People only accomplish great things when they're royally cheesed off or on fire with a cause .
I just had a close-up look at this principle in action. My sister, Melanie, a licensed drug and alcohol counselor, was telling me how she won her current gig. It started when she got into a beef over the way public-school funding was allocated in her home state of Washington. At a public meeting to talk about how special-ed moneys would be spent in her district, another parent argued that those funds should be dedicated exclusively to training all teachers to work with autistic children. She sent a copy to the local newspaper, which printed it.