The Ripple

For years our founder flew organ-donor transplant flights across Northern California — a King Air C90, all hours, all weather. One trip was routine in every way: fly out with a transplant coordinator, wait, fly the cooler with a donated liver to another city, hand it off. Eight hours on duty, done well but done like always — careful preflight, clean weather brief, professional handoff.

Afterward, the two pilots rested in a lounge, then climbed out on a beautiful clear evening and flipped on the satellite radio news.

And then they looked at each other and said nothing. Because the news was reporting who had just received a liver transplant: one of the most famous CEOs in the world — a man who would go on, in the years that followed, to change the world and the industries behind it. The pilots hadn't known. Nobody had told them. It was just Tuesday's cooler.

That's the whole point. They didn't fly that leg better because someone important was at the end of it — they flew it the way they flew every leg, which is why it went well. You will almost never be told which of your ordinary days is the hinge of someone else's history.

In 1855, a Boston Sunday-school teacher named Edward Kimball felt prompted to visit one of his teenage students at the shoe store where the boy worked, and spoke to him briefly, awkwardly, about faith — an encounter Kimball himself thought he had fumbled.

The teenager was Dwight L. Moody, who became one of the century's most influential evangelists.

The chain historians trace from that shoe shop runs through the preachers Moody influenced, and the ones they influenced, down to Billy Graham — whose ministry reached hundreds of millions. One nervous conversation between a teacher and a stock boy, and the ripple ran for a century and a half.

A small one from our own founder's life: at eighteen, he paid for a seminar by a then-unknown young speaker named Tony Robbins — and it was canceled.

Instead of taking the refund and going home, he went to the hotel where the speaker was staying. An assistant took his name and number — and then got him into the next seminar and paid for his hotel room.

Three days in the front row, a firewalk, and a dose of belief that he says shaped his whole adult life — including, decades later, the building of this website, which now hands encouragement to strangers at all hours. The assistant who wrote down a teenager's phone number has no idea this page exists.