union and freed the slaves,” or, “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War.” You didn’t have to be told “Lincoln” or “FDR.”
“She wondered what Kennedy’s sentence would be.”
Peggy Noonan is of course talking about Obama, but I’m talking about you. Still, some of the syndromes we fall afoul of that keep us from closing in on that crystallline-clarity, hard-as-diamonds One Sentence that we would hope would define us are the same.
- We want to do great things, to break through, to be “consequential.” This “can cause a blur.”
- We get carried away, swept up. We have the mantel of leadership, time to exercise it.
- We think everything matters–and this is not wrong. Everything does matter. It’s just that not everything matters equally.
- We lose sight of the reality of limits.
The consequence is that instead of One Sentence, we are left with a legacy of 10 paragraphs. Which is of course no legacy at all.
We try to please many constituencies, but since they are many, their goals are disparate and probably, ultimately, inconsistent. So we are tempted to temporize.
We hate to offend or take issue with our partners and our colleagues, so we prevaricate, or if we don’t prevaricate, we nod and smile gamely when what we ought to do is to state candidly that we don’t see things that way (although we’re willing to be persuaded).
We think all things are important. And yes, everything is important (as noted). But not equally. Not equally.
We wish, in our limited times in our various offices, to fix everything in sight, to redress every grievance, to rationalize every irrationality, to iron every wrinkle. I understand (so do and so would I wish). But time enough there’s not.
So I have a suggestion:
- Write your ten paragraphs. You may have already written them, but it will be easy enough if you haven’t.
- Distill them down to five.
- Go away for at least a week.
- Distill the five to three.
- [Repeat going-away.]
- Distill to one.
- [You get the idea.]
- Distill the paragraph to Your Sentence.
Now, before you finish, realize that history will tag you with one sentence, like it or not. Yes, Washington, Lincoln, and FDR each get their One Sentences, but so do Millard Fillmore and George H. W. Bush.
So you can control that sentence or you can let history dictate it for you.
What is Your One Sentence?
