Whether it's making your vision manifest, providing genuine help for free, or choosing the better story when faced with a decision, this episode offers food for thought on visualizing your goals, deepening your customer relationships, and leading a more interesting life.
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A full transcript is below.
This podcast was recorded on Nov.05, 2025.
David Gardner: Recurring series are a staple of Rule Breaker Investing, inspired by David Letterman's Top 10 lists and Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. One of our originals is great quotes, where sometimes we theme it. We've had a great quotes with my favorite Shakespeare quotes, a great quotes with my favorite Buffett quotes. And sometimes it's a grab bag, a Motley mix, and this time we're theming it. Great Quotes Volume 21 is for entrepreneurs. We'll be talking about investing and about life too, but this edition is especially for the risk takers, the dreamers, the visionaries. The people who dream it, build it. Let's get smarter, happier, and richer for a while with one of our OG series. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Those who know me well will detect my voice is not quite back to 100%. Last week, it was 82%. I'm going to say I'm about 94% right now. It may run down a little bit over this shorter episode, but I'm looking forward to having my voice 100% back. Doing lots of interviews around my book launch and then speaking in person, and then meeting with Motley Fool members and then going away traveling abroad. All of these things have conspired to have me speaking, as I said last week, a little bit more like Deborah Winger than I usually do. This episode is a great quotes episode. I'm excited for this series to continue. It's Volume 21. I want to mention rulebreakerinvesting.com is now a wonderful place, a resource for this podcast and its listeners. If you want to go back and hear any of my other great quotes volumes, you don't have to search back through Spotify or Apple anymore. You can go to rulebreakerinvesting.com, go to the podcast tab and you will see alphabetically laid out there for you, chronologically laid out as well. Every one of my past 20 great quotes series. I'm not saying you should listen to any of them, but if you do want to find one or any one of a dozen or so other episodic series that we've recurred here over the years on Rule Breaker Investing, they're all now conveniently organized and linked at rulebreakerinvesting.com as we get ready for this week's five great quotes. I want to say this particular episode in the series Volume 21 is less about the one-liner great quotes that I usually like to rock. I also fill my Rule Breaker investing book with some of my favorite one-liner great quotes. This one's really more about sharing a short passage that will illuminate, especially for entrepreneurs, how to do business well, how to do business better. Some guideposts to have in mind. Now, I have said for entrepreneurs, but really this applies to business to any working professional, for profit or not for profit. In many cases. Yes, I especially aim this toward those who are starting businesses, who are founders, who are dreaming and building, but a lot of our thinking and quotes this week are really you and me, for any of us who are working professionals.
Also, before we get started, since we're at the start of a new month, I thought it would be fun just to lay out where we're headed. In the weeks ahead. Next week on Rule Breaker Investing, we're going to do our second in the 10 years later series. We'll be reviewing a five-stock sampler that I picked 10 years ago next week. It was entitled Five Lesser-known Rule Breakers. We'll see how those lesser-known Rule Breakers have done, which ones won, which ones lost. This is a fun news series we just started with the first of our 35 stock samplers about 10 weeks ago and the next one comes next week. Then every year on the third week of November, I do my gratitude podcast. Gratitude 2025 just before Thanksgiving week here in the US, then of course, we close with a mailbag at the end of this November. I'm going to hype it up right now. We are going to have my annual Games podcast. Coming out the first week of December. There for you talking about my favorite tabletop board games, card games, word games, most of which would have come out in the last year or so, games that I want to draw your attention to either because, A, you're an avid gamer and if you are, God bless you or B, you know some and want to have some good gift ideas around the tree this December. We intentionally do our games, episodic series, the first week of every December 2025 will be no exception. I look forward to that. No great quote number one this week. As I mentioned at the top, this won't be a single line. This will be a few sentences. This is a short passage from Warren Bennis' wonderful book On Becoming a Leader. He's quoting entrepreneur Larry Wilson. Now I'm not familiar with Larry and this book was written some years ago now but is listed as a founder of Innovative Learning Centers. Bennis is quoting him, so I'm quoting Bennis quoting Larry Wilson. Here's great quote Number 1. "For most entrepreneurs, certainly for me, the primary pull is the vision. You are simply passionately compelled to make it come about. I think that a compelling vision, combined with a unique ability to manage risk is the magic behind successful entrepreneurs. It's as if you already handled the risk ahead of time in your mind, so you can go where angels fear to tread because you've already skipped ahead to the gain." For entrepreneurs, I know you can relate. The primary pull is the vision. Wilson says you were simply passionately compelled to make it come about. Just my own little entrepreneurial story, I remember the first time I saw the words The Motley Fool in print in the Wall Street Journal.
