I had the great good fortune to interview Michael Brown, co-founder and CEO of City Year, for a forthcoming book on meta-leadership. City Year is a volunteer service agency that deploys corps of young people to assist with worthy projects in 20 cities. It gives these youth the chance to garner valuable experience and share their invaluable energy and spirit. It was an inspiring 90 minutes.
You’ll have to wait for the book for the real skinny on the full interview but I have to share this one nugget: Brown said that inspiration is a skill set, not a mind set.
What he meant was that idealism is attitude in action. It is not simply optimism or a dreamy-eyed reach for the stars: idealism involves a commitment and concrete steps toward realizing the potential of one’s vision. Idealism is doing.
I have more than 10 pages of notes that are going to be great additions to the book. One of the things that I liked best about Brown was that he offered the books that inspired him, and his co-founder Alan Khazei, without having to be asked. Among them was Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth (both the PBS series and the book). I’m going to revisit that one.
I have long been a City Year enthusiast and a believer in national service. I’m sorry that I am too old to have taken advantage of the program but am happy and proud to be a supporter.
Sometimes you never know from whence wisdom will leap: I was reading the back of my cup of iced tea from Chipotle Grill and found this quote from Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute: “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re thinking too small.”
I recently spent a great four days in Atlanta working with my co-authors on a forthcoming book on meta-leadership. We wrestled with many issues but one that I think we need to go back to is, “What is the purpose of leadership?” In short, why care? Why go to all of the work to develop the capability? Why buy our book? I got caught up in thinking back to Burns’ definition that leadership is the achievement of desired objectives — nice, but rather dry and academic (and a great over-simplification of Burns’ work). One my co-authors, Lenny Marcus, likes the simple “you’re a leader if you have followers” but that doesn’t speak to leadership.
But Wes’s words really hit me between the eyes — reminding me to think deeply about both about my own life’s work as well as the life’s work of the many (we hope) people who buy the book. It is too easy to assume that everyone knows why they want to be — or should be — a leader. Leadership is aspirational and a worthy calling but one can’t take its value for granted or wear it like a merit badge for basket weaving.
We started into a discussion on legacy though there was push-back that legacy is too airy-fairy. I think that’s wrong. I think that what may truly differentiate true leadership from other activities that seem to fall under that name is impact: Will the impact last after you are gone? Will you have had a deep enough impact on other people that they will change what they do and why they do it significantly enough that you can claim to have led that change? Will others take forward what you have done, shape it, and pass it on?
I think that this will be an ongoing discussion. What do you think?
It’s hard to know where one will find a bit of wisdom. I was cruising the site www.twitterbackgroundsgallery.com looking for visual inspiraton today and one of my searches turned up a page with the following tweet that I thought just wonderful:
“The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man.” Anonymous
I can only agree.
This photo is of Paine’s Creek beach on Cape Code where, once you cross over the rocks and onto the flats, only the hand of nature is at work. Each sunset is a work of art and I don’t pretend to be photographer enough to capture the beauty.
This is a wonderful, smile-inducing effort to generate awareness of a serious disease. Ah, the power of people to make a positive impact on the rest of the world. The thumbnail photo shows another kind of glove, but I love the shot.
I love this short film about sand artist Peter Donnelly. He works against the clock, except that he doesn’t see it that way (a powerful lesson) and is not possessive about what he creates.
