We are all snowflakes, because we are fragile as individuals and, like the blizzard, extremely powerful in groups.

New Jersey Senator Cory Bookers tells the story of how he rose from the depths of despair to bring change to his local community through local action. We are all snowflakes, he says, not because we are all unique but because we are fragile as individuals and, like the blizzard, extremely powerful in groups. To accomplish your biggest goals in life, it's important to surrender the idea that they must be completed within your lifetime. Only when we activate the power of community, and other agents beyond the individual, will we arrive to affect real change.

Cory Booker is the junior United States senator from New Jersey. He was born in Washington, D.C., and his parents, who both worked for IBM, later relocated the family to Harrington Park, New Jersey. A star high school athlete, Booker received a football scholarship to Stanford University, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He then attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before earning his law degree from Yale University. Booker won a special election to fill the term of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg to become New Jersey’s first African American senator and only the twenty-first person in American history to ascend directly from mayor to senator. Booker lives in Newark’s Central Ward. His book, United, gives an account of his own political education that have shaped his particular civic vision for America.