online profile up on a dating site or blocking your ex on your phone can feel like an
act of bravery. So can adopting new technology for your business or walking in the
door of your home and facing your problems head-on instead of pouring a drink
and zoning out in front of the TV.
As I began to write this book and started collecting stories of people around
the world using the Rule, it became clear that inside every decision there exist five
seconds of courage that can change everything in our lives.
The more the word “courage” came up, the more I began to wonder if there
was something about one of the most historic moments of courage that would
help me better understand the nature of courage itself. The first person that came
to mind was Rosa Parks. You probably know the story of how Rosa Parks sparked
the modern American Civil Rights Movement on a chilly December evening in
1955 when she quietly refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger.
Her moment of courage teaches us all that it’s not the big moves that change
everything—it’s the smallest ones in your everyday life that do. She didn’t plan to do
what she did that night. Mrs. Parks described herself as the kind of person who
tried to “be as careful as possible to stay out of trouble.” The only thing she
planned on doing that evening was to get home after a long day at work and have
dinner with her husband. It was just an evening, like any other evening—until one
decision changed everything.
Curious, I dug in and researched everything I could find about Mrs. Parks, from
the National Archives, biographies, radio interviews, and newspaper articles. What I
found is incredible. Just weeks after her arrest, she gave a radio interview to Sidney
Rogers on Pacifica Radio and the National Archives website has a recording of it.
Here’s how she described that historic moment in her own words:
As the bus proceeded out of town on the third stop, the white passengers had filled the front of the bus. When I got on the
bus, the rear was filled with colored passengers, and they were beginning to stand. The seat I occupied was the first of the