How to Rally People Around a Shared Vision (Secrets From America’s Founders)

Happy Thanksgiving from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions. This is Entrez Leadership, the show where leaders like you learn what it takes to win at any stage of business in leadership. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host with over 30 years of experience leading in the trenches right alongside you. Today, we're digging into the incredible story behind the very first Thanksgiving. And you might be thinking,

What do the pilgrims have to do with my business? Well, more than you think, because this is a story about choosing a God-honoring vision, counting the cost. and uniting ordinary people around turning hardship into hope. And of course, the importance of gratitude.

For this one, I'm handing over things to John Falcons from the Entree Leadership team, who will be sitting down with my friend, best-selling author, leadership expert, and historian, Stephen Mansfield. Let's dive in. Well, Stephen, thank you for coming today. Appreciate the opportunity to get to have a conversation about a fascinating part of our history. Hey, it's a privilege. Good to be with you. You know, we're coming up on Thanksgiving, and there's so much history around Thanksgiving.

One of the things that is such a big part of our identity is the pilgrims and their whole story. So what do we have to learn from the pilgrims? What lessons are there? What should we remember about them?

Well, I'm kind of geeky about the Pilgrims. I go crazy every Thanksgiving. To speak Professor for a moment. Yes, Professor Mansfield. Professor. The Plymouth Settlement and the Pilgrims are the first permanent...

Christian English settlement in the New World. So that's its place of glory. But for us, at more of a family lore level, There are powerful parts of that story about the relationship with Native Americans, about their sacrifices, about starvation, about what they said they intended to do and why they came that have lived down through the generations of American history.

We've kind of forgotten in our generation. I mean, I'm not bothered that Thanksgiving's about food and football in our time, but I wouldn't mind a little bit of this. bleeding into our lives. And so I'm sure we'll get into all of this, but this is what, it's really a living, vibrant, powerful story of faith and sacrifice and family and even international relations that ought to land on our Thanksgiving tables every year.

You know, I have gone actually both to Plymouth Rock and the pilgrim monument that's there in Provincetown on the Cape. And well, for one thing. Plymouth Rock is probably the most disappointing. It's literally just this rock, you know, that's there. But why? Why do you think so much of our identity, you said this is the first Christian settlement, but Jamestown was just down the road, metaphorically speaking, but it doesn't seem to play as much into what we remember of history. Why is it?

Yeah, you've got two English settlements before Plymouth. 1585, Roanoke. One's Jamestown, 1607. But both of them are business ventures. They're not primarily for faith purposes, okay? There are Christians amongst them, and there are chaplains. But the Plymouth Plantation, 1607, a few years later, they said, this is the famous Mayflower Compact, they said, we sailed for the glory of God.

and the advancement of the Christian faith. They were doing fine in Europe. They weren't persecuted. We'll talk about the story in a minute. But where they ended up, they could have lived for the rest of their lives. But they sailed to the new world for the cause of the gospel. So it's a real powerful thing.

And by the way, let me circle back just for a moment. I'm here to knock some myths in the head. Please do. What's funny is you have this awesome story, and then you have the Madison Avenue PR version of the story, which includes Plymouth Rock. We have no idea.

where the pilgrims first put their foot in the New World. That rock was there. It was prominent. And some publicist who wanted to encourage tourism to the Cape Cod said, hey, it was probably here. And then, as you know, they built this almost... church-like structure over it, caca. Remember this word with me, caca. It ain't true. So yeah, I'm actually glad you were disappointed because it ain't part of the story. Yeah, so speaking of the story, and you mentioned it a little bit, let's go back.

Yeah. Let's go back and talk about why they came to the Americas and what caused all of that. And what was the driving force behind it? So since Queen Elizabeth, you'd had the official Anglican church, actually sort of since King Henry VIII. And so the Anglican Church was this compromise between Protestantism and Catholicism. But they passed a law along about 1550s, I won't give you too many dates here, that basically said that everyone had to be part of the Anglican Church and pay tithe.

taxes to it and so on. Well, there were dissenters. There were people who said, no, this is a state church. This is corrupt. We want to have our own consciences. We want to have our own congregationally ruled churches and not ruled by the king or the queen. And so they began to break away. Well, they were persecuted.

