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Finding Your Voice
When Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman from New South Wales, announced that he was “here to sing opera” on the television show, Britain’s Got Talent – think American Idol with an English accent – it was all that Simon Cowell, his fellow judges, Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden, and the audience could do not to snicker out loud.
Poor guy. Rumpled suit. Gap in his front teeth large enough to drive a red double-decker London tourist bus through. Slouched posture. A near-grimace of self-doubt on his face that was truly painful to behold. An embarrassing moment just head. A car wreck you just couldn’t take your eyes off. So I had to watch.
And then the miracle. A voice suited for the Royal Opera House in London or the Teatro alla Scala in Milan stunningly bursts forth on the opera classic, Nessun Dorma. The loquacious Cowell had no words – Amanda openly wept. Audience members, including some who looked like they were on their way to a U2 or Linkin Park concert and might possibly have never heard of opera, gave Paul one standing ovation after another.
The timid phone salesman found his voice.
Many people seem to simply be going through the motions in life. Too many disappointments. Too many failures. Too little recognition and affirmation.
Of course, it’s possible that some of us have given up dreaming and daring for the simple reason that we have held on to the wrong dreams for too long. We’ve been trying to sing someone else’s song and haven’t found our own calling, our own gifting, our own purpose that transcends gap teeth, rumpled suits, and any other shortcomings real or perceived.
Have you found your voice? When your moment arrives, will you be ready to sing?
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The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan
The American Who Became King of Afghanistan
I loved the Michael Caine and Sean Connery movie, The Man Who Would Be King, which came out when I was in high school. The John Huston film was nominated for four Academy Awards. Christopher Plummer played the role of a young journalist by the name of Rudyard Kipling – and the film was based on the Kipling’s short story by the same name.
But who knew that Kipling’s literary bon mot was inspired by a true story – and that truth truly is stranger than fiction?
In 1989, Ben Macintyre was sent to Afghanistan to cover the final stages of the 10 year war between the Soviets and the CIA-backed Mujahideen guerrillas. While there he read Kipling’s tale of Daniel Dravot (written in 1888 but looking back to the middle of the Victorian Age, the 1820s and 30s), who made it to the heart of Afghanistan disguised as a Muslim holy man to become king of a fierce tribal empire. It was several years later, while combing through stacks of books in the British Library that Macintyre first discovered the name of a man who “reputedly inspired Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘The Man Who Would Be King.'”
So began Macintyre’s search for an elusive footnote in history – all his papers were assumed to have been destroyed in a house fire in 1929 – that culminated in The Man Who Would Be King, a fascinating slice of history that is relevant to today’s most pressing geopolitical hotspot. Following clues that led him from Britain’s war archives to the Punjab, San Francisco, and Pennsylvania, Macintyre was finally able to find a box hidden away in the basement of the archives in a tiny U.S. museum of this mysterious man’s birthplace. At the bottom of the box was a “document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.”
The first American in Afghanistan had many titles: Prince of Ghor, Paramount Chief of the Hazarajat, Lord of Kurram, personal surgeon to Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Five Rivers, King of Afghanistan … and many others. His highness Halan Sahib – who in 1839, enthroned on a bull elephant, raised his standard and made claim to the Hindu Kush – was known back home in Chester County, Pennsylvania, as Josiah Harlan. The man who followed Alexander the Great’s winding mountain path 21 centuries later and led an army made up of Afghan Pathans, Persian Qizilibash, Hindus, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras who were descendents of the Mongolian Hordes, a pacifist Quaker of Chester County, Pennsylvania.
If you like history, biographies, and tales that seem too fanciful to be true, you’ll love The Man Would Be King.
