You are not a leader until you understand that your peoples’ imaginations are more important than your ideas.
Leaders don’t lead: they evoke hidden potential. They provoke the destruction of anything that stifles the best in human effort.
You go as far as the amount of truth about yourself and about life you can stand.
All growing up narrows who you are. Your job as an adult is to become one. Recast your life with an ever-widening lens and move into your essential, not your pretend and adapted, life.
Frodo is us: he stumbled onto his calling. ”I will take the ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.”
Most people are afraid of themselves. The truth of who we are is what makes us great. Leaders get this.
Mentors teach people that only enduring the pain of uncertainty creates the joy of achievement.
Leaders mentor people on how to suffer creatively, leaning into the anxiety and ambiguity to reconstruct who they are so they can get a lot, not a little, better.
Most organizations in trouble are more short of fresh ideas than they are of cash.