So there was a congregation up in Scrooby, England. I've had history students write Scooby-Doo England, and that didn't work out real well for them on their grade. But Scrooby, England, and they were really heavily persecuted. So they finally decided to go where there was a measure of religious...

liberty, even though their lives would be hard, and they went to Holland. They went to Holland, yeah. We use Netherlands as the name now, but back then it would have been Holland. And they went to a place called Leyden. So Leyden, L-E-Y-D-E-N, Holland. It would have been about 1608. and they began to set up new lives. Now, some of them did well because they had certain gifts and skills, and others had to start working in labors that they weren't used to, you know, the Dutch.

dairy farms and their seafaring ways and ships and all that. And it was really hard. really hard. But what was great was, even though they could have lived there for the rest of their lives, they began to have prayer meetings and they began to say, Lord, we're not just meant to be a congregation in exile. What do you want us to do?

And we have their journal, so we know what they wrote about. And they said, we are increasingly having a burden to take the gospel to the natives of the new world. I'm partially Native American, so this moves me. Here they are where they could stay forever.

free of persecution and have their congregational life. But in the prayer meetings, what do they start to do? They start to say, we know there's this new world. We've heard about it. We've seen the journals. We've read the reports. And there are natives there who don't know the gospel.

We, over the years, this would have been from 1608 to 1620, about a dozen years, we're increasingly getting, they wouldn't have used the word burden, but maybe modern Christian languages, I got a burden, I got a thing in my heart for the natives of the new world. And that's primarily... why they sailed. You'll read a lot of, again, my favorite word, caca, in the textbooks about they wanted religious liberty, they already had it. They were escaping persecution, they already had. So that...

That's loosely part of the story, but it isn't the burning hot issue. The burning hot issue is what they said in the Mayflower Compact, the document they signed on ship before they went ashore, where they said, we sailed for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith. That brings us down to 1620.

They finally decide, all who are healthy and can from the Leiden congregation of these dissenters, these people who are broken off from the Church of England, they're going to rent some ships, hire some ships, and go to the New World. How many folks roughly... was at that point in the journey? Yeah, you would have had about 300 people in the congregation in Leyden. You started out, it's kind of an interesting little story, you started out with two ships and let's say roughly 150 people.

Okay. Divided on two ships, the Speedwell and the Mayflower. The Mayflower was about the size of a volleyball court. Okay, not very big at all. And it was a wine barge, and it had been around for a while. She was in her dotage. She was older. So they set sail. in 1620, but the speed well began to take on water right off the coast of England. So they went back to Southampton, the port where they had sailed from.

They left the speed well there. They determined that she was unworthy. The sailors will tell you she had too much sail and the mast was breaking the bow, breaking the undercarriage. So finally, Too many people get on the Mayflower. So you got about 100, you may have as many as 120 people on the Mayflower in a ship no bigger than a volleyball court. Think about 120 people. You know, we watch four people play sand volleyball, but 120 people think about that.

And that's what sails to the new world in 1620. And they sail. Too late in the year, all this messing around, sailing back to the shore, having to put people on board. Some people go, hey, God's obviously not in this. I'm not going, so they go home. You have all this fall draw going on. Finally, the Mayflower sails. but it's late in the year and this is going to be a major part of the story. Sales Gravy understands that managing a sales team is one of the toughest jobs in the business.

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This guide is free, but only at one place, salesgravy.com slash entree. It's exclusive for our entree leadership audience. Again, that's salesgravy.com slash E-N-T-R-E. Go get it. I'm curious, do we know anything? Did leaders start to emerge or was it like a… mob rule, and that's probably the wrong, pure democracy, let's say. Did they vote on everything? No, it was a congregationally ruled, it would have been elders and a pastor. The pastor was John Robinson, a really good guy.

who preached the vision for taking the gospel to the new world, but knew he needed to stay with the congregation in Leyden. So he did not come to the New World, but he put the younger ones, those who were healthy, those who were strong, some of the elders, one military man, others on this ship. And they sailed to the new world. And so leadership did emerge. In fact, what I think sets us all up for this is that they sail 66 days across the North Atlantic.

