Dr. Benjamin Carson at Butler University's Diversity Lecture Series

"It is not my intention to offend anyone. And if I do, too bad."

When Dr. Benjamin Carson said that, I knew I was going to have a good time.

I was sitting in Clowes Hall, at Butler University's Diversity Lecture Series. Dr. Carson, of "Gifted Hands" fame, has spoken to hundreds of groups about the importance of reaching for your dream, no matter how impossible it seems. And he was at Butler University on Wednesday night to speak to a nearly-full Clowes Hall. I had been asked to attend the event for Smaller Indiana, and write about it.

I was chagrined to realize that had it not been for this offer, I might have missed one of the most exciting and inspiring speeches I have ever heard. (So thanks, Pat Coyle, for making this available.)

"I do not believe in political correctness," Carson continued. "It is a destructive force. It is vitally important that people talk and are not shut up by a vocal minority."

And that's what he did. Carson spoke from his heart about his own personal struggles and fights to becoming a doctor, about how he committed himself to studying and working, and even about how his efforts to learn about classical music so he could be in GE's College Bowl resulted in him getting into medical school. The problem was College Bowl was canceled when he started his freshman year at Yale.

Yale freakin' University. That's a big change from where he had been just 8 years earlier.

When Carson was in the fifth grade, everyone called him "dummy." This was a problem, given his dream of being a physician. He said that when he was a kid, and he and his brother and mother would visit the hospital, he would hear the doctors being called on the PA system. He dreamed that one day he would hear his voice being called.

"Dr. Carson to surgery," the PA would say, letting the whole world hear his name. "Dr. Carson to the ER."

"Of course, now we have beepers, so I don't get to hear it" he said.

But the "dummy" decided he didn't want to be a dummy; dummies don't get to be doctors. And he wasn't going to let people take his dream away from him. By studying, reading, and constantly learning, Carson said he went from being the dumb kid in fifth grade to the kid everyone asked for help in the seventh grade. He fought to become not only a physician, but the world-renowned chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital.

Not only that, he is the Benjamin S. Carson, Sr., M.D. and Dr. Evelyn Spiro, R.N. Professor of Pediatric Neurosurgery.

In other words, the guy is so famous they named a professorship aft... And the only guy good enough to fill the role? The guy they named it for.

My neighborhood association won't even let me put my name on my mailbox, but one of the leading hospitals in the entire world named a job after Ben Carson. He was named by the Library of Congress as one of 80 Living Legends, has received the 2008 Spingam Medal from the NAACP, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in this country.

Not too bad for a dummy.

As I listened to Carson, I couldn't help but wish my kids were there with me. I tell them over and over that they can do anything, be anything they want.

When I went home that night, I told my youngest daughter all about this amazing man I had heard, and what he had done to get there. My daughter is black, and is always interested in hearing about other black people she can look up to as a role model. I explained how he had a hard childhood, but worked really hard to overcome it.

"And you've got a head start on him," I told her. "You don't have the same problems he did when he was a boy. So you can do anything you want to."

"I want to be a doctor," she said.

When Dr. Carson became a neurosurgeon 20-some years ago, there were only 10 black pediatric neurosurgeons in the country. He become the eleventh. When my daughter is old enough, I think it's Dr. Carson's extraordinary efforts and successes that will have paved the way for my daughter and others like her.