A 7-Year-Old’s Path to Greatness

[Revised to include essay]

Greatness is attributed to such people as Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and Abraham Lincoln. Yet I suspect I have greatness in my midst.

And it’s tucked inside a 7-year-old boy’s body.

Another student astounded his parents – and me – this week in his thousand-mile journey in the martial arts. No matter how many times I’ve seen transformative moments like this before, I still get giddy with excitement. Still get chills.

I’m a writer – and you can’t write this stuff.

Earlier this month, I invited four young men to apply to become Junior Leaders at Tao of Texas Martial Arts Institute. At our school, being a Junior Leader isn’t something you pay for in extra tuition. It’s something you earn. A candidate must be at least a green belt who has accumulated 36 or more hours of leadership-related tasks.

Students get leadership points by leading the class in warm-ups; teaching classmates their kicks, punches, and forms; or helping with chores around the dojang. Junior Leader is a coveted role. Not every student becomes a Junior Leader, but those who have attained this position also coincidentally have gone on to obtain their black belts.

These students are selfless, hard-working, and determined. They are humble, inspiring examples to their peers of the true power of martial arts. They are my right-hand men and women on the mat.

And they get to wear cool uniforms: black pants and a white top with black V-neck trim – a privilege typically reserved for black belts only.

Calvin has been foaming at the mouth to become a Junior Leader for a while now. For the past three months, he has been the first student in the dojang on Tuesdays and Thursdays, showing up an entire hour before his own class begins so that he can assist me in the Tiny Texans class.

Calvin is 7 YEARS OLD.

He is big for his age, but Calvin is big to the 3- to 5-year-old Tiny Texans for another reason. To them, he’s not just Calvin – a 2nd-grader who struggles with penmanship. He’s “Mr. Redman,” and Mr. Redman can do all kinds of neat, cool kicks. He can break whitewood pine boards and throw hard punches with his fists, and he can knock over the yellow standup punching bag with a powerful front kick and loud kihap. These mini-martial artists literally and figuratively look up to Calvin. They want to be just like him.

Every training day, Calvin has diligently written down his leadership points on the Leadership Log and added them up. (He has become very motivated to improve his math skills now that addition has a real-life application.)

Calvin wants to be a Junior Leader so badly he can hardly stand it. So the day after he was promoted to green belt, I gave Calvin and three other boys an opportunity to get 10 leadership points by writing an essay on what it means to be a leader.

Calvin was motivated – the kind of motivation that inspires greatness. So I wasn’t too surprised when I received the following email from his mom:

"Okay. Where is my son? What have you done to him? Geez.... As soon as we left [the dojang], Calvin said, ‘I want to write my essay tonight.’ I said no, and explained to him that an essay takes time and thought. Being the persistent little bugger that he is, he started talking about what makes a good leader. I had a feeling he did not quite understand the question by the random answers he was giving me. So, I explained the best I could. First off, I explained that leaders are not just ‘Junior Leaders,’ but teachers as well. ‘Ms. Cathy is a leader…,’ and so on. Then it clicked. We came home and I told him to write a rough draft. Of course, he had never even heard of that, so I had to explain that to him. I told him an essay had a beginning, middle, and an end (at least that is how I remember it!). We talked about what made you respect people and what makes you want to learn from someone. Cathy, that guy wrote an essay!!!!! He wrote everything, and formed all of the sentences on his own. I added one word at the end to complete the last sentence. He is extremely proud, and I cannot even tell you how proud I am. I hope you feel the same when he hands it into you tomorrow.”

Calvin turned in his essay on Wednesday – handwritten so that he could practice improving his penmanship – and his mom was right. It was amazing:

“To be a good leader you have to listen to your students. It might be important.

“Be honest to your students so your students do the move right.

“Be kind to your students so they will like you.

“Respect your students and they will respect you.

“Think about your students and they will think about you.

“I think these [qualities] will make a good leader.”

Check it: He’s 7 years old, people! And while his mom admits she added one word (obviously: “qualities”) to the essay, he wrote the whole darn thing himself.

At the end of his mom’s email, she wrote “You are the BEST!” and thanked me for inspiring her son.

Let’s be clear. I’M not the best. CALVIN is the best. He is the one who sat down and thought about being a leader – about how I treat him and his classmates with courtesy, integrity, and respect, and about how that’s how he wants to treat others when he’s in a leadership role.

You may have begun your day listening to the pundits on CNN bemoaning the fact that this country’s in a liberal/conservative/Democratic/Republican/Tea Party hell hole and there’s no way out. You might feel discouraged, disheartened, and hopeless. You may say, “Where are our heroes? Our John Waynes?”

I can attest that many of the great heroes you seek stand in sharp, neat lines, kicking and punching on a daily basis at Tao of Texas MAI here in Austin, Texas. But truly, they’re everywhere.

You may not pay much attention to 7-year-olds. They may not warrant the time of day on your busy calendar. Be advised, though: If you dismiss these kids, you will be missing out on greatness-in-waiting. Inspiration and empowerment can come from the most unusual and unlikely places, circumstances, and people.

Is Calvin the next Dalai Lama? Doubt it. Yet I sense we should all keep our eyes on him.

The Force is strong in this one, Yoda might say.