Companies and successful entrepreneurs often promote their founding stories to the level of myth:
- Bill Hewlett and David Packard in the first Silicon Valley garage
- Sam Walton’s first 5&10 in Bentonville, AK, and his first Walmart a few years later
- Oprah Winfrey rising up from poverty, attending Tennessee State University on a full scholarship won in a high school speech competition, and in Chicago quickly taking down Phil Donahue as the top rated talk show. She was on her way to becoming a billionaire.
Founding myths are best when they involve rising up from little or nothing.
These stories are very important because people remember stories far more than facts, and they typically include the unique values of the founder that led to success. The Walmart story says, “Sam’s competitors thought his idea that a successful business could be built around offering lower prices and great service would never work…”
As we prepare to celebrate our nation’s birthday, we are also celebrating our founding myth and values which are embodied in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
We had a small, ragtag army that rose up and defeated the most powerful empire in the world. As they sing in “Hamilton,”: The world turned upside down.
Of course, the young nation hardly lived up to these words initially. Several hundred thousand black people may have been created equal but in 1776 they were held as slaves. Only white, male land owners could vote and had full rights.
But the direction of the country over the past 243 years has been to make those founding values real by emancipating slaves, expanding voting rights, and providing additional rights as the understanding among liberal democracies of what those should entail has expanded. .
The USA has done many great things. A friend was recently vacationing in Croatia and a person said to him, “You liberated us twice. You didn’t need to do that, but you did.” And we’ve done some not so great things.
But our founding myth has been an inspiration to people all over the world. In 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence, he started his declaration with, “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”
There are now many democracies, but we are the only major country with this kind of founding myth and document, and these values continue to inspire people all over the world.
Happy birthday! And may all of your stories be inspirational.
