A Great Man is One Sentence

In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, on of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. 'A great man,' she told him, 'is one sentence.' Abraham Lincoln's sentence was: 'He preserved the union and freed the slaves.' Franklin Roosevelt's was: 'He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.' Luce feared that Kennedy's attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph....One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence.

-Daniel Pink, Drive, pp. 154-155