This will be approximately from September to November. I want you to think about that. Well, I just did the Ramsey cruise for seven days in the Caribbean. Yeah. And I was ready to get off after seven days. Okay. 66 days. With storms so bad, I'm going to raise my arm. My arm is the mast. The ship is going like this, dipping in the ocean on one side and then flipping over and dipping in the ocean on the other. I can't imagine. Yeah.

The captain, whose name was Christopher Newport, won't let them go above decks because they're gonna wash off. So now they're in four lower decks and what they call the tween deck. All kinds of human refuse and bile is floating around. People can't go outside. There's no porta potty. There's no plumbing. Right? One third of this 103 to 120, we don't know the exact number, are children.

They're screaming, vomiting, pooping. I mean, this is what's going on. One woman's pregnant. She gets on the boat. Gets on the boat pregnant. Has the first child, you know, we think in the new world, one of them anyway. They're in water so cold that the U.S. Navy says at that time of year, if you spend three minutes in the water, you die. Not hypothermia, like you're sick. You die. Three minutes. That's the cold water that's coming in.

We have a journal reference from one guy that I've always enjoyed reciting because they're, you know, they're Calvinists and they're positive and they see everything in light of the providence of God. Well, what's happening is the slats and the ship, when the ship hits the water, so hard from being lifted up, the slats actually opened for a little bit. And fish were coming in at times.

That's how big the opening was. And he said, we did thank God for the various and sundry fish that came in through the side of the ship that we might eat them. And I'm thinking, I would rather fast.

than have the ship opening up with fish coming in the side. The fish are supposed to stay on the outside. It was unbelievably violent. But I don't want to lose the fact that this is serious suffering. These are farmers, by the way. These people have never been on a ship before. You were on a cruise ship. I'm like, get me off of this thing.

for a week or two, right? Right, just a week. 66 days. Incredible. That's two months and a week. Yeah. But there's one guy whose name is John Howland, and I love his story. He finally goes, forget the captain. I'm going up top. I can't stay down here in the vomit and the poop and the screaming and the whatever anymore. So he disobeys the captain, goes up the hatch. And as soon as he goes up the hatch,

a wave comes, which is exactly what the captain knew would happen. Catches him and washes him off the ship. Well, as he's flailing in the air and the water, he reaches out and grabs a rope. Again. these Calvinist providential goddesses. The ship goes one way away from him, he's over here with the rope, comes back.

And a wave picks him up and slam dunks him, Michael Jordan style, through the open hatch back to where he was. It's like God was saying, I told you to stay put. Put him back in place. The journal writings tell us that he never moved again.

He just sat in the corner and said, I'm not moving, I'm not moving, I'm not moving. He learned his lesson. So there's some humorous things with it all. One of the sailors constantly called them, and I love this insult. It's an old insult, but it tells us what they used to do. He said, these pilgrims are psalm singing puke stockings. That was his phrase. Psalm singing puke stockings. I think I've heard of this guy. Isn't he the only one that dies? He's the only one who died.

But I love it for two reasons. First of all, he's the only dude that dies. The one sailor who insults them is the only guy who dies on the entire voyage. And the other thing is those are the two things the pilgrims spent their time doing, singing psalms, which is what the old Christians would have done in that era, and throwing up.

Psalm singing puke stockings. But it was miserable. Absolutely miserable. Finally, they come to the new world. They land by our calendar, November 9. Now we're talking Cape Cod, we're talking New England. So they are already aware they're in trouble. They have come late. They got 120-ish souls on board.

They don't know exactly where they are. And by the way, the storms have blown them. They're charters for Virginia and the northern parts of Virginia, which we can think of as being kind of maybe southern Pennsylvania. They're way north of there. They don't have a charter for where they are.

So now they're going to start exploring, looking around, and they're not going to actually get off the ship for another five, six weeks. It'll be just before Christmas that they actually step off the ship and permanently go ashore. They are trying to figure out where to plant, where to build, where to build their fort. They finally do at what's now called Plymouth.

