Lead to Win is brought to you by Leader Box, a monthly reading experience curated by Leaders,

Four Leaders.

Learn more at Leaderbox.com.

In your lifetime, you will utter more than 860 million words, the equivalent of speaking

the entire text of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, nearly 15 times.

What do those words add up to?

What is the effect of your words on other people?

On yourself.

What are you accomplishing with your words?

On March 4th, 1865, the American Civil War was within days of completion.

Abraham Lincoln stood on the steps of the Capitol building and spoke these words.

With malice toward none, with charity for long, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.

Let us strive on to finish the work we are in,

to bind up the nation's wounds,

to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan,

to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Lincoln's second inaugural address has been described as being quote among the handful

of semi-sacred texts by which Americans conceive their place in the world.

This speech, perhaps more than anything else, united a nation reeling from years of bloody

conflict and set its course for the 20th century.

Words can create, they can also destroy.

In 1899, a largely unknown communist agitator named Vladimir Lenin

...