Day: March 7, 2014

The last few weeks have led me to serious thoughts about what it means to be a leader. Leadership is something you have to want. Furthermore, leadership is something you have to believe you can do successfully. In my work life there are many leadership opportunities. I’ve had occasion to be a leader at different levels and bear the scars of the effort. Not all of my attempts were successful. I learned more from my failures than I did from success, because when I failed it was made clear to me what I did wrong. When I am successful nobody tells me what I am doing right. They are simply not angry, and that is my reward for a job well done.  I’ve learned from this practice that leadership is largely thankless activity that one ought to do because it is the right thing to do and because you are the best suited for the position. You can’t do it for any overinflated since of glory or personal value or even for the money. All of that factors into why people want to be leaders and the difficult part for me has been separating these parts out and reflecting on why I want the things I want.

 

The biggest question is do I want to lead and why? I do want to lead. Some of it is ego. I see myself as a leader and have since my earliest memory of myself. So, in a way being a leader is what I expect of myself and what I gear myself for. On the other hand, it feels like a responsibility. I also think that my strength is my creativity. Being a leader creates the opportunity to express that creativity. On the other hand it means involving others in the creative process and having the organizational skills/structure to implement and to delegate. Anyone who’s read my blog longer than a week knows this is a weakness. All of this leads to the question: Can I be comfortable not leading?

There is going to be a time in the next few years where I have to step back from the leadership role I’m in and my primary concern is that I won’t have a voice to express myself once that happens. This is probably not how things will go, but the fear of it drives this blog—as does the fear of letting go of what I continue to work so hard to build. I guess the best any of us can do is put our soul into the things we do and know that we’ve done everything in our power. That work—that effort—has to be able to stand on its own after we’re gone.

Eleanor Roosevelt quipped, “There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. [T]he purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for a newer richer experience.” When this process started 1400 days ago I wondered aloud what I might gain from the experience. I learned that I have within me the discipline to do whatever I want so long as it means enough to me to put forward that Herculean effort required to do so. I am no different than anyone I pass on the street in the sense that great potential lies within me.

The 10 minute rule was a test to see if I could access of fraction of that potential, the way so many of us access strength, perseverance, dedication, willpower, etc. exactly when we need it. When I think about people who have ‘successful lives’ they are always the ones who can put their abilities to work even when it isn’t a matter of survival instinct. So, where do we go from here? The only way to grow as Eleanor Roosevelt suggests is to push ourselves to experience more and more often. I’ve decided to put together a plan that sets me back on the path I was on when the ‘Rule’ hit the web. I recognize now that I was trying to do too much too soon and with experience came a sense of understanding as to how to level up my life.

What comes next is a better me, because I will make it so. We all have that potential if we are willing to take it.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Internet connection is spotty, so these blogs are going to be a bit more sporadic than normal.
2. There is something to be said about alliteration.
3. I was going to post something insightful about what I learned about Developmental Students today but my learning, much like my internet, has been shoddy. The Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas is not shoddy. In spite of producing a vapid and undeserving heiress who is plainly reflective of everything I expressed a few days ago, the Hilton family can make one feel at home.

 

No matter how much money we make or how pompously we sip our tea, in the end most of us are still animals driven by a biological imperative. I’m reminded of this more and more watching all forms of media. Beauty, see, drives a lot of the media message. I’m hard pressed to think of the last time I saw an ugly news anchor—especially a female one. Women are subject to the rule of beauty more than men, but we are in no way immune to its pull.

 

I’ve seen all manor of product sold with beauty. The webserver this very site lives on is sold on the back of beauty. Appropriately dressed yet sublimely attractive women beckon you to the front page with the forward promise of affordable technology and the implicit promise of being in the presence if not being recognized by beauty. I think that is the problem there—we want to have beauty or to be beautiful so much that it creates a subconscious binding to all things beautiful in the sense that we want beauty and anything that consciously represents that is something we subconsciously yearn for.

There is nothing to be done about this relationship with beauty, but understanding in allows us a modicum of freedom. The things we understand and are consciously aware of are the things that we have the ability to affect, if only a little.

Some Thoughts:

1. 1400 posts. That. Just. Happened.