And they are aware they're in trouble. I mean, it's December 21st when they finally put foot ashore, cold, bitter, empty wilderness. They're not growing anything at this point, and they didn't bring groceries with them. Right. People of that era did not trust just natural, what they would have...

called natural water they wouldn't just drink from a stream or a lake because they knew that they had previously their children maybe had consumed water from a river and gotten badly sick right so they brewed beer they had learned they didn't know about microorganisms what was going on with B vitamins and all that. But they just knew that beer didn't make them sick because the alcohol, we now know the alcohol killed the microorganisms and it had B vitamins that made their children healthy.

They hauled beer with them, but they wouldn't have consumed water from the ocean, the lakes, the rivers, so on. So they were in trouble. They knew they had to hurry, get some structures going, start brewing beer, getting things in operation. While they're doing that, they notice that there are some natives watching them from the trees. And I'm part Native American, so I'm going to switch now and become Hiawatha for you and be very Native American.

But I love these guys because we now know who these guys were. And so they're watching. They've assigned some people with guns to watch them. Finally, two big old tall Indians, about 6'4", stride out of the woods, walk up. to the pilgrims. And in perfect King James English, they say, do you have a beer? Now this sounds like I'm making this up. I'm not. It does. I'm not. This is part of the record.

The tribe of these natives had been killed off through disease. They had lived with some other tribes. They noticed the Englishmen coming. They had gotten on ships with other English captains just sailing in the area and so on. Learned English, acquired a taste for English beer.

and then finally been put back with a tribe, not their tribe. And that's when they noticed the pilgrims actually showing up. So they watched for a while to see if they were dangerous and so on, and then they wanted to help. So they walked out of the woods, walked up to the person they thought was in charge, and thinking they were being friendly, just in the same way I might say to you, hey, do you have a glass of wine or something? They said, do you have a beer?

So God had English-speaking natives who had a taste for, who wanted a Budweiser or whatever, walk up to the pilgrims. And this is their story. The pilgrims told this story. And this, the person who... said that, the Indian who said that was Samoset. His best buddy was the famous Squanto. Squanto. And they became friends. They befriended them. And basically, they said after they had some refreshment and became friends, you're in trouble.

As soon as they had beers together. Yeah, yeah. You're in trouble. The pilgrims would not have celebrated Christmas like a lot of dissenters did, but they knew what time of year it was. You're heading into the dead of winter. You're in trouble. Here's what you need to do quickly.

Was it called the starvation time? Is that right? They called it the starving time. The starving time. Okay. So they meet the Indians. Yes. The Indians tell them, you're in trouble. You're in trouble. And it kind of gets worse from there, doesn't it? It does get worse because there's not much you can do.

I don't work in agriculture, but you and I both know, if you're three or four months behind in an agricultural endeavor, you can't make that up overnight, right? You can't just go buy some things and speed it along. So they know they're in trouble. And what starts now is a combination of the bitter New England cold and that we know from records that that was a particularly harsh winter.

just the most basic huts and so on for homes. And it got to the point where there was five kernels of corn per person and a little bit of brackish water, meaning water that they had thought they had filtered. Per meal? Per person, per day. Per person, per day. That was the rations. Five kernels of corn and a little brackish water. Oh, wow. And half of them died. Yeah.

Half of them died. Now bear in mind, we're only... In that winter, half of them... From the winter to the spring, half of them died. Half of them died. And then in the spring, I don't want to... I want you to bear in mind, they're burying half of their people. Every family had a death of some sort, uncle, child, whatever. They were burying people constantly, freezing constantly, eating almost nothing, down to skeletons.

And they were rescued by the sunshine and the spring and natural things growing. And then they planted. And this is where some business concepts come in, that they had planted a common... common plots of food and farmed it we would probably say they did socialized farming like a co-op like farmed a common thing okay but their governor william bradford this is a very important

name in the history of their, he's also the guy who wrote the history, decided that they should have family plots, that they would produce better, work harder, tend it better if there wasn't a common plot, farming plot, but each family was farming. So they went basically to privatized farming. I love entrepreneurs. Don't forget guys, I started my company on a card table myself.

