As a boy, best-selling author Dennis P. Kimbro wasn’t allowed to watch television on weeknights, with one exception. Each week, he and his brother would have to watch “Biography” — to be grilled afterward by their father.

There they’d sit, watching those black-and-white bios on Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Babe Ruth and Mohandas K. Gandhi, but no African-Americans like themselves and precious few women.

“What did you learn?,” Kimbro’s education-obsessed father would ask once narrator Mike Wallace had signed off. “What lessons did you draw from that life?”

Flash forward to a recent visit to Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, where Kimbro tells an audience of business students and faculty of the inspirational traits that have propelled African-Americans to success — familiar territory for this author of four books, including What Makes the Great Great.

Kimbro, 56, has interviewed legions of high-achievers to find the common threads in lives successfully led. From his early career, Kimbro has sought the answer to two basic questions: Why does one individual succeed while another fails?, and Why is one person rich and another impoverished?

“What makes the great great?” asked Kimbro, who studied wealth and poverty in underdeveloped countries while getting his doctorate at Northwestern University. “They dream big dreams. They desperately want to accomplish something in life. The greatest gift in life is purpose — living your life on purpose.”

Charismatic and colorful, with a penchant for the telling anecdote, Kimbro talked about interviewing such high-profile African-Americans as Bishop T.D. Jakes, Andrew Young, Maynard Jackson, Eddie Robinson, Don King, Hazel O’Leary, Maya Angelou and Johnnetta Cole.

Beyond dreaming big, he said, mega-achievers commit themselves to excellence, engage in lifelong learning — “you’re in school every day of your life” — and an absolute refusal to fail.

“Get a big dream,” Kimbro urged the Goizueta students. “These individuals were inner-directed versus outer-directed. They weren’t so quick to believe well-meaning friends or family members who said, ‘You can’t do this’ or ‘You can’t do that.’ They walked to the beat of a different drummer.

“And they flat out refused to fail,” noted Kimbro, who spoke as part of Goizueta’s Leadership Speaker Series. “I’m not saying they didn’t fail — many of them actually failed their way to success.”

What makes the great great? Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson offered Kimbro this observation: “Life is a grindstone, but whether it grinds you down or polishes you up depends on what you are made of.”

Famed pediatric neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson imparted this recipe for success: “Think big, think bold, think stretch, think global, think quantum leap, but Lord have mercy, think.”

Kimbro recalled asking the late Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown about leadership.

“His face lit up like a Christmas tree,” Kimbro recalled. “Brown said, ‘There are only two requirements of leadership. First, the price of leadership is always loneliness. Second, you can never be concerned about what other people say and do.’ ”

Persistence, dedication and a driving passion mark the successful, stressed Kimbro, telling Goizueta students that they should chart their own course and create their own identity, rather than inevitably be labeled and pigeonholed by others.

“You are unique,” he said. “You cannot succeed by being like everybody else. Sooner or later you have to ask, ‘Why did the Lord take time out of His busy schedule to blow life into my lungs?’ ”

Passion. Kimbro recalled following the late Maynard Jackson around when he was mayor of Atlanta. “On Sunday afternoon, his one day off a week, Maynard would throw his wife and kids in the car and ride around the city looking for potholes,” he said. “That’s passion.”

Kimbro talked about Hazel O’Leary, secretary of energy in the Clinton Administration and now president of Fisk University in Nashville, where many African-American students study to become doctors.

During an interview, he asked O’Leary what she learned working for the president of the United States.

“The first thing is the power of ideas,” she told him. “We don’t live in a society that’s divided between rich vs. poor, black vs. white, liberal vs. conservative, Republican vs. Democrat, male vs. female. No, we live in one that’s divided between dreamers and nondreamers. You will get in trouble in life not because you wanted too much but because you settled for too little. And No. 2, that everyone is special.”

Kimbro then rattled off a list of statistics to help students grasp the importance of vision and persistence.

“Of the 33.4 million African-Americans, fewer than 35,000 are millionaires,
 he said, “and most struggled mightily to get there.”

“The average millionaire didn’t realize his or her dream until age 45 and didn’t become a millionaire until age 54,” he said. “The average one goes bankrupt 3.2 times on the road to millionaireship, dips and dabbles in 17 different businesses, and doesn’t hit it big until the 18th try. You’d be hard pressed to find one in a suit worth more than $400, and nine times out of 10 they’re married to their first spouse.”

There are many forms of wealth, among them confidence, charisma and persistence, noted Kimbro. “Money is only No. 3, behind knowledge and work habits. I remember asking Walter Turnball, founder of the Harlem Boys Choir, what wealth was to him. He started crying and said, ‘Wealth is hearing the voices of my boys.’ ”

Kimbro said he tells his students he doesn’t want them to become millionaires for the sake of the money.

“The money is great, but I want you to be a millionaire because of what you have to become in the process,” said Kimbro, criticizing “the whole bling-bling microcosm” of modern black youth. “Money is the result of living in effective service. It’s the result of building relationships, and anything short of that is fleeting.

“Sixty-four percent of black Americans believe the only way they’re going to acquire wealth is to hit the lottery, and they act that way,” he said.

Successful people never stop learning, said Kimbro, whose next book will be about black millionaires (no athletes or entertainers, just “folks you’d pass on the street” without a second glance).

High achievers also give back to their community and remember where they came from, Kimbro said. “They throw the rope back.” Given the dispiriting data on black youth, “we’d better throw life preservers and everything else back, too,” he said.

Kimbro drew a sharp contrast between African-American success stories and the dismal statistics on black men in this country.

“Right now there are 620,000 black males on college campuses, compared to 1.4 million in prison,” said Kimbro, a professor at Clark Atlanta University and a former director of the school’s Center of Entrepreneurship. “But there are (only) 125,000 white males in prison compared to 3.29 million in college. Every 90 seconds of the day, a black child is born to a teen mother who’ll never finish high school. Every 40 minutes of the day, a black male is convicted of a violent crime.

“I don’t know what to tell you; but we’d better do something quick,” he said, urging the audience to seek answers for this social disparity and to reiterate the importance of reaching back and helping others.

Kimbro then offered an object lesson in servant leadership, courtesy of then-Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole. The setting was a black-tie dinner for school trustees one glorious night years ago.

“All the beautiful people were there,” he said. “Just imagine, it was the board of Spelman College.”

The fare was prime rib and lobster. “But before the first knife and fork hit that baked potato, up pops Johnnetta Cole. She said, ‘Something’s not right with this picture. No one move. Put your knife and fork down.’ And then she goes back in the kitchen.”

Minutes pass. More uncomfortable minutes pass.

“Finally she comes back with her arm around this little black woman who wasn’t a second younger than 70 years old. She hadn’t been to the hair dresser in weeks, gray hair all over the place and wearing a white apron with a giant gravy stain in the middle.

“Here comes Johnnetta Cole walking out in the midst of all these beautiful people with her arm around this dear old black woman, and she says, ‘I just want to make sure everybody in this room knows the person who’s responsible for your meal.’

“That’s throwing the rope back,” Kimbro said. “Man oh man, do I respect Johnnetta Cole.”