250,000 People Came to Washington Because They Shared a Dream

Simon Sinek, the business writer and speaker known for the idea "start with why," asked an audience thinking about inspiring leadership to picture the summer of 1963. In Sinek's telling, a quarter of a million people gathered at the National Mall to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., even though, as Sinek framed it, word spread without formal invitations or any modern way to look up the date.

His explanation drew a laugh. King gave the "I have a dream" speech, Sinek said, not the "I have a plan" speech.

Sinek argued that King was not the only great orator in America, nor the only man who had suffered before civil rights. For Sinek, that was the point. King's gift was not being unique, but saying plainly what he believed, rather than listing what needed changing. He told audiences, "I believe, I believe, I believe," Sinek said.

Sinek said, "people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people." Some built networks to carry the message further. Then, Sinek said, a quarter of a million people arrived "on the right day at the right time" to hear him speak.

Sinek put the number who came for King himself at zero, because, in his account, they came for their own convictions about the country. That conviction, he argued, was strong enough to bring people on an eight-hour bus ride to wait under the hot August sun in the capital. It crossed racial lines, he noted, with one quarter of the audience white.

That distinction, Sinek argued, separates holding power from inspiring action. "Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us," he said. In King's case, strangers carried the message because they recognized their own belief in it.