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and the better wisdom from the native americans the native americans that don't make a hole like that make it like this don't plow your furrows like that plow they had knowledge from the years of living there so better technology better intelligence and uh basically a capitalist, or I would say it's more free market. Sure.

We've learned from surveys that the young don't like the phrase capitalism. They think that means crony capitalism, but they do love the free market. So it's interesting. So I just lean that way. But that's how the pilgrims would have spoken as well. And their yield...

come the fall of 1621. This is almost a year after they've arrived, a little less than a year after they've arrived. Their yield was huge. And if I can keep on rattling on. Please do. That's when their governor said, We need to have a Thanksgiving. Okay. Now we come down to Thanksgiving. Yeah. So he declared, because they had so much food, and they were relieved.

to be out of the starving time. This is the people who are visiting graves all the time and visiting graves of not just, you know, great grandpa, but... My son, my daughter, my wife, my husband. Or maybe even my parents, right? No question. No question. They were orphans. My point is that... though they didn't write about emotional things very much. I'm sure depression was hanging over the whole thing all the time.

But they had a really good harvest because of the privatized farming, the better technologies, the better wisdom. And so in the fall of 1621, they had a four-day Thanksgiving ceremony. I love this, by the way. because they decided to invite the 90 Braves. Now, the 90 Braves of the natives of Samoset and Squanto outnumbered the number of...

Pilgrims, right? If you have 120 people and half of them die, you haven't had time to replenish. So they got more Braves coming. So the Braves, being good guests, went out and shot a bunch of deer and turkey, brought them. And they had four days, which I love talking about just briefly because they had athletic contests. They wrestled. They had shooting contests. They did all kinds of things. So there was the sports theme that we have in our modern Thanksgiving.

I'm all for it. I'm all for it. I wish it was about different teams, but still, I won't go talk smack now. And they had a four-day celebration. The natives taught the English how to make popcorn. It's the first time we see popcorn introduced to English life. Some of the foods we have now they wouldn't have had, but it doesn't matter. They ate mainly seafood, even though they had venison.

had some fowl they would have eaten mainly seafood because the bay was right there and they knew how to harvest it um all of the berry pies and everything they would have had some version of that okay um but You know, there are some things we can be cynical about. And every year, come Thanksgiving, the article starts trotting out about the myths and Plymouth Rock and all this stuff. But there was a Thanksgiving. It was to give thanks to God. They did invite the nation.

who remember they had come over to try to draw to Jesus anyway. And they had four days of food and sports and rowdiness. And at one point, the elders had to stop a food fight. That's how much food they had. I don't know if they were throwing edible food, but they were throwing apple cores and whatever, and the elders had to stop. Well, stop, stop, stop.

So it's like the college cafeteria breaking out. But I love it. It was joyous. It was faith-filled and involved the Native Americans. Again, I feel a part of that history. And when you sit down at your Thanksgiving table, this is what was going on. And here's the thing I love most that survived through the generations, and that is I told you that during the starving time, they had five kernels of corn. So there was a New England tradition.

that survived for generations and even gave birth to a poem, I'll tell you the name of it in just a few moments, where what they would do. when all the food had been cooked and the table had been set, the family was dressed and coming to eat the great big Thanksgiving meal, they would pause and put five kernels of corn on each plate. Oh, wow. To remember that era, that time, the starving time. Yeah.

say thank you for the first comers, as the phrase New Englanders would have used, and offer a prayer. That's fantastic. And I revived that in my family, my military family. My father was Colonel in the Army. We would not have done that, but we were very reverent about Thanksgiving. So when I learned this history, I did it with the kids. And at first, you know, kids were like...

Dad, really? I mean, there's food waiting. But as they got older into their 20s and were coming back from college, if I didn't do it, they'd go, Dad, the five kernels. Where's the popcorn? And there's a famous poem by Herbert Butterworth.

there's an easy name to remember with Thanksgiving meals, Herbert Butterworth, which is all about the five kernels of corn and how they celebrated at New England and how that's all they had during the starving time. So what I'm saying is beneath things like Plymouth Rock and some of the myths.