That was a magical moment where all of a sudden Tom and Dave and our motley band of early fools realized, wow, this is actually going to become a thing, a company. Look, our names in the Wall Street Journal and not just any name. It's not like we were online investing.com or some other more generic name. It was the Motley Fool. It was specifically that we could take the position of a court jester and dispense advice as court jesters did using humor, whispering in the ear of the kings and queens, our members, you, our listener. Whispering in your ears our foolish advice with our floppy belled caps. What an amazing moment for me to think that something that started as a print newsletter for our parents' friends. I was the one who picked the name out of the Penguin Book of Quotations one night that would actually manifest as a vision turn reality. That pull I will always remember. It isn't again, only true of entrepreneurs. Roy Spence, another great entrepreneur who's been on this podcast before, said it's the greatest joy in life, putting something there that wasn't there before. I can't quite imitate Roy's Texas twang as he says it. He says it better than I did right there with my 90% something voice. But that feeling of putting something there, whether it's a building, if you're an architect or a child, if you're a parent, putting something there that wasn't there before, making your vision manifest is what Quote Number 1 is all about. I was looking back at my Rule Breaker Investing book and through the magic of computers today, you can count the number of times words show up in your manuscript. I wrote the word vision in Rule Breaker Investing 42 times. The word vision appears 42 times in Rule Breaker investing.
It's a stock market book, but it celebrates locating the visionaries and buying shares in their companies. It also asks you, and this is important to point out as well, with Principle Number 1 of the Rule Breaker portfolio, I'm asking you to make your portfolio reflect your best vision for our future. It's not enough to be a Rule Breaker investor to just seek out visionaries as CEOs and founders of the stocks that you want to buy. I'm actually asking you what your vision is, and I think it should be manifest in your own portfolio. As Larry Wilson says in his quote, the more you're pulled by a vision and I would even say, the more passionately that you are pulled by your vision, the more likely you are to succeed at actually making it happen in investing in business, my main context this week, and in life. I have a friend of mine who sometimes, when we're talking about something in the near future, for me, it might be something I'm not fully comfortable with or I've got some worries or anxieties about he says, David, what's the best you can imagine here for yourself in this situation? I realize that's such a wise question because when you envision what the best you can imagine for yourself in any given context is, you're much more likely to actually achieve it. If you can say it and think about it and dream it, you are much more likely to arrive at the completion of your dream than if you're not dreaming, if you're not actually stating or thinking ahead of time, what's the best you could imagine for yourself in this situation? As I flew in on a plane tonight flying back from Montreal just before doing a later recording of this podcast this week, just looking out the window of the plane, I was reminded, wow. We are part of a tiny percentage of historical humans that could ever get to fly on a plane.
Of course, these days, we just take it for granted, but we really shouldn't. The utter beauty of the clouds, there was a blood red sunset, twinkling lights over the cities. As I flew into Washington, DC tonight, what's the best you can imagine for yourself and what pulls you and what vision do you want to make manifest either as a brand new start-up or in that portfolio that you're building for yourself? Again, I'll always remember the first time I saw the Motley Fool in print in the Wall Street Journal. Let's move on to Quote Number 2. This next one is from a book called Utility. Except utility in the book's title is not spelled starting with the letter U. It's spelled starting with the letters Y-O-U, Utility. It's by author Jay Bayer author and entrepreneur himself. Author and marketing, Maven coach and thinker, about how to really win with your marketing rather than sell help, Bayer says in his wonderful book, Utility. Again, this is probably written 15 or 20 years ago. One of those books that for me anyway, stands the test of time. Here's the quote. Bayer writes. You know that expression, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Jay Bayer goes on the same is true for marketing. If you sell something, you make a customer today. If you help someone, you make a customer for life. That really is summarizing the premise of utility in a lot of ways in this info-rich world and The Motley Fool tries to do this well ourselves. But especially about free tools and free information, that you as an entrepreneur, a business person, you might be running the division of a company, you might be the head of marketing, you might be a founder of your own start the more that you can provide true help for free, in whatever cheap way you could manage to do so for people, the better off your start-up is going to start in my experience, anyway, so this one's really for the marketers, first and foremost. The best companies, the best brands, the best people, help.
