Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.

In my opinion, Jimmy Carter is a true statesman and a hero. The successes and failures of his presidency can be debated ad nauseum, and it's not yet clear how history will judge him as a president. But as a former president, he is without peer.

In his book Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, Carter writes of how bereft he and Rosalynn felt leaving the White House with so much work left undone. After personal, financial, and spiritual soul-searching, they began the work that resulted in the founding of The Carter Center. 

We had the opportunity to visit The Carter Center headquarters near Atlanta a few years ago. It's beautifully situated and quietly elegant. The many stories of accomplishment are moving and inspiring. I'm a sucker for a great tagline or aphorism. I've always thought The Carter Center's tagline to be one of the best.

Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.

Most of us have neither the ability nor the inclination to do the amazing things that the Carters have done. In David Brooks thoughtful opinion piece "A Question of Moral Radicalism," he argues that the world is better off because we have people like Ghandi and Mother Theresa, but it wouldn't be better off if we were all like that. The same can be said of the Carters. We can't all achieve what they have, but the world is definitely a better place thanks to all they have done. 

Brooks concludes, "Yet I don’t want to let us off the hook. There’s a continuum of moral radicalism. Most of us are too far on the comfortable end and too far from the altruistic one. It could be that you or I will only really feel fulfilled after a daring and concrete leap in the direction of moral radicalism." 

At the very least, in this era of personal "branding," we should think twice about whether our own taglines are justified.