Being a Leader
For years, I struggled interacting with people that I believed just “didn’t get it”. The right answer was just so obvious and clear — how could they not see it? Why was I wasting my time trying to explain this to them? In the end, I would often just avoid these people and “lock them out” of involvement in whatever it was that I was doing.
Talking with many others in my industry, this is a common refrain. Interesting, everyone thinks they “get it” and it is the other people that don’t.
Over the course of the last few years, I have learned that I was the one that didn’t get it.
In fact, I was committing one of the dumbest mistakes in history: I was not leading folks to my way for thinking. I was not making what I was doing better by understanding their point of view. I was not helping them achieve their vision/goals in a way that could help mine. I was just being plain stupid.
As I think about a clean summary of the above — I think about a quote that I just read from Martin Luther King, Jr (in Tricycle):
“I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
As a Buddhist, you would think that this would be obvious to me. It wasn’t, but it is now. For those of you of a less philosophical bend (and if I could be so bold):
I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality definition of leadership.
Maybe it’s called growing up, or being a parent, but I’ve noticed the same in myself. Even if it’s not expedient to try to bring someone else along or work toward a shared understanding, it’s the right thing to do. I’ve benefitted from others’ patience countless times in the past and probably won’t be able to repay that debt before I’m dead.
BTW, the clock on your shiny new blog server appears to be 7 or more hours ahead.
Joshua Allen
14 Apr 08 at 02:10
Being a parent certainly has something to do with it from my standpoint.
As for the time thing, I am thinking about going all UTC all the time. This time zone thing is _so_ last century — actual _so_ two centuries ago.
metadouglasp
14 Apr 08 at 02:47
I never even thought of UTC. If readers are like me, the most interesting information is what time it was for *you*, when *you* posted the item. Was it daylight, was it a workday, etc? Knowing what time it was in England when you wrote the post is not that useful in setting context for me, except on days when you post from London.
Of course, you could publish times clearly stamped UTC and it would be only a minor arithmetical annoyance to people who aren’t timezone geeks. But there is the fact that we have this horrible modern invention called DST that makes it a PITA to convert between UTC and local time. The rules for conversion from UTC to local time are not even stable; congress arbitrarily moved the window even this year.
Joshua Allen
14 Apr 08 at 04:01
Oh, BTW, I was looking over my diary (which I started keeping based on one of your old blog posts about reading your gradfather’s), and found this quote which is quite relevant to the topic of your post:
From “The Captive” by Marcel Proust
“The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange worlds but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is…”
Joshua Allen
14 Apr 08 at 04:24
I hope I wasn’t one of the ones that “didn’t get it”…
Kent Sharkey
15 Apr 08 at 18:28
@Kent Sharkey: No, you got it.
metadouglasp
16 Apr 08 at 02:34
@Joshua Allen: I love that quote and I love that you are keeping a journal.
As for UTC, I think that all countries should move to it. I understand the point about context, but most of these blog systems only have one time zone — so that means that even if I am in London writing this (which I could be), the datetime would show up as PST (if I was using that).
I think you could do something where these blog systems allowed you to enter in the local time with the post — but I really think that UTC is a good way for us to be “one world”.
metadouglasp
16 Apr 08 at 02:39