The Story of Sir John Wilson

Today’s Monday Morning Motivational Minute is excerpted from The Element, How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson.

When 12 year old John Wilson walked into chemistry class one day in October of 1931, he had no idea his life would change completely.  The experiment that day was to show how heating a container of water would cause oxygen to rise to the surface.  The experiment itself was very common but the container John was given this day was not.  A mistake by a lab assistant and a wrongly labeled bottle meant that when John heated his container, it exploded.  A portion of the classroom was destroyed, several students came away bleeding and John was left blinded in both eyes.

After two months in the hospital, as John and his parents tried to figure out how to deal with the tragedy, it became apparent that John did not view the accident as quite as catastrophic as everyone else did.  In a later interview with the London Times he said, “It didn’t strike me, even then, as a tragedy.”  He knew he had the rest of his life to live and he didn’t intend to live it in an understated way.  He went on to learn Braille, become and accomplished rower, swimmer, actor and orator as he finished high school.  After receiving his law degree form Oxford, he went to work for the National Institute for the Blind in England.

In 1946 his real calling found him while on a fact finding tour of British colonies in Africa and the Middle East.  What he discovered was rampant blindness.  However, unlike his blindness, the diseases that affected so many of the people he encountered were preventable with proper medical attention.

John went on to found Sight Savers International and over his 30 years as its director, accomplished remarkable things.  Generations of African children can thank John Wilson for their sight.  Under John’s direction, the organization preformed 3 million cataract operations and treated 12 million others at risk of becoming blind.  Between these and other preventative measures, tens of millions of people can see.

When John retired, he and his wife devoted their energy to IMPACT, a program of the World Health Organization devoted to preventing all types of disabling diseases.  Knighted in 1975, he also received the Helen Keller International Award, the Albert Schweitzer International Prize and the World Humanity Award.  He continued to be active until his death in 1999.

The story of Sir John Wilson reminds me that in Kindergarten we are all marvelously hopeful little boys and girls.  We have the world before us and we believed in the goodness of everything.  We believe in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy.  We believe we can be a fire truck or an astronaut when we grow up.  We believe in fairytales and princesses and that you really can turn a frog into a prince with just a kiss.  We believe in magic. To us, everything is magical.  We dream as much with our eyes open as we do while we sleep and we believe we could fly if we could just remember how we did it in our dream.  In short, we believe in everything. 

John Wilson never stopped believing.  He never lost that marvelous hopefulness. John was faced with a circumstance that would have crushed the spirit of so many other people but he insisted that he never saw his blindness as anything more than a “confounded nuisance”.  He proved dramatically that it is not what happens to us that determines our life, it is what we make of what happens to us.

So everyone, make life happen, be inspired and have a great day.