Being a Leader

However you look at it -- there is no substitute for life-experience.

It goes without saying: we can't become great runners without doing a lot of running... Neither can we acquire strong character or matchless wisdom by simply attending college -- no matter how good our grades may be. We can't become great lovers without experiencing deep pain and loss... And, speaking from personal experience, we may not completely understand what it takes to be a true leader until we become sick-to-death of being leaderless.

Yes, there are a lot of curious paradoxes conce
ing the values and qualities of true leadership... Here are a few others:

a). Economic uncertainty becomes the way of life for those who have been taught from childhood to react to exte
al authority, and have been seldom afforded, or actually discouraged from having, the opportunity to explore their own powers of choice.

b). Private enterprise, and the future itself, is in jeopardy when a majority of people learn to be good students and good employees, to the exclusion of learning self-reliance... Throughout history, those who have contributed the most to the progress of civilization are those who have first discovered value in their own soul and joy in their own unique reason for living.

c). People tend to develop powerful loyalties to those who have (apparently) enabled them to be popular and safe. Furthermore, most will tend to maintain and defend those loyalties, even when the behaviors they adopt render them less capable of developing the kinds of relationships that will advance their economic or social status.

d). There is no growth without inner conflict. Human cravings for security: familiar standards, conventions and stereotypes, will not give up without a fight... And when the need for comfort and security supersedes the drive for self-growth -- the experiential development of character -- stagnation results, relationships become unfulfilling, careers go nowhere and economies stop growing.

That's why there are so few true leaders.

Throughout the world, success in economic or business activities has depended on two types of information:

1. Knowing what to expect.
2. Knowing how to organize.

The business world has perfected the profit mechanism, without developing an equally profitable program for creatively maintaining the quality of their leaders... the world's only true fuel supply. To reliably forecast economic success in the future, a third type of information must be developed and generously supplied...

3. Knowing how to grow as a leader.

Without true leadership, existing successful enterprises will fail to make the transition to a more competitive global economy. A business will fail to compete if it isn't organized effectively, but especially if the enterprise was founded on product alone, without due regard for growing human values such as job satisfaction and customer service.

A high standard of living is not essentially built or maintained on products or by systems, but with the kind of realistic, validated and sustainable hope for the future that is the motivation for persistence, the foundation for self-respect, the parent of self-control, the impetus for long-term global thinking and the basis for strong leadership.

Hope for the future is the power of the free-enterprise system and the impetus for its global expansion. It sustains the more progressive values and intelligent loyalties of both providers and consumers, and it remains the only reliable foundation for a successful business of any kind.

Growing as a leader is not so much a learning process, as it is a balancing and cleansing process. The process begins by fully recognizing and accepting that most of the world's current leaders are regrettably stuck in the past: still justifying the traditional options that have been handed down to them for centuries by their security-loving ancestors.

Those who align themselves with a more spiritual basis for free enterprise -- the character-building creative passions of true entrepreneurs, are true leaders -- now patiently biding their time, watching and prudently waiting for the current materialistic-secular panic to exhaust their many adversaries and ultimately, open the door for continued progress... To those I say:

Grow!

Your future will be bountiful.