Really, when you think about the voluntary exchange of goods and services, I'm a buyer, you're a seller, then I'm a seller, you're a buyer, and we buy from each other. You're good at this, I'm good at this. I buy your stuff, you buy what I'm good at. That really in large part explains so much progress for the human race over thousands of years. Really, while I know a lot of marketing talk is about selling and how to sell and we're all salesmen, etc, I think with Jay Bayer, I want to say it's more about helping. I would say, for example, I hope this podcast is an example of free help that is offered to anybody who wants to take the time to listen. Occasionally, we hope that you will buy our services and occasionally I'll mention a new product launch or something else that I'm happy or proud of like my book this year. Of course, there's selling involved in business. Yet rather than just try to make a customer for today by selling whoever you are, selling whatever you're selling, if you actually help that person, you really can make a customer for life. Again, I think the best companies brands and people help. I've often said, my favorite products and services are those that solve an old problem in some new way, that would be helping. Or the create a new possibility, something that never existed before.
That's also helping. Utility, the book, which I recommend to all, is largely about asking yourself as a business person. What are some truly helpful things that I could offer my customers out front that's free? I would even say something as simple as a sampler at Whole Foods Market. Just go in and they put out a little piece of cheese or give you a taste of a drink and say, would you like to maybe buy this? That is free, that is helpful, and we appreciate the companies and brands that do that. Before I move on to Quote Number 3, I do want to add one more part of this quote because I've been obviously speaking to the power of help and truly helping as opposed to just selling, but also there in buyer's quote is that concept of today versus for life. Of course, I know you know that you're listening to somebody who thinks we should always be playing the long game. We are living in a world where many people are playing the short game. My golly, most people are trading in and out of stocks in the market, whether we're talking about institutional professional money managers or just a lot of meme stock following crypto hype day traders. There are a lot of people who are so much in the moment with their money and they care too much about what happens today and not enough about what will happen tomorrow. Many times they don't realize if they just tried to hold not just today and tomorrow, but well past tomorrow, they would do better and spend less time trading their way through life. I would be remiss if I didn't point out a key part of this quote. If you sell something today, you make a customer today. I would say most of your competitors out there in business are mostly focused on just making that customer today. But if you help someone, Jay Bayer reminds us, you make a customer for life. I think that's the time frame that puts you in a minority. Often when you're playing the game differently from others, you have much better shot at winning that game. I will ask you rhetorically, as we end Quote Number 2, are you playing for today or are you playing for tomorrow? Onto great quote number three. This one is from the book, Software, an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle by journalist Matthew Symonds. The book was written in 2004. This is one of those business books I read part of. I don't always finish every book.
In fact, we've learned as non-fiction authors that the majority of readers do not go past page 50 of a non-fiction book. A lot of books are written in such a way that they put up front their frameworks or key concepts, knowing people don't keep reading. I'm guilty in this case of not finishing this book, but I really did en learning more about Larry Ellison, who has become one of the richest founding entrepreneurs alive today in the United States of America, obviously the founder of Oracle and Oracle has been on quite a run itself recently in the book, Simonds does indeed paint a pretty intimate portrait, getting to know Larry Ellison well, how he was thinking about business, where he came from, what his hopes were for his company Oracle, which has had its ups and downs, which any great stock or company will over the decades. But this particular quote is pulled from a short section about the tension that exists between software developers and salespeople. I think again, a lot of us are probably familiar with this tension. I'm going to just share the passage and then let's think about it together for a little bit. The passage from the book, Software, by Matthew Symonds. "Tensions between the development and distribution organizations in software firms are almost inevitable. Sales and consulting think that developers sit in ivory towers insulated from the real world of deals, implementations, and dissatisfied customers. They are the ones who suffer, above all in their wallets when development is late in delivering anticipated functionality or when the products that do ship are buggy and unstable for its part, development tends to believe that sales will say anything that customers want to hear to snag their fat commissions, and then expect engineers to perform miracles to rescue them from the consequences of their over-promising."