There really was a Thanksgiving celebration. It really was an offering to God. It really was about a starving time and a vision to be Christians in a new world. And it really was about love and generations yet to come. And there really was a food fight. So, hey.

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I know this is going a little bit beyond the story, but I'm curious because I think you know the story so well. It wasn't a federally recognized holiday for a period of time, right? Wasn't it Abraham Lincoln that memorialized it as a federal holiday?

There were many days of prayer and fasting that had happened, especially during the American Revolution later on in history and so on. But Lincoln was the first one to call a national day of prayer and fasting. He didn't call it. Some people fasted, but he... called it a day of Thanksgiving, and then people chose to eat. And then it was FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who made the date that it is.

Then it evolved as kind of a day of, you know, national day. Initially, it would have been a distinctly Christian day. And of course, the pilgrims were coming when there was no United States of America. That hadn't even been thought of and so on. But it got pulled into our national life after our revolution. And part of the reason was during the American Revolution, there had been so many days of Thanksgiving that we'd win. I mean...

The fact that the American colonists won the American Revolution is like the Nashville police force defeating the U.S. Army. You know what I mean? It's just the percentages are nuts. Right. So lots of Thanksgiving, lots of when we had time feasting, some days of fasting. So that tradition got carried. into our national life. Lincoln made it national. FDR made it November, you know.

turkeys and all that third or fourth Thursday in the month. And it became a national holiday, which I still, you know, I tell Christmas people who are focused on Christmas, give me a minute. Don't rush me. Let me be.

You guys are putting up Christmas lights before I got the turkey picked out of my teeth. Give us a moment to think about a pilgrim and to relax a little bit and think about that heritage. It's funny you say that, because at our house, we refuse to put up Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving. Thank you. Thank you.

I mean, I'm a Christmas person too, but what I, I'm joking about it, but what I think is important is that this is the only day in our year, the only day built into our calendar to think about our, American Christian heritage. I'm all for Fourth of July. I'm all for the President's days. Hey, I'm in all of it. I'm a historian. I love all those remembrances. But to think about the heritage of faith.

tied to our national existence. Really, Thanksgiving's it. And so part of the reason that I tell this story so much and make speeches about it and write about it is that it's genuine. I don't want the myth to take over. I don't want the debunkers to over. you know, remove the story. But also, you know, like at your house at Thanksgiving, I'm not saying you have to do this, but five minutes.

between when the food is done and we're going to sit down or we sit down and put some corn. My kids just went and put popcorn seeds, you know, on the, and we put a few minutes. Thank you, God, for the pilgrims. Thank you for that vision. Thank you for some vision for the Native Americans. My kids understood that they were half-descended from Native Americans. Thank you for that heritage. Let us light our torch, so to speak, our own torch of faith in that flame.

And thank you that we're not in a starving time. You know, that half our family's not dead or, you know, and the kids would voice it in different ways. And then let... Food and football reign. It's fine. It's perfectly fine. Yeah. But give us a minute, for heaven's sakes, to be sacred about it. To reflect back. I also, you know, I look forward to it to just for us to look at the past year as a family. Yes. What are we?

thankful for yes because as you said we're not dealing with the starving time we're so far beyond that right but we do have a lot to be thankful for well and and who knows what depends on where a kid goes to school what he's going to hear he or she is going to hear about their national life and

Is the whole country just abusive to the natives? And were we just always militaristic, angry? I mean, who knows what they've heard? And I'm grateful for teachers, but sometimes there's some real lies being taught in our schools, private and public. So this is just a moment where the parents can take a little bit of control. I'm not trying to pick a fight here, but have a little control and just say,

hey, let me just read this to you. And sometimes the reason I mention the Herbert Butterworth poem is that sometimes people read that. That was read at New England tables. It's a four or five paragraph. You have to script that well. Don't put food on the table hot and then time out. We're gonna take a half an hour for a sermon here. That'll just take everybody off.

But take a moment, you know, and be a little reverent. And my kids are that way now. I mean, you know, they're all coming in for Christmas and they're a little ticked off. They're not coming in for Thanksgiving. because I'm not 100% sure what Bev and I are doing for Thanksgiving, but if it's just the two of us at a restaurant, I won't be, but if it were, we'd say, could you guys give us a little corn in a bowl? And we've done it out publicly when we've had to travel and so on.

And it really does bring a sense of holiness and reverence and heritage into our family. I love that. I love and admire how much you value it and thought about it and have learned, if you could. If there was one lesson from the pilgrims and what they went through, what would you want people to know? What would you want them to take away?

Well, I actually teach this story to a lot of businesses and break out the business principles. And so there are two or three that I think are important. And I know you've asked for one, but you're talking to a historian. I'm not going to just give you one. Are you crazy? Come on.

The fact that they were vision-driven, the story gets told like they're being driven by persecution, driven by the... But they were doing fine, but they got a vision. Happened to be a vision for Christian evangelism, but...

You know, purpose-driven, vision-driven, all the language we use these days, I think that's important. It's important for a business. It's important for a person. What's the defining vision, purpose, et cetera, driving your life? Yeah. That's the success. That's what needs success in business. marriage, weight loss, whatever we're about, we got to have a vision. The second thing was they survived by the grace of God, but also by...

taking full responsibility for production. I'm putting it in business terms. But that privatizing of farming, granted they had better tools, always a key business. A bit of wisdom. Granted, they had better intelligence and knowledge. They'd done, in a sense, research, even though it was handed to them by the natives. But for each family to take responsibility for its own production transformed their farming.

In fact, they wrote letters back to Europe saying, what are you guys doing with socialized plasma? They were sort of evangelists for Adam Smith, so to speak, even though he wouldn't live for another 150 years. But I think probably... the thing that touches me the most is that when we celebrate Thanksgiving, we have to realize that the first pilgrim celebrated Thanksgiving out of an unbelievably agonizing era of death and suffering.

and watching children starve to death in your home. I mean, I just want to make it personal for a moment. So when they thanked God for His grace and had a laugh at throwing apple cores and arm wrestled the natives and went to hunting. Right. And there was any laughter and any lifting of the gloom. It was in the face of all that. Yeah. And I think that's a lesson for us. People tell me all the time in our current generation, what a terrible time to be alive. I go, really?

Really? You just happened to say that to a PhD in history who believes in the providence of God. And I know we've got some challenges in our time. But even if they're the worst times men have ever known, they're not as bad. Yeah. as that starving time, and yet they rose. They built a civilization. They continued good relationships with the natives for decades more. There was a war in 1670, but that wasn't even this generation. So all that I'm saying is...

Great victory out of great suffering. And that's, you know, we've all had suffering in our lives. We will have more. It's just what it means to live in this fallen world. But to know that that's possible. And the pilgrims, you know, they're not... they live as a symbol for me. Yeah, absolutely. And having spent so much time reading their journals and so on, I'm moved by the fact that they could, you know, in the words of the famous sports TV show, snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

The image that everybody has of big black hats with muckles on them and great all black and big black. These are Quakers. Those aren't pilgrims. Pilgrims wore bright colors and they drank rum and they smoked pipes. we've turned them into sin-sniffing, snot-nosed, narrow Christians. Felt board cartoons. Yeah, because it's easy to put up on a cake or something.

No, they were fun and rowdy, and like I say, when they do Thanksgiving, they wrestled, they arm wrestled, they fired their weapons, they had a food fight, and they talked smack about the Cowboys, I'm sure, but they did. Giving thanks to them that winter or that fall after the starving time wasn't a concept to them, was it? No. No. No. It was a lifestyle. It was. Thank you so much for your time and sharing your story and your wisdom.

Well, thanks for letting me rant on about one of my loves and be a professor for a moment. I love it. Thanks, Stephen. You betcha. Wow, that's some powerful stuff there. Hey, it's a great reminder of what real vision, grit, and faith look like when everything's on the line. Big thanks to Steven Mansfield and our own John Falcons for that incredible conversation. And remember, better a weary warrior than a quivering critic. This world needs more high-quality leaders. Take courage and lead.

Thanks for joining us on Entree Leadership. And again, happy Thanksgiving.