David Gardner: The first thing I want to say about that is the struggle is real. I know a lot of us are sitting there nodding our heads because in your organization may not be software might be an Internet firm. Heck, it might just be a bagel manufacturer. I'm quite sure we could all relate to the idea of over promising salespeople putting us in a difficult position because of the expectations that were created or the promises maybe that were made. At the same time, the salespeople can be sacrificed on the altar of, wait, you didn't get the work done. You're not ready to ship the product, or we ship the product, and it's buggy. It's a very natural struggle. The struggle is real. A lot of us in the business world can relate. But let's step outside of this dynamic. Let's get above it for a sec, to see the game for what it is, and recognize that it's inevitable. It's going to be inevitable that people out front, whose job is often on commission to sell whatever the company produces, whatever service is delivered, and the people who are actually making that product or service are not the same people, and there's always going to be a natural tension. Therefore, my advice is that you can make yourself extra valuable to your enterprise by getting above the game as I just said and seeing it for what it is. In fact, you can go one further.
You can show awareness to the other side, that other team, whichever side you're not on, you can show awareness to the other people that you know where they're coming from. You understand this dynamic, and in so doing, rather than be perceived as just another member of the other guys, the other team, the people that are creating problems for my team, you can distinguish yourself as somebody who's able to see empathetically and understandably that this is going to happen and that you know where they're coming from, and you're going to work on that. In fact, pulling a related quote from another great business book that I completely recommend to everybody listening, The Why of Work by Dave and Wendy Ulrich, and I quote, "Leaders manage conflict by inviting the parties into a dialogue where they seek to understand and verbalize the other's point of view until each can state the other person's position, as well as the person presenting it." This is going to be true of any leader and a lot of you are listening to me right now. You can really set your teams up for success if they get to know the other side's viewpoint so well that they can eloquently, matter of factly state the other side's viewpoint. I'm sure a lot of us have been in mediation sessions or other forms of counseling where you learn that listening to the other side and then being able to say back to them exactly what it is you hear them saying to the point that you really are directly connecting what you're saying with how they feel, that is almost always a way to win. You can personally make yourself valuable to your enterprise by getting above the game, seeing that natural tension between the salesmen and the techies, and then having those two groups be able to articulate to each other exactly where they think they're coming from. I might just add one more before we move on to Quote Number 4. That is that as leaders, we can actually set our metrics, our incentives, our goals for our organizations that will actually reward the whole team when it wins instead of just one of the teams.
Of course, if you're only setting incentives for salespeople and those are not shared by the techies or the product producers, then you are naturally creating a dynamic where only one side is going to be getting rewarded in a certain context if certain things happen or don't. In the same way that football coaches, since we're in football season this time of year, don't draw big distinctions between their offense and their defense. They don't pit their own teams against each other, although some teams, no doubt, that have really good offenses and bad defenses, probably the guys on the offense are thinking, I wish the defense was better because every time we score, they give up another touchdown and we have to go down and score again or vice versa, yet great teams don't have that dynamic because they do have different people playing offense. They do have different people playing defense or sales and takkies. There are different motivations, but there's a similar goal, and that is winning. Obviously, the best leaders and the best coaches are going to be speaking to the whole team, creating the whole win, or sometimes, yes, we lose to the whole loss. Just to put a capper on this, a lot of the tension can be diffused not only by having people be able to state the intention or goal of the other side, but you can do it in the first place by giving a shared metric, shared incentive, shared goal toward an overall team win that diffuses that tension, as Matthew Symonds writes in his book, Softwar, that tension between the development and distribution organizations, which he says is almost inevitable.
On to Quote Number 4. This one is from Warren Berger's wonderful book The Book of Beautiful Questions. Warren Berger, past guest on this show and author in August, which reminds me if you want to find that quickly and easily, you can go to rulebreakerinvesting.com, go to our podcast tab and find my Authors in August and see when I've talked to Warren Berger before about this wonderful book that I'm now quoting from, and here it is. I'm just going to call this quote pick the better story. That's where it's headed, but it's a few sentences. Here's the passage and I quote, Berger writes the experiences you say yes to now will be the stories that are remembered and shared by future you. Which brings us to one more crystal ball question, Berger writes, shared by the author and consultant John Hagel, who suggests that whenever you face a decision between two diverging paths, ask yourself the following. When I look back in five years, which of these options will make the better story? As Hagel explains and he quotes, "No one ever regrets taking the path that leads to the better story." John Hagel, the author mentioned by Berger is somebody that I've also met and I completely appreciated his book, Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities. John wrote that book in the late 90s back when AOL was on top of the world and The Motley Fool was a small upstart company publishing on AOL. What Hagel was basically advocating is that communities, discussion boards, chat rooms, if you will, thanks to the new technology, you can really expand your markets through the net and that's why he called his book Net Gain.
Anyway, it's that John Hagel that Warren Berger is quoting. But I too love stories. I bet you do too. Most humans do. On this podcast, we have whole series dedicated to stock stories, which we just did one of those last month. We've had our campfire stories that we've told. I was thinking about my book, Chapter 1 of Rule Breaker Investing is basically the story of Nvidia. When I first picked it and then why I reupped it, and through incredible volatility, why I then reupped it once again, years and years later and how well that's all worked out. It's really just though a story, Chapter 1 of the book. Sometimes in this podcast, I'll have friends on and ask them to tell the story of their life in 10 sentences. We humans, we are a storytelling creature. We love stories. In another place in Warren Bennis' book On Becoming a Leader, I think I used this as a previous great quote in an earlier episode. Bennis says another study indicates that what determines the level of satisfaction in post middle-aged men, this may be true of women as well, but this study is about men. What determines the level of satisfaction in post middle-aged men is the degree to which they acted upon their youthful dreams. Is not so much whether they were successful in achieving their dreams, Bennis writes as the honest pursuit of them that counts.
That makes me think about regret and it makes me think back to our quote here, which of the options you're thinking about right now, when you look back in five years, which one is going to be a better story or with Bennis is going to involve less regret. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, uses his regret minimization framework where Bezos has said he asks himself, when I'm 80 or 90-years-old, looking back to this moment right now, this decision that I'm asking myself, should I say yes, or should I say no? Whatever it is, Bezos says, My aim is to minimize the regret that I will feel when I'm 80 or 90-years-old. That means sometimes you decide you should do that thing because you'll have less regret when you're 80 or 90. With Bennis your level of satisfaction will be higher because you're going to pursue a youthful dream. But in other cases, you're going to minimize regret if you say no, I won't do that thing because I want to minimize regret with Bezos when I hit the age of 90-years-old. I'm thinking again about this concept of which option should you pick in investing in business and in life? A lot of people would say, with Bezos, minimize your regret. But what Hagel is actually rocking here is whichever tells the better story, which is a crazy way of thinking about decision making. How could Hagel be right? What is going on here? This idea that the right move is always to pick the thing that will make the better story. Well, the best way I can think to articulate that is a phrase I've used sometimes in the past of this podcast. It's one of my favorite phrases.
There's a story attached that I've told elsewhere. But I think that when you pick something that gives you the better story to tell around the campfire five years later, what you're really doing is you're leading a more interesting life. A more interesting life is going to be led by those who decide, I'm going to do this because it's going to be a better story that I'm going to get to tell later on, even if it doesn't work. In fact, some of our best stories are around failure, whether it's funny, how we failed, or heartbreakingly educational. In either case, which of these options Quote Number 4, will make the better story? Onto great Quote Number 5. In keeping with my somewhat tweaked format, this particular episode for this series, this is a passage. This is not a single great quote. In fact, this is the longest passage that I'm sharing with you this week and it's just because I love it. In fact, it has a story running through it, speaking of stories, and it's about somebody who's very admirable this passage comes from Candice Millard's book, Destiny of the Republic, which is the story of President Garfield's assassination, his untimely early death, and the circumstances that surrounded it in the late 19th century. One of the people who tried to save the president's life was the very famous Scottish entrepreneur, speaking of four entrepreneurs, Alexander Graham Bell. Near the end of her book, Candice, who's appeared on this podcast talking about this book as an author in August, I absolutely love the book Destiny of the Republic. She near the end of the book tells the story afterward. It's like one of those movies where the movie ends, and then you hear what happened to each of the characters after the movie ended.
Sometimes it's a documentary, which is interesting or sometimes it's funny fiction. Where are they now? That's near the end of Destiny of the Republic. That's what Candice starts to do with some of the key figures in the book. She tells the end of Alexander Graham Bell's life, and it's probably my favorite quote. It's, again, a passage, and that's what I wanted to end with this week. Here we go from Destiny of the Republic, about a page or so from Candice' book. The death of Alexander Graham Bell's son also inspired him to build a machine that would essentially breathe for those who, like Edward, could not breathe for themselves. The invention, which Bell called a vacuum jacket, consisted primarily of an airtight iron cylinder that encircled the patient's tarsal and a suction pump that forced air into his lungs. The vacuum jacket was a precursor to the iron lung, which would help thousands of people breathe during the polio epidemic of the 1940s and early 1950s. At this point in the book, near the end of Candice's book, Bell, still a young man, had an astonishingly busy and productive life yet ahead of him. Soon after Garfield's death, he would become a United States citizen. In 1888, he and a small group of like minded men would found the National Geographic Society, whose ambition it was to create, "A society for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge." At the same time, Bell also founded the Volta Bureau, "For the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf." In 1893, he moved the bureau into a yellow brick and sandstone building, now a national historic landmark on 35th Street in Washington, DC, directly across the street from where he had earlier moved his Volta laboratory. Although he would continue to work on a wide range of inventions, most strikingly with various forms of flight. For Bell, the desire to help and teach the deaf would be the overarching passion of his life. In 1886, Captain Arthur Keller traveled to Washington from Alabama to see Bell. He brought with him his six-year-old daughter, Helen, who had been left blind, deaf, and mute after contracting what may have been scarlet fever when she was 19 months old. Years later, Helen Keller would remember that meeting with Bell as,"The door through which I should pass from darkness into light." Grateful was she to Bell that 16 years later, she would dedicate her autobiography to him. Keller wrote her memoirs when she was just 22-years-old, but Bell even near the end of his life, refused to write his own. When repeatedly asked to put down on paper the extraordinary events of his life, his reply was always the same. He was, "Still more interested in the future than in the past." Bell would live to be 75-years-old dying at his home in Nova Scotia on August 2nd, 1922.
Alone with him in his room was his wife, Mabel. She had been by his side when he was an unknown, penniless teacher, and she was with him now 45 years later as he left the world, one of its most famous men. Moments before his death, Mabel who would survive her husband by only six months, whispered to Alec, "Don't leave me." Unable to speak, he answered her by pressing her fingers with two of his own sign language, their language for no. I love several different things about that story, but just to pull out a few of them in closing, the first is, I happen to have grown up in Washington, DC myself, and I grew up just blocks away from that bureau that yellow brick and sandstone building, which is now a national historic landmark on 35th Street in Washington, DC. I saw it, but I had no idea. It was Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Bureau, which was founded, as Candice mentions, for the number 1 passion of his life, which was to increase our understanding and serve the deaf. I didn't know of his connection to Helen Keller. I think that's phenomenal. That story at the end with Mabel sitting by her husband's side as he dies and the last thing that he conveys to her in his answer to her question is no, I think that is heartbreaking and it is beautiful, and it is my pleasure to end on a heartbreaking and beautiful note. Just to summarize our five quotes this week, obviously not going to read them all, but Quote Number 1 from Warren Bennis's book, quoting Larry Wilson, "The primary pull is vision." Vision, a word I used 42 times in an investing book. Quote Number 2, from J Byers utility, if you sell something, you make a customer today. If you help someone, you make a customer for life. Quote Number 3, Matthew Symonds book, Softwar about Larry Ellison, and the struggle is real between the people selling products and the people building and delivering the products and getting above that and seeing both sides and making sure we're aligned is the work of great leaders. Quote Number Four, from author John Hagel in Warren Berger's book, The Book of Beautiful Questions, again, a book I completely recommend. When I look back in five years, you should ask yourself, which of these options I'm considering will make the better story. Hagel says no one ever regrets taking the path that leads to the better story. Then finally, Alexander Graham Bell there at the end. Something I love about Candice as she leaves that story go, is that heartbreaking no that Bell leaves Mabel with is ambiguous.
As I read it and reread it again, I couldn't figure out what he was saying to her. Moments before his death, Mabel, who would survive her husband by only six months, whispered to Alec, "Don't leave me." Unable to speak, he uses their finger based sign language and he says, no. I still can't tell whether he was saying, no, I won't ever leave you or whether he was to his wife who's saying, Don't leave me, whether he was saying, I'm dying, I am leaving you. No. In some ways, that Bell story is just a great capper for this whole episode because Bell himself was driven by many visions, talk about being pulled as an entrepreneur toward visions. Then what was he really doing? Well, I'm sure he was selling from time to time, but his life was dedicated to help. He helped so many people in so many different ways, although what he cared most about were the deaf and he wasn't selling for one day. He was living his life for others. In some ways, just finishing this particular podcast with a story that story of Bell's, one told by Candice Millard so expertly. Well, that brings this podcast together. Thanks for joining with me this week